Citation

Symes E, Ottoboni G, Tucker M, Ellis R, Tessari A. Q. J. Exp. Psychol. (2006) 2010; 63(7): 1387-1397.

Affiliation

University of Plymouth, Plymouth, UK.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2010, SAGE Publications)

DOI

10.1080/17470210903380806

PMID

19921595

Abstract

There is evidence that preparing and maintaining a motor plan ("motor attention") can bias visual selective attention. For example, a motor attended grasp biases visual attention to select appropriately graspable object features (Symes, Tucker, Ellis, Vainio, & Ottoboni, 2008). According to the biased competition model of selective attention, the relative weightings of stimulus-driven and goal-directed factors determine selection. The current study investigated how the goal-directed bias of motor attention might operate when the stimulus-driven salience of the target was varied. Using a change detection task, two almost identical photographed scenes of simplistic graspable objects were presented flickering back and forth. The target object changed visually, and this change was either high or low salience. Target salience determined whether or not the motor attended grasp significantly biased visual selective attention. Specifically, motor attention only had a reliable influence on target detection times when the visual salience of the target was low.

Language: en