An apparent-motion confound causes the negative exogenous cuing effect at SOAs with larger numbers of target locations

Salient but irrelevant stimuli seem to cause an automatic orienting of covert attention, facilitating the detection of targets at the cued location for a brief period of time. However, this finding is highly dependent on the number of possible target locations, at least when the simple detection of targets is all that the task requires. Whereas small numbers of possible target locations (e.g., 2 or 3) produce the well-known advantage in response time for valid cue trials (i.e., a positive cuing effect), larger numbers of possible target locations (e.g., 6 or 8) produce a negative cuing effect. If not explained in terms of a nonattentional mechanism, this latter finding raises serious questions about the standard interpretation of positive cuing effects. The present experiment tested a particular nonattentional mechanism: that a confound between target presence and apparent motion, which occurs only on invalid cue trials, is responsible for negative cuing effect. We reduced or eliminated this confound by the use of a new type of catch trial and eliminated the negative cuing effect with large numbers of target locations.