EVIDENCE FOR PROCESSING LETTERS AT UNCUED LOCATIONS

The sequential cuing procedure introduced by Eriksen, Webb, and Fourni er (1990) was used to study the processing of stimuli presented at unc ued locations of a multielement display. The present studies differed from that investigation by varying target/distractor similarity. A sec ond and third experiment investigated the effect of task difficulty an d the presence of the first cue. For all three experiments, informatio n presented in the original display at the second cued location varied as a function of experimental condition. Distractor and target change conditions differed from the control condition in that the target app eared after a 75-ms preview of the original display. The findings show ed that the effect of order of cuing and preview varied with the kind of background items. The more dissimilar the target from the backgroun d items, the smaller the cuing effect, the larger the preview effect, and the more evidence for processing items from uncued locations of th e display. The results are consistent with Duncan and Humphreys's (198 9) revised late selection theory.