What's the Craic with Cueing?

An uninformative exogenous cue speeds target detection if the cue and target appear in the same location separated by a brief temporal interval. This finding is traditionally ascribed to the orienting of spatial attention to the cued location. Here, we examine the possibility that faster reaction time to cued targets is due to perceptual averaging of the two events—that is, the cue and target are perceived as one event if they appear in the same location and therefore the target has an earlier onset. We measured manual reaction times to detect cued and uncued targets, and observed the traditional facilitation of cued over uncued targets. We asked the same observers to judge target onset time by noting the time on a clock when the target appeared. Observers consistently judge the onset time of the target as being earlier than it appeared, with cued targets judged as earlier than uncued targets. When the cue-target order is reversed so that the target precedes the cue, perceived onset is highly accurate in both cued and uncued locations. These findings suggest that perceptual averaging, in addition to attentional orienting, contributes to cueing effects.