Abstract
Our conscious perception of the world is not an instantaneous, moment-by-moment construction. Rather, our perception of an event is influenced, over time, by information gained following the event: this is known as a postdictive effect. A recent study used a choice paradigm, where participants were asked to quickly choose from a set of options before a randomly selected option was made salient, and reported that postdictive effect could occur even in choice. The present study sought to test whether the striking postdictive effect of choice reflects the modulation of attention on choice, by directly and systematically manipulating attention in a similar choice paradigm in two experiments. Specifically, Experiment 1 revealed that the robust postdictive effect of choice was almost completely eliminated when attentional bias was removed. More importantly, Experiment 2 demonstrated that the postdictive effect of choice could be modulated by directly manipulating participants’ attention with a spatial cue, in particular, when the cue appeared at short time delays. These results suggest that choice could be considerably postdictively influenced by attention and this effect was most pronounced within a short time window wherein decision-making was most likely in progress. The current study not only enables clarification of the mechanism of the newly discovered postdictive effect of choice, but also extends evidence of the modulation of attention on decision-making.