How automatic is Automated Symbolic orienting? D Hayward, C Dick, J Ristic |
|---|
Department of Psychology, McGill University, QC, Canada
|
| Recent studies have found that behaviorally relevant cues, like arrows, invoke a new form of attention – Automated Symbolic Orienting – where spatial attention is engaged by overlearned expectancies that are important for everyday behavior. Here we investigated whether spatial automated symbolic orienting depends on voluntary control engaged by explicit expectancies about when in time a target will occur. We assessed participants’ performance in detecting a target when (i) spatial automated orienting was engaged in isolation using spatially nonpredictive arrow, (ii) voluntary temporal orienting was engaged in isolation using temporally predictive shape, and (iii) both spatial automated orienting and voluntary temporal orienting were engaged simultaneously. Both types of attention produced the expected orienting effects when they were engaged in isolation. Further, the two processes did not interact even when they were engaged simultaneously, with symbolic automated orienting remaining unaffected by concurrent voluntary orienting. These data dovetail with the accepted notion that spatial and temporal orienting generally operate in parallel and more specifically indicate that automated symbolic orienting is highly resistant to modulations from explicit voluntary processes. |
| Up Home |
|---|