This study examined whether or not vernier acuity would be improved if the location of a briefly presented vernier stimulus was pre-cued. The vernier target appeared alone, or together with straight lines or ellipses. Effects of spatial pre-cuing were found only when straight tine distractors were present It is suggested that since the straight tines are confusable with the vernier targets, they introduce statistical noise in decision. Precuing the most probable location that contains a target may help by allowing this noise to be excluded.