Attentional Capture by Future Events : anticipatory saccades towards salient and non-salient action consequences are influenced by individual exogenous and endogenous attention

Kurzfassung/Abstract

When our actions contingently yield predictable effects, we bi-directionally associate action and effect. Anticipating desired effects then allows us both to select and plan corresponding actions and to proactively shift our attention towards the location of our action’s future effect. Such anticipatory saccades are thought to reflect a proactive effect monitoring process that prepares a later comparison of expected and actual effect. Here, we examined how the saliency (luminance, colour contrast, and flicker frequency) of future visual effects of participants’ forced-choice left/right key presses influences anticipatory saccades towards them. Furthermore, we assessed individual differences in exogenous (pro-saccade) and endogenous (anti-saccade) attentional orienting in following phases of the experiment in which the salient and non-salient effect (target) stimuli occurred unpredictably at the prior effect locations. Surprisingly, participants were slower to manually produce future salient as compared to non-salient effects and this was modulated by individual differences in exogenous and endogenous attentional orienting. Crucially, the frequency of anticipatory saccades towards participants’ actions’ future visual effects was modulated by interactions of action-effect compatibility, effect saliency, and participants ́ individual exogenous/endogenous attentional orienting. These findings demonstrate that a person ́s individual exogenous and endogenous attentional orienting can affect the proactive monitoring of their actions ́ future effects and thereby impact on goal-directed action control.