ИСТИНА

The word superiority effect (WSE) in visual information processing has been described more than a century ago. However, the ambiguity remains regarding the interaction between WSE and attention. An attempt was made investigate into this issue using a number of experimental paradigms, including the attentional blink, motion-induced blindness, percepual latency priming and visual search. The data obtained agree with the previous findings and demonstrate that full attention is not required for the WSE to occur, but only when attention is directed towards or diverted from the word as a whole rather then word components.