Enhanced orienting effects: Evidence for an interaction principle

Abstract

Predictive arrow cues, as used in the classic “Posner paradigm”, that were long thought to engage and isolate voluntary attention, may in fact trigger a strong interaction between voluntary and involuntary attention (Ristic & Kingstone, 2006). This interaction produces an orienting effect that exceeds both the effects of involuntary and voluntary attention alone, and the additive combination of involuntary and voluntary orienting. The present study shows that nonpredictive peripheral cues—understood to engage and isolate involuntary attention—if made predictive, result in enhanced orienting effects similar to predictive arrows. The important contribution of these data is that they suggest an “interaction principle”: If attention cues can elicit reliable involuntary orienting, then when they are made spatially predictive, the resulting attention effect will be greater than the sum of involuntary and voluntary orienting alone.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a fellowship of the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research to Bettina Olk and by grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Hampton Foundation, the Killam Foundation, the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research, and the Human Early Learning Partnership to Alan Kingstone. We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers and Ray Klein for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.

Notes

¹An ANOVA with the factors target location (left, right), cue direction (left, right) and SOA (100, 450, 800 ms) showed no significant relationship between cue direction and target location (replicating Ristic & Kingstone, 2006).

²The cueing effects at SOA 450 ms and 800 ms of PB are smaller than those of PA, which we would interpret as the presence of IOR in the PB condition. However, if one assumes that IOR is not present at the shortest SOA, the question may arise why the cueing effects at SOA 100 ms differ between PB and PA. Considering the cueing effects of NB and NA may point to an answer. At the short SOA effects are larger for NB than for NA and also, RT for NB is faster than for NA. It thus seems that even though NB and NA trigger involuntary orienting, the size of the cueing effects need not be the same, which is not unexpected given the array of differences between these cues. As the cueing effects at SOA 100 ms for NB are larger than those for NA, it is not surprising that the cueing effects at this SOA should be larger for PB than for PA.

³It has been shown (for central arrow cues) that cueing effects increase gradually with the predictive value of cues, i.e., cues with 80% predictability show larger cueing effects than cues with 70% predictability, which in turn produce larger cueing effects than cues with 60% predictability (Olk, 2006). It may thus be the case that, if participants perceive cues as more predictable (even if the cues are not), cueing effects increase.