Do attentional effects differ across visual fields?
” Perception 27 ECVP Abstract Supplement Do attentional effects differ across visual fields? M Carrasco, C Wei, Y Yeshurun, I Orduña It has been reported that attentional resolution is greater in the lower than in the upper visual field [He, Cavanagh, and Intriligator, 1996 Nature (London) 383 334 – 337]. Because stimulus complexity and distractor heterogeneity varied across tasks in the He et al’s study, we decided to further evaluate their hypothesis. We explored whether observers’ performance in several detection tasks, considered to impose different attentional demands, varied as a function of the visual field in which the target appeared. Observers performed several feature-search (eg, detect a vertical target amid tilted distractors) and conjunction-search (eg, detect a red vertical target amid blue vertical and red tilted distractors) tasks. Performance was assessed by measuring speed and accuracy for targets appearing in the four quadrants of the visual field. A significant and
