Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous work suggests pictures may be processed more readily than words, likely because pictures appear tomaintain more direct access to semantic and conceptual representations (Amit, Algom, & Trope, 2009). However, it is unclearhow words and pictures may be processed differently when they are actively ignored. Our earlier work demonstrated a facilitatedrecognition for actively ignored words, provided they appeared frequently with an attended target in a previously presentedrepetition detection task (Dewald, Sinnett, & Doumas, 2012). The current study adapted this paradigm to examine the extentto which unattended pictures may be processed under analogous conditions. Overall, ignored pictures were recognized moreoften than ignored words. Moreover, recognition for ignored pictures did not benefit from target-alignment whereas ignoredwords did. These findings suggest that unattended pictures may continue to be processed more readily than words even underconditions in which attention is not directed toward them.