Abstract
Voluntary attention is at the core of a wide variety of cognitive functions. Attention can be oriented to and sustained at a location, or reoriented in space to allow processing at other locations – critical in an ever-changing environment. Numerous studies have investigated attentional orienting in time and space but little is known about the spatio-temporal dynamics of attentional reorienting. Here, we explicitly manipulated attentional reorienting using a cueing procedure in a 2-AFC orientation discrimination task. We interrogated attentional distribution by flashing two probe stimuli with various delays between the pre-cue and target stimuli. Then, we used the probabilities of both probes and none of the probes being correctly reported to solve a second-degree equation, which estimates the report probability at each probe location. We demonstrated that attention reorients periodically at ∼4 Hz (theta) between the two stimulus locations. We further characterized the processing dynamics at each stimulus location, and demonstrated that attention samples each location periodically at ∼11 Hz (alpha). Finally, simulations support our findings and show that this method is sufficiently powered, making it a valuable tool for studying the spatio-temporal dynamics of attention.