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Contrasting attentional biases in a saccadic choice task

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Abstract

To gain insight into how human observers select items in the visual field we pitted two attentional biases against one another in a single free choice design. The first bias is the nasal-temporal asymmetry during free choice tasks, where observers tend to choose targets that appear in their temporal hemifield over targets appearing in their nasal hemifield. The second is the choice bias found in studies of attentional priming. When observers have to select between a stimulus that shares features with a preceding target and a stimulus sharing features with previous distractors, they have a strong tendency to choose the preceding search target and this bias increases the more often the same search is repeated. Our results show that both biases affect saccadic choice, but they also show that the nasal-temporal bias can modulate the strength of the priming effects, but not vice versa. The priming effect was stronger for stimuli appearing in the temporal than in the nasal hemifield, but the nasal-temporal bias was similar for primed and unprimed targets. Additionally, our findings are the first to show how search repetition leads to faster saccades. The observed difference between the effects of the NTA and priming biases may reflect the difference in neural mechanisms thought to be behind these biases and that biases at lower levels may outrank higher-level biases, at least in their effect on visual attention.

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Data availability

The datasets generated and analysed during the current study will be available from the corresponding author upon request.

Notes

  1. Past evidence has shown no left–right asymmetry in saccades that could potentially affect performance at a saccade choice task (see, e.g., Honda 2002; Tagu et al. 2020; Vergilino-Perez et al. 2012), so although we only covered the left eye, we are quite confident that the left–right differences we observe in the current study reflect naso-temporal asymmetries in choice.

  2. Although the difference in the luminance of the red and green stimuli is considerable it could not have affected the results because the distributions of the colours were perfectly balanced between all conditions in the experiment.

  3. It is not possible to use glmer() here, because there is no grouping variable that can be used as factor.

  4. When the effects of repetition in the whole data set are measured, it is important to note that the same colour combination is repeated twice, occurring in each of the three streak lengths; 4 repetitions occur for streak lengths 4 and 6 repetitions occur only when the streak length is 6. Therefore, there is more data behind 2 repetitions than 4 and more data behind 4 repetitions than 6 repetitions.

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Funding

ÁK was supported by the Icelandic research fund (#207045-052 and # 173947) and the research fund at the University of Iceland and T was supported by the Icelandic research fund (#206744-051).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Icelandic Vision Lab, Department of Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, School of Health Sciences, University of Iceland, Sæmundargötu 2, 101, Reykjavík, Iceland

    Ómar I. Jóhannesson, Árni Kristjánsson & Jérôme Tagu

  2. School of Psychology, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russian Federation

    Árni Kristjánsson

  3. EA 4139 Laboratory of Psychology, University of Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France

    Jérôme Tagu

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  1. Ómar I. Jóhannesson
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  2. Árni Kristjánsson
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Correspondence to Ómar I. Jóhannesson.

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Appendix A

Appendix A

See Tables 1, 2 and 3.

Table 1 Summary of the nasal temporal asymmetry. Descriptive statistics and results of the statistical tests in all the choice trials
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Table 2 Summary of the priming effects
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Table 3 Selections of the temporal stimulus
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Jóhannesson, Ó.I., Kristjánsson, Á. & Tagu, J. Contrasting attentional biases in a saccadic choice task. Exp Brain Res 240, 173–187 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-021-06245-y

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