No evidence of rhythmic visuospatial attention at cued locations in a spatial cuing paradigm, regardless of their behavioural relevance

Abstract

Recent evidence suggests that visuospatial attentional performance is not stable over time but fluctuates in a rhythmic fashion. These attentional rhythms allow for sampling of different visuospatial locations in each cycle of this rhythm. However, it is still unclear in which paradigmatic circumstances rhythmic attention becomes evident. First, it is unclear at what spatial locations rhythmic attention occurs. Second, it is unclear how the behavioural relevance of each spatial location determines the rhythmic sampling patterns. Here, we aim to elucidate these two issues. Firstly, we aim to find evidence of rhythmic attention at the predicted (i.e. cued) location under moderately informative predictor value, replicating earlier studies. Secondly, we hypothesise that rhythmic attentional sampling behaviour will be affected by the behavioural relevance of the sampled location, ranging from non‐informative to fully informative. To these aims, we used a modified Egly‐Driver task with three conditions: a fully informative cue, a moderately informative cue (replication condition), and a non‐informative cue. We did not find evidence of rhythmic sampling at cued locations, failing to replicate earlier studies. Nor did we find differences in rhythmic sampling under different predictive values of the cue. The current data does not allow for robust conclusions regarding the non‐cued locations due to the absence of a priori hypotheses. Post‐hoc explorative data analyses, however, clearly indicate that attention samples non‐cued locations in a theta‐rhythmic manner, specifically when the cued location bears higher behavioural relevance than the non‐cued locations.

Performance modulations phase-locked to action depend on internal state

“…In contrast to our initial hypothesis based on these findings, we did not find any significant accuracy modulation after button press in our pooled data. This result adds to other recent reports of inconclusive and null findings (Morrow and Samaha, 2021; van der Werf et al, 2021; Vigué-Guix et al, 2020) and it is in line with the general revision happening in the field (Keitel et al, 2022). However, this result does not question the validity of the studies implementing similar paradigms (Benedetto et al, 2016; Nakayama and Motoyoshi, 2019; Zhang et al, 2019), because of differences in the task design.…”

“…Recently, there was a debate about reproducibility of psychophysics studies reporting such modulations (Lin et al, 2021; Morrow and Samaha; van der Werf et al, 2021) and about the correct use of analysis methods in the field (Brookshire, 2022; Re et al, 2022; Tosato et al, 2022; Vinck et al, 2022). The fact that different studies applied different analysis methods and statistical tests makes the comparison difficult.…”

Rhythms in cognition: The evidence revisited

“…Notably, even within the subset of studies that can be considered direct replication attempts of previous findings (Plöchl et al, 2021;van Der Werf et al, 2021), or at least studies with very similar designs (van Der Werf et al, 2021;Zazio et al, 2021), the results are mixed. Replication and extension of key findings in the literature will be critical for the development of the field (Pavlov et al, 2021), and the replication studies included in this Special Issue provide valuable examples.…”

“…For instance, appropriate test time intervals need to be chosen, which might require studies with a large number of trials and participants. On that note, van der Werf et al (2021) were unable to replicate previous findings of rhythmic attentional sampling (Fiebelkorn et al, 2018; Helfrich et al, 2018) in a modified Egly‐Driver task (Egly et al, 1994) This task involves detecting a target that can appear at one end (i.e., the cued location) or at the other end (i.e., space‐based, non‐cued location) of a bar, or at the equidistant end of another bar (object‐based, non‐cued location). No rhythmic pattern of detection accuracy was found at cued locations for any level of predictive cue validity, though an exploratory analysis did reveal a significant ~7–8 Hz behavioural rhythm at non‐cued locations when the cues were moderately informative.…”

Absence of behavioural rhythms: Noise or unexplained neuronal mechanisms? (response to Fiebelkorn, 2021)

“…If this were true, one would expect behavioural performance to follow the oscillatory sampling rhythm in the brain. Whereas some seminal papers have provided evidence for such behavioural sampling (Fiebelkorn et al, 2013;Landau & Fries, 2012), our recent paper did not show systematic rhythmic behavioural patterns at the cued location using similar design steps in one paper reporting this effect (Helfrich et al, 2018;Van der Werf et al, 2021). Given the previous evidence on the role of oscillations in attention sampling (Fiebelkorn et al, 2018;Szczepanski et al, 2014), we do not think that this absence of effect should be interpreted as an absence of the role of oscillations in attention, but rather as an eyeopener to the sensitivity of these behavioural effects, as well as the still insufficient knowledge of how we can reliably study the role of oscillations in absence of electrophysiology.…”