Exogenous spatial attention shift induced by up and down vection direction

Compelling visual illusions of self-motion can be induced in physically stationary observers by moving, or simulating the motion of, their surrounding environment. This vection normally occurs in the opposite direction to the visual stimulus motion. Previously we found that vection direction (either left or right) could serve as a valid exogenous cue for visual spatial attention task. In this study, we examined the effects of up/down vection direction on both a visual spatial attention task (Experiment 1) and a colour discrimination go-no-go task (Experiment 2) – to see if the effects of vection cueing generalize to different directions of illusory self-motion and different cognitive tasks. On each trial in both experiments, global vertical motion was initially presented to the observer for either 20 s or 5 s (i.e., more or less favorable conditions for vection induction). While vection induction was found to slow task response times in Experiment 1 (relative to no vection control trials), it did not do this in Experiment 2. Consistent with the findings our previous study using horizontal vection, valid up/down vection direction cues again improved reaction time performance in our exogenous spatial attention localization task (relative to invalid vection direction cues). Valid 20-s up/down vection direction cues were also found to improve performance in our novel go-no-go colour discrimination task. These results provide new evidence for the influence of visual self-motion perception on spatial attention.