Independent effects of endogenous and exogenous attention in touch

Abstract

Endogenous and exogenous attention in touch have typically been investigated separately. Here we use a double-cueing paradigm manipulating both types of orienting in each trial. Bilateral endogenous cues induced long-lasting facilitation of endogenous attention up to 2 s. However, the exogenous cue only elicited an effect at short intervals. Our results favour a supramodal account of attention and this study provides new insight into how endogenous and exogenous attention operates in the tactile modality.

• Endogenous
• exogenous
• tactile attention

Acknowledgement

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper. This research was supported by a City University London PhD scholarship to Alexander Jones

Notes

¹ The 250 ms SOA was largely based upon Spence and McGlone (2001) who demonstrated facilitation up to 400 ms using a similar discrimination task. Experiment 2 was added to establish whether the lack of IOR in the 850 ms condition in Experiment 1 was because the SOA was not long enough, or whether no IOR was present in this double-cueing paradigm. Thus, in Experiment 2 we included a SOA of 1350 ms which is well within the time range of when IOR would be expected in an exogenous tactile discrimination task (e.g., Miles et al. 2008).