Cueingparadigmas

Cueingparadigmas are experimental frameworks used in cognitive psychology and neuroscience to study how cues influence attention, expectation, and subsequent perception or action. In a typical cueing paradigm, a cue signals where or when a target will appear, and participant performance on the target is compared across valid, invalid, and neutral cue conditions. The aim is to separate cue-driven facilitation from baseline processing to understand attentional orienting.

Common design elements include: endogenous (central) versus exogenous (peripheral) cues; cue validity manipulated (valid, invalid, neutral); varying cue-target intervals (stimulus onset asynchrony, SOA); target modality and discrimination or detection tasks; and the measurement of reaction time and accuracy.

Key phenomena observed in cueingparadigmas include the cueing effect, where responses are typically faster and more accurate after valid cues than invalid cues, and the inhibition of return at longer SOAs, where the benefit at cued locations diminishes. Variants of cueingparadigmas also probe temporal cues, feature-based cues, or cross-modal cues.

Applications span attentional control research, aging and neurological populations, and investigations of automatic versus voluntary attentional deployment. Limitations include task heterogeneity and potential confounds from expectation, motivation, or perceptual load, which can influence cue validity effects.

See also: Posner cueing task, attentional orienting, spatial attention, temporal cueing.