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Updated: Jun 17, 2026

Investigating the Deployment of Visual Attention Before Accurate and Averaging Saccades via Eye Tracking and Assessment of Visual Sensitivity
Published on: March 18, 2019
The automatic orienting of attention to goal-relevant stimuli
Julia Vogt1, Jan De Houwer, Agnes Moors
1Department of Experimental - Clinical and Health Psychology, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium. julia.vogt@UGent.be
Abstract:
It is often assumed that attention is automatically allocated to stimuli relevant to one's actual goals. However, the existing evidence for this idea is limited in several ways. We investigated whether words relevant to a person's current goal influence the orienting of attention even when an intention to attend to the goal-relevant stimuli is not present. In two experiments, participants performed a modified spatial cueing paradigm combined with a second task that induced a goal. The results of the experiments showed that the induced goal led to the orientation of attention to goal-relevant words in the spatial cueing task. This effect was not found for words semantically related to the goal-relevant words. The results provide evidence for motivational accounts of attention, which state that the automatic allocation of attention is guided by the current goals of a person.
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