Processing of distractors inside and outside the attentional focus in a priming procedure

A priming procedure was used to study the processing of distractors located either inside (between the location of two targets) or outside (peripherally to the locations of the targets) the focus of attention. The stimuli were five-letter arrays, and participants had to decide whether two marked target letters were the same or different. In Experiments 1 and 2, positive priming was obtained both when targets and in-distractors in primes …