Unattended words need to be primed to be recognized

The categorical relation between a target word and a flanking, to-be-ignored, nontarget word can influence target response. Although usually taken as evidence of a full and automatic analysis of stimuli whether or not they have been attended, this flanker effect may only point to the failure of focused attention when nontarget stimuli have been primed and made task-relevant. The present study examined the role of priming in the flanker task. In one condition, schematic and semantic priming of nontargets was potentiated by having subjects categorize the target as an instance of a living or nonliving thing. In a second condition, priming was minimized by requiring only a shallow analysis of the target for a response; subjects searched the target for the presence of the letter R. A flanker effect was found only in the categorization condition, and then only when the target was the name of an animal. There was no evidence that unattended nontargets had been fully and automatically encoded to a semantic level.