Abstract
It has been reported that the self-controlled mouse cursor among randomly moving distractor cursors is easy to find for the operator but not for others. An application of this is called the Ninja Cursor (e.g., Watanabe et al., 2013). To test the contribution of attention to this phenomenon, we undertook a simple visual search experiment for a self-controlled object. The participants' task was to search for a target Landolt C from the randomly moving Landolt C and report the direction of the target Landolt C. Two conditions were employed: the self condition, in which participants controlled the target Landolt C position freely via a computer mouse, and the second condition, in which the participants searched for the target Landolt C that moved in accordance with the recorded mouse movement of the other individuals. Overall, results showed typical search slopes, and reaction time increased linearly alongside the number of Landolt Cs in a display. However, the self-condition showed a much shallower search slope, suggesting that participants could search for the self-controlled cursor with relatively little attentive cost, as if it were "popping out." To further test the contribution of the multimodal discrepancy and the sense of the intuitive controllability or agency to the cursor, a temporal delay was inserted between the mouse and cursor movement. As the delay increased, the search slope became steeper and the participants lost the sense that they were operating the target. The critical temporal delay that matched the performance of the delayed self-conditions to the other condition increased alongside the number of distractors. These results suggested that the visual feedback that matches the ongoing action or movement would easily summon one's attention. This attraction would play a critical role in distinguishing subject and object, or self and others, in our visual field.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2014