Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 10, 2026

Orienteering as a Tool for Cognitive Research: An Implementation Guide
Published on: November 29, 2024
The phenomenology of endogenous orienting
Paolo Bartolomeo1, Caroline Decaix, Eric Siéroff
1INSERM Unit 610, Paris, France. paolo.bartolomeo@chups.jussieu.fr
Abstract:
Can we build endogenous expectations about the locus of occurrence of a target without being able to describe them? Participants performed cue-target detection tasks with different proportions of valid and invalid trials, without being informed of these proportions, and demonstrated typical endogenous effects. About half were subsequently able to correctly describe the cue-target relationships ('verbalizers'). However, even non-verbalizer participants showed endogenous orienting with peripheral cues (Experiments 1 and 3), not depending solely on practice (Experiment 2). Explicit instructions did not bring about dramatic advantages in performance (Experiment 4). With central symbolic cues, only verbalizers showed reliable endogenous effects (Experiment 5). We concluded that endogenous orienting with peripheral cues can occur independently of participants developing explicit hypotheses about the cue-target relationships.
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