Landmark cueing and exogenous (onset) cueing: How are they related?

•New visual onsets affect attention via processing in the retinotectal pathway.•Landmark features of cues affect attention via cortical (dorsal stream) encoding.•Attentional effects of cue onset and cue features exhibited different features.•A neurocognitive model of input pathways for visual attention is proposed.•Cortical and retinotectal input processes interact during visual orienting. Attentional consequences of (i) mere onset of a peripheral visual cue, and (ii)encoding spatially predictive, landmark features of that cue were studied in two experiments. Target location was associated with landmark features of peripheral cues. Cue onset elicited both attention capture (Experiment Two) and inhibition of return (Experiment One) effects. In both experiments, attentional effects of landmark features of the cues were observed early in practice, and diminished with time on task. Contrary to hypotheses based on models that liken attention to a moving spotlight or zoom lens, in both experiments attentional effects of landmark features were confined to the location where the cue was presented. To explain this, we enlist the concept of attentional priority maps, and propose that visual encoding causes attentional priorities to be updated via alternative input routes and mechanisms. We suggest that onset cueing effects are associated with retinotectal ‘spatial indexing’, which registers the location, but not the attributes of new stimuli, while landmark cueing effects are associated with interaction between spatial indexing and dorsal stream visual processing of attentionally relevant landmark features.