Attention and nontarget effects in the location-cuing paradigm

Three experiments were conducted in order to determine whether irrelevant items presented outside the focus of attention would affect the identification of a precued target. A peripheral cue indicated one of eight possible locations in a circular array, centered on fixation with a radius of 5.25 degrees. After a variable interval (0-200 msec), eight characters were presented briefly and masked. In each experiment, there was an effect of the identity of the characters at the seven noncued locations (the nontargets) on the accuracy of identification of the target. When there were more nontargets identical to the target, accuracy was higher than when there were fewer nontargets identical to the target. Nontargets consistently affected performance despite incentives to focus only on the target.