The Time Course of Attentional Focusing

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...

On the time course of attentional focusing in older adults.

Many sensory and cognitive changes accompany normal ageing, including changes to visual attention. Several studies have investigated age-related changes in the control of attention to specific locations (spatial orienting), but it is unknown whether control over the distribution or breadth of attention (spatial focus) also changes with age. In the present study, we employed a dual-stream attent...

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