title: Further evidence in favor of prior entry from endogenous attention to a location in space.
abstract: Titchener's (1908) law of prior entry states that "the object of attention comes to consciousness more quickly than the objects which we are not attending to," or otherwise, that attended stimuli are perceived earlier than unattended stimuli. Shore, Spence, and Klein (Psychological Science, 12, 205-212. doi: 10.1111/1467-9280.00337 , 2001) showed that endogenous visuospatial orienting does in fact elicit prior-entry effects, albeit to a smaller degree than does exogenous visuospatial orienting. In disagreement with this finding, Schneider and Bavelier (Cognitive Psychology, 47, 333-366. doi: 10.1016/S0010-0285(03)00035-5 , 2003) found no effect of their instruction to attend. They concluded that nonattentional effects could masquerade as prior entry, which could account for findings such as those in Shore et al.'s endogenous condition. We investigated this empirical and theoretical discord by replicating the temporal-order judgment task used by Shore, Spence, and Klein, while manipulating and measuring endogenous orienting by way of an orthogonal color probe task. We showed evidence of prior entry as a consequence of endogenous orienting, supporting the conclusions of Shore, Spence, and Klein.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology & Neuroscience, Dalhousie University, 1355 Oxford St., 3rd Floor LSC, Halifax, Nova Scotia, B3H 4R2, Canada. rredden@dal.ca.
authors.forename: Ralph S
authors.initials: RS
authors.lastname: Redden
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology & Neuroscience, Dalhousie University, 1355 Oxford St., 3rd Floor LSC, Halifax, Nova Scotia, B3H 4R2, Canada.
authors.forename: Ghislain
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: d'Entremont
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology & Neuroscience, Dalhousie University, 1355 Oxford St., 3rd Floor LSC, Halifax, Nova Scotia, B3H 4R2, Canada.
authors.forename: Raymond M
authors.initials: RM
authors.lastname: Klein
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D003243:Consciousness / Q000502:physiology; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D008297:Male; D009949:Orientation / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods*; D011897:Random Allocation; D013028:Space Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Bayesian analysis; Color wheel; Endogenous orienting; Prior entry; Temporal-order judgment