Covert attention beyond the range of eye-movements: Evidence for a dissociation between exogenous and endogenous orienting

Casteau, Soazig; Smith, Daniel T.

doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2018.11.007

Cited by 35 publications

(48 citation statements)

References 79 publications

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“…The automatic shift of attention to a distracting cue outside the oculomotor range observed here is an exogenous effect that cannot be explained by voluntary, endogenous orienting. As spatial exogenous attention was attracted unrestrictedly toward locations to which no saccade could be executed, the present findings question the coupling of exogenous attention and eye movement control proposed by the premotor theory of attention [2] and its variants [3,5,6]. Our results are in line with a recent study demonstrating that, unlike previously claimed [9], pathological oculomotor restrictions are not necessarily associated with corresponding attentional deficits [10].…”

Section: Main Textsupporting

confidence: 88%

Attention capture outside the oculomotor range

Hanning¹,

Deubel²

2020

Preprint

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Neurophysiological studies demonstrated that attentional orienting is performed by fronto-parietal brain areas which also play an important role in oculomotor control. Accordingly, several studies claimed that exogenous attention can only be allocated to where we can potentially make an eye movement, i.e. within the oculomotor range. We tested this assumption by assessing the disruptive effect of a salient distractor at locations within and beyond participants' oculomotor range. Participants rotated their heads ~38 degree leftwards to prevent them from performing large rightward saccades. In this posture, participants fixated the screen center and focused their attention on a location on the left side of the screen, where they had to discriminate the orientation of a visual noise patch. While assessing visual orientation sensitivity, an established proxy of visual attention, at this endogenously attended location, we flashed a salient cue either at the attended location or at various locations inside or outside their oculomotor range. We found that whenever the salient cue occurred at a location other than the endogenously attended location, it withdrew visual attention and significantly disrupted endogenous attentional orienting. Crucially, this effect occurred regardless of whether the cue was presented within or beyond participants' oculomotor range, demonstrating that exogenous events equally grab our attention both inside and outside the eyes reach. Since spatial exogenous attention was attracted unrestrictedly toward locations to which no saccade could be executed, the coupling of attention and eye movement control is less tight than, for example, the prominent Premotor Theory of Attention suggests. Rather, attention can be shifted freely over the entire visual range, independent of pathological and physiological limitations of the eye movement system.

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Section: Main Textsupporting

confidence: 88%

Attention capture outside the oculomotor range

Hanning¹,

Deubel²

2020

Preprint

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“…This manipulation reliably elicits deficits of exogenous orienting (Morgan, Ball, & Smith, 2014;Smith, Schenk, & Rorden, 2012) and visuospatial working memory (Ball, Pearson, & Smith, 2013;Pearson, Ball, & Smith, 2014) while having little effect on endogenous orienting (Smith, Ball, & Ellison 2014; although see Craighero et al, 2004). On the basis of these studies we argued that premotor theory is only valid for exogenous orienting, a view that is consistent with a growing body of other experimental and neuropsychological evidence (Casteau & Smith, 2018;Smith et al, 2014;.…”

supporting

confidence: 71%

“…This discrepancy means stimuli can be presented that are visible, but not accessible, by a saccadic eye movement. We have previously used this approach to examine the role of oculomotor control in attention using the Posner cueing task (Casteau & Smith, 2018). In this study, the EOMR was established for each participant and the stimuli positions individualized to ensure they were within or beyond each individual's EOMR.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

On the link between attentional search and the oculomotor system: Is preattentive search restricted to the range of eye movements?

Casteau

Smith

2020

Atten Percept Psychophys

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It has been proposed that covert visual search can be fast, efficient, and stimulus driven, particularly when the target is defined by a salient single feature, or slow, inefficient, and effortful when the target is defined by a nonsalient conjunction of features. This distinction between fast, stimulus-driven orienting and slow, effortful orienting can be related to the distinction between exogenous spatial attention and endogenous spatial attention. Several studies have shown that exogenous, covert orienting is limited to the range of saccadic eye movements, whereas covert endogenous orienting is independent of the range of saccadic eye movements. The current study examined whether covert visual search is affected in a similar way. Experiment 1 showed that covert visual search for feature singletons was impaired when stimuli were presented beyond the range of saccadic eye movements, whereas conjunction search was unaffected by array position. Experiment 2 replicated and extended this effect by measuring search times at 6 eccentricities. The impairment in covert feature search emerged only when stimuli crossed the effective oculomotor range and remained stable for locations further into the periphery, ruling out the possibility that the results of Experiment 1 were due to a failure to fully compensate for the effects of cortical magnification. The findings are interpreted in terms of biased competition and oculomotor theories of spatial attention. It is concluded that, as with covert exogenous orienting, biological constraints on overt orienting in the oculomotor system constrain covert, preattentive search.

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“…The majority of attention studies used target eccentricities up to 25 • of visual angle [10][11][12], in the rarer cases up to 30 • [13][14][15]. To my knowledge, only two studies, Casteau and Smith [16] and Poggel, Strasburger and MacKeben [17] investigated visual attention beyond 30 • [16], used eccentricities up to 44 • , and [17] even up to 60 • . However, mean target eccentricities for most studies on visual attention are much smaller and lie rather between 8 • -15 • .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Although the terms near, medium/intermediate, and far periphery are frequently used 2 of 21 in empirical literature, they are not applied consistently to specific eccentricity ranges. For instance, while some studies define only eccentricities beyond 60 • and larger as far periphery [18,19], other studies already define eccentricities >30 • -40 • as far or even extreme periphery [16,17]. Therefore, these different parts of the periphery are defined here in accordance with crucial functional subdivisions of the human visual field: Near periphery begins outside foveal vision (>2 • from gaze center) and ranges up to 25 • because~25 • represents the outer border of a performance plateau for discrimination or recognition tasks (letter recognition thresholds) ( [20], p. 27).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exogeneous Spatial Cueing beyond the Near Periphery: Cueing Effects in a Discrimination Paradigm at Large Eccentricities

Weiß

2020

Vision

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Although visual attention is one of the most thoroughly investigated topics in experimental psychology and vision science, most of this research tends to be restricted to the near periphery. Eccentricities used in attention studies usually do not exceed 20° to 30°, but most studies even make use of considerably smaller maximum eccentricities. Thus, empirical knowledge about attention beyond this range is sparse, probably due to a previous lack of suitable experimental devices to investigate attention in the far periphery. This is currently changing due to the development of temporal high-resolution projectors and head-mounted displays (HMDs) that allow displaying experimental stimuli at far eccentricities. In the present study, visual attention was investigated beyond the near periphery (15°, 30°, 56° Exp. 1) and (15°, 35°, 56° Exp. 2) in a peripheral Posner cueing paradigm using a discrimination task with placeholders. Interestingly, cueing effects were revealed for the whole range of eccentricities although the inhomogeneity of the visual field and its functional subdivisions might lead one to suspect otherwise.

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Covert attention beyond the range of eye-movements: Evidence for a dissociation between exogenous and endogenous orienting

Cited by 35 publications

References 79 publications

Attention capture outside the oculomotor range

Attention capture outside the oculomotor range

On the link between attentional search and the oculomotor system: Is preattentive search restricted to the range of eye movements?

Exogeneous Spatial Cueing beyond the Near Periphery: Cueing Effects in a Discrimination Paradigm at Large Eccentricities

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