?
Spatial attention with Rescorla's 'truly random control'
The allocation of attention can occur not only in space, but also in time. Application of Rescorla's "truly random control" procedure about independency of cues and targets allowed us to differentiate the impact of endogenous (voluntary) and exogenous (automatic) components of temporal attention on the performance separately and within their interaction. In a random dot motion task, variation of luminance and motion of dots, that represent the cue, affects the engagement of exogenous mode. Temporal contingency between cues and targets or its absence affects the impact of endogenous mode. Combining these conditions, the results are as follows. For endogenous cues, we see improvement of both speed and accuracy at early cue target onset asynchrony. For exogenous cues, we see improvement of response times, but not accuracy. When both are involved, we observe a trade-off of speed and accuracy. This parallels from the auditory modalities of alertness cueing but with purely visual stimuli.