Attention spotlight

Posner experimented on cueing attention by measuring response times to a stimulus in 3 conditions: with an arrow cueing where the stimulus will appear, with no arrow, or with an arrow cueing incorrectly to another location. People reacted fastest to a correct cue and slowest to the misleading cue. Posner as a result said there was a spotlight of attention in the visual field and the cues were directing this spotlight, when the spotlight was in the right place on presentation of the stimulus the response was quicker. Some exogenous cues cause involuntary shifts in the location of the attention spotlight.

Eriksen & Eriksen tested where in the visual field a distracting flanker would have an impact on response to the target and found that at more than 0.5 degree of retinal angle from the target the distraction’s effects were minimal. So they concluded that the minimum size of the spotlight was 1 degree of retinal angle.

Multiple Object Tracking experiments ask participants to track visually a certain number of objects (eg circles) from within a wider pool of those identical objects, the objects then move around and the participant is tested to see if they can identify all the target objects. The experiments find that people can accurately track 3 or 4 objects before they start losing them. The MOT results suggest that people track objects rather than a visual area, so this does not support the attention spotlight theory.

Egly’s experiments found that people responded more to a stimulus located on the same object as the target of attention than to a stimulus at the same distance but not attached to the object. This suggests attention is on objects rather than an amount of physical space (spotlight).

Balint’s syndrome can be caused by bilateral parietal lobe damage. These patients are only able to see one object at a time. When the patient is shown a pen and a comb crossed over each other, they can only see one. This suggests their attention is to an object, rather than to a spotlight because both objects are in the same location.