Differentiating General and Peripheral Alerting Effects During Visual Orienting Tasks
Author(s): Raymond D. Collings, Anthony J. Nelson, Shirleen M. McClarren, Katharine L. Campi
Abstract: Posner's exogenous Visual Orienting Task (VOT) was administered to a normative sample of 44 undergraduate participants to examine specific alerting and spatial effects of visual cues. The current findings revealed the presence of two distinct alerting effects: an initial general alerting effect and a later-occurring peripheral alerting effect, specifically benefiting responses to invalidly cued targets. A small but significant inhibition of return (IOR) effect on bilaterally cued targets was also found (p < .05). A series of correlational analyses revealed that the specific peripheral alerting effect was most highly correlated with individual differences in self-report measures of inattention. These findings have both theoretical and methodological implications for attention and individual difference researchers.
Pages: 119-141
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