The effect of language on the orienting of spatial attention and inhibition of return

This study examined whether neutral words in native and alternative languages can serve as exogenous cues that elicit spatial attention and inhibition of return (IOR), a hallmark of reflexive attentional disengagement. Across six experiments, participants performed a modified Posner cueing task in which peripheral word cues (in Hebrew, Arabic, English, or Chinese) were followed by an asterisk target at varying stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs; 100–850 ms). A robust IOR effect was observed across experiments, with slower responses on valid trials compared to invalid ones regardless of language familiarity or orthographic similarity. While IOR emerged at the earliest SOAs in Experiments 1–5, its onset was delayed until 350 ms under conditions of lower cue-target contrast in Experiment 6. While cue language did not interact with validity, subtle SOA × Language interactions revealed modest processing delays for alternative-language words, particularly at intermediate SOAs. These findings demonstrate that neutral words can serve as effective exogenous cues, though the current design cannot definitively isolate responses to their visual properties from automatic orthographic processing. The consistent IOR effects at early SOAs indicate that attentional capture by these stimuli is robust, extending prior research by demonstrating that this holds even across scripts that are orthographically dissimilar. Thus, this study contributes to models of exogenous attention by showing that low-level orienting mechanisms respond to linguistic input with surprising flexibility and speed.