The following is a summary of “Effects of involuntary and voluntary attention on critical spacing of visual crowding,” published in the March 2023 issue of Ophthalmology by Bowen, et al.

The allocation of visual spatial attention can occur voluntarily or involuntarily. Voluntary attention is directed to relevant environmental locations, while salient external stimuli capture involuntary attention. Although precueing spatial attention has been found to enhance perceptual performance in various visual tasks, its effects on visual crowding – the decreased ability to identify target objects in clutter – is unclear. 

To investigate this, an anticueing paradigm was used to measure the separate effects of involuntary and voluntary spatial attention on a crowding task. Participants completed an orientation discrimination task with a target Gabor patch flanked by similar patches with random orientations. Each trial began with a peripheral cue that predicted the location of the crowded target on the opposite side of the screen 80% of the time and on the same side of the screen 20% of the time. 

In trials with a short stimulus onset asynchrony, involuntary attention capture led to faster response times and smaller critical spacing when the target appeared on the cue side. Conversely, in trials with a long stimulus onset asynchrony, voluntary attention allocation led to faster reaction times but no significant effect on critical spacing when the target appeared on the opposite side of the cue. 

Interestingly, the magnitudes of these cueing effects were not strongly correlated across subjects for either reaction time or critical spacing.

Reference; jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2785412