Temporal contextual cuing of visual attention

Previous research has shown how spatial attention is guided to a target loc ation, but little is understood about how attention is allocated to an even t in time. The authors introduce a paradigm to manipulate the sequential st ructure of visual events independent of responses. They asked whether this temporal context could be implicitly learned and used to guide attention to a relative point in time or location, or both, in space. Experiments show that sequentially structured event durations, event identities, and spatiot emporal event sequences can guide attention to a point in time as well as t o a target event's identity and location. Cuing was found to rely heavily o n the element immediately preceding the target, although cuing from earlier items also was evident. Learning was implicit in all cases. These results show that the sequential structure of the visual world plays an important r ole in guiding visual attention to target events.