Expect the unexpected: a paradoxical effect of cue validity on the orienting of attention

Predictive central cues generate location-based expectancies, voluntary shifts of attention, and facilitate target processing. Often, location-based expectancies and voluntary attention are confounded in cueing tasks. Here we vary the predictability of central cues to determine whether they can evoke the inhibition of target processing in three go/no-go experiments. In the first experiment, the central cue was uninformative and did not predict the target's location. Importantly, these cues did not seem to affect target processing. In the second experiment, the central cue indicated the most or the least likely location of the target. Surprisingly, both types of cues facilitated target processing at the cued location. In the third experiment, the central cue predicted the most likely location of a no-go target, but it did not provide relevant information pertaining to the location of the go target. Again, the central cue facilitated processing of the go target. These results suggest that efforts to strategically allocate inhibition may be thwarted by the paradoxical monitoring of the cued location. The current findings highlight the need to further explore the relationship between location-based expectancies and spatial attention in cueing tasks.