The effect of pre-cueing on spatial attention across perception and action

Moran M. Israel, Pierre Jolicoeur, Asher Cohen

It is well established that processes of perception and action interact. A key question concerns the role of attention in the interaction between perception-action processes. We tested the hypothesis that spatial attention is shared by perception and action. We created a dual-task paradigm: In one task, spatial information is relevant for perception (spatial-input task) but not for action, and in a second task, spatial information is relevant for action (spatial-output task) but not for perception. We used endogenous pre-cueing, with two between-subjects conditions: In one condition the cue was predictive only for the target location in the spatial-input task; in a second condition the cue was predictive only for the location of the response in the spatial-output task. In both conditions, the cueing equally affected both tasks, regardless of the information conveyed by the cue. This finding directly supports the shared input-output attention hypothesis.