Measuring attention using the Posner cuing paradigm: the role of across and within trial target probabilities

Abstract

Numerous studies conducted within the recent decades have utilized the Posner cuing paradigm for eliciting, measuring, and theoretically characterizing attentional orienting. However, the data from recent studies suggest that the Posner cuing task might not provide an unambiguous measure of attention, as reflexive spatial orienting has been found to interact with extraneous processes engaged by the task's typical structure, i.e., the probability of target presence across trials, which affects tonic alertness, and the probability of target presence within trials, which affects voluntary temporal preparation. To understand the contribution of each of these two processes to the measurement of attentional orienting we assessed their individual and combined effects on reflexive attention elicited by a spatially nonpredictive peripheral cue. Our results revealed that the magnitude of spatial orienting was modulated by joint changes in the global probability of target presence across trials and the local probability of target presence within trials, while the time course of spatial orienting was susceptible to changes in the probability of target presence across trials. These data thus raise important questions about the choice of task parameters within the Posner cuing paradigm and their role in both the measurement and theoretical attributions of the observed attentional effects.

Automated symbolic orienting is not modulated by explicit temporal attention

“…The results fully replicated the omnibus ANOVA reported in the Results section. 3 Although there has been some evidence to suggest that the experimental manipulation of voluntary temporal preparation affects attentional orienting only during discrimination tasks (see Gabay & Henik, 2008, 2010Milliken, Lupiáñez, Roberts, & Stevanovski, 2003 for a more indepth discussion), we recently showed that changes in tonic alertness and voluntary temporal preparation also affect attentional orienting during detection tasks (Hayward & Ristic, 2013a). 4 The same data pattern held if, instead of analyzing the data from the common cue-target intervals, we analyzed the data including all cuetarget intervals.…”

“…This is accomplished by halving the number of targets allocated to appear at each successive cue-target interval (Fig. 3, Quadrants 2 and 4) (Gabay & Henik, 2008;Hayward & Ristic, 2013a). In contrast to the aging distribution, here the ratio between the number of trials that contain the target at each successive cue-target time and the number of remaining trials remains unchanged, as both parameters decrease systematically.…”

“…However in addition to spatial orienting, this typical task sequence engages two additional processes-tonic alertness and voluntary temporal preparation-whose effects on the resultant measurements of spatial orienting have not been systematically considered until very recently (Gabay & Henik, 2008, 2010Hayward & Ristic, 2013a). Studying how these two processes in isolation and in conjunction affect orienting elicited by social and nonsocial cues provides a way to address the two outstanding issues regarding the nature of the attentional effects elicited by social and nonsocial information.…”

“…Figure 1 shows our 2 × 2 design. Tonic alertness was either (i) high, with the target occurring in 94 % of trials (Gabay & Henik, 2008;Hayward & Ristic, 2013a) or (ii) low, with the target occurring in 75 % of trials (Tipper & Kingstone, 2005). Voluntary temporal preparation was either (i) present, with implicit temporal entrainment induced by the task (e.g., aging distribution; Näätänen, 1972) or (ii) absent, with implicit temporal entrainment eliminated (e.g., non-aging distribution; Gabay & Henik, 2008, 2010Näätänen, 1972).…”

“…3, Quadrants 1 and 3). This resulted in an increased probability of target occurrence with lengthening of cue-target time (Hayward & Ristic, 2013a). For the high alertness case, 128 targets were assigned to each cue-target interval, whereas 32 trials contained no target, resulting in a total of 544 trials (Fig.…”