Student Research Detail

Posner and associates provided evidence of three distinct attention networks, one associated with performing controlled executive tasks, one associated with visual orienting, and one associated with becoming and remaining alert. The current study examined the relationship between alertness and visual orienting, using Posner’s exogenous Visual Orienting Task with a normative sample of undergraduates. Specifically, we studied the effect of varying the salience (brightness) of visual cues on responses to subsequent targets. It was found that brightening the cues affected responses to peripheral stimuli, as well as the unique alerting effect of the visual cues.

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