Attention and ageing: Measuring effects of involuntary and voluntary orienting in isolation and in combination

The cueing paradigm provides an established method for eliciting involuntary and voluntary attention shifts. Involuntary orienting is traditionally measured with non‐predictive peripheral cues and voluntary orienting with predictive central arrows. Recent studies with young adults have established that predictive central arrows trigger a combination of involuntary and voluntary orienting, raising the possibility that previous studies – including those with older adults – misinterpreted their findings with central arrow cues as isolating the effects of voluntary attention. The present experiment applied different cueing conditions that measured involuntary orienting, voluntary orienting, and involuntary and voluntary orienting in combination in older adults. The results show that past studies of voluntary orienting in older adults confound involuntary and voluntary orienting. Cueing effects in a condition that for the first time isolated voluntary orienting (predictive number cues) with older adults were significant, and comparable to effects for younger adults, demonstrating that older adults successfully utilize cues to direct their spatial attention strategically. A similar normal pattern of orienting was observed for involuntary orienting. Our study provides a methodology that can be applied effectively to isolate and investigate the effects of age on voluntary and involuntary attention.     

The Effect of Informative and Uninformative Cueing of Attention on Feature Integration

In the present study, the authors observed the effect of informative and uninformative attentional cueing on visual search for targets that were defined by a simple feature or by conjunctions of features. Three different types of attentional cueing were tested in three experiments: peripheral informative cueing, peripheral uninformative cueing, and central informative cueing. Participants showed a greater effect of cueing in detecting a conjunction of features than in detecting unique features only when attention was oriented by either peripheral or central informative cueing. This differential cueing effect was not observed when attention was oriented by peripheral uninformative cueing. The results suggest that voluntarily oriented attention plays a more important role in feature integration than automatically oriented attention does. The results also pose limits on the generalizability of K. A. Briand's (1998) proposal regarding the role of automatically oriented attention in feature integration.     

Social Beliefs and Visual Attention: How the Social Relevance of a Cue Influences Spatial Orienting

We are highly tuned to each other's visual attention. Perceiving the eye or hand movements of another person can influence the timing of a saccade or the reach of our own. However, the explanation for such spatial orienting in interpersonal contexts remains disputed. Is it due to the social appearance of the cue—a hand or an eye—or due to its social relevance—a cue that is connected to another person with attentional and intentional states? We developed an interpersonal version of the Posner spatial cueing paradigm. Participants saw a cue and detected a target at the same or a different location, while interacting with an unseen partner. Participants were led to believe that the cue was either connected to the gaze location of their partner or was generated randomly by a computer (Experiment 1), and that their partner had higher or lower social rank while engaged in the same or a different task (Experiment 2). We found that spatial cue‐target compatibility effects were greater when the cue related to a partner's gaze. This effect was amplified by the partner's social rank, but only when participants believed their partner was engaged in the same task. Taken together, this is strong evidence in support of the idea that spatial orienting is interpersonally attuned to the social relevance of the cue—whether the cue is connected to another person, who this person is, and what this person is doing—and does not exclusively rely on the social appearance of the cue. Visual attention is not only guided by the physical salience of one's environment but also by the mental representation of its social relevance.     

Investigation of collaborative inhibition for key-term definitions

Collaborative inhibition is the counterintuitive finding that learners working in a group recall less information compared with the combined nonredundant output of the same number of learners working individually (Weldon & Bellinger, 1997). Although research has shown that collaborative inhibition occurs for a variety of to-be-learned material, no research has evaluated whether the effect emerges for key-term definitions. In two experiments, learners individually studied key-term definitions during an initial study phase. Learners then completed a retrieval practice phase, which occurred either collaboratively or individually. After a delay, all learners individually completed a final test phase. Performance during the retrieval practice phase is of greatest interest for present purposes. Results established collaborative inhibition such that recall was lower for learners in the collaborative group versus the individual group, which provides novel evidence to the collaborative memory literature by demonstrating that the effect emerges with key-term definitions.     

The role of spatial attention and other processes on the magnitude and time course of cueing effects

We are quite often exposed to multiple objects present in the visual scene, thus attentional selection is necessary in order to selectively respond to the relevant information. Objects can be selected on the basis of the location they occupy by orienting attention in space. In this paper, we review the evidence showing that attention can be oriented in space either endogenously, on the basis of central cues, predictive of the relevant location, or exogenously, automatically triggered by the salient properties of visual stimuli (peripheral cues). Several dissociations observed between orienting on the basis of the two types of cues have led to the conclusion that they do not represent just two modes of triggering the orienting of the very same attentional mechanism, but rather they modulate processing differently. We present a theoretical framework according to which endogenous predictive cues facilitate target processing by orienting attention, thus amplifying processing at the attended location. In contrast, apart from attentional orienting, peripherally presented discrepant cues might trigger additional cue-target event-integration and event-segregation processes, which modulate processing in a different way, thus leading to cueing effects that are exclusively triggered by peripheral cues.     

Emotional modulation of attention orienting by gaze varies with dynamic cue sequence

ABSTRACT

Recent gaze cueing studies using dynamic cue sequences have reported increased attention orienting by gaze with faces expressing fear, surprise or anger. Here, we investigated whether the type of dynamic cue sequence used impacted the magnitude of this effect. When the emotion was expressed before or concurrently with gaze shift, no modulation of gaze-oriented attention by emotion was seen. In contrast, when the face cue averted gaze before expressing an emotion (as if reacting to the object after first localizing it), the gaze orienting effect was clearly increased for fearful, surprised and angry faces compared to neutral faces. Thus, the type of dynamic sequence used, and in particular the order in which the gaze shift and the facial expression are presented, modulate gaze-oriented attention, with maximal modulation seen when the expression of emotion follows gaze shift.     

The Influence of Approach and Avoidance Behavior on Visual Selective Attention

Recent findings indicate that enactment of approach behavior broadens the focus of perceptual attention. The aim of the present study was to examine how approach and avoidance behavior influence visual selective attention. To achieve this, the authors combined approach and avoidance manipulations with a visual precueing task (local vs. global cues preceding either local or global targets). The authors hypothesized that participants with an enactment of approach behavior would show faster attentional orienting with compatible cue-target-relations than in incompatible trials. The results support that enactment of approach behavior leads to faster attentional orienting in compatible trials compared with incompatible trials. Although participants showed significant attentional learning effects across blocks, learning was not enhanced by approach and avoidance manipulations.     

Contrast polarity of eyes modulates gaze‐cueing effect1

Two experiments using a modified Posner‐type visual cueing paradigm tested the prediction that detecting the darker region of the eyes of another's gaze triggers a reflexive orienting of the observer in the direction of the gaze. A target was presented in the left or right visual‐field following a gaze‐cue with positive or negative‐image polarity (Experiment 1). In Experiment 2, the polarity of the eyes was manipulated independently of the negative polarity of the face (eye‐positive or eye‐negative‐image polarity conditions). The results showed that the response to the target presented at the side the eyes gazed toward was faster than for the target presented at the other side in the positive polarity condition (Experiment 1), whereas, in the negative polarity condition, the gaze‐cuing effect was not found. In Experiment 2, in the eye‐negative condition, a reversed gaze‐cueing effect appeared, whereas in the eye‐positive polarity condition, a typical gaze‐cueing effect was obtained. These findings suggested that the reflexive orienting of the observer shifts toward the position indicated by the darker region of the other's eyes.     

Cognitive control in cued task switching with transition cues: Cue processing,task processing,and cue–task transition congruency

We investigated the processes underlying performance during cued task switching with transition cues. To this end, transition cueing and explicit cueing were compared in a design controlling for sequential effects in the two preceding trials in order to further examine the contribution of cue processes, task processes, and cue–task transition congruency during transition cueing. The study confirmed that the task-switch cost in transition cueing is larger than the task-switch cost in explicit cueing and showed that this larger switch cost is mainly due to cue processing. We also successfully decomposed performance in transition cueing into cue processing, task processing, and cue–task transition congruency on both a theoretical (Experiment 1) and an empirical basis (Experiments 2–3). Our empirical dissociation also demonstrates that cue–task transition congruency affects performance during both cue processing and task processing. We discuss the importance of our findings in relation to the different theories on task switching.     

The flexibility of context-specific control: Evidence for context-driven generalization of item-specific control settings

In two experiments we address an ongoing debate concerning the processes driving context-driven modulations to the Stroop effect (Crump, Gong, & Milliken, 2006). In particular, we demonstrate that context-driven processes can modulate the size of the Stroop effect for frequency-unbiased item types. We also clarify the role of item frequency in producing context-driven modulations to the Stroop effect. Taken together, our results provide unambiguous support for the claim that contextual processing can impart fast and flexible control over the operation of selective attention processes during online performance.