Endogenous and exogenous orienting of spatial attention in intramodal and crossmodal displays

Ana B. Chica, Universidad de Granada

Abstract
The present experiments were designed to compare the endogenous and exogenous orienting of spatial attention using both intramodal and crossmodal displays. In Experiment 1, an informative peripheral cue, either visual or tactile, predicted (in each block of trials) either the same or opposite position of the appearance of a tactile target. Using this paradigm, both endogenously attended and unattended locations could either be cued or uncued, making it possible to dissociate endogenous and exogenous orienting of spatial attention using the same set experimental of stimuli. In Experiment 2, an uninformative peripheral cue was used, in order to further study the cuing effects (independent of the orienting of attention) in the intramodal and crossmodal conditions. Two main results emerged from the present study: First, the effect of the voluntary orienting of spatial attention was larger when the cue and target were presented in the same modality than when they were presented in different modalities, but only at the short stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA). On the other hand, the cuing effects differed across SOA between crossmodal and intramodal conditions: In the intramodal condition both facilitation and Inhibition of Return (IOR) were observed, while in the crossmodal condition, a facilitatory effect was observed at the short SOA, but no evidence of IOR was observed at an 1000 ms SOA.

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