title: When motor attention improves selective attention: the dissociating role of saliency.
abstract: There is evidence that preparing and maintaining a motor plan ("motor attention") can bias visual selective attention. For example, a motor attended grasp biases visual attention to select appropriately graspable object features (Symes, Tucker, Ellis, Vainio, & Ottoboni, 2008). According to the biased competition model of selective attention, the relative weightings of stimulus-driven and goal-directed factors determine selection. The current study investigated how the goal-directed bias of motor attention might operate when the stimulus-driven salience of the target was varied. Using a change detection task, two almost identical photographed scenes of simplistic graspable objects were presented flickering back and forth. The target object changed visually, and this change was either high or low salience. Target salience determined whether or not the motor attended grasp significantly biased visual selective attention. Specifically, motor attention only had a reliable influence on target detection times when the visual salience of the target was low.
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of Plymouth, Drake Circus, Plymouth PL4 8AA, UK. esymes@plymouth.ac.uk
authors.forename: Ed
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Symes
authors.forename: Giovanni
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Ottoboni
authors.forename: Mike
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Tucker
authors.forename: Rob
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Ellis
authors.forename: Alessia
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Tessari
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006040:Goals; D018737:Hand Strength / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D014794:Visual Fields / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult