Selective attention and temporal-order judgment.
A procedure originally introduced by Sternberg and coworkers was used to examine the effect of selective attention on temporal-order judgment. Two-response and three-response paradigms were employed. As in Sternberg et al's work, a shift of psychometric functions for the two-response paradigm was found that suggested shorter latency for the stimulus to which attention was directed. However, no shift was noted for the three-response paradigm. This discrepancy can be explained by the assumption that the shift obtained for the two-response paradigm results from an artifact caused by a specific task. The artifact occurs because the instruction to attend to a particular stimulus induces a response bias when the subject is forced to guess in situations where he/she cannot recognize the temporal order of stimuli. The artifact disappears with the three-response paradigm where the subject has the additional option to respond "simultaneous".
Jaśkowski
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Department of Biophysics, Medical Academy, Poznań, Poland.
D016477:Artifacts; D001288:Attention; D005260:Female; D005403:Fixation, Ocular; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011594:Psychometrics; D013998:Time Perception; D014794:Visual Fields; D014796:Visual Perception