Investigating Performance Under Two Forms of Temporal Cueing

Abstract

Temporal attention is the focusing of cognitive resources to an interval in time to prepare a response and improve perception. Recently, it has been shown that there are two independent forms of temporal attention: one elicited by purely endogenous alerting mechanisms, and one elicited through a combination of both endogenous and exogenous alerting mechanisms (McCormick et al., 2018). While these both improve performance at validly cued intervals, more informative speed and accuracy comparisons were not possible due to them being measured during a detection task. The current pair of experiments looks to compare these two forms of temporal attention in a discrimination task, while measuring both speed and accuracy, by making methodological modifications that lower task demand. This marks the first study to observe benefits to temporal cueing in a discrimination task for both the combined and purely endogenous temporal attention conditions. Speed and accuracy relationships are further discussed.