goxpyriment

Posner Covert Attention Task

A spatial cueing paradigm (Posner, 1980) that measures covert attentional orienting. An arrow cue appears at the centre of the screen and points left or right. After a variable delay, a target (star) appears on the left or right side. Participants respond as quickly as possible.

Valid trials (cue points to target side) yield faster reactions than invalid trials (cue points away), demonstrating the cost/benefit of spatial attention.


Trial structure

Fixation  →  Arrow cue  →  Target  →  ITI
 500 ms       500 ms        (response)

Prerequisites


Running

# Fullscreen, participant 1
go run main.go -s 1

# Windowed (development / testing)
go run main.go -s 1 -d

Flags

Flag Default Description
-s 0 Participant ID (integer)
-d off Development mode: windowed 1024×768

Response keys

Press any key as quickly as possible when the target appears.


Output

Trial information is printed to the console (congruency, side, key, reaction time). No .xpd file is written in the current version.


References

Posner, M. I. (1980). Orienting of attention. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 32(1), 3–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/00335558008248231