title: Conflict resolved: On the role of spatial attention in reading and color naming tasks.
abstract: The debate about whether or not visual word recognition requires spatial attention has been marked by a conflict: the results from different tasks yield different conclusions. Experiments in which the primary task is reading based show no evidence that unattended words are processed, whereas when the primary task is color identification, supposedly unattended words do affect processing. However, the color stimuli used to date does not appear to demand as much spatial attention as explicit word reading tasks. We first identify a color stimulus that requires as much spatial attention to identify as does a word. We then demonstrate that when spatial attention is appropriately captured, distractor words in unattended locations do not affect color identification. We conclude that there is no word identification without spatial attention.
authors: ARC Centre for Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, Department of Cognitive Science, Macquarie University, Macquarie, NSW, 2109, Australia. serje.robidoux@mq.edu.au.
authors: Serje
authors: S
authors: Robidoux
authors: Department of Psychology, Cognition and Perception Unit (CPU), University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada.
authors: Derek
authors: D
authors: Besner
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D003118:Color Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D011932:Reading; D013028:Space Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D057190:Stroop Test; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Color naming; Exogenous cueing; Spatial attention; Stroop interference; Visual word recognition