| Budget Amount *help |
¥1,000,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,000,000)
Fiscal Year 1992: ¥300,000 (Direct Cost: ¥300,000)
Fiscal Year 1991: ¥700,000 (Direct Cost: ¥700,000)
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| Research Abstract |
In the first year, research efforts were directed to the selection of an appropriate task. The results suggested that reaction times might not be a good choice, since it might be contaminated by the processes that were not related to the mechanisms and workings of spatial attention (i.e., direct facilitation or priming of response initiation and programming). Therefore, a perceptual task seemed to be a better choice. A survey of the Literature suggested that the multiple-item sequential presentation method developed by Weiselgartner and Sperling (1987) would satisfy the requirements. The methodpresented multiple items successively at the same location in short time interval. The method was considered to be suitable for the purpose of the present research, because it could avoid automatic attention capturing, allowing only for the working of controlled attention processes and did not depend on reactiontime measures.
In the second year, the hypothesis that the gap effect would facilitate not only saccadic latency but also that of attention shifts was tested with this method. The results of two experiments, one with naive subjects and the other with two trained subjects, could not confirm the hypothesis. However, since Mackeben and Nakayama (1993) recently reported the gap effects for spatial attention shifts using a vernier acuity task, it was felt that the clarification of this contradiction would help reveal the mechanisms with which spatial attention facilitates our visual functions.
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