Disentangling selective attention from orienting of attention

Natural selective attention: orienting and emotion.

The foundations of orienting and attention are hypothesized to stem from activation of defensive and appetitive motivational systems that evolved to protect and sustain the life of the individual. Motivational activation initiates a cascade of perceptual and motor processes that facilitate the selection of appropriate behavior. Among these are detection of significance, indexed by a late centro...

Orienting of attention.

Bartlett viewed thinking as a high level skill exhibiting ballistic properties that he called its “point of no return”. This paper explores one aspect of cognition through the use of a simple model task in which human subjects are asked to commit attention to a position in visual space other than fixation. This instruction is executed by orienting a covert (attentional) mechanism that seems suf...

Orienting attention to semantic categories

We investigated the ability to orient attention to a complex, non-perceptual attribute of stimuli-semantic category. Behavioral consequences and neural correlates of semantic orienting were revealed and compared with those of spatial orienting, using event-related functional magnetic-resonance imaging. Semantic orienting significantly shortened response times to identify word stimuli, showing t...

Attention Capture , Orienting , and Awareness

Attention to baseline: does orienting visuospatial attention really

21 Standard protocols testing the orientation of visuospatial attention usually present 22 spatial cues before targets, and compare valid-cue trials to invalid-cue trials. The valid/invalid 23 contrast results in a relative behavioural or physiological difference that is generally 24 interpreted as a benefit of attention orientation. However, growing evidence suggests that 25 inhibitory control...