Citation

McCann RS, Folk CL, Johnston JC. J. Exp. Psychol. Hum. Percept. Perform. 1992; 18(4): 1015-1029.

Affiliation

Sterling Software, Palo Alto, California.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1992, American Psychological Association)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

1431741

Abstract

Subjects made lexical decisions on a target letter string presented above or below fixation. In Experiments 1 and 2, target location was cued 100 ms in advance of target onset. Responses were faster on validly than on invalidly cued trials. In Experiment 3, the target was sometimes accompanied by irrelevant stimuli on the other side of fixation; in such cases, responses were slowed (a spatial filtering effect). Both cuing and filtering effects on response time were additive with effects of word frequency and lexical status (words vs. nonwords). These findings are difficult to reconcile with claims that spatial attention is less involved in processing familiar words than in unfamiliar words and nonwords. The results can be reconciled with a late-selection locus of spatial attention only with difficulty, but are easily explained by early-selection models.

Language: en