Visuospatial cueing by self-caused features: Orienting of attention and action-outcome associative learning

The effect of a salient visual feature in orienting spatial attention was examined as a function of the learned association between the visual feature and the observer's action. During an initial acquisition phase, participants learned that two keypress actions consistently produced red and green visual cues. Next, in a test phase, participants' actions continued to result in singletons, but their color could be either congruent or incongruent with the learned action-color associations. Furthermore, the color singletons now functioned as valid or invalid spatial cues in a visual search, in which participants looked for a tilted line ("/" or "\") among distractors ("X"s). The results showed that an action-congruent color was more effective as a valid cue in the search task (increased benefit), but less effective as an invalid cue (reduced cost). We discuss our findings in terms of both an inhibition account and a preactivation account of action-driven sensory bias, and argue in favor of the preactivation account.