Abstract
The eccentricity effect on visual search tasks that differ on attentional demand: Evidence in favor of attentional hypothesis. It seems intuitively clear and it has been experimentally proven that in visual search task when target appear in the fixation point it is detected and located better than when such element occupy more peripheral locations. Initially these effects were explained as a result of the decrement of the spatial resolution and sensitivity that happens in the retinal periphery. Nevertheless, they have appeared new data that indicate that these effects represent a foveal bias in the allocation of attention. Our study explores the role that eccentricity has in two different tasks of visual search (parallel and serial). The results that we have obtained support the attentional hypothesis. They show how the effects produced by this variable are directly related to the level of difficulty of the task: the more attentional resources needed the greater the effect produced by the localization in which the target is found.
