Posner Cueing

The Posner cueing paradigm is a spatial attention task in which a cue directs attention to one of several possible target locations before the target appears. On valid trials the cue correctly predicts the target location and RT is faster, on invalid trials the cue misleads and RT is slower. Posner (1980) used the resulting validity effect to argue that attention can be oriented covertly, independent of eye movements, and to decompose attentional orienting into disengage, move, and engage operations.

Reference: Posner, 1980. The NeuroRank implementation holds the canonical form and scales interference via task-irrelevant stimulus density.

1. A teammate's callout that says long A in CS2 biases your attention to that corridor, making a target there faster to acquire but a surprise elsewhere slower.
2. Minimap pings in League of Legends act as endogenous cues: a ping in mid river speeds reaction to an appearing jungler there and slows reaction to a surprise bot-lane gank.
3. Pre-aiming an angle in Valorant is a self-generated cue: attention and crosshair placement prepare one location at the cost of every other.

NeuroRank does not run a pure Posner cueing task. The reaction and aim modules use randomised target positions with no predictive cues, which isolates stimulus-driven orienting from cue-driven preparation. The underlying attentional-orienting construct is still relevant across modules.