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Abstract
The retinal projection to the superior colliculus is thought to be important both
for stimulus-driven eye movements and for the involuntary capture of attention. It
has further been argued that eye-movement planning and attentional orienting share
common neural mechanisms. Electrophysiological studies have shown that the superior
colliculus receives no direct projections from short-wave-sensitive cones (S cones),
and, consistent with this, we found that irrelevant peripheral stimuli visible only
to S cones did not produce the saccadic distractor effect produced by luminance stimuli.
However, when involuntary orienting was tested in a Posner cueing task, the same S-cone
stimuli had normal attentional effects, in that they accelerated or delayed responses
to subsequent targets. We conclude that involuntary attentional shifts do not require
signals in the direct collicular pathway, or indeed the magnocellular pathway, as
our S-cone stimuli were invisible to this channel also.