Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

For simplicity, contemporary models of written-word recognition and reading have unspecified feature/letter levels—they predict that the visually similar substituted-letter nonword PEQPLE is as effective at activating the word PEOPLE as the visually dissimilar substituted-letter nonword PEYPLE. Previous empirical evidence on the effects of visual similarly across letters during written-word recognition is scarce and nonconclusive. To examine whether visual similarity across letters plays a role early in word processing, we conducted two masked priming lexical decision experiments (stimulus-onset asynchrony = 50 ms). The substituted-letter primes were visually very similar to the target letters (u/v in Experiment 1 and i/j in Experiment 2; e.g., nevtral–NEUTRAL). For comparison purposes, we included an identity prime condition (neutral–NEUTRAL) and a dissimilar-letter prime condition (neztral-NEUTRAL). Results showed that the similar-letter prime condition produced faster word identification times than the dissimilar-letter prime condition. We discuss how models of written-word recognition should be amended to capture visual similarity effects across letters.

Can we learn without awareness? Although this issue has been extensively explored through studies of implicit learning, there is currently no agreement about the extent to which knowledge can be acquired and projected onto performance in an unconscious way. The controversy, like that surrounding implicit memory, seems to be at least in part attributable to unquestioned acceptance of the unrealistic assumption that tasks are process-pure—that is, that a given task exclusively involves either implicit or explicit knowledge. Methods such as the process dissociation procedure (PDP, Jacoby, 1991) have been developed to overcome the conceptual limitations of the process purity assumption but have seldom been used in the context of implicit learning research. In this paper, we show how the PDP can be applied to a free generation task so as to disentangle explicit and implicit sequence learning. Our results indicate that subjects who are denied preparation to the next stimulus nevertheless exhibit knowledge of the sequence through their reaction time performance despite remaining unable (1) to project this knowledge in a recognition task and (2) to refrain from expressing their knowledge when specifically instructed to do so. These findings provide strong evidence that sequence learning can be unconscious.

Conjunction faces are formed from feature sets learned across different faces. In previous studies, false alarms (“old” responses) to conjunctions have been very high, approaching hits to old faces; this is surprising, because, perceptually, upright faces are processed configurally, with strong integration of parts into the whole. We test the idea that the atypical reliance on unrelated parts could be due to using unnatural line drawings as stimuli, and to forming conjunctions across external features (e.g., hair) and internal features (e.g., eyes, mouth). We used realistic face stimuli and conjunctions made entirely from internal features. Results were, as expected, consistent with configural processing for upright faces (hits to old faces much greater than FA to conjunctions) and not for inverted faces (hits to old = FA to conjunctions).

During stress, attentional capture by threatening stimuli may be particularly adaptive. Individuals are more efficient at identifying threatening faces in a crowd than identifying nonthreatening faces (e.g., Öhman et al., Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 130(3): 466–478, 2001a, Öhman et al., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80(3): 381–396, 2001b). However, under conditions of stress, when attention to threat may be most critical, cognitive processes are generally disrupted. The present study explored the attentional advantage of threatening stimuli under stressful conditions. We exposed participants to either high or low stress conditions during a visual search task displaying threatening and nonthreatening facial targets among distractors. Participants’ accuracy, reaction times, and self-reported stress were measured. Stress introduced a speed–accuracy trade-off: participants in the high-stress condition were faster, but less accurate, than participants in the low-stress condition. Although both groups of participants showed relative performance advantages in detecting threatening compared with nonthreatening stimuli, this advantage was markedly larger for participants in the high-stress condition. This suggests that the established stress-mediated increase in the activity of the ventral neural network responsible for the reorienting of attention may have enhanced the ability to detect threatening stimuli or buffered the disruptive effects of stress on this process. Our findings highlight the potentially adaptive nature of stress disruption on attentional processes and align research on the anger superiority effect and automated attentional processes under stress.

In most situations, we are able to tell those outcomes we cause from those we do not. By now, research has provided us with a reasonably good understanding of the cognitive processes that underlie this sense of agency – it is thought to be produced by a comparison between a prediction of the outcome and the actual outcome that occurs. What is less clear is whether having a sense of agency can, itself, influence cognition. In the current study, we examined the possibility that sense of agency can affect memory, and we report evidence that stimuli that one feels a sense of agency over are, in fact, better remembered than counterparts without this. This self-agency effect can be distinguished from previously described control-related memory enhancements and adds to what we know of the cognitive consequences of having a sense of agency.

Normatively, a statistical pairwise comparison is a function of the mean, standard deviation (SD), and sample size of the data. In our experiment, 203 undergraduates compared product pairs and judged their confidence that one product was better than the other. We experimentally manipulated (within subjects) the average product ratings, the number of raters (sample size), and theSD of the ratings. Each factor had two levels selected, so that the same change in statistical power resulted from moving from the low to the high level. We also manipulated (between subjects) whether subjects were given only the product rating data as summarized in a statistical format or the summaries plus the raw ratings. Subjects gave the most weight to mean product ratings, less weight to sample size, and very little weight toSD. Providing subjects with raw data did not increase their use of sample size andSD, as predicted.

Picture-naming studies have demonstrated interference from semantic-categorically related distractor words, but not from corresponding distractor pictures, and the lack of generality of the interference effect has been argued to challenge theories viewing lexical selection in speech production as a competitive process. Here, we demonstrate that semantic interference from context pictures does become visible, if sufficient attention is allocated to them. We combined picture naming with a spatial-cuing procedure. When participants’ attention was shifted to the distractor, semantically related distractor pictures interfered with the response, as compared with unrelated distractor pictures. This finding supports models conceiving lexical retrieval as competitive (Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999) but is difficult to reconcile with the response exclusion hypothesis (Finkbeiner & Caramazza, 2006b) proposed as an alternative.

Throughout their lifetime, adults learn new words in their native lannguage, and potentially also in a second language. However, they do so with variable levels of success. In the auditory word learning literature, some of this variability has been attributed to phonological skills, including decoding and phonological short-term memory. Here I examine how the relationship between phonological skills and word learning applies to the visual modality. I define the availability of phonology in terms of (1) the extent to which it is biased by the learning environment, (2) the characteristics of the words to be learned, and (3) individual differences in phonological skills. Across these three areas of research, visual word learning improves when phonology is made more available to adult learners, suggesting that phonology can facilitate learning across modalities. However, the facilitation is largely specific to alphabetic languages, which have predictable sublexical correspondences between orthography and phonology. Therefore, I propose that phonology bootstraps visual word learning by providing a secondary code that constrains and refines developing orthographic representations.

The conjunction fallacy, in which individuals report that the conjunction of two events is more rather than less likely to occur than one of the events alone, is a robust phenomenon. We assessed the possibility that an analysis in terms of functional measurement methodology might be consistent with occurrence of the fallacy. A 3 × 3 design in which we varied the judged likelihood of the two components constituting the conjunction permitted us to assess the possibility that subjects judge the likelihood of conjunctions by averaging the likelihood of their component parts. The results were consistent with this possibility, and this interpretation was supported by analysis of the results in terms of functional measurement methodology.

Latent semantic analysis (LSA) is a model of knowledge representation for words. It works by applying dimension reduction to local co-occurrence data from a large collection of documents after performing singular value decomposition on it. When the reduction is applied, the system forms condensed representations for the words that incorporate higher order associations. The higher order associations are primarily responsible for any semantic similarity between words in LSA. In this article, a memory model is described that creates semantic representations for words that are similar in form to those created by LSA. However, instead of applying dimension reduction, the model builds the representations by using a retrieval mechanism from a well-known account of episodic memory.