Sustained visual attention improves visuomotor timing

Abstract

Relative to audition, vision is considered much less trustworthy in sensorimotor timing such as synchronizing finger movements with a temporally regular sequence. Visuomotor timing requires maintaining attention over time, whereas the sustained visual attention may not be well held in conventional visuomotor timing task settings where flashing visual stimuli consisted of a briefly presented flash and a long blank period. In the present study, the potential attentional lapses in time due to the disappearance of the flash were carefully controlled in Experiment 1 by changing the color of the flash instead of its disappearance, or in Experiment 2 by adding an additional continuously presented fixation point serving as an external attentional cue when the flash disappeared. Improvement of visuomotor timing performance was found in both experiments. The finding suggests a role of enhanced sustained visual attention in improving visuomotor timing, by which vision could also be a trustworthy modality for processing temporal information in sensorimotor interactions.