Spatial cues help participants detect a visual target when it appears at the cued location. One hypothesis for this cueing effect, called selective perception, is that cueing a location enhances perceptual encoding at that location. Another hypothesis, called selective decision, is that the cue has no effect on perception, but instead provides prior information that facilitates decisionmaking. We distinguished these hypotheses by comparing a simultaneous display with two spatial locations to sequential displays with two temporal intervals. The simultaneous condition had a partially valid spatial cue, and the sequential condition had a partially valid temporal cue. Selective perception predicts no cueing effect for sequential displays given there is enough time to switch attention. In contrast, selective decision predicts cueing effects for sequential displays regardless of time. We used endogenous cueing of a detection-like coarse orientation discrimination task with clear displays (no external noise or postmasks). Results showed cueing effects for the sequential condition, supporting a decision account of selective attention for endogenous cueing of detection-like tasks.
There has been a longstanding debate about whether lexical and semantic processing of words is serial or parallel. We addressed this debate using partially valid cueing, where one of two words is cued. The cue was valid on 80% and invalid on the other 20% of the trials. The task was semantic categorization, and performance was measured by accuracy. The new feature was to limit attentional switching using a postmask of consonants that closely followed the presentation of words. We found a large effect of cueing and, most importantly, performance for the uncued word was at chance. This chance performance was consistent with serial processing, but not with typical parallel processing. This result adds to the evidence from other recent studies that the lexical and semantic processing of words is serial.
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