Attention to Non-Contiguous Locations of the Visual Field

Abstract

Our recent finding (Kramer and Hahn, 1995) challenged the traditionally accepted idea that attention can be directed to only one connected area at a time. We investigated this issue with a same-different matching task while pre-cueing two separate locations. Our results suggested that attention can be allocated to noncontiguous regions of space as long as sudden-onsets do not appear between the attended locations. We hypothesized that subjects could allocate attention over noncontiguous locations of the visual fields, but may not be able to maintain the multiple foci if stimulus-based attention capture by sudden-onsets disrupt previous built attentional foci. The series of current experiments further provided the converging evidence that people could attend to multiple (at least two) noncontiguous locations simultaneously. We modified LaBerge's (1995) cognitive neuroscience model of attention with two stage of attentional distribution to provide the explanatory framework of attentional distribution over noncontiguous locations.