generating a taxonomy of spatially cued attention for visual discrimination effects of judgment precision and set size on attention attention precues improve the performance of perceptual tasks in many but not all circumstances these spatial attention effects may depend upon display set size or workload and have been variously attributed to external noise filtering stimulus enhancement contrast gain or response gain or to uncertainty or other decision effects in this study we document systematically different effects of spatial attention in low and highprecision judgments with and without external noise and in different set sizes in order to contribute to the development of a taxonomy of spatial attention an elaborated perceptual template model eptm provides an integrated account of a complex set of effects of spatial attention with just two attention factors a setsize dependent exclusion or filtering of external noise and a narrowing of the perceptual template to focus on the signal stimulus these results are related to the previous literature by classifying the judgment precision and presence of external noise masks in those experiments suggesting a taxonomy of spatially cued attention in discrimination accuracy