title: Automated symbolic orienting: the missing link.
abstract: Attention can be controlled either exogenously, driven by the stimulus features, or endogenously, driven by the internal expectancies about events in the environment. Extending this prevailing framework, we (Ristic and Kingstone, 2012) recently demonstrated that performance could also be independently controlled by overlearned behaviorally relevant stimuli, like arrows, producing automated effects. Using a difficult target discrimination task within a double cuing paradigm, here we tested whether automated orienting engages selective attention, and if in doing so it draws on its own pool of attentional resources. Our data unequivocally support both possibilities, and indicate that human attention networks are uniquely specialized for processing behaviorally relevant information.
authors: Department of Psychology, McGill University Montreal, QC, Canada.
authors: Jelena
authors: J
authors: Ristic
authors: Mathieu
authors: M
authors: Landry
authors: Alan
authors: A
authors: Kingstone
keywords: additive factors method; attention; automaticity; behaviorally relevant stimuli; performance; reaction time