Abstract
Vection is a term used to refer to a visual illusion of self-motion induced in a stationary observer (by moving, or simulating the motion of, the surrounding environment). Previous studies have found that vection requires attention resources, and that attention regulates the intensity of vection. Until now, there has not been an investigation of the effects of vection intensity on exogenous spatial attention. In this study, we combined the vection induced by left and right grating motion stimuli with classic spatial attention cueing paradigms. We examined whether vection direction could serve as an effective cue for exogenous spatial attention (Experiment 1), and (if so) whether its ability to do so would be affected by the target stimulus modality (visual only in Experiment 1; audiovisual in Experiment 2) and unintentional memory task (Experiment 3). While vection was found to slow response times (Experiment 1 and 2) and decrease performance accuracy (Experiment 3), it was found that vection direction could be used as an effective cue for an exogenous spatial attention task (Experiment 1). In Experiments 2 and 3, it was found that the use of audiovisual targets and unintentional memory task reduced the effectiveness of this vection cue for exogenous attention. These results provide new evidence for the influence of vection on spatial attention. They also provide a new paradigm that could be used in future experiments to examine the complex relationships between motion perception and cognition.