Abstract
Predictive arrow cues, which have traditionally been used to measure effects of voluntary attention, elicit a combination of involuntary and voluntary orienting. To measure effects of voluntary orienting in isolation, recent research has employed predictive number and color cues. The observed effects of the latter are smaller than those obtained with predictive arrows. We assessed whether this difference is related to the ease of decoding cue meaning, following the rationale that it may be easier to process direction information instructed by symbols such as arrows than by arbitrary numbers or colors and that this advantage of arrows may influence cueing effects. The same participants completed two separate conditions/tasks. They judged the direction indicated by a stimulus (left or right arrow, numbers 1 or 2, numbers 3 or 9, red or green) and detected a target following a predictive cue (arrow, number, color). They were significantly faster and more accurate at judging arrows than all other stimuli and exhibited a significantly larger cueing effect with arrows than all other cues. Critically, differences in speed and accuracy of judging stimulus direction were not correlated with the differences in cueing effects. This lack of a relationship was supported by Bayesian analyses, with all Bayes factors indicating substantial evidence in favor of the null hypothesis for no correlation. A lack of a correlation was supported by the observation that participants were better at judging direction of colors and numbers 1/2 compared to numbers 3/9, while the cueing effects in those three conditions were the same. Smaller cueing effects produced by predictive numbers and colors than arrows may rather be explained by the type of orienting that is engaged (predictive numbers and colors elicit voluntary orienting; predictive arrows measure a combination of voluntary and involuntary orienting) than by the ease of decoding cue meaning.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2014