Visual word recognition: Reattending to the role of spatial attention

Three experiments examine whether spatial attention and visual word recogni tion processes operate independently or interactively in a spatially cued l exical-decision task. Participants responded to target strings that had bee n preceded first by a prime word at fixation and then by an abrupt onset cu e 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 visua l word recognition processes are best, seen as interactive. Spatial attenti on affects word recognition in 2 distinct ways: (a) it affects the uptake o f orthographic information, possibly acting as "glue" to hold Letters in th eir proper places in words, and (b) it (partly) determines whether or nor a ctivation from the semantic level feeds down to the lexical level during wo rd recognition.