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Can arrows change the subjective perception of space? Exploring symbolic attention repulsion

The attention repulsion effect (ARE) refers to distortions in the perception of space for areas near the focus of attention. For instance, when attending to the right-hand side of the visual field, objects in central vision may appear as though they are shifted to the left. The phenomenon is likely caused by changes in visual cell functioning. To date, research on the ARE has almost exclusively used exogenous manipulations of attention. In contrast, research exploring endogenous attention repulsion has been mixed, and no research has explored the effects of nonpredictive arrow cues on this phenomenon. This gap in the literature is unexpected, as symbolic attention appears to be a unique form of attentional orienting compared with endogenous and exogenous attention. Therefore, this study explored the effects of symbolic orienting on spatial repulsion and compared it with an exogenously generated ARE. Across four experiments, both exogenous and symbolic orienting resulted in AREs; however, the magnitude of the symbolic ARE was smaller than the exogenous ARE. This difference in magnitude persisted, even after testing both phenomena using stimulus timing parameters known to produce optimal effects in traditional attentional cueing paradigms. Therefore, compared with symbolic attention, it appears that exogenous manipulations may tightly constrict attention resources on the cued location, in turn, potentially influencing the functioning of visual cells for enhanced perceptual processing.