Temporal course of position shift for a peripheral target.

When a target is presented near a leading cue stimulus, the perceived location of the target is displaced from the cue (attentional repulsion). On the other hand, a memorized target is sometimes mislocalized toward the cue (attentional attraction). The present study aimed at clarifying the temporal relationship between attentional repulsion and attentional attraction. We used a relative judgment task wherein observers judged whether the horizontal location of the target circle was displaced leftward or rightward from the location of a vertically separated probe disk. In Experiments 1 and 2, the stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) between the target and the probe was manipulated from 0 ms to 2000 ms. Repulsive and attractive position shifts were observed at short and long target-probe SOAs, respectively. In Experiment 3, we found that both the cue-target SOA and the target-probe SOA governed the repulsion and attraction in different ways. The results suggest that attentional repulsion and attentional attraction occur at different visual processing stages.