The Time Course of Exogenous and Endogenous Control of Covert Attention

Overview

Journal Exp Brain Res

Specialty Neurology

Date 2009 Nov 27

PMID 19940982

Citations 24

Authors

Clayton Hickey

Wieske van Zoest

Jan Theeuwes

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Studies of eye-movements and manual response have established that rapid overt selection is largely exogenously driven toward salient stimuli, whereas slower selection is largely endogenously driven to relevant objects. We use the N2pc, an event-related potential index of covert attention, to demonstrate that this time course reflects an underlying pattern in the deployment of covert attention. We find that shifts of attention that occur soon after the onset of a visual search array are directed toward salient, task-irrelevant visual stimuli and are associated with slow responses to the target. In contrast, slower shifts are target-directed and are associated with fast responses. The time course of exogenous and endogenous control provides a framework in which some inconsistent results in the capture literature might be reconciled; capture may occur when attention is rapidly deployed.

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