Citation

Wright CE, Marino VF, Chubb C, Rose KA. Atten. Percept. Psychophys. 2011; 73(3): 854-871.

Affiliation

University of California, Irvine, CA, USA, cewright@uci.edu.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2011, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

10.3758/s13414-010-0062-x

PMID

21264702

PMCID

PMC3063872

Abstract

Choice reaction time generally increases linearly with the logarithm of the number of potential stimulus-response alternatives, a regularity known as Hick's law. Two apparent violations of this generalization, which have been reported for aimed eye movements (Kveraga, Boucher, & Hughes, Experimental Brain Research, 146, 307-314, 2002), and arm movements (Wright, Marino, Belovsky, & Chubb, Experimental Brain Research, 179, 475-496, 2007), occurred when the indicator stimulus was an abrupt change at the location that was the target of the to-be-made movement. We report two experiments that examined and rejected the hypothesis that these abrupt-onset indicator stimuli triggered a shift in exogenous attention and that this led to unusually small uncertainty effects. Each experiment compared this indicator stimulus with a single alternative: Experiment 1 tested an indicator stimulus at all locations other than the target; Experiment 2 tested a central pointer to the target. Neither alternative led to an uncertainty effect for pointing responses that was of the size typically observed for other responses using the same stimuli.

Language: en