Orienting in voluntary and involuntary attention conditions

To investigate the orienting of visuospatial attention, the attention type (voluntary vs. involuntary) was manipulated in a within-subject design, and event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded in a peripheral cued, line-orientation discrimination task. A larger and later contralateral P1 and a smaller and later contralateral N1 were elicited by the valid trails relative to the invalid trails in the involuntary attention condition, whereas larger P1 and N1 were elicited by the valid trails in the voluntary attention condition. The present results provide evidence for the dissociation between voluntary and involuntary attention in one task.