Evidence for Processing Letters at Uncued Locations

Abstract

The sequential cuing procedure introduced by Eriksen, Webb, and Fournier (1990) was used to study the processing of stimuli presented at uncued locations of a multielement display. The present studies differed from that investigation by varying target/distractor similarity. A second and third experiment investigated the effect of task difficulty and the presence of the first cue. For all three experiments, information 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 appeared after a 75-ms preview of the original display. The findings showed that the effect of order of cuing and preview varied with the kind of background items. The more dissimilar the target from the background items, the smaller the cuing effect, the larger the preview effect, and the more evidence for processing items from uncued locations of the display. The results are consistent with Duncan and Humphreys's (1989) revised late selection theory.