How do selected arrows guide visuospatial attention? Dissociating symbolic value and spatial proximity.

Previous research on the control of visuospatial attention showed that overlearned symbols like arrows have the potential to induce involuntary shifts of attention. Following work on the role of attentional control settings and of the content of working memory in the involuntary deployment of visuospatial attention, Pratt and Hommel (2003) found that this unintentional orienting by an arrow depended on its top-down selection, contingent on the attentional control settings, that is to say, the target selection cue. However, in this study, each arrow was closer to the location it indicated than to any other location, raising the issue of attention being drawn to the arrow location, facilitating processing at adjacent locations, rather than pushed to the symbolically cued location. In the present study, we dissociated symbolic cueing and spatial proximity cueing by the selected arrow. The results support the proximity cueing hypothesis.