title: Luminance-increment detection: capacity-limited or not?
abstract: Three experiments investigated whether spatial cuing influences luminance-increment detection accuracy. Ss saw multiple-target displays and responded yes or no to 4 locations, including cued position. To test whether cuing effects are due to the load on visual short-term memory from the number of locations, Experiments 1 and 2 presented displays with 4 or 8 relevant locations. Experiment 1 used peripheral cues; Experiment 2 used central cues. Significant cuing effects were less marked with 4- than 8-location displays. Cuing effects were largest with multiple targets, but a small reliable effect remained even with single targets. Experiment 3 replicated the single-target effect with predominantly multiple- and single-target displays. A capacity-limited selection account is developed for these findings and their implications are discussed for separate central and peripheral cuing mechanisms and the locus of spatial cuing effects.
authors.affiliation: Birkbeck College, University of London, England.
authors.forename: H J
authors.initials: HJ
authors.lastname: Müller
authors.forename: G W
authors.initials: GW
authors.lastname: Humphreys
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D003463:Cues; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D006801:Humans; D008027:Light; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D009949:Orientation; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011601:Psychophysics; D011930:Reaction Time; D014796:Visual Perception