Attentional orienting within visual field in a lexical decision task

The influence of spatial attention on lexical decisions to lateralized targ et letter-strings appearing either along with a distracter (Experiment 1) o r in an otherwise empty held (Experiments 2-6) was examined. Attentional or ienting was controlled by peripheral (Experiments 1, 2, 3, and 6) and centr al (Experiments 4-5) cuing methods. Manipulations of spatial attention, inc luding cue validity and cue-target stimulus onset asynchrony, were combined with manipulations of word frequency in Experiments 3-6. All the attention al manipulations were effective, but they did not modify the right visual f ield advantage in word performance. In addition, the attentional effects di d not interact with either the presence or absence of distracters or with s timulus familiarity. Implications of these results regarding the influence of spatial attention (the posterior attention system) on word processing ar e discussed.