Visual exploration is driven by two main factors--the stimuli in our environment, and our own individual interests and intentions. Research investigating these two aspects of attentional guidance has focused almost exclusively on factors common across individuals. The present study took a different tack, and examined the role played by individual…

Human visual attention operates in a context that is complex, social and dynamic. To explore this, we recorded people taking part in a group decision-making task and then showed video clips of these situations to new participants while tracking their eye movements. Observers spent the majority of time looking at the people in the videos, and in…

We report a study that examines whether the presentation of irrelevant, ordinal information at central fixation interacts with the allocation of attention beyond fixation. Previous research has demonstrated that number perception influences the allocation of spatial attention, such that the presentation of a spatially nonpredictive number at…

The inhibition of return (IOR) phenomenon is routinely considered an effect of reflexive attention because the paradigm used to generate IOR employs peripheral cues that are uninformative as to where a target will appear. Because the cues are spatially unreliable it is thought that there is no reason for attention to be committed volitionally to…

Attention is shifted reflexively to where other people are looking. It has been argued by a number of investigators that this social attention effect reflects the obligatory bottom-up activation of domain-specific modules within the inferior temporal (IT) cortex that are specialized for processing face and gaze information. However, it is also the…

Highly variable bisection performance in neglect patients has been attributed to an increased "zone of indifference" (Marshall & Halligan, 1989). The indifference zone indicates the discrepancy between two line lengths which are judged as equal in length. Following this argumentation, the central area of a line should be expanded in neglect…

To better understand the prefrontal circuitry that putatively supports executive functions, such as those involved in switching tasks, we asked whether a current task set is open equally to receiving information from any sensory modality or if it is to some degree modality-specific. Subjects were presented with a sequence of digits to be…

Participants judged whether two sequential visual events were presented for the "same" length of time or for "different" lengths of time, while ignoring two irrelevant sequential sounds. Sounds could be either the same or different in terms of their duration or their pitch. When the visual stimuli were in conflict with the sound stimuli (e.g.,…

Do people tend to underestimate time when their attention is engaged? Studies supporting this idea have routinely confounded attentional manipulations with changes in other factors, such as response complexity and memory load. The aim of the present study was to obtain the first direct evidence that attentional engagement mediated by cortical…

Data from experiments with split-brain patients, who have had their left and right hemispheres disconnected, suggests a remarkable specialization of function within each hemisphere. At the same time, these patients conduct their daily lives with great proficiency. This ability suggests that some information integral to coordinated function between…

When two masked targets are presented in a rapid sequence, correct identification of the first hinders identification of the second. This attentional blink (AB) is thought to be the result of capacity limitations in visual information processing. Neuropsychological and neuroimaging evidence implicated the right hemisphere as the source of this…

It is widely assumed that high-level visual processes subserve the attentional blink (AB). Recent evidence from studies of visual masking during the AB that were designed to directly test the contributions of high-level masking effects, however, have failed to provide empirical support for this position.The implication is that low-level visual…

For the past several years it has been thought that cues, such as eye direction, can trigger reflexive shifts in attention because of their biological relevance and their specialized neural architecture. However, very recently, Ristic, Friesen, and Kingstone (2002) reported that other stimuli, such as arrows, trigger reflexive shifts in attention…