Visual Word Recognition: Reattending to the Role of Spatial Attention

Three experiments examine whether spatial attention and visual word recognition processes operate independently or interactively in a spatially cued lexical-decision task. Participants responded to target strings that had been preceded first by a prime word at fixation and then by an abrupt onset cue either above or below fixation. Targets appeared either in the cued (i.e., valid) or uncued (i.e., invalid) location. The proportion of validly cued trials and the proportion of semantically related prime-target pairs were manipulated independently. It is concluded that spatial attention and visual word recognition processes are best seen as interactive. Spatial attention affects word recognition in 2 distinct ways: (a) it affects the uptake of orthographic information, possibly acting as "glue" to hold letters in their proper places in words, and (b) it (partly) determines whether or not activation from the semantic level feeds down to the lexical level during word recognition.