Figure 1.

Experimental paradigms at the focus of the current review. (A,B) Hybrid spatial cueing paradigm. (A) Timing. (B) Spatial cueing with single validly cued target, invalidly cued trials (20%) and competition trials (20%). For the competition trials proper sensory control experiments were conducted to tease out attentional and sensory effects of adding a distracter. (C,D) Change detection paradigm. (C) Timing and basic design. In reality the target set size was varied in discrete steps (1, 2, 4, or 6 targets) as well as the distracter set size (0, 2, 4, or 6 distracters) according to a factorial design. Letters were targets, numbers distracters. (D) Factorial design with varying targets (T) and distracters (D) within the array. The height of the bars corresponds to the number of targets (#T in VSTM) and the number of distracters (#D in VSTM) loaded into visual short-term memory (VSTM) in each of the cells of the factorial design, according to the Theory of Visual Attention.