Why some experiments say we can read words we aren't paying attention to, and others say we can't.

What is it about?

For a long time now, researchers have been arguing about whether or not reading is 'automatic' in some sense. The word 'automatic' has a lot of different definitions, but one way researchers sometimes talk about it is to say that we can access the meaning of words, even if we aren't paying attention to them. In this paper, we talk about something called visual spatial attention. Think of how you sometimes "watch someone out of the corner of your eye" - you are looking in one place, but paying attention to someone that is not directly where you are looking. The question is, can you read a word if you don't pay any attention to it? There are two ways researchers have tested this. One way is to have people read one word right after showing them another word for a really short time (Lachter and colleagues, 2004). We call the word they are reading the target, and the word they are not reading the prime. Studies that do this find that if the "prime" is in the *same* place as the word the person has to read, then it can speed up or slow down their reading times. This makes sense because it is in the same place that you are paying attention to, since you know the word you have to read is going to show up there. However, if the prime is in a spot just a bit above (or below) the target, then it no longer affects reading times. This suggests that when you aren't paying attention to a word, you don't read it. Some researchers think it is unfair to ask if people are reading the prime when you already have to read the target (Brown and colleagues, 2002). They think that your reading system might be sort of 'turned off' for the prime because it's waiting for the target. These researchers use a different approach - instead of asking you to read a target word, they ask you to identify the colour of a rectangle (for example, a red rectangle). Like the other experiments, they show you a word that is just a little bit away from the rectangle. The trick is, sometimes they show you the word that matches the colour (RED), and sometimes a different colour word (BLUE). It turns out that when they do this, it is much harder to say 'red' when the word is BLUE. This suggests that you are accessing information about the word, even though you aren't paying attention to it. Keep in mind that this argument assumes that you aren't paying attention to the words. Attention is a funny thing, though. Sometimes we focus it very tightly on one area. Other times, we spread it out a bit to cover more space. Other research has shown that we change our strategy based on a lot of different things, one of which is how hard the task we are doing is. This is a bit of a problem for the coloured-rectangles experiments, because it turns out that naming colours is easier than reading words (Robidoux and colleagues, 2014). This means that when we do the colour task instead of reading, we might spread our attention out more and that means we might be paying attention to those words that researchers assumed we couldn't pay attention to. In this study, we changed the coloured rectangle to make it a lot harder. Instead of only one colour, we showed people a random mix of two colours, and they had to tell us which one covered *most* of the rectangle (it covered two thirds of it). This made the task just as difficult as reading words (Experiment 1). Then we used that multi-coloured rectangle in a similar experiment, where a word (RED or BLUE) would appear just outside of where we expected attention to be. It turns out that the word had no influence on people's ability or speed at naming the right colour (Experiment 2). We think this means that when the task is too easy (a single colour rectangle), people spread their attention around a bit and that means that they *do* pay some attention to the word that they're not suppose to be able to pay attention to. When the task is harder (reading words, or using our more complicated coloured rectangle), they focus their attention more, and so they don't pay attention to the word above or below the rectangle. When they do that, they don't seem to read the word.

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Why is it important?

This argument is at least 30 years old, and the results have been very consistent. If you ask people to read words, it seems like they can't read words they don't pay attention to. If you ask them to name colours instead, they *do* seem read words that they aren't supposed to be paying attention to. This experiment does two important things: first, it explains why the two different tasks lead to different conclusions (one is easier than the other). Easy tasks just don't prevent us from paying attention to other things on the screen. Second, it makes it clear that if the task is hard enough that people focus their attention on the target word or coloured rectangle, then they don't read a word that appears in another place. We think this ends the debate - we don't read words that we don't pay attention to.