The Suppression of Reflexive Visual and Auditory Orienting when Voluntary Attention is Engaged
Single Paper Presentation

Valerio Santangelo
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford

Marta Olivetti Belardinelli
Department of Psychology, University of Rome "La Sapienza"

Charles Spence
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford

     Abstract ID Number: 64
     Full text: Not available
     Last modified: March 16, 2006
     Presentation date: 06/19/2006 4:00 PM in Hamilton Building, Foyer
     (View Schedule)

Abstract
Several recent studies have examined whether or not abrupt onsets are capable of reflexively capturing attention when they occur outside the current focus of attention, as would be expected if exogenous spatial attention operates in a truly automatic fashion. Typically, these previous studies have induced a highly-focused attentional state in participants by means of the presentation of informative central arrow cues. However, given that unpredictive central arrows have been shown to elicit reflexive spatial orienting effects, they may not provide an appropriate means of studying focused attention. In order to overcome this potential problem, we established a highly-focused attentional state by means of the central presentation of a rapidly-presented visual (or auditory) stream which participants sometimes had to monitor. Over 4 experiments, participants had to perform various intramodal and crossmodal exogenous audiovisual orthogonal cuing tasks either in isolation (as in a traditional reflexive cuing study) or else together with the central focused attention monitoring task. To our surprise, no reflexive cuing effects were observed (in either audition or vision) under the dual-task conditions. These result suggest a strict top-down control of reflexive orienting that appears to be far from truly automatic in either unimodal or crossmodal settings.