Hemifield effects on the read-out of the visual analog

Background. The existence of visually detailed informational persistence (visual analog) has been documented both within fixations and across saccades (De Graef & Verfaillie, 2002). Because of the short-lived nature of the visual analog, the amount of information that can be read out from it is constrained by the time needed to focus attention on a specific location (Germeys et al., 2007). Combined with recent evidence for independent attentional resources in left and right hemifields (Alvarez & Cavanagh, 2004), this entails the possibility of hemifield effects in the read-out process. Using a spatial location change detection task where attention was directed in the interstimulus interval by cueing locations either within a hemifield or across hemifields, we assessed the presence of such hemifield effects.