| Abstract: | In the present study we investigated whether the visually allocated "beam" studied by Posner and others is the same visual attentional resource that performs the role of feature integration in Treisman's model. Subjects were cued to attend to a certain spatial location by a visual cue, and performance at expected and unexpected stimulus locations was compared. Subjects searched for a target letter (R) with distractor letters that either could give rise to illusory conjunctions (PQ) or could not (PB). Results from three separate experiments showed that orienting attention in response to central cues (endogenous orienting) showed similar effects for both conjunction and feature search. However, when attention was oriented with peripheral visual cues (exogenous orienting), conjunction search showed larger effects of attention than did feature search. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
