Exogenous orienting does not reflect an encapsulated set of processes.

It is widely assumed that orienting attention by the use of exogenous cues reflects an encapsulated system impervious to linguistic influence. This view was assessed in 4 experiments in which observers made discriminations between target characters presented above or below fixation. The spatial location of the target was cued by the abrupt onset of a word that was semantically related to a word at fixation on half of the trials and unrelated on the remainder. Responses were significantly faster when target location was validly cued than when it was not. More important, the magnitude of this cuing effect varied as a function of whether the abrupt-onset word cue was semantically related to the fixation word. These results suggest that linguistic processing influences the process of disengagement or movement (or both) from the cued location. Visuospatial attention as reflected in the exogenous-cuing paradigm does not depend on an encapsulated set of processes.