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Updated: May 19, 2026

Measuring Attentional Biases for Threat in Children and Adults
Published on: October 19, 2014
Looking ahead: attending to anticipatory locations increases perception of control
Laura E Thomas1, Adriane E Seiffert
1Department of Psychology, North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND 58108-6050, United States. laura.e.thomas@ndsu.edu
Abstract:
When people manipulate a moving object, such as writing with a pen or driving a car, they experience their actions as intimately related to the object's motion, that is they perceive control. Here, we tested the hypothesis that observers would feel more control over a moving object if an unrelated task drew attention to a location to which the object subsequently moved. Participants steered an object within a narrow path and discriminated the color of a flash that appeared briefly close to the object. Across two experiments, participants provided higher ratings of perceived control when an object moved over a flash's location than when an object moved away from a flash's location. This result suggests that we use the location of spatial attention to determine the perception of control. If an object goes where we are attending, we feel like we made it go there.
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