Word and picture identification: Is representational parsimony possible?

Four experiments are reported examining the locus of structural similarity effects in picture recognition and naming with normal subjects. Subjects carried out superordinate categorization and naming tasks with picture and word forms of clothing, furniture, fruit, and vegetable exemplars. The main findings were as follows: (1) Responses to pictures of fruit and vegetables ("structurally similar" objects) were slowed relative to pictures of clothing and furniture ("structurally dissimilar" objects). This structural similarity difference was greater for picture naming than for superordinate categorization of pictures. (2) Structural similarity effects in picture naming were reduced by repetition priming. Repetition priming effects were equivalent from picture and word naming as prime tasks. (3) However, superordinate categorization of the prime did not produce the structural similarity effects on priming found for picture naming. Furthermore, such priming effects did not arise for picture or word categorization or for reading picture names as target tasks. It is proposed that structural similarity effects on priming object processing are located in processes mapping semantic representations of pictures to name representations required to select names for objects. Visually based competition between fruit and vegetables produces competition in name selection, which is reduced by priming the mappings between semantic and name representations.Most current models propose that object naming may be decomposed into a series of processing stages, involving access to and retrieval of different kinds of stored information (e

Section: Priming Modality and Task Influences On Object Namingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Categorizing chairs and naming pears: Category differences in object processing as a function of task and priming

Lloyd‐Jones

Humphreys

1997

“…Such frequency effects on priming have been obtained in lexicaldecision tasks, perceptual-identification tasks, and wordfragment completion tasks (Jacoby & Dallas, 1981;Kirsner, Milech, & Stumpfel, 1986;MacLeod, 1989;Scarborough, Cortese, & Scarborough, 1977). However, these effects of frequency on priming often are small and not statistically significant.…”

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confidence: 99%

The effects on priming of word frequency, number of repetitions, and delay depend on the magnitude of priming

Ostergaard

1998

Conflicting findings with respect to the effects of experimental manipulations on priming have been reported in previous studies. It is argued that, in many priming tasks, large amounts of task-relevant information are available from various sources, and that, therefore, the information available from a specific study episode will have only a small impact on overall performance level. Under such circumstances, high levels of baseline performance and small priming effects will be observed. The experiments reported here investigated the hypothesis that a high baseline performance in informationprocessing tasks that are used to measure priming may constrain priming effects. In a series of wordnaming experiments, perceptual difficulty and, therefore, baseline performance was manipulated. Under easy conditions, priming effects were relatively small and were not affected by word frequency, spaced repetition, or delay.Under more difficult conditions, priming effects were larger, and significant effects of all of the above-mentioned experimental manipulations were observed. Under conditions that produced the largest priming effects, a significantrelationship between printingand explicit-memory performance could be observed. Inthe last experiment, it was shown that the characteristics of the retrieval task can substantially affect the magnitude of priming. It is argued that priming effects should be considered to reflect interactions between memory traces and the information-processing components of the priming task.Experimental manipulations that significantly affect explicit-memory performance on tasks such as recall or recognition often have little or no significant effect on priming measures that are obtained in tasks such as tachistoscopic identification, lexical decision, and word-stem completion. These variables include massed repetition of studied items, divided versus focused attention, and levels ofprocessing ofthe study items

“…Across several experiments, Weldon and colleagues (Roediger et al, 1992;Weldon, in press;Weldon & Roediger, 1987;Weldon et al, 1989) have repeatedly found that although words produce substantially more priming than do pictures on this test, pictures consistently produce small but significant amounts of priming (about .20 for words, .05-.07 for pictures). Others also have obtained significant priming from pictures on verbal, perceptual tasks (Brown, Neblett, Jones, & Mitchell, 1991;Kirsner, Milech, & Stumpfel, 1986;Kroll & Potter, 1984). Pictures provide an interesting means for studying priming on the word-fragment completion test because they share no physical features with the target words yet still refer to the same concept.…”

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confidence: 99%

Why do pictures produce priming on the word-fragment completion test? A study of encoding and retrieval factors

Weldon

Jackson-Barrett

1993

Three experiments examined why pictures produce priming on the word-fragment completion test, despite the fact that there is no match between the physical features of the picture and the word fragment. Pictures and words were presented as primes, and performance on the wordfragment completion test was measured; encoding and retrieval conditions were varied. Experiments 1 and 2 examined the role of picture labeling by increasing the presentation rate and by introducing a shadowing task during encoding; labeling appears to playa role in priming. In Experiment 3, the word fragments were presented for 500 msec, and subjects were required to provide a solution immediately. Word priming was unaffected, but picture priming was eliminated, suggesting that word fragments enable efficient recovery of perceptually similar primes (i.e., words), but slower and less direct recovery of conceptually similar but physically dissimilar primes (i.e., pictures).