The following article from the February 2013 issue is being retracted: Jiang, Y. V., Swallow, K. M., & Rosenbaum, G. M. (2013). Guidance of spatial attention by incidental learning and endogenous cuing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 39(1), 285–297. https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0028022.
The retraction is at the request of the authors. There was an unintentional error in the MATLAB experimental script used for Experiment 5 that caused one experimental condition to be incorrectly recorded in the data files. Upon learning of the error from a colleague who used it in a replication, the authors verified that it occurred in Experiment 5 and investigated whether any other experiments in the article were affected. The authors confirmed that the MATLAB scripts used for Experiments 1 and 2 did not contain any errors and the findings and conclusions remain valid. However, for Experiments 3 and 4, the programming error led to two issues: (a) one variable was incorrectly written to the data files, and (b) the actual number of trials per condition during the training phase was unbalanced (the testing phase was unaffected). For Experiment 5, the programming error resulted in one variable being incorrectly written to the data files, but the design of the experiment was not affected. After the authors corrected the output using variables that they confirmed were accurately written to the data files, they reanalyzed the data from Experiments 3, 4, and 5. For Experiment 5, where the error was adequately corrected by this reanalysis, statistical significance of all main effects and interactions showed the same pattern as before. However, in the reanalysis, probability cuing persisted both when the cue was valid and when it was invalid, rather than being present only when the cue was valid (as previously reported). For Experiments 3 and 4, the reanalysis yielded the same pattern of results as those reported in the article. However, because the actual design was unbalanced, these experiments were not appropriate tests of the hypotheses. When re-writing the MATLAB scripts, we found that it was not possible to create a balanced design in Experiments 3 and 4 without introducing experimental confounds. To ensure that the scientific record is adequately corrected, the authors have uploaded additional information, including the MATLAB scripts for all experiments, the reanalysis of the data from Experiments 3, 4, and 5, and the validation of Experiments 1 and 2, to this OSF repository: https://osf.io/k79j4/?view_only=2220d62d0bb643f9b4ca53e7a6da872f. The first author of the paper, who programmed the MATLAB scripts, takes full responsibility for the error. The authors sincerely regret this error and apologize for its effects on the editors, reviewers, and the broader scientific community. All authors of the original article joined in the request for the retraction.