The time course of attentional selection among competing locations

The Time Course of Attentional Focusing

In four experiments, we investigated the time course of attentional focusing. Our main aims were to estimate the time necessary for focusing to take place and the time over which focal attention can be maintained. The use of a pre-cueing procedure allowed us to estimate the time necessary for focusing, excluding the time needed for orienting. The results of the ® rst three experiments showed th...

The influence of target discriminability on the time course of attentional selection

A wealth of neurophysiological data has demonstrated that visual attention can selectively enhance target representations early in the visual processing pathway. In addition, behavioural evidence tells us that the extent to which irrelevant items interfere with target processing depends on their featural similarity to the target. In this context, how does target discriminability influence tempo...

The time course of attentional deployment in contextual cueing.

The time course of attention is a major characteristic on which different types of attention diverge. In addition to explicit goals and salient stimuli, spatial attention is influenced by past experience. In contextual cueing, behaviorally relevant stimuli are more quickly found when they appear in a spatial context that has previously been encountered than when they appear in a new context. In...

Characterizing the time course and nature of attentional disengagement effects

Visual features of fixated but irrelevant items contribute to both how long overt attention dwells at a location and to decisions regarding the location of subsequent attention shifts (Boot & Brockmole, 2010; Brockmole & Boot, 2009). Fixated but irrelevant search items that share the color of the search target delay the deployment of attention. Furthermore, eye movements are biased to distracto...

The Time Course of Attentional Bias to Threat and Safety