Lexical priming of space depends on how deeply you think about it

There is a long debate about how the meaning of words cues our spatial attention. For implicitly spatial words such as “ROOF” or “BASEMENT”, it was recently shown that processing both the cue word and a subsequent spatial target stimulus was necessary for spatial congruity effects to emerge. Here we challenge this work by documenting that word cues alone suffice to induce congruity effects if they are processed deeply. Sixty-three healthy adults detected vertically displaced targets after looking at centrally presented cue words under three counterbalanced instructions, imposing increasing processing depth: Lexical decision, non-spatial categorization, and spatial categorization. Target detection speed revealed spatial congruity effects for both spatial and non-spatial categorization but not for lexical decision. An interpretation in terms of covert attention deployment was corroborated by concomitant vertical displacements of eye gaze. Our results reveal minimal requirements for covert and overt semantic cueing of spatial attention.