No abstract

This study examined the bizarre imagery effect in young and older adults, under incidental and intentional conditions. Intentionality was manipulated across experiments, with participants receiving an incidental free recall test in Experiment 1 and an intentional test in Experiment 2. This study also examined the relation between working memory resources and the bizarreness effect. In Experiment 1 young and older adults were presented with common and bizarre sentences; they later received an incidental recall test. There were no age differences in sensitivity to the bizarreness effect in Experiment 1 when ANOVAs were used to analyze the data. However, when the bizarreness effect was examined in terms of effect size, there was evidence that younger adults produced larger bizarreness effect sizes than younger adults. Experiment 2 further explored age differences in sensitivity to the bizarreness effect by presenting young and older adults with bizarre and common sentences under intentional learning conditions. Experiment 2 failed to yield age differences as a function of item type (bizarre vs. common). In addition, Experiment 2 failed to yield significant evidence that the bizarreness effect is modulated by working memory resources. The results of this study are most consistent with the distinctiveness account of the bizarreness effect.

Four experiments are reported in which 60 younger children (7-8 years old), 60 older children (10-11 years old), and 60 young adults (18-25 years old) performed a conjunctive visual search task (15 per group in each experiment). The number of distractors of each feature type was unbalanced across displays to evaluate participants' ability to restrict search to the smaller subset of features. The use of top-down attention processes to restrict search was encouraged by providing external aids for identifying and maintaining attention on the smaller set. In Experiment 1, no external assistance was provided. In Experiment 2, precues and instructions were provided to focus attention on that subset. In Experiment 3, trials in which the smaller subset was represented by the same feature were presented in alternating blocks to eliminate the need to switch attention between features from trial to trial. In Experiment 4, consecutive blocks of the same subset features were presented in the first or second half of the experiment, providing additional consistency. All groups benefited from external support of top-down attention, although the pattern of improvement varied across experiments. The younger children benefited most from precues and instruction, using the subset search strategy when instructed. Furthermore, younger children benefited from blocking trials only when blocks of the same features did not alternate. Older participants benefited from the blocking of trials in both Experiments 3 and 4, but not from precues and instructions. Hence, our results revealed both malleability and limits of children's top-down control of attention.

No abstract

This study examined the effects of homograph meaning frequency on semantic satiation within an ambiguity resolution paradigm. Participants received 3 homograph conditions: the concordant (QUICK-FAST-SPEEDY), discordant (HUNGER-FAST-SPEEDY) and neutral (CEILING-FAST-SPEEDY). On each trial, a prime (e.g., QUICK) was presented for various numbers of repetitions. Afterward, the prime was removed and participants made relatedness judgments about a homograph and target. On half of the trials, the prime was related to a high-frequency meaning of the homograph, and on the other half of the trials, the prime was related to a low-frequency meaning. The concordant condition yielded evidence of semantic satiation across meaning frequency conditions (QUICK-FAST-SPEEDY), but the discordant condition only yielded evidence of semantic satiation when the prime activated a subordinate meaning of the homograph (HUNGER-FAST-SPEEDY).