Unintended Allocation of Spatial Attention to Goal-Relevant but Not to Goal-Related Events

We investigated whether words relevant to a person’s current goal and words related to that goal influence the orienting of attention even when an intention to attend to the goal-relevant and goal-related stimuli is not present. Participants performed a modified spatial cueing paradigm combined with a second task that induced a goal. The results showed that the induced goal led to the orienting of attention to goal-relevant words in the spatial cueing task. This effect was not found for goal-related words. The results provide evidence for accounts of automatic goal pursuit, which state that goals automatically guide attention to goal-relevant events.