Attentional cartography: mapping the distribution of attention across time and space

Abstract

Decades of research have shown that the orienting of attention follows a reliable pattern of facilitation and then inhibition following a peripheral cue. However, the literature lacks a high-resolution spatiotemporal map of this pattern. Moreover, the use of visual placeholders to highlight potential stimulus locations is inconsistent. This is puzzling, given attention's well-known predilection for objects. In this article, we remedy these outstanding issues with a large-scale investigation charting the spatiotemporal distribution of attention. Participants detected targets presented at 121 possible locations 100, 200, 400, or 800 ms following an uninformative peripheral cue. The cued locations were presented with or without placeholders. With placeholders, the classic pattern of early facilitation and late inhibition was observed for targets appearing within the placeholders, and the spread of inhibition was severely limited to within the placeholders. Without placeholders, we observed inhibition shortly after cue presentation, upsetting the famously reliable effect of facilitation following a cue. Moreover, inhibition spread from the cued location, unlike when placeholders were present. This investigation has produced an eminently detailed spatiotemporal map of attentional orienting and illustrated the consequences of placeholder stimuli, with surprising results.Keywords Attentional capture . Space-based attention . Object-based attention For 35 years, researchers have fruitfully employed variations of the spatial cueing paradigm to learn how visual attention moves. This paradigm, designed and popularized by Posner (1980;Posner & Cohen, 1984), uses abrupt peripheral onsets (cues) to attract attention. Shortly thereafter, a target is presented at the same location as the cue or at a different location; the difference in the reaction times (RTs) to detect targets at cued and uncued locations indexes the orienting of attention. These types of cues produce two effects: a brief period of facilitation, in which targets are detected faster at the cued than at uncued locations shortly after the cue, followed by a longer period of inhibition, during which targets are detected slower at cued than at uncued locations

Spreading pre-saccadic attentional resources without trade-off

“…We then found that, contrary to the narrow allocation of presaccadic attention for a structured visual field, attention dynamically spread over space as a function of the delay between cue-offset and saccade onset. These effects are in contrast with a recent report in which the disappearance of a briefly presented cue, during a fixation task, lead to slower reaction times in detecting the presence of a flashed target on a black screen in the absence of placeholders (Taylor et al, 2015). Contrary to these effects, we observed an overall increase in sensitivity after the disappearance of the target.…”

“…In our view, this difference is principally due to the difficulty in drawing conclusions about the deployment of attention based on the use of reaction times to supra-threshold stimuli (Handy et al, 1996). Indeed, with or without visual placeholders, reaction time benefits have been shown to cover entire visual quadrants or even entire visual hemifields (Bennett & Pratt, 2001;Hughes & Zimba, 1987;Taylor et al, 2015). These results are in contradiction with the tight allocation of attention to a saccade target, or to an exogenous cue, observed through changes in visual sensitivity (Deubel & Schneider, 1996;Handy et al, 1996).…”

“…These huge variations seem to primarily reflect methodological discrepancies, such as the use of exogenous or endogenous cues, and also variations in the task difficulty (Intriligator & Cavanagh, 2001). Indeed, by using a structured visual field (Eriksen & Yeh, 1985;Taylor, Chan, Bennett, & Pratt, 2015), by increasing the difficulty of the tasks by masking the targets (Deubel & Schneider, 1996;Baldauf:2006hn;Doré-Mazars, Pouget, & Beauvillain, 2004;Handy, Kingstone, & Mangun, 1996;Henderson, 1991;Kowler, Anderson, Dosher, & Blaser, 1995), or by controlling for visual eccentricity effects (Koenig-Robert & VanRullen, 2011), it was shown that the attentional spread was narrowly concentrated, with benefits limited to a few degrees of visual angle surrounding a covertly attended cue or a saccade target.…”

No supplementary evidence of attention to a spatial cue when saccadic facilitation is absent

“…Pratt, Sekuler and McAuliffe 34 suggested an influence of attentional set on early facilitation. Taylor, Chan, Bennet and Pratt 35 observed no facilitation and early IOR when potential target locations were not marked with placeholders. MacInnes 36 tested the spatial and temporal gradient of IOR with continuous random CTOAs and also found no early facilitation for either manual or saccadic responses.…”

Location-cued visual selection—Placeholder dots improve target identification

“…While they generally seem to facilitate the attraction and alignment of attention, several researchers who have observed strong IOR in test conditions with placeholders failed to see that when the placeholders were removed (e.g., Birmingham & Pratt, 2005;Pratt & Chasteen, 2007;Jefferies & Di Lollo, 2015;Taylor, Chan, Bennett, & Pratt, 2015). Furthermore, while attentional facilitation seems to spread with a gradient-like profile from the center of a cue (Downing & Pinker, 1985;Shulman, Wilson, & Sheehy, 1985;Shulman, Sheehy, & Wilson, 1986)-preferentially within but also across framed objects (Egly et al, 1994;Nothdurft, 2016a)-the spread of inhibition appears to be blocked by placeholder frames (Taylor et al, 2015). As a matter of fact, even some of the early cuing experiments (which revealed attentional benefits and costs and, under certain circumstances, IOR; Posner & Cohen, 1984) used placeholder boxes which were eventually cued and in which the later targets were presented.…”