Exploring attention-based explanations for some violations of Hick's law for aimed movements.
Choice reaction time generally increases linearly with the logarithm of the number of potential stimulus-response alternatives, a regularity known as Hick's law. Two apparent violations of this generalization, which have been reported for aimed eye movements (Kveraga, Boucher, & Hughes, Experimental Brain Research, 146, 307-314, 2002), and arm movements (Wright, Marino, Belovsky, & Chubb, Experimental Brain Research, 179, 475-496, 2007), occurred when the indicator stimulus was an abrupt change at the location that was the target of the to-be-made movement. We report two experiments that examined and rejected the hypothesis that these abrupt-onset indicator stimuli triggered a shift in exogenous attention and that this led to unusually small uncertainty effects. Each experiment compared this indicator stimulus with a single alternative: Experiment 1 tested an indicator stimulus at all locations other than the target; Experiment 2 tested a central pointer to the target. Neither alternative led to an uncertainty effect for pointing responses that was of the size typically observed for other responses using the same stimuli.
University of California, Irvine, CA, USA. cewright@uci.edu
Charles E
CE
Wright
Valerie F
VF
Marino
Charles
C
Chubb
Kelsey A
KA
Rose
D001288:Attention; D002755:Choice Behavior; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological; D004215:Distance Perception; D005260:Female; D005403:Fixation, Ocular; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009949:Orientation; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D011601:Psychophysics; D011930:Reaction Time; D035501:Uncertainty
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