Authors: Dieter Bauer Axel Plinge Walter H Ehrenstein Gerhard Rinkenauer Marc Grosjean
Publish Date: 2011/11/26
Volume: 76, Issue: 6, Pages: 730-735
Abstract
The aim of this study was to investigate the spatial orienting of visual attention in depth under purely stereoscopic viewing conditions Randomdot stereograms were used to present disparitydefined target stimuli that were either validly or invalidly cued in depth In separate tasks participants responded either to the relative depth of the target protruding vs receding or to its shape square vs diamond Stimulus onset asynchronies SOAs between an uninformative exogenous cue and target were varied from 250 to 600 ms For both tasks mean response times RTs were shorter for validly than invalidly cued target depths and this RT advantage was essentially restricted to the shortest SOA of 250 ms These results indicate that attention can be reflexively allocated to locations in stereo depth under conditions of low perceptual load and independent of whether depth is relevant to the task or not
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