Beutinger, D: Redundancy Gain

This book includes a study in which three experiments were conducted in order to gain more information about the locus of the redundant stimulus effect (RSE). It is the first attempt to obtain this information by examining whether the RSE is dependent upon spatial attention. Several studies have indicated that focusing attention onto a location in space leads to a modulation of perceptual processing. If the RSE has a perceptual locus, then one would expect different RSEs for attended vs. unattended locations. Alternatively, one may suppose that the redundancy gain is unaffected by attention. This would be evidence against the hypothesis of a perceptual locus of the RSE. It could be figured out that neither the effect of redundancy on RT nor the effect on peak force changed for attended vs. unattended locations. Thus it appears that the speedup of RT associated with redundant visual stimuli arises after the perceptual processes that are affected by spatial attention.