%0 Journal Article
%T Exploring attention-based explanations for some violations of Hick's law for aimed movements
%J Attention, perception and psychophysics
%D 2011
%A Wright, Charles E.
%A Marino, Valerie F.
%A Chubb, Charles
%A Rose, Kelsey A.
%V 73
%N 3
%P 854-871
%X 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.<p /> <p>Language: en</p>
%G en
%I Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group
%@ 1943-3921
%U http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/s13414-010-0062-x