The Spatial Allocation of Attention Across Two Objects Larence Becker and Howard Egeth Johns Hopkins University Abstract When we attend to two locations, is the intervening space also attended, or is processing split into two noncontiguous regions? Pan and Eriksen (1993) found response competition from a distractor placed between two attended locations, suggesting that intervening locations are attended. However, in that study, response competition was confounded with the distractor's distance from fixation. This confound was eliminated in the present study. A dual-target identification procedure was used in which retinal eccentricity of distractor elements was controlled for across conditions. Distractor elements were either placed along a line connecting the two targets (collinear condition) or orthogonal to this line. Target identification performance was worse for the collinear condition than the orthogonal condition. It is hypothesized that attention is oriented in an elliptical shape, along the axis connecting attended locations.