Authors
Sander A Los
Publication date
2010
Source
Attention and time
Volume
289
Issue
302
Pages
24
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Description
An early contribution to the field of temporal attention was Herbert Woodrow’s (1914) voluminous monograph titled ‘The measurement of attention’. Woodrow provided a comprehensive review of what was known at the time about the behavioural effects of the foreperiod (FP). FP is the interval between the offset of a warning stimulus (S1) and the onset of an imperative stimulus (S2) to which the participant is instructed to respond as quickly as possible. A key characteristic of the design that Woodrow considered was that S1 (typically a brief tone) merely served to signal that S2 was impending, while being uninformative of any other feature of S2, like its location, content, or task requirement. Despite the minimal information conveyed by S1, Woodrow observed that the response time (RT) with respect to S2 was highly dependent on the duration of FP. This led him to propose that attention varies systematically during FP, and that RT is shorter to the extent that the occurrence of S2 coincides with a peak in the participant’s attentional state. Woodrow (1914) also reported several new phenomena from his own experimental work. Among these new phenomena was the sequential effect of FP, which he observed in the variable-FP paradigm, where FP varies randomly across the trials of a block. Although the robustness of this effect has been established across many publications since Woodrow’s seminal contribution, its theoretical importance has not been widely appreciated. In this chapter, I will describe the sequential effect of FP and explain whyI think it may cast light on some fundamental properties of temporal attention.
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