Cueing and counting: Does the position of the attentional focus affect enumeration?

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Abstract
We argue that enumerating 1–4 (subitizing) involves a preattentive mechanism that pre-selects a small number of items for the attentional focus, whereas enumerating larger numbers involves actually changing the position of the attentional focus (Trick & Pylyshyn, 1993). The position of the attentional focus should thus have a stronger effect on enumeration latencies when there are 5 or more items than when there are 1–4. The position of the attentional focus was manipulated using the cue validity paradigm. As predicted, when the position of the attentional focus had any effect at all, it had a significantly greater effect on latencies for 5 or more than for 1–4, although the usual discontinuity in the slope of the enumeration function was apparent. This result obtained with both endogenous and exogenous cues, even when the difficulty of the task was increased by embedding the target items in distractors of a different colour, so that overall contour density was thus held constant between small and large numbers of targets. In these experiments, the effect of cueing was not reliable with no distractors and endogenous cues, however.

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