AUTHOR=Ristic Jelena , Landry Mathieu , Kingstone Alan TITLE=Automated Symbolic Orienting: The Missing Link JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology VOLUME=Volume 3 - 2012 YEAR=2012 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00560 DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00560 ISSN=1664-1078 ABSTRACT=

Attention can be controlled either exogenously, driven by the stimulus features, or endogenously, driven by the internal expectancies about events in the environment. Extending this prevailing framework, we (Ristic and Kingstone, 2012) recently demonstrated that performance could also be independently controlled by overlearned behaviorally relevant stimuli, like arrows, producing automated effects. Using a difficult target discrimination task within a double cuing paradigm, here we tested whether automated orienting engages selective attention, and if in doing so it draws on its own pool of attentional resources. Our data unequivocally support both possibilities, and indicate that human attention networks are uniquely specialized for processing behaviorally relevant information.