Abstract
The present study examined how attention shift involved in the construction of visual space in memory. We employed a spatial cueing paradigm in which an inner or outer (6 or 12 deg eccentric, respectively) landmark was vanished with a variable SOA (or remained) to induce centripetal or centrifugal attention shift from target position, respectively. As a baseline, no-landmark condition was employed. Landmarks were four identical bars (2 deg × 0.2 deg) placed at four cardinal axes. The target stimulus was a 0.33 deg diameter black dot presented 9 deg eccentrically at one of four axes. Observers were instructed to memorize the location of the target appearing for 80 ms while maintaining fixation at the center on the screen. They pointed to the remembered location with the mouse cursor (identical to target) available around target's location after 500 ms following its offset. The results with 9 observers showed that the estimated eccentricity of the target was significantly smaller with inner than outer landmark (F (1, 8) =6.992, p < .03). Moreover, reproduced location with inner landmark deviated towards center significantly from actual location (t (8) = 2.64, p < .02). These results can be taken to suggest that centripetal attention enhances shrinkage of visual space.