Increasing the duration of an intervening distractor word can increase repetition blindness: Evidence for interitem competition in rapid visual sequences.

In rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP), accurate report of a critical item (C2) declines when an earlier critical item (C1) is identical rather than unrelated. The most prominent theories of this phenomenon of (RB) concern the effects of processing C1 on later processing of C2. However, characteristics of distractor items between C1 and C2 strongly moderate RB, suggesting that items may compete for registration as separate events.

Retrieval practice via corrective feedback: is learning better for targets in an expected or surprising sense?

Adult participants learned homographic cue words and weakly associated targets. Each target was in the dominant (expected) sense of the cue (e.g.

Errors may not cue recall of corrective feedback: Evidence against the mediation hypothesis of the testing effect.

Successfully retrieving information protects it against later forgetting. Failed retrieval attempts are also beneficial if followed by study of corrective feedback. To explain both of these findings, researchers have proposed the mediation hypothesis.

Repetition priming and repetition blindness: Effects of an intervening distractor word.

In a simplified repetition blindness (RB) paradigm, university students named target words (C2) that were presented for 72 ms and followed by a pattern mask. A prime word (C1) that was identical or unrelated to the target was read silently at the beginning of each trial, and there was an intervening distractor item displayed for 120 ms between prime and target. When the distractor was a word, there was a large repetition cost for target accuracy at both prime durations (Experiments 1A and 1B).

The curious case of spillover: Does it tell us much about saccade timing in reading?

In completing daily activities, the eyes make a series of saccades by gazing at stimuli in succession. The duration of gaze on each stimulus has been used to infer how the initiation of a saccade is timed relative to the underlying mental processing. In reading, gaze dwells longer on a word that occurs infrequently in English text (low frequency) than on a more frequent word (high frequency), but also on the following word, which is referred to as spillover.

Repetition blindness in priming in perceptual identification: Competitive effects of a word intervening between prime and target.

University students named a 72-ms masked target word that was preceded by two 120-ms consecutively presented words, a prime word followed by a distractor. In Experiment 1, all words were in lowercase letters, whereas in Experiment 2, the target word was changed to uppercase letters. In both experiments there was an accuracy and latency cost (repetition blindness: RB) when the prime was the same word as the target, with the cost much less severe in Experiment 2 than in Experiment 1.

Brand name confusion: Subjective and objective measures of orthographic similarity.

Determining brand name similarity is vital in areas of trademark registration and brand confusion. Students rated the orthographic (spelling) similarity of word pairs (Experiments 1, 2, and 4) and brand name pairs (Experiment 5). Similarity ratings were consistently higher when words shared beginnings rather than endings, whereas shared pronunciation of the stressed vowel had small and less consistent effects on ratings.

Recognition in context: Implications for trade mark law.

Context effects in recognition have played a major role in evaluating theories of recognition. Understanding how context impacts recognition is also important for making sound trade mark law. Consumers attempting to discriminate between the brand they are looking for and a look-alike product often have to differentiate products which share a great deal of common context: positioning on the supermarket shelf, the type of store, aspects of the packaging, or brand claims.

Do Learned Alarm Sounds Interfere With Working Memory?

Objective: To assess whether identifying (or ignoring) learned alarm sounds interferes with performance on a task involving working memory.

Background: A number of researchers have suggested that auditory alarms could interfere with working memory in complex task environments, and this could serve as a caution against their use. Changing auditory information has been shown to interfere with serial recall, even when the auditory information is to be ignored.

Masked form Priming is Moderated by the Size of the Letter-Order-Free Orthographic Neighbourhood.

University students made lexical decisions to targets preceded by masked primes. In Experiment 1, transposed-letter primes were used also in the sandwich priming paradigm, in which the target is briefly pre-presented prior to the prime. The priming effects in the masked paradigm, but not in the sandwich paradigm, were moderated by the density of the letter-order-free neighbourhood of the target.

The locus of taboo context effects in picture naming.

Speakers respond more slowly when naming pictures presented with taboo (i.e., offensive/embarrassing) than with neutral distractor words in the picture-word interference paradigm.

Masked priming by misspellings: Word frequency moderates the effects of SOA and prime-target similarity.

University students made lexical decisions to eight- or nine-letter words preceded by masked primes that were the target, an unrelated word, or a typical misspelling of the target. At a stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of 47 ms, primes that were misspellings of the target produced a priming benefit for low-, medium-, and high-frequency words, even when the misspelled primes were changed to differ phonologically from their targets. At a longer SOA of 80 ms, misspelled primes facilitated lexical decisions only to medium- and low-frequency targets, and a phonological change attenuated the benefit for medium-frequency targets.

The role of lexical expertise in reading homophones.

In Experiment 1, university students classified on lexical expertise on the basis of spelling plus nonword pronunciation accuracy made lexical decisions to homophones and control words. Homophones were accepted as words more slowly than control words, but lexical experts showed a smaller homophone cost than the less skilled group. In Experiment 2, similarly classified groups showed a large difference in their ability to detect homophones, with the low-expertise group showing a yes bias to high-frequency words, and having difficulty detecting homophones when mate-frequency was low.

Repetition in visual word identification: benefits and costs.

University students performed lexical tasks with visually presented target words after the presentation of an identical or unrelated prime, at short (80-120 ms) or longer (410-710 ms) prime-target stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). Experiment 1 showed perceptual identification benefits in vocal responding at a short SOA that were reduced (accuracy) or reversed (latency) at a longer SOA. Experiment 2 showed a transition from a repetition benefit to a cost over 3 SOAs in a target-masked version of the lexical decision task (LDT; target displayed for only 141 ms).

Spelling recognition after exposure to misspellings: implications for abstractionist vs. episodic theories of orthographic representations.

University students made spelling accuracy judgments about correctly and incorrectly spelled words that had been seen incorrectly spelled (Experiments 1 and 2). In contrast to results for spelling production, studying a misspelling produced a small benefit in classification of the correct word at test. When the studied misspelling was re-presented at test, there was a substantial cost in accuracy.

The exemplar interleaving effect in inductive learning: moderation by the difficulty of category discriminations.

Recent research demonstrates a spacing effect in inductive learning. Spacing different individual exemplars apart in time, rather than massing them together, aids in the learning of categories. Experiment 1 examined whether it is interleaving or temporal spacing that is critical to the spacing effect in the situation where the memory load is high, and the results favored interleaving.

Are word representations abstract or instance-based? Effects of spelling inconsistency in orthographic learning.

In Experiment 1, 62 10-year-old children studied printed pseudowords with semantic information. The items were later represented in a different format for reading, with half of the items spelled in the same way as before and half displayed in a new phonologically equivalent spelling. In a dictation test, the exposure to an alternative spelling substantially increased the number of errors that matched the alternative spelling, especially in good spellers.

T1 difficulty affects the AB: manipulating T1 word frequency and T1 orthographic neighbor frequency.

Colored target words were presented with distractor nonwords in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task. In Experiment 1, the attentional blink (AB) effect on T2 accuracy was larger when T1 was a difficult (low-frequency) word than when it was a high-frequency word. In Experiment 2 the effect of T1 frequency on the AB was replicated in a between-participants design, and the frequency of T1's one-letter different neighbors (e.

Using maintenance rehearsal to explore recognition memory.

We examined associative and item recognition using the maintenance rehearsal paradigm. Our intent was to control for mnemonic strategies; to produce a low, graded level of learning; and to provide evidence of the role of attention in long-term memory. An advantage for low-frequency words emerged in both associative and item recognition at very low levels of learning.

Selective attention for masked and unmasked threatening words in anxiety: Effects of trait anxiety, state anxiety and awareness.

We investigated the effects of awareness on selective attention for masked and unmasked verbal threat material using a computerised version of the emotional Stroop. Participants were assigned to the high trait anxious (HTA) and low trait anxious (LTA) groups on the basis of questionnaire scores, and state anxiety was manipulated within participants through the threat of electric shock. To investigate the effects of awareness on responses to threat, the mode of exposure was blocked such that half the participants received masked trials before the unmasked trials, whereas the other half received the reverse order.

Evidence from the attentional blink for different sources of word repetition effects.

T2 in an attentional blink paradigm served as a high- or low-frequency prime word for a subsequent repeated target. Consistent with research in visual word identification, only reported primes facilitated the identification of a target repeated approximately 8s after RSVP. Priming was greater for low- than high-frequency words.

Selective attention for masked and unmasked emotionally toned stimuli: effects of trait anxiety, state anxiety, and test order.

We investigated selective attention for masked and unmasked, threat, and positively valenced words, in high trait anxious (HTA) and low trait anxious (LTA) individuals using the emotional Stroop colour-naming task. State anxiety was varied within participants through the threat of electric shock. To investigate whether the sequencing of the state anxiety manipulation affected colour-naming latencies, the ordering of the shock threat and shock safe conditions was counterbalanced across participants.

Genetic covariation between theAuthor Recognition Test and reading and verbal abilities: what can we learn from the analysis of high performance?

The Author Recognition Test (ART) measures print exposure and is a unique predictor of phonological and orthographic processes in reading. In a sample of adolescent and young adult twins and siblings (216 MZ/430 DZ pairs, 307 singletons; aged 11-29 years) ART scores were moderately heritable (67%) and correlated with reading and verbal abilities, with genes largely accounting for the covariance. We also examine whether high (and low) (i.

Orthographic influences in spoken word recognition: the consistency effect in semantic and gender categorization tasks.

According to current models, spoken word recognition is driven by the phonological properties of the speech signal. However, several studies have suggested that orthographic information also influences recognition in adult listeners. In particular, it has been repeatedly shown that, in the lexical decision task, words that include rimes with inconsistent spellings (e.

Phonological and semantic information in adults' orthographic learning.

A training paradigm was used to assess the early stages of the acquisition of novel letter strings in adults. Provision of either phonological or semantic information during training improved spelling recognition (Experiment 1). Manipulation of the processing required during training (phonological, semantic, or both) produced no consistent effects on spelling when both phonology and meaning were provided (Experiment 2).