Exogenous attention differentially modulates the processing of categorical and coordinate spatial relations

Carrasco and her colleagues have suggested that exogenous attention reduces the size of receptive fields at an attended location (Gobell & Carrasco, 2005; Yeshurun & Carrasco, 1998, 2000). Based on the hypothesis that categorical and coordinate spatial relations are more efficiently processed by smaller and larger receptive fields, respectively, we predicted that exogenous attention would be more beneficial to the processing of categorical spatial relations than coordinate spatial relations while it would disrupt the processing of coordinate spatial relations. To test these hypotheses, participants were tested using a variant of Posner's (1980) attentional cueing paradigm. Exogenous attention produced larger facilitative effects on categorical spatial processing than on coordinate spatial processing at a short cue-target stimulus onset asynchrony (100 ms, Experiment 1, N = 28), and this result was replicated regardless of cue size in Experiment 2 (N = 24). When the coordinate judgment was sufficiently difficult, exogenous attention disrupted the processing of coordinate spatial relations (Experiment 3, N = 28). These findings indicate that exogenous attention can differentially modulate the processing of categorical and coordinate spatial relations.