Cognitive Psychology · Simplified

Posner Spatial Cueing

Keep your eyes on the cross. Attention can go somewhere your eyes have not, and it costs you when it goes to the wrong place.

Practice

Say which box the target is in

A box brightens, then a filled disc appears in one of the two boxes. Press Left or Right to say which. Six untimed practice trials first, with feedback.

What this needs. Two arrow keys or two buttons, and about four minutes. Nothing is ever timed out: the target waits until you answer. The only thing asked of you is to keep looking at the central cross rather than at the boxes.

Practice trial 1 of 6.

Your result

A benefit and a cost, not one effect

The dashed line is your neutral mean, where the cue pointed nowhere. Everything to the left of it is time you gained, everything to the right is time you lost, and both are measured from the same baseline.

All the values behind this chart


Trial type	Mean reaction time	Correct trials used	Accuracy

Key idea: Your eyes never moved, and the cue still changed how fast you responded. That is covert orienting: attention going somewhere the eyes have not. Without the neutral trials there is one number, the gap between valid and invalid, and no way to say what produced it. With them there are two, and they usually are not the same size. In most people the cost of being cued to the wrong side is larger than the benefit of being cued to the right one, which suggests that pulling attention away from somewhere it has already gone takes work.

One person, one short block, in a browser. Only a fraction of the trials are invalid, because the cue has to be worth believing for the effect to exist at all, so that mean rests on the fewest trials and is the least stable number on the page. Browser timing adds noise of its own. And nothing here checks where you were actually looking: you were asked to hold fixation, which is an instruction rather than a control. A proper study would track your eyes. A result near zero, or the wrong way round, is a result about the block rather than about you, and nothing here measures your attention or your ability.

The longer version adds a second cue-to-target interval so the effect can be made to reverse, a running table of every block, a worked example and a transfer challenge. It is at Posner Spatial Cueing in the main collection.