Symbolic control of visual attention: The role of working memory and attentional control settings.

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This article should be addressed to Jay Pratt, Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, 100 Saint George Street, Toronto, Ontario M5S 3G3, Canada. E-mail: pratt@psych .utoronto.ca Journal of Experimental Psychology: Copyright 2003 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. Human Perception and Performance 2003, Vol. 29, No. 5, 835--845 0096-1523/03/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/0096-1523.29.5.835 835 Recently, Hommel, Pratt, Colzato, and Godijn (2001) showed that involuntary shifts of attention are not limited to viewing hand or eye movements but also occur with simple, overlearned communicative symbols. Hommel et al. presented centrally located arrows and directional words (up, down, left, right) which were followed by a peripheral target. It is important to note that these symbols were entirely irrelevant to the task, and the observers were explicitly told that arrows and words contained no useful information about the location of the upcoming target. Nevertheless, in the first and third experiments, targets were detected faster when they occurred at the location indicated by the arrow or word (compatible condition) than at another location (incompatible condition). The second experiment extended this finding by showing that the compatibility effect also affected (i.e., counteracted) inhibition of return (IOR), a long-lasting attentional inhibitory effect. Finally, the fourth experiment showed that the compatibility effect was present even when the observers were told which location was the most likely target location. Thus, even in the presence of a volitional shift of attention to a specific location, the noninformative arrows and directional words still influenced the responses. Moreover, the compatibility effects occurred for targets at both the volitionall..

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