Modeling the Symbolic Control of Visual Attention

Humans use a variety of perceptual and conceptual symbols to orient visuo- spatial attention around the visual field. Much of the research investigating the orienting of attention, however, has focused on the form of attentional control these symbols elicit. In so doing, the interaction between cue processing and attentional orienting has largely been overlooked. The present study attempted to address this gap in knowledge by first developing three computational models of voluntary attentional control. Each model was based on a competing theory about how previously observed differences in performance on the well known spatial cuing task arise as a function of cue processing. Differentiating the theories using the computational models was inconclusive, with some effects being predicted better by one model or another. However, all models revealed a consistent difference in mechanism efficiency as a function of cue type.