The attentional repulsion effect in perception and action

The attentional repulsion effect refers to the perceived displacement of a Vernier stimulus in a direction that is opposite to a brief peripheral cue. The twofold purpose of the present study was to: (1) replicate the perceptual effect using a Vernier discrimination task, and (2) determine whether the effect would also affect action using a guided localization task. A perceptual attentional repulsion effect was found in experiment 1 and a similar effect was found in experiment 2, with a computer mouse localization task, and in experiment 3, with a guided limb localization task (in both cases pointing responses were biased in the direction opposite to that of the cue). These findings suggest that the attentional repulsion effect occurs early in visual processing, probably affecting the receptive fields of the position-coding units in primary visual cortex before 'object-perception' and 'object-action' information is segregated into separate pathways.