Posner cueing
≈ 3 MIN · 4 PRACTICE + 40 TRIALS · Attention
What this is about
Attention moves faster than the gaze: when something flashes at the edge, it is already there before an eye twitches. Michael Posner made this covert shift measurable in 1980 — with nothing but a cue, a target and a stopwatch.
When the target appears where the cue pulled, answers come tens of milliseconds faster than when it shows up on the other side. The cue here predicts nothing — it only pulls. The difference of the two means is your shifting cost.
How it runs
- Eyes on the central cross; two boxes left and right.
- One box flashes briefly (100 ms) — it does NOT say where the target appears.
- Shortly after, the dot appears in one box: press SPACE or tap the NOW button as fast as you can.
- Four practice trials, then forty scored (twenty valid, twenty invalid, mixed); jump starts are discarded.
Runs entirely in your browser — nothing is transmitted or stored.
You can stop the run at any time.
Your finding
What it means
Limits of this experiment
- No eye tracking — whether your gaze truly stayed on the cross, only your head knows.
- Screen and keyboard add unknown latency — but the same for both conditions.
- Forty trials show the direction; the original curves average over far more.
- The first scored trial is discarded — it carries the switch from practice to the experiment; 39 are scored.