#4096. Shifting expectations: Lapses in spatial attention are driven by anticipatory attentional shifts

September 2026publication date
Proposal available till 23-05-2025
4 total number of authors per manuscript0 $

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Journal’s subject area:
Experimental and Cognitive Psychology;
Sensory Systems;
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Abstract:
Attention is dynamic, constantly shifting between different locations – sometimes imperfectly. In addition to revealing feature-binding errors during dynamic shifts of attention, this study unexpectedly found that participants sometimes made correlated errors on trials when they did not have to shift attention, mistakenly reporting the features and location of an object at a different location. The authors posited that these errors represent “spatial lapses” attention, which are perhaps driven by the implicit sampling of other locations in anticipation of having to shift attention. To investigate whether these spatial lapses are indeed anticipatory, we conducted a series of four experiments. We first replicated in Psychological Science, 30(3), the original finding of spatial lapses, and then showed that these spatial lapses were not observed in contexts where participants are not expecting to have to shift attention. We found that spatial lapses do not seem to be driven by explicit knowledge of likely shift locations. Combined, these results suggest that spatial lapses of attention are induced by the implicit anticipation of making an attentional shift, providing further insight into the interplay between implicit expectations, dynamic spatial attention, and visual perception.
Keywords:
rhythmic sampling; spatial probability; statistical learning

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