Abstract
The shifting of visual attention is often described as being like a spotlight moving through empty space between locations. In the present experiment, a peripheral precue summoned attention to an initial location, and 200 msec later a second peripheral cue appeared beside a second location, 20° away. The target was twice as likely to appear at the location indicated by the immediately preceding cue as it was to appear at the other location, although the second location was completely predictable from the first. A fine-grained temporal analysis revealed that as attention was shifted, sensitivity to information at the second location gradually increased while sensitivity at the first location simultaneously decreased. Sensitivity averaged over the two locations during the shift remained significantly greater than sensitivity immediately following the initial precue. An attentional spotlight moving from the first to the second location would produce a decrease in average sensitivity to its initial level while the spotlight was between locations.
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An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society, November 1990, New Orleans.
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Chastain, G. Time-course of location changes of visual attention. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 29, 425–428 (1991). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03333960
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03333960