Linguistic and conceptual control of visual spatial attention.

A theory of voluntary, top-down control of visual spatial attention is presented that explains how linguistic cues like "above," "below," "left," and "right" are used to direct attention from one object to another. The theory distinguishes between perceptual and conceptual representations of space and views attention as a set of mechanisms that establish correspondences between the representations. Spatial reference frames play an important part in this analysis. The theory interprets reference frames as mechanisms of attention, similar to spatial indices but with more computational power. The theory was tested in 11 experiments that assessed the importance of linguistic distinctions between classes of spatial relations (basic, deictic, and intrinsic) and examined the flexibility with which subjects manipulated spatial reference frames.