Eye and hand movements disrupt attentional control

Voluntary attentional control is the ability to selectively focus on a subset of visual information in the presence of other competing stimuli-a marker of cognitive control enabling flexible, goal-driven behavior. To test its robustness, we contrasted attentional control with the most common source...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2022-01, Vol.17 (1), p.e0262567-e0262567
Main Authors: Hanning, Nina Maria, Wollenberg, Luca, Jonikaitis, Donatas, Deubel, Heiner
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Attention
Attention - physiology
Biology and Life Sciences
Cognitive ability
Cues
Executive function (Psychology)
Experiments
Eye
Eye movements
Eye Movements - physiology
Female
Hand - physiology
Healthy Volunteers
Humans
Influence
Male
Medicine and Health Sciences
Mental task performance
Movement - physiology
Multitasking
Neurosciences
Noise
Perceptual-motor processes
Photic Stimulation - methods
Physical Sciences
Psychological research
Psychomotor Performance - physiology
Reaction Time - physiology
Robust control
Saccades - physiology
Social Sciences
Visual perception
Visual Perception - physiology
Visual stimuli
Visual system
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Voluntary attentional control is the ability to selectively focus on a subset of visual information in the presence of other competing stimuli-a marker of cognitive control enabling flexible, goal-driven behavior. To test its robustness, we contrasted attentional control with the most common source of attentional orienting in daily life: attention shifts prior to goal-directed eye and hand movements. In a multi-tasking paradigm, human participants attended at a location while planning eye or hand movements elsewhere. Voluntary attentional control suffered with every simultaneous action plan, even under reduced task difficulty and memory load-factors known to interfere with attentional control. Furthermore, the performance cost was limited to voluntary attention: We observed simultaneous attention benefits at two movement targets without attentional competition between them. This demonstrates that the visual system allows for the concurrent representation of multiple attentional foci. Since attentional control is extremely fragile and dominated by premotor attention shifts, we propose that action-driven selection plays the superordinate role for visual selection.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0262567