Shifting and Scaling: Critically Investigating Deployments of Spatial Attention

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2024

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Wyche, Nicholas

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Abstract

In the visual domain, attention can be deployed to specific points in space in two ways: firstly, through modulations of attentional breadth (the spatial extent of attentional focus around the fixated point), and secondly, through shifting the location of attentional focus, a process usually accomplished via eye movements. The aim of this thesis was to address two unresolved issues in the study of spatial-attentional deployments: firstly, the lack of measurement validation for tasks claiming to operationalise attentional breadth, and secondly, the virtual absence of knowledge about how different kinds of spatial-attentional deployment relate to each other. The first part of this thesis addressed concerns arising from failures to validate operationalisations of attentional breadth. Study 1 investigated whether two tasks commonly used to measure attentional breadth (the Navon composite-letters and Eriksen flanker tasks) operationalise the same construct, concluding that a widely-used version of the Eriksen flanker task is unlikely to index attentional breadth. Study 2 found that the ability to resize attentional breadth correlates with a leading predictor of crash risk in older drivers, the Useful Field of View task (UFOV). This contrasts with research that has questioned the role of attentional breadth in UFOV performance using the Eriksen flanker task. Together these findings demonstrate the importance of measurement validation when studying attentional processes, even for measures which have long been used in their fields of application. The second part of this thesis investigated whether different kinds of spatial-attentional deployments relate to each other. Study 3 found that increasing working memory load affected eye movement behaviour but not attentional breadth. It also found strong correlations between eye movement behaviour metrics across the working memory load conditions, indicating that individual differences in eye movement behaviours are so characteristic that they transcend the effects of experimental manipulations. Study 4 found no association between attentional breadth and eye movement behaviour, but some eye movement behaviours were predicted by the personality variable of Openness to Experience. Taken together, these findings demonstrate the uniqueness of how each individual acquires information from the visual world.

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Thesis (PhD)

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