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Related Experiment Video

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A Novel Single Animal Motor Function Tracking System Using Simple, Readily Available Software

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Published on: August 31, 2018

Prior-entry: a review.

Charles Spence¹, Cesare Parise

¹Crossmodal Research Laboratory, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom. charles.spence@psy.ox.ac.uk

Consciousness and Cognition

|January 9, 2010

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

The law of prior entry demonstrates that attended stimuli reach consciousness faster than unattended ones. Recent evidence confirms this attention-based effect, clarifying century-old research.

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Psychology
Neuroscience
Psychophysics

Background:

The law of prior entry, a fundamental law of attention proposed by E.B. Titchener, posits that attended objects enter consciousness faster than unattended ones.
Over a century of research, methodological confounds have obscured whether prior entry effects stem from attention, response biases, or sensory facilitation.

Purpose of the Study:

To review the literature on the prior-entry effect.
To highlight methodological confounds in prior research.
To summarize current consensus and outline future research questions.

Main Methods:

Review of existing literature on the prior-entry effect.
Analysis of methodological confounds in previous studies.
Examination of recent psychophysical and electrophysiological evidence.

Main Results:

Recent research provides compelling psychophysical and electrophysiological evidence supporting the prior-entry effect.
Attending to sensory modality, location, or feature speeds the arrival of attended stimuli into consciousness.
Prior-entry effects are observed with both endogenous and exogenous attention orienting.

Conclusions:

The prior-entry effect is a genuine phenomenon supported by modern research.
Understanding the prior-entry effect requires careful methodological control to distinguish attentional effects from confounds.
Future research should continue to explore the neural and behavioral mechanisms underlying the prior-entry effect.