Familiarity, redundancy, and the spatial control of visual attention.
Highly familiar letter sequences (English words) in noncued portions of a tachistoscopic display were shown to substantially reduce accuracy of partial report. These findings suggest that in addition to facilitating character scanning, familiarity may operate in automatically directing attentional resources to a particular spatial region of a display. Such attentional capture may be disruptive if the material to be reported is presented at another location.
D001288:Attention; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D005260:Female; D005556:Form Perception; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D012718:Set, Psychology; D013028:Space Perception