Involuntary attentional orienting to counterproductive exogenous cues

Abstract

AcknowledgementsFirst and foremost, I would like to express my gratitude to my mentor, Antonio Schettino, for his ever present faith in me and for continuously challenging me. It was a pleasure to work with someone so contagiously enthusiastic. Thanks to you, my thesis was not only a very educational and most valuable experience that opened up a whole new world to me (shout-out to Bayes factors), but also a very enjoyable one. I appreciated the touch of humour hidden in your comments, the attention to detail, and the many helpful advises that made it possible for me to turn my thesis into something I am very proud of. I could not have wished for a better mentor, you are truly inspiring. I cannot thank you enough.I would also like to thank my promotor, Gilles Pourtois, for giving me the opportunity to be a part of this exciting research project in the first place.Furthermore, I would like to thank all the friends and family that have provided me with support and encouragement over the years. A special mention goes out to my dear friend Saskia Baes. A group assignment in our very first year of university was the start of a friendship I have grown to cherish. In the years that ensued, we have cried together and have celebrated together, and even in these last few weeks, I could always count on your support. Our joint library working-sessions were just what I needed to lift my spirits on low days and provide me with some fresh motivation. I would also like to thank Lucie Demolder, for some wonderful moments we have shared over the past few years. We have not been able to see much of each other lately, but my (and Saskia's) graduation will be a good excuse for us all to meet up again and celebrate (btw, we still have a to do list to finish!).Last but not least, I want to thank my parents for giving me the best opportunities in life and giving me the freedom to discover and pursue my interests. You have patiently put up with me occupying the whole kitchen table with my notes and supported (and tolerated) me in my most stressed out moments. But most of all, thank you for always believing in me, even at times when I did not. 2 AbstractIn the literature, there is an ongoing debate regarding the nature of attentional orienting towards non-reportable exogenous cues. Some argue that even though bottomup orienting can occur towards conscious stimuli, it is consistently modulated by endogenous factors in the case of unconscious stimuli. This would suggest that there may be no purely exogenous shifts of attention towards unconscious stimuli. In this thesis, we set out to provide compelling evidence for an automatic nature of attentional orienting towards non-reportable cues, independent from endogenous factors (e.g., attentional task set). To investigate this, an experiment employing the temporal order judgement (TOJ) paradigm was conducted, in which two line gratings of opposite orientation were presented on each side of a fixation, separated by various stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). Participants were required to repo...