Action planning can override exogenous cueing effects.

Abstract

Action planning can bias the distribution of attention toward the anticipated consequences of the action. Human performance could be facilitated in processing stimuli appearing in locations congruent with the planned action and subsequently held in spatial working memory. This suggests that action planning has the capacity to endogenously orient attention, but this has yet to be formally investigated. In the current study, we examined whether the endogenous nature of action planning could affect exogenous attention capture. Using a virtual three-dimensional (3D) environment, participants underwent simulated driving while presented with a modified cue-target paradigm. Action planning was prompted before (Experiment 1) or during cue presentation (Experiment 2) by requiring participants to perform a lane change following their localization response at the peripheral target onset. The results showed that traditional exogenous cueing effects (inhibition of return; IOR) were revealed when action planning was not required. However, when action planning was required, the IOR effect was diminished at the action-relevant location but remained present at the action-irrelevant location. In addition, we tested that our results were not merely the effect of an induced working memory load before making the lane change (Experiment 3) and that action planning endogenously oriented attention in the absence of any exogenous cueing manipulations (Experiment 4). Collectively, these findings suggest that the endogenous shifting of attention that results from planned actions can impact the effect of exogenous orienting in dynamic stimulus interactions. Future research should continue to examine the interplay between endogenous and exogenous attention in ecologically valid settings.