This paper reports an investigation of autokinetic response tendency based upon a conceptualization of the autokinetic phenomenon as being rooted in attention deployment. The hypothesis that field-dependence-independence and the autokinetic phenomenon require a similar type of attention deployment was tested in a multiple regression design. Results suggest that the autokinetic response requires the ability to attend selectively to relevant aspects of the external environment while ignoring the spatial context in which they are embedded. Attention to internal stimuli was found to be unrelated to the autokinetic response tendency.
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