Abstract
When do we deploy our attention? Most attention theories assume that at any given moment, attention shifts to the location with the highest priority. By contrast, the Priority Accumulation Framework (PAF) suggests that we deploy our attention only when relevant contextual information signals that the appropriate time to do so has arrived. The findings from several spatial cueing studies support PAF by showing that although the cue has the highest priority in the cueing display, information from its location is extracted only after the search display appears, as indexed by response compatibility effects. However, recent findings challenge PAF. These show that cue-related information is processed prior to search display onset, as indexed by semantic priming effects. Here, we tested PAF’s predictions by contrasting response compatibility and semantic priming effects as measures of attentional selection. In four spatial cueing experiments, we manipulated semantic relatedness and response compatibility, whether the cue matched the attentional template and whether contextual information reliably differed between the cue and search displays (e.g., digits vs. number words). We found that the cue always produced semantic priming, both when it matched the attentional template and when it did not. By contrast, the same cue produced response compatibility effects only when participants could not rely on contextual information but not when they could (i.e., when the formats of the objects in the cueing vs. search displays swapped unpredictably vs. remained consistently different). These findings support PAF’s predictions. In addition, they indicate that, as focused attention is not necessary for semantic priming, response priming is a better index of attentional allocation.