Covert orienting to non-informative cues: reaction time studies

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Psychology
• Visual Attention

Background:

• Lateralized, non-informative visual cues can influence reaction time (RT) to successive targets.
• Early facilitation in RT is observed only when cues and targets co-occur.
• Inhibition from visual cues has both sensory and attentional components, with attentional effects being spatially lateralized.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the mechanisms underlying reaction time inhibition induced by lateralized, non-informative cues.
• To explore the role of voluntary suppression of orienting in motor readiness.
• To determine if similar covert orienting mechanisms operate across different spatial extents and modalities.

Main Methods:

• Review of studies examining reaction time (RT) to targets following lateralized visual, somatic, or auditory cues.
• Analysis of intramodal (e.g., visual-visual) and cross-modal (e.g., visual-somatic) cue-target interactions.
• Examination of the spatial constraints of attentional components of inhibition.

Main Results:

• Non-informative visual cues lengthen RT to targets in the same visual field.
• Sensory inhibition components are independent of orienting, while attentional components are lateralized.
• Inhibition effects are observed across visual, somatic, and auditory modalities, and in cross-modal interactions.
• Covert orienting mechanisms appear to operate across peripersonal and near extrapersonal space.

Conclusions:

• Directional constraints in motor readiness, induced by suppressing overt orienting, best explain the observed RT effects.
• Covert orienting mechanisms are consistent across peripersonal and near extrapersonal space.
• A common neural substrate likely underlies both intramodal and cross-modal attentional effects.