Comparing intramodal and crossmodal cuing in the endogenous orienting of spatial attention

Abstract

The endogenous orienting of spatial attention has been studied with both informative central cues and informative peripheral cues. Central cues studies are difficult to compare with studies that have used uninformative peripheral cues due to the differences in stimulus presentation. Moreover, informative peripheral cues attract both endogenous and exogenous attention, thus making it difficult to disentangle the contribution of each process to any behavioural results observed. In the present study, we used an informative peripheral cue (either tactile or visual) that predicted that the target would appear (in different blocks of trials) on either the same or opposite side as the cue. By using this manipulation, both expected and unexpected trials could either be exogenously cued or uncued, thus making it possible to isolate expectancy effects from cuing effects. Our aim was to compare the endogenous orienting of spatial attention to tactile (Experiment 1) and to visual targets (Experiment 2) under conditions of intramodal and crossmodal spatial cuing. The results suggested that the endogenous orienting of spatial attention should not be considered as being a purely supramodal phenomenon, given that significantly larger expectancy effects were observed in the intramodal cuing conditions than in the crossmodal cuing conditions in both experiments.