What does the visual system know about words?

Carr, Thomas H.; Pollatsek, Alexander; Posner, Michael I.

doi:10.3758/bf03207285

Cited by 45 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…Thus the results obtained by Paap and Newsome were probably due to the particular experimental conditions employed. In addition, the fact that they required their subjects to respond both to the prime and the target words may have helped disrupt the priming effect (Carr et al, 1981;McCauley et al, 1980).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

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Semantic Processing of Foveally and Parafoveally Presented Words in a Lexical Decision Task

Fuentes

Tudela

1992

The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section A

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Using a lexical decision task in which two primes appeared simultaneously in the visual field for 150 msec followed by a target word, two experiments examined semantic priming from attended and unattended primes as a function of both the separation between the primes in the visual field and the prime-target stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA). In the first experiment significant priming effects were found for both the attended and unattended prime words, though the effect was much greater for the attended words. In addition, and also for both attention conditions, priming showed a tendency to increase with increasing eccentricity (2.3°, 3.3°, and 4.3°) between the prime words in the visual field at the long (550 and 850 msec) but not at the short (250 msec) prime-target SOA. In the second experiment the prime stimuli were either two words (W-W) or one word and five Xs (W-X). We manipulated the degree of eccentricity (2° and 3.6°) between the prime stimuli and used a prime-target SOA of 850 msec. Again significant priming was found for both the attended and unattended words but only the W-W condition showed a decrement in priming as a function of the separation between the primes; this decrement came to produce negative priming for the unattended word at the narrow (2°) separation. These results are discussed in relation to the semantic processing of parafoveal words and the inhibitory effects of focused attention.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Indeed, previous results have shown that, when overt responses to the prime are required, priming may be disrupted (e.g. Carr, Pollatsek, & Posner, 1981;McCauley, Parmelee, Sperber, & Carr, 1980).…”

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confidence: 96%

Semantic Processing of Foveally and Parafoveally Presented Words in a Lexical Decision Task

Fuentes

Tudela

1992

The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section A

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“…It is possible, of course, that evidence for visual unitization might be obtained with another experimental paradigm. For example, Carr, Pollatsek, and Posner (1981) have argued that the same-different matching task is more likely to involve visual coding than the Reicher tachistoscopic recognition task, which is more likely to emphasize phonological coding. Another possibility is that by requiring the detection of a target letter within each string, Reicher's tachistoscopic recognition paradigm may place too much emphasis on letter-level coding for visual unitization to occur.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A word superiority effect with nonorthographic acronyms: Testing for unitized visual codes

Noice

Hock

1987

Perception & Psychophysics

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Letters in briefly presented masked letter strings were detected more accurately when the strings were three-consonant acronyms than when they were nonwords. In the absence of orthographic regularity, this word superiority effect (WSE) could not have depended on visual units corresponding to familiar bigrams. Since rendering the acronyms visually unfamiliar by alternating the case of their constituent letters did not introduce the left-right scanning effects observed for nonwords, it is concluded that the processing of the acronyms did not depend on the formation of whole-word visual units. It is argued instead that the WSE resulted from the postlexical activation of associatively connected single-letter codes. Finally, the results of case-alternation, sizealternation, and mixed-type-font experiments are interpreted in conjunction with the view that lexical access is based on both lowercase and uppercase letter recognition units for words and only uppercase letter recognition units for acronyms.In Reicher's (1969) tachistoscopic recognition paradigm, the brief presentation of a test string (e.g., WORK) was preceded and followed by masking characters that interfered with the processing of the string. Subjects were then provided with two response alternatives (e.g., WORK-WORD). Their choice between the alternatives, which in the above example would indicate whether they had detected the presence of a K in the last letter of WORK, was better for strings that were words than for strings that were nonwords. This result, which has been termed the word superiority effect (WSE), indicates that tachistoscopic letter detection is facilitated by the activation of lexical entries for the test word. Carr and Pollatsek (1985) have recently proposed that the WSE results from the formation of nonvisual, wholeword unitizing codes that "protect" the information in the briefly presented word from the effects of masking and memory loss. Evidence consistent with this hypothesis has been reported by Hawkins, Reicher, Rogers, and Peterson (1976), who showed that letter detection was more accurate for standard response alternatives (e.g., WORD-WORK) than for phonologically identical response alternatives (e.g., SITE-CITE). Another possibility is that the WSE could result from the formation of unitized whole-word codes that are visual rather than phonological. Experiments in which consecutive letters in a test string are presented in different cases (e.g., wOrK) are consistent with the hypothesis that higher order visual codes could mediate the WSE. Pollatsek, Well, andThe research reported in this paper was supported by Grant MDA903-82-C-Q317from the Army Research Institute. We thank Mary LaLomia for preparing the computer programs used to conduct the experiments and analyze the data, and Edward O'Brien for his careful reading of the manuscript. Helga Noice is currently at Rutgers University. H. S. Hock's mailing address is Department of Psychology, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL 33431. Schindler (1975) found that case alt...

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“…Whether one examines work on intelligence (e.g., Carr 1984;R. Sternberg 1984b), reading comprehension (e.g., Carr 1981;Jackson & McClelland 1979;Olson, Kliegl, Davidson & Foltz 1984), mathematical computation (e.g., Ashcraft & Stazyk 1981;Croen & Parkman 1972;Klahr & Wallace 1976), expert problem solving (Chase & Simon 1973;Engle & Bukstel 1978), memory judgments (S. Sternberg 1969), or perceptual recognition (e.g., Allport 1980;Carr, Pollatsek & Posner 1981), one finds cognitive psychologists dividing the labor involved in a given performance into parcels that can be handed over to specialized processing mechanisms whose job is to carry out one particular kind of mental labor on some particular class of stimulus inputs. These specialized processors, or elementary mental operations, become the building blocks from which the performance as a whole is pieced together in a way that is somewhat analogous to piecing together commands and subroutines into a computer program (Posner & McLeod 1982).…”

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confidence: 99%

The nature of the black–white difference on various psychometric tests: Spearman's hypothesis

1985

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Although the black and white populations in the United States differ, on average, by about one standard deviation (equivalent to 15 IQ points) on current IQ tests, they differ by various amounts on different tests. The present study examines the nature of the highly variable black–white difference across diverse tests and indicates the major systematic source of this between-population variation, namely, Spearman's g. Charles Spearman originally suggested in 1927 that the varying magnitude of the mean difference between black and white populations on a variety of mental tests is directly related to the size of the test's loading on g, the general factor common to all complex tests of mental ability. Eleven large-scale studies, each comprising anywhere from 6 to 13 diverse tests, show a significant and substantial correlation between tests' g loadings and the mean black–white difference (expressed in standard score units) on the various tests. Hence, in accord with Spearman's hypothesis, the average black–white difference on diverse mental tests may be interpreted as chiefly a difference in g, rather than as a difference in the more specific sources of test score variance associated with any particular informational content, scholastic knowledge, specific acquired skill, or type of test. The results of recent chronometric studies of relatively simple cognitive tasks suggest that the g factor is related, at least in part, to the speed and efficiency of certain basic information-processing capacities. The consistent relationship of these processing variables to g and to Spearman's hypothesis suggests the hypothesis that the differences between black and white populations in the rate of information processing may account for a part of the average black–white difference on standard IQ tests and their educational and occupational correlates.

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What does the visual system know about words?

Cited by 45 publications

References 31 publications

Semantic Processing of Foveally and Parafoveally Presented Words in a Lexical Decision Task

Semantic Processing of Foveally and Parafoveally Presented Words in a Lexical Decision Task

A word superiority effect with nonorthographic acronyms: Testing for unitized visual codes

The nature of the black–white difference on various psychometric tests: Spearman's hypothesis

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