How does the Posner Cueing Test work?
You keep your eyes on a cross between two boxes. One box's outline flashes for 100 ms, and 150 or 300 ms after the flash began a dot appears in one of the boxes: in the flashed one 36 times out of 48, in the other 12 times. You answer which side the dot is on as fast as you can, with the arrow keys, F and J, or the two buttons.
Between trials the cross stays alone for 0.8 to 1.4 seconds. A press before the dot appears restarts that trial, and no answer within 1.5 seconds counts as a miss.
How is the Posner cueing effect calculated?
Your cueing effect is your average time when the dot was in the box that didn't flash, minus your average when it was in the box that did, right answers only. A positive number is the cost of attention being in the wrong place: it had gone to the flash and had to move.
Each dot is timed from the animation frame that draws it to the moment your key or finger goes down, using the timestamp your browser gives the press. Both averages are shown beside the result, with your number right out of 48.
What does the Posner Cueing Test measure?
It measures covert orienting: attention moving to a place while your eyes stay still. Michael Posner (1980), in “Orienting of attention”, showed that people detect a target faster where a cue has drawn their attention, and slower somewhere else, even without moving their eyes. Attention works like a spotlight that can move ahead of the gaze.
The cue here is a sudden flash at the place itself rather than an arrow pointing to it. A flash pulls attention without your deciding to look, and because it is right three times in four it is worth following as well.
Why does the Posner Cueing Test use two short delays?
Two delays, 150 or 300 ms, chosen at random, so you can't time your answer from the flash. Both are short, so the dot arrives while attention is still at the flashed place. With longer delays after a flash that predicts nothing, the advantage can turn around, an effect Michael Posner and Yoav Cohen described in 1984 and now known as inhibition of return. The dot is on the left and right equally often, and never on the same side more than three times running.
What can affect your Posner Cueing result?
Looking at the flash instead of the cross makes the test about eye movements, not attention, so keep your eyes on the center. A guess before the dot restarts the trial, so guessing doesn't pay. Your device's delay adds the same time to every answer and cancels out of the effect. To ignore arrows that point the wrong way, try the Flanker Test; to search a crowded screen, the Visual Search Test.