Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The literature has long emphasized the neocortex’s role in volitionalprocesses. In this work, we examined endogenous orienting in anevolutionarily older species, the archer fish, which lacks neocortex-like cells. We used Posner’s classic endogenous cuing task, in whicha centrally presented, spatially informative cue is followed by a tar-get. The fish responded to the target by shooting a stream of waterat it. Interestingly, the fish demonstrated a human-like “volitional”facilitation effect: their reaction times to targets that appeared onthe side indicated by the precue were faster than their reactiontimes to targets on the opposite side. The fish also exhibited inhi-bition of return, an aftermath of orienting that commonly emergesonly in reflexive orienting tasks in human participants. We believethat this pattern demonstrates the acquisition of an arbitrary con-nection between spatial orienting and a nonspatial feature of acentrally presented stimulus in nonprimate species. In the literatureon human attention, orienting in response to such contingencies hasbeen strongly associated with volitional control. We discuss theimplications of these results for the evolution of orienting, and forthe study of volitional processes in all species, including humans.