Dynamic visual identification was investigated in 4 experiments. In Experiments 1 and 2, 2 perceptual objects (2 frames, each containing a letter or 1 containing a letter and the other a plus sign) were previewed in the periphery. A saccade brought these objects to central vision. During the saccade the display was changed so that 1 frame contained a letter and the other a plus sign, and the subject identified the letter by naming it aloud as rapidly as possible. In Experiment 3, the retinal events of Experiments 1 and 2 were simulated. In Experiment 4, both the preview and the target were presented centrally within a single fixation. In all experiments both object-specific and nonspecific preview benefits were observed. These results support a theory in which the preview benefits observed during visual identification arise from 2 processes, object file review and type priming.

False recognition occurs when people mistakenly claim that a novel item is familiar. After studying lists of semantically related words, healthy controls show extraordinarily high levels of false recognition to nonstudied lures that are semantic associates of study list words. In previous experiments, we found that both Korsakoff and non-Korsakoff amnesic patients show reduced levels of false recognition to semantic associates, implying that the medial temporal/diencephalic structures that are damaged in amnesic patients are involved in the encoding and/or retrieval of information that underlies false recognition. These data contrast with earlier results indicating greater false recognition in Korsakoff amnesics than in control subjects. The present experiment tests the hypothesis that greater or lesser false recognition of semantic associates in amnesic patients, relative to normal controls, can be demonstrated by creating conditions that are more or less conducive to allowing true recognition to suppress false recognition. With repeated presentation and testing of lists of semantic associates, control subjects and both Korsakoff and non-Korsakoff amnesics showed increasing levels of true recognition across trials. However, control subjects exhibited decreasing levels of false recognition across trials, whereas Korsakoff amnesic patients showed increases across trials and non-Korsakoff amnesics showed a fluctuating pattern. Consideration of signal detection analyses and differences between the two types of amnesic patients provides insight into how mechanisms of veridical episodic memory can be used to suppress false recognition.

In 2 experiments, a new technique called the auditory moving window was used to investigate aspects of spoken-language processing. Participants paced their way through spoken sentences divided into word or wordlike segments, and their processing time for each segment was recorded. The 1st experiment demonstrated that high-frequency words in spoken sentences require less time to process than do low-frequency words. The 2nd experiment demonstrated that words in syntactically demanding contexts (i.e., the disambiguating word of so-called garden-path sentences) are processed longer than the same words in syntactically simpler contexts. Helpful prosodic information appeared to facilitate reanalysis of garden-path structures but did not seem to prevent the misanalysis. The implications of these findings for issues in spoken-language comprehension are discussed. The authors conclude that the auditory moving-window technique provides a useful tool for addressing largely unexplored issues in spoken-language comprehension. Most of the useful linguistic information that children receive during the several years preceding literacy is obtained through the auditory modality, and even as adults, the majority of our linguistic experience comes from spoken language. Given its predominance, one might expect that the study of how spoken language is understood would be far more advanced than the study of reading. However, this is clearly not so. Little is known about the processing of spoken language, particularly that of connected speech (i.e., phrases, sentences, and texts), in contrast to the large body of work on the processing of visual language. One reason for this state of affairs is that researchers have fewer adequate tasks for examining on-line language processing in the auditory domain. In this article, we present a new on-line task we have developed for studying spoken-language comprehension. We then describe the results of two experiments with this task. These experiments provide important new information about spoken-language comprehension, demonstrating that listeners are immediately sensitive to both lexical frequency and syntactic complexity during the auditory processing of coherent sentences. To see the need for a new task like the one we have developed, we briefly consider the contrasting situation in the field of reading. The availability of the eye-movement monitoring technique has led to a large body of data concerning basic

Little is known about the neuropsychology of false recognition. D.L. Schacter, M. Verfaellie, and D. Pradere (1996) induced false recognition in amnesic patients and normal controls by exposing them to numerous semantic associates of a nonstudied word and found that amnesics showed significantly reduced levels of false recognition. To determine whether this outcome is specific to the semantic domain, the authors examined false recognition after exposure to lists of conceptually and perceptually related words. In the control group, conceptual false recognition was associated with "remember" responses and perceptual false recognition was associated with "know" responses. Amnesic patients showed reduced levels of conceptual and perceptual false recognition that were approximately equally divided between remember and know responses.

Cigarette control laws can be effective in significantly reducing the rate of cigarettes sold by merchants and rates of cigarette use by adolescents. Key elements of successful legislation implementation are consistent compliance checking and heightened community awareness of the problems and prevalence of adolescent smoking.