, 2004). The strongest indicators of endogenous orienting were seen at the following N140 and Nd components, which have also demonstrated attention effects in previous tactile studies (Eimer & Forster, 2003; Forster & Eimer, 2004; Zopf learn more et al., 2004). Imporantly, and previously not demonstrated, is the

presence of strong correlations between behavioural and ERP attention effects in both endogenous attention tasks (Fig. 7). That is, participants with larger behavioural attention effects also demonstrated relatively larger ERP amplitude effects between expected and unexpected trials. This expands on a previous study (Forster & Eimer, 2005) that indirectly suggested a similar link by showing analogous weighing of attentional orienting cost and benefits in RTs and these later latency attentional ERP modulations. The endogenous correlations developed slightly earlier in the endogenous predictive task at the N140 (r = 0.69), which probably reflects

the additional time to orient attention from one hand to the other, compared with keep focusing attention on the same hand. The following late negativity (Nd) showed strong correlations in both endogenous predictive (r = 0.81) selleck inhibitor and counter-predictive (r = 0.60) tasks. This indicates that increasing task and attention demands, orienting from one hand to the other instead of attention remaining on the same hand, delays the development of endogenous attention markers in the ERP trace. Interestingly, this delay was not reflected in the behavioural performance where there was no difference between the two endogenous tasks. As a whole, the pattern of early exogenous effects of attention (N80), followed by later markers of endogenous attention (N140 and Nd), is consistent with behavioural accounts based on visual attention proposing that exogenous attention develops faster than endogenous attention (Müller & Rabbitt, 1989). Future research may wish to further explore the exact

nature and relationship between behavioural performance and neural markers of attention in touch. For example, it should be noted that the present study only used one stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA; Methisazone 800 ms), an interval chosen as IOR has previously been observed here in touch (Lloyd et al., 1999; Cohen et al., 2005; Jones & Forster, 2012). Unlike in vision, facilitation of exogenously cued targets has not been observed with short cue–target intervals in a detection task (Lloyd et al., 1999 found IOR with a 100-ms SOA). However, similar to vision, the biphasic facilitation–IOR pattern has been demonstrated when targets are discriminated instead of simply detected (for visual discrimination task, see Lupiáñez et al., 1997; and in touch, see Miles et al., 2008).