Individual differences in selective attention reveal the nonmonotonicity of visual spatial attention and its association with working memory capacity.

Visual spatial attention is typically thought to have a facilitatory effect on processing that monotonically decreases with the distance from the center of attention (Posner, 1980). Some studies suggest that the distribution of attention across space is nonmonotonic, with suppression around the target object (Cutzu & Tsotsos, 2003; Müller et al., 2005). We show in two flanker-task experiments that discrepancies in past work can be unified by a...