Effects of spatial cueing on overt orienting of gaze to attentive stimuli

The latency of visually guided saccades executed after a cueing condition was adopted as a more ecological index to explore how spatial attention, usually assessed by manual responses, operates in the visual field. Subjects executed saccades aimed towards one of 4 possible positions, equally distributed around a central fixation cross. Before the onset of the saccadic target, a visual cue was briefly presented at the same or at a different spatial location. The visual cue was non-predictive of the target position. Two experimental sessions were carried out, differing for the onset asynchrony between cue and target. A time-dependent coupling between the task-irrelevant location of the cue and the direction of a following overt shift of attention emerged. Clinical applications of the adopted experimental setting to neurological and psychiatric patients with motor impairments are discussed.