Familiarity, redundancy, and the spatial control of visual attention.

Highly familiar letter sequences (English words) in noncued portions of a tachistoscopic display were shown to substantially reduce accuracy of partial report. These findings suggest that in addition to facilitating character scanning, familiarity may operate in automatically directing attentional resources to a particular spatial region of a display. Such attentional capture may be disruptive if the material to be reported is presented at another location.