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On the link between attentional search and the oculomotor system: is pre-attentive search restricted to the range of eye movements?

Casteau, S.; Smith, D.T.

On the link between attentional search and the oculomotor system: is pre-attentive search restricted to the range of eye movements? Thumbnail


Authors



Abstract

It has been proposed that covert visual search can be fast, efficient, and stimulus driven, particularly when the target is defined by a salient single feature, or slow, inefficient, and effortful when the target is defined by a nonsalient conjunction of features. This distinction between fast, stimulus-driven orienting and slow, effortful orienting can be related to the distinction between exogenous spatial attention and endogenous spatial attention. Several studies have shown that exogenous, covert orienting is limited to the range of saccadic eye movements, whereas covert endogenous orienting is independent of the range of saccadic eye movements. The current study examined whether covert visual search is affected in a similar way. Experiment 1 showed that covert visual search for feature singletons was impaired when stimuli were presented beyond the range of saccadic eye movements, whereas conjunction search was unaffected by array position. Experiment 2 replicated and extended this effect by measuring search times at 6 eccentricities. The impairment in covert feature search emerged only when stimuli crossed the effective oculomotor range and remained stable for locations further into the periphery, ruling out the possibility that the results of Experiment 1 were due to a failure to fully compensate for the effects of cortical magnification. The findings are interpreted in terms of biased competition and oculomotor theories of spatial attention. It is concluded that, as with covert exogenous orienting, biological constraints on overt orienting in the oculomotor system constrain covert, preattentive search.

Citation

Casteau, S., & Smith, D. (2020). On the link between attentional search and the oculomotor system: is pre-attentive search restricted to the range of eye movements?. Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, 82(2), 518-532. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-019-01949-4

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Nov 21, 2019
Online Publication Date Jan 15, 2020
Publication Date Feb 29, 2020
Deposit Date Nov 26, 2019
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Journal Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics
Print ISSN 1943-3921
Electronic ISSN 1943-393X
Publisher Springer
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 82
Issue 2
Pages 518-532
DOI https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-019-01949-4

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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
Advance online version © The Author(s) 2020. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.






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