Noah Britt¹ (), Juan Lupiáñez², Elisa Martín-Arévalo², Ana Chica², Hong-jin Sun¹; ¹Department of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Behaviour, McMaster University, Canada, ²Department of Experimental Psychology, and Brain, Mind, and Behavior Research Center (CIMCYC), University of Granada, Granada, Spain

Through daily experiences, we learn where and what information our spatial attention should be prioritized to. We (Britt et al., 2025; CRPI) showed that, during simulated driving, drivers attend more to roadside pedestrian targets oriented toward the road than away from it, demonstrated in an enhanced cueing effect in the form of facilitation in an exogenous cueing task with SOA of longer than 1000ms. However, such attention modulation by target orientation was not observed in the same environment when the participants’ viewpoint remained stationary or during driving, but when the target was changed to a light post. The classical cueing literature has shown that if a central, attention-capturing event—known as an ‘intervening event’—appears between the cue and the target, cueing effects can shift from facilitation to inhibition of return (Martín-Arévalo et al., 2013; APP). In this study, we sought to observe, with the implementation of an intervening event, if our earlier findings of the context-dependent and orientation-dependent modulation of attention would be replicated. During the time interval between the appearance of the cue and the target, we implemented a driving-relevant stimulus (flashing the tail-light of a centrally located lead car). Participants were required to discriminate the hand position of the pedestrian (up, down) or the array position of the light within the light post (top, bottom). The results revealed that despite adding the intervening event, when the target was the roadside pedestrian, facilitation effects remained and with enhanced facilitation for inward (facing the road) compared to outward orientations. However, when the roadside target was the arbitrary light post, or participants’ viewpoint remained stationary, an inhibition of return effect was observed. These results demonstrate again that the behavioural significance of roadside pedestrians changes how participants orient attention across stimuli, but importantly, in a contextually-specific manner (i.e., specifically only while actively driving).

Acknowledgements: NSERC