Event-related potential correlates of color selection and lexical decision: hierarchical processing or late selection?

In a series of experiments, a color discrimination task was combined with a lexical decision task. Words and non-words that appeared in the relevant color elicited attention-related event-related potential (ERP) components (anterior positivity, posterior N2 and N2b). The results of the recognition tasks, that investigated the retention of the words, were not closely related to the emergence of these ERP components. These findings show that instead of being the correlates of a filtering mechanism confining lexical processing to stimuli in relevant color, the attention-related ERP components are correlates of late selection processes, ensuring task-related stimulus evaluation.