Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Early literature on spatial attention and visual word recognition has often treated the two as independent processes (Stolz & McCann, 2000) and offered mixed opinions regarding their interaction. Existing theories argued for early or late interaction, or proposed moderation by familiarity of word targets (McCann et al., 1992). However, these results are mainly derived from investigations in English and their generalizability to languages written in different orthographies is not clear. The current study investigated the interaction between spatial attention and word recognition in Hindi language which is written in Devanagari orthography—a spatially dense abugida. Across two experiments, using a spatial-cueing paradigm, we found that cueing effect was robust for words but entirely absent for non-words. Within the word category, this effect remained stable regardless of word frequency, suggesting attention interacts only with lexical-status. Our results align with a late selection view for spatial attention and visual word recognition.