Paradigm and Hypotheses

This document plots the results of a 30 min version of Online Cueing. Subjects completed 7 blocks of a simple exogenous cueing task. Subjects are asked to keep their eyes at the center of the screen and monitor two possible target locations on either side of the screen for the occurrence of the target. Prior to the target appearing, a random one of these target locations flashes white. Subjects are informed that this flash is random and meant to be distracting, and therefore should ignore it. Following the occurrence of the cue, the target appears. The target is a gabor patch oriented 30 degrees clockwise or counterclockwise from vertical, and is immediately followed by a visual noise mask at that location. At the end of each trial, subjects report which direction the target was turned and report how vividly they experienced the target using the Perceptual Awareness Scale. The scale has 4 points (colloquially outlined here): (1)no experience of the target, (2) something was there but I can’t tell you anything about it, (3) something was there and I have a good guess about what it was, and (4) explicit experience of the target. Subjects report the direction of the target turn using the n (CW) and m (CCW) keys, and the vividness rating using the 1-4 keys at the top of the keyboard.

This is a first pass at attempting to get exogenous cueing effects in an online experiment, with the addition of the PAS ratings to get some pilot data on how a visual cue changes the phenomenological experience of the target.

Note: all error bars are within-subject SEM. Subjects who had a d’ of less than .5 or greater than 2.5 overall, or more than 10% of trials marked as RT outliers, were excluded.

Subject (N = 162) overall performance on cueing task, before exclusion

d’

Trial exclusion details

Cueing task performance (N = 90) after exclusion

Target d’

d’ for clockwise/counter-clockwise target judgement based upon cue validity (valid vs. invalid). Error bars are within-subject SEM.

Size of d’ cueing effect for each subject

Correlation between overall d’ and cueing effect size

Response Time

RT based upon cue validity (valid vs. invalid). Error bars are within-subjects.

Size of RT cueing effect in each subject

Average Vividness Response

Average vividness rating, based upon cue validity (valid or invalid)

Vividness Response Distribution

Distribution of vividness ratings, based upon cue validity (valid or invalid)

Statistics

d’ ANOVA

Effect DFn DFd SSn SSd F p p<.05 ges partial_eta_squared
(Intercept) 1 89 377.121 48.594 690.700 0 * 0.875 0.886
validCue 1 89 3.361 5.125 58.354 0 * 0.059 0.396


log10(RT) ANOVA

Effect DFn DFd SSn SSd F p p<.05 ges partial_eta_squared
(Intercept) 1 89 1453.877 5.485 23591.271 0 * 0.996 0.996
validCue 1 89 0.108 0.294 32.833 0 * 0.018 0.269


VR ANOVA

Effect DFn DFd SSn SSd F p p<.05 ges partial_eta_squared
(Intercept) 1 89 1299.525 57.436 2013.666 0.000 * 0.956 0.958
validCue 1 89 0.140 1.971 6.311 0.014 * 0.002 0.066