Meaningful contingent attentional orienting effects: Spatial location-based inhibition and capture

It is well-known that attentional orienting is contingent on the features of attentional settings, and in recent years, an increasing number of studies have supported that the meaningful contingency between cue and target stimuli modulates spatial attention. However, the spatial distribution of meaning-guided attentional orienting has not been thoroughly elucidated, especially in noncentral space. To address this issue, we examined the attentional orienting effects by establishing the meaningful contingency between the objects and how the attentional orienting was affected by the nature of the objects. Furthermore, the attentional distribution in the noncentral fields was analyzed. A modified spatial cueing paradigm was employed in the current study. In Experiment 1, cues were presented as strawberry or watermelon sketches, and targets were presented in red or green. The participants were asked to discriminate the location of the gap of the target square in different cue-target blocks. Experiment 2 was identical to Experiment 1, except that the cues were white Chinese characters, (sic) (meaning red) or (sic) (meaning green), and the number of possible positions was increased from four to six. Experiment 3 was identical to Experiment 2, except that the cue and target stimuli were swapped, where cues were presented in red or green and targets were Chinese characters in white. The results indicated that the inhibition effects were found in the lower spatial field and the increasing capture effects were found in the left and right and the upper spatial fields when the sketches were adopted as cues in Experiment 1. In Experiment 2, it was found that there was a general trend of inhibition and capture effects from the lower to upper locations, but only part of the inhibition effects reached significance when the number of the positions was increased and the Chinese character cues were employed. Experiment 3 replicated the results obtained in Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 when color cues were utilized, but more robust inhibition and capture effects were obtained. The results of this study indicated that (1) the meaningful contingency between the objects guided the visuospatial attentional orienting, highlighting the inhibition and capture effects in different visuospatial fields; (2) the nature of the object modulated the meaningful-contingent attentional orienting, showing that the more vivid the object was, the more modulated it was, whereas the more abstract the object was, the less modulated it was; and (3) the meaningful-contingent attentional orienting was performed regularly in different visual fields, highlighting the location-based inhibition and capture from the lower to the upper fields.