Visual word recognition: Reattending to the role of spatial attention.

Three experiments examine whether spatial attention and visual word recognition processes operate independently or interactively in a spatially cued lexical-decision task. Participants responded to target strings that had been preceded first by a prime word at fixation and then by an abrupt onset cue either above or below fixation. Targets appeared either in the cued (i.e., valid) or uncued (i.e., invalid) location. The proportion of validly cued trials and the proportion of semantically related prime-target pairs were manipulated independently. It is concluded that spatial attention and visual word recognition processes are best seen as interactive. Spatial attention affects word recognition in 2 distinct ways: (a) it affects the uptake of orthographic information, possibly acting as "glue" to hold letters in their proper places in words, and (b) it (partly) determines whether or not activation from the semantic level feeds down to the lexical level during word recognition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sources of the attentional blink during rapid serial visual presentation: perceptual interference and retrieval competition

Observers watched for 1 or 2 colored words as targets presented in lists of distractor strings (10 items/s). Identification of 1 target (T1) temporarily reduced the accuracy of reporting a 2nd target (T2). This attentional blink (AB) effect was most pronounced when T1 and T2 occurred close together in time. Use of recognition tests (instead of recall) improved performance but did not eliminate the AB effect. The AB effect was found with both word and nonword distractors, a smaller AB effect was found with consonant string distractors, and the AB effect was substantially attenuated with strings of unfamiliar characters (a false font). Analyses of errors indicated that the 2nd target is frequently replaced or corrupted by the following distractor during the blink. The AB effect appears to result from both attentional and mnemonic processes.     

Distractor modality can turn semantic interference into semantic facilitation in the picture–word interference task: Implications for theories of lexical access in speech production.

A number of recent studies have questioned the idea that lexical selection during speech production is a competitive process. One type of evidence against selection by competition is the observation that in the picture–word interference task semantically related distractors may facilitate the naming of a picture, whereas the selection by competition account predicts them to interfere. In the experiments reported in this article, the authors systematically varied, for a given type of semantic relation—that is, basic-level distractors (e.g., fish) during subordinate-level naming (e.g., carp)—the modality in which distractor words were presented (auditory vs. visual) and the proportion of response-congruent trials (i.e., trials allowing for the correct naming response to be derived from both the distractor and the target). With auditory distractors, semantic interference was obtained irrespective of the proportion of response-congruent trials (low in Experiment 1, high in Experiment 2). With visual distractors, no semantic effect was obtained with a low proportion of response-congruent trials (Experiment 3), whereas a semantic facilitation effect was obtained with a high proportion of response-congruent trials (Experiment 4). The authors propose that two processes contribute to semantic effects observed in the picture–word interference paradigm, namely selection by competition (leading to interference) and response congruency (leading to facilitation). Whether facilitation due to response congruency overrules the interference effect because of competition depends on the relative strength of these two processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Competing for a Desired Reward in the Stroop Task: When Attentional Control is Unconscious but Effective Versus Conscious but Ineffective.

Recent studies using Stroop's paradigm have shown that word recognition processes can be controlled when the local context of the task is manipulated. In the present study, factors related to the participants' broader context (i.e., presence vs. absence of a competitor and of a desired reward) were manipulated. The results (1) support the conclusion that control of semantic-level activation can be unconscious but effective versus conscious but ineffective, (2) suggest that unconscious control alone operates on line (i.e., when the participant is responding), and (3)clarify the impact of socio-contextual factors that have been confounded in past research. Taken together, these findings strengthen the view that word recognition processes are controllable and offer new reasons to pay constant attention to the social environment of cognition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Interactive Activation in Visual Word Recognition: Constraints Imposed by the Joint Effects of Spatial Attention and Semantics.

Two lexical-decision experiments investigated the effects of semantic priming and stimulus intensity when target location varied and was cued by an abrupt onset. In Experiment 1, the spatial cue was a good predictor of target location, and in Experiment 2 it was not. The results indicate that word recognition processes were postponed until spatial attention was focused on the target and that whether attention further affected word recognition depended on cue validity. The joint effects of cue validity and priming interacted when cue validity was high but were additive when cue validity was low. The joint effects of stimulus intensity and semantic priming also varied according to cue validity (i.e., interactive when high and additive when low). The results are discussed in terms of their implications for visual word recognition, the distinction between exogenous and endogenous spatial attention, and how attention is affected by visual word recognition processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The prime lexicality effect: form-priming as a function of prime awareness, lexical status, and discrimination difficulty

G. W. Humphreys, D. Besner, and P. T. Quinlan (1988) found that form-primes (e.g., contrast-CONTRACT) were effective only with masked primes. C. Veres (1986) obtained the same effect for word primes but found that nonword primes (e.g., controct) were effective regardless of masking. In a lexical-decision task, the present study failed to find any priming with word primes but only when the nonword distractors were very close to a particular word (e.g., UNIVORSE). With more distant nonword distractors (e.g., ANIVORSE), priming with word primes was restored in the masked condition. In terms of an entry-opening model of priming, this effect was interpreted as a blocking of priming by a postaccess checking operation. Alternatively, in an interactive activation model, this effect could be modeled either by decreasing the strength of lexical competition or by changing the decision criterion from local to global activation.     

Specialized processors subserving visual word recognition: Evidence for local control.

One of the assumptions inherent in a distributed processing view of cognition is that specialized processors tend to run to completion because they are autonomous rather than being immediately subject to top-down constraints such as goals or intentions. Two experiments, with 60 undergraduates, demonstrated that early processes in visual word recognition ran to completion, even when the task was designed such that the product of these processes did nothing but interfere with performance. Ss made same–different judgments to letter strings that were either familiar (e.g., FBI) or unfamiliar (e.g., IBF). Familiarity disrupted performance, despite the fact that the task called for a classification based solely on physical criteria. The interference effect observed in the present experiments may have been a consequence of local control and was consistent with the assumptions of modular, distributed processing. (French abstract) (34 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The influence of attention at encoding on direct and indirect remembering

The relation between attention at encoding and direct (i.e., recognition) versus indirect (i.e., rapid reading) remembering was investigated. In Experiments 1 and 2, color of print indicated whether to read an individual word aloud or to ignore it. This attentional manipulation reduced direct but not indirect remembering for the ignored words relative to the attended words. Apparently direct remembering is extremely dependent on attention at encoding. In Experiment 3, however, presenting two words simultaneously at study, with color now signifying which word to read and which to ignore, eliminated this dissociative effect of attention. Ignored words were not remembered on either test, although attended words were remembered well on both. Mere exposure is not sufficient to produce indirect remembering: Stimuli must be attended. Ignoring one stimulus in favor of processing another stimulus that is simultaneously presented and equally salient may prevent even the minimal attentional requirements of indirect remembering from being met, let alone the more stringent requirements of direct remembering.     

Indirect influence on modality on direct memory for words and their modality: Closed-head-injured and control participants.

Twenty closed-head-injured (CHI) patients and 28 control participants were tested on recall and recognition of words. In addition, memory for modality (i.e., visual vs. auditory) of word presentation was measured directly (i.e., recognition) and indirectly (i.e., by its influence on word and modality recognition). As predicted, the CHI patients were impaired relative to controls on all of the direct memory tasks; that is, word recall, word recognition, and modality judgment. However, the CHI and control groups did not differ significantly on the magnitude of the modality effect (i.e., facilitation due to correspondence of modality in learning and test). The findings are interpreted in the theoretical framework that distinguishes between item (i.e., words) and source (i.e., modality) memory and between direct and indirect measures of memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Grammatical and nongrammatical contributions to closed-class word selection.

Closed-class word selection was investigated by focusing on determiner production. Native speakers from three different languages named pictures of objects using determiner plus noun phrases (e.g., in French "la table" [thefeminineA table], while ignoring distractor determiners printed on the pictures (e.g., "le" [themasculine]. The target and distractor expressed either shared or different grammatical and nongrammatical features (gender, number, and definiteness). A gender-facilitation effect was observed and attributed to noun processing. Crucially, across five experiments, distractors that shared a feature with the target determiner never resulted in longer naming latencies than distractors that were more different. These results indicate that activating related candidates is not detrimental for determiner retrieval, suggesting a noncompetitive mechanism of closed-class word selection. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aging and memory for expected and unexpected objects in real-world settings.

Adult age differences in the consistency effect were examined in 3 experiments. The consistency effect refers to items inconsistent with expectations being better remembered than items consistent with expectations. Younger and older adults walked into an office room and viewed objects that varied in their consistency with expectation. Immediate and delayed recognition tests on item information (i.e., distractors were defined by their semantic identity) revealed that both age groups recognized unexpected items better than expected items. However, when recognition of token information was requested (i.e., distractors were defined by their physical appearance), younger adults, in contrast to older adults, exhibited consistency effects. Also, under divided attention, young adults revealed the same pattern of data as did elderly adults under full attention. The results are discussed in terms of capacity-related differences in distinctive encoding. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

"Measuring search efficiency in complex visual search tasks: Global and local clutter": Correction to Beck et al. (2010).

Reports an error in "Measuring search efficiency in complex visual search tasks: Global and local clutter" by Melissa R. Beck, Maura C. Lohrenz and J. Gregory Trafton (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 2010[Sep], Vol 16[3], 238-250). The copyright for the article was incorrectly listed. The correct copyright information is provided in the erratum. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2010-19027-002.) Set size and crowding affect search efficiency by limiting attention for recognition and attention against competition; however, these factors can be difficult to quantify in complex search tasks. The current experiments use a quantitative measure of the amount and variability of visual information (i.e., clutter) in highly complex stimuli (i.e., digital aeronautical charts) to examine limits of attention in visual search. Undergraduates at a large southern university searched for a target among 4, 8, or 16 distractors in charts with high, medium, or low global clutter. The target was in a high or low local-clutter region of the chart. In Experiment 1, reaction time increased as global clutter increased, particularly when the target was in a high local-clutter region. However, there was no effect of distractor set size, supporting the notion that global clutter is a better measure of attention against competition in complex visual search tasks. As a control, Experiment 2 demonstrated that increasing the number of distractors leads to a typical set size effect when there is no additional clutter (i.e., no chart). In Experiment 3, the effects of global and local clutter were minimized when the target was highly salient. When the target was nonsalient, more fixations were observed in high global clutter charts, indicating that the number of elements competing with the target for attention was also high. The results suggest design techniques that could improve pilots' search performance in aeronautical charts. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Desirable responding triggered by affect: Automatic egotism?

Two experiments demonstrated an increase in socially desirable responding in the presence of affect-laden stimuli. Subjects responded "me" or "not me" to trait adjectives presented on a microcomputer. Affect was manipulated by pairing each trait adjective with a distractor word presented nearby. Some distractors were affect-laden (e.g., sex, blood); others were innocuous (e.g., station, lake). In Study 1, some trait adjectives were positive traits and others were neutral. Results showed that endorsements of positive traits were increased and speeded up by the affective distractors; denials of positive traits were reduced and slowed down by affective distractors. Both claims and denials of neutral traits were slowed by the affective distractors. In Study 2, positive, neutral, and negative traits were presented. The Study 1 results were replicated with parallel results for negative traits. The overall pattern of results was interpreted as a response-potentiation effect. Thus, the net reaction to the presence of affective distractors was increased desirable responding. The high speed of this process suggests mediation by a fast-rising arousal or an attentional mechanism. The latter model suggests that self-perception automatically becomes more egotistical. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Can Language Do the Driving? The Effect of Linguistic Input on Infants' Categorization of Support Spatial Relations.

Two experiments explored the effect of linguistic input on 18-month-olds' ability to form an abstract categorical representation of support. Infants were habituated to 4 support events (i.e., one object placed on another) and were tested with a novel support and a novel containment event. Infants formed an abstract category of support (i.e., looked significantly longer at the novel than familiar relation) when hearing the word "on" during habituation but not when viewing the events in silence (Experiment 1) or when hearing general phrases or a novel word (Experiment 2). Results indicate that a familiar word can facilitate infants' formation of an abstract spatial category, leading them to form a category that they do not form in the absence of the word. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Eye movements when reading transposed text: The importance of word-beginning letters.

Participants' eye movements were recorded as they read sentences with words containing transposed adjacent letters. Transpositions were either external (e.g., problme, rpoblem) or internal (e.g., porblem, probelm) and at either the beginning (e.g., rpoblem, porblem) or end (e.g., problme, probelm) of words. The results showed disruption for words with transposed letters compared to the normal baseline condition, and the greatest disruption was observed for word-initial transpositions. In Experiment 1, transpositions within low frequency words led to longer reading times than when letters were transposed within high frequency words. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the position of word-initial letters is most critical even when parafoveal preview of words to the right of fixation is unavailable. The findings have important implications for the roles of different letter positions in word recognition and the effects of parafoveal preview on word recognition processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Asymmetric aging effects on semantic and phonological processes: Naming in the picture-word interference task.

In 2 experiments, participants named pictures while ignoring auditory word distractors. For pictures with homophone names (e.g., ball, distractors semantically related to the nondepicted meaning (e.g., prom) facilitated naming by top-down phonological connections for young but not for older adults. Slowing from unrelated distractors and facilitation from phonologically related distractors were age invariant except in distractors that were both semantically and phonologically related. Only distractors semantically related to the picture interfered more for older than younger adults. These results are inconsistent with age-linked deficits in inhibition of irrelevant information from either internal or external sources. Rather, aging affects priming transmission in a connectionist network with asymmetric effects on semantic and phonological connections involved in comprehension and production, respectively. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Influence of the Phonological Characteristics of a Language on the Functional Units of Reading: A Study in French.

Taft (1992) reported results supporting the idea that the "Body of the BOSS" (BOB) is an important unit in the visual recognition of English polysyllabic words. "BOSS" refers to the orthographically-defined first syllable of a word (e.g., the lam of lament); "Body" refers to the part of that syllable which follows the initial consonant(s) (e.g., the am of lam). The primary evidence supporting this notion was that the pronunciation of an ambiguously pronounceable nonword could be biased by the pronunciation of a preceding word when they shared their BOB, but not when they shared their phonologically-defined first syllable. Three experiments were conducted in French, to examine whether the syllable dominates as a unit of orthographic representation when the language has a clear phonological syllable structure. To construct ambiguously pronounceable nonwords, upper case letters were used and the first syllable always contained an E, which could be pronounced either as é or e. Nonwords (e.g., MERANE) were preceded by an upper case version of a word sharing a BOB (e.g., feroce) or a first syllable (e.g., méduse). The pronunciation of the nonword's E was biased by the syllable and not by the BOB, implying that the syllable, but not the BOB, is a relevant structure in the processing of visually presented French words. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The influence of the phonological neighborhood clustering coefficient on spoken word recognition.

Clustering coefficient—a measure derived from the new science of networks—refers to the proportion of phonological neighbors of a target word that are also neighbors of each other. Consider the words bat, hat, and can, all of which are neighbors of the word cat; the words bat and hat are also neighbors of each other. In a perceptual identification task, words with a low clustering coefficient (i.e., few neighbors are neighbors of each other) were more accurately identified than words with a high clustering coefficient (i.e., many neighbors are neighbors of each other). In a lexical decision task, words with a low clustering coefficient were responded to more quickly than words with a high clustering coefficient. These findings suggest that the structure of the lexicon (i.e., the similarity relationships among neighbors of the target word measured by clustering coefficient) influences lexical access in spoken word recognition. Simulations of the TRACE and Shortlist models of spoken word recognition failed to account for the present findings. A framework for a new model of spoken word recognition is proposed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Tracking the time course of orthographic information in spoken-word recognition.

Two visual-world experiments evaluated the time course and use of orthographic information in spoken-word recognition using printed words as referents. Participants saw 4 words on a computer screen and listened to spoken sentences instructing them to click on one of the words (e.g., Click on the word bead). The printed words appeared 200 ms before the onset of the spoken target word. In Experiment 1, the display included the target word and a competitor with either a lower degree (e.g., bear) or a higher degree (e.g., bean) of phonological overlap with the target. Both competitors had the same degree of orthographic overlap with the target. There were more fixations to the competitors than to unrelated distractors. Crucially, the likelihood of fixating a competitor did not vary as a function of the amount of phonological overlap between target and competitor. In Experiment 2, the display included the target word and a competitor with either a lower degree (e.g., bare) or a higher degree (e.g., bear) of orthographic overlap with the target. Competitors were homophonous and thus had the same degree of phonological overlap with the target. There were more fixations to higher overlap competitors than to lower overlap competitors, beginning during the temporal interval where initial fixations driven by the vowel are expected to occur. The authors conclude that orthographic information is rapidly activated as a spoken word unfolds and is immediately used in mapping spoken words onto potential printed referents. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The absence of a gender congruency effect in romance languages: A matter of stimulus onset asynchrony?

Using the picture-word interference paradigm, H. Schriefers and E. Teruel (2000) found that in German the grammatical gender of the distractor word affects the production of phrases composed of article+picture name: Latencies were longer for picture-word pairs of different genders. However, the effect was found only at positive stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs; i.e., when pictures were presented 75 or 150 ms earlier than word distractors). This gender congruency effect is not obtained in Romance languages. The present article examines whether in these languages, as in German, the effect appears at positive SOAs. No effect was observed in Italian and Spanish at positive SOAs. An account is proposed to explain why the gender congruency effect is obtained in Germanic (Dutch and German) but not in Romance languages. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)