Central and peripheral precuing of forced-choice discrimination

There are suggestions in the literature that spatial precuing of attention with peripheral and central cues may be mediated by different mechanisms. To investigate this issue, data from two previous papers were reanalysed to investigate the complete time course of precuing target location with either: (1) a peripheral cue that may draw attention reflexively, or (2) a central, symbolic cue that may require attention to be directed voluntarily. This analysis led to predictions that were tested in another experiment. The main result of this experiment was that a peripheral cue produced its largest effects on discrimination performance within 100 msec, whereas a central cue required approximately 300 msec to achieve maximum effects. In conjunction with previous findings, the present evidence for time differences between the two cuing conditions suggests that more than one process is involved in the spatial precuing of attention.