Part-set cueing and lexical decisions: Testing an inhibitory account

Providing some elements of a studied set during testing (part-set cues) can impair memory for the remaining elements (noncues)—a counterintuitive effect that has recently been attributed to inhibition of noncues. To test for such inhibition using a lexical decision task, we manipulated semantic and episodic relationships, such that cues and noncues were related only semantically, only episodically, or both semantically and episodically. Results showed that part-set cueing evoked inhibition, slowing lexical decisions for noncues that were related to cues both semantically and episodically, consistent with previous results involving the retrieval practice paradigm. However, either type of relationship alone was insufficient to slow decisions, despite previous evidence of impaired memory in similar conditions when tested with other measures such as free recall. The latter results raise questions regarding the extent to which inhibition can account for cueing-induced impairment when cues and noncues are related only semantically or only episodically.     

Children's avoidance of lexical overlap: a pragmatic account

Children tend to choose an unfamiliar object rather than a familiar one when asked to find the referent of a novel name. This response has been taken as evidence for the operation of certain lexical constraints in children's inferences of word meanings. The present studies test an alternative--pragmatic--explanation of this phenomenon among 3-year-olds. In Study 1 children responded to a request for the referent of a novel label in the same way that they responded to a request for the referent of a novel fact. Study 2 intimated that children assume that labels are common knowledge among members of the same language community. Study 3 demonstrated that shared knowledge between a speaker and listener plays a decisive role in how children interpret a speaker's request. The findings suggest that 3-year-olds' avoidance of lexical overlap is not unique to naming and may derive from children's sensitivity to speakers' communicative intentions.     

Toward a unified account of spacing effects in explicit cued-memory tasks

Memory for repeated items improves when presentations are spaced during study. This effect is found in memory tasks using different types of material, paradigms, and participant populations. Although several explanations have been proposed, none explains the presence of spacing effects in cued-memory tasks for unfamiliar stimuli. Two experiments assessed the spacing effect on a yes-no recognition-memory task using nonwords and words as targets. The main results showed that changing the font between repeated occurrences of targets at study removed the spacing effect for nonwords only. A 3rd experiment using lexical decision showed that the font manipulation reduced repetition priming of nonwords when items were repeated at Lag 0. These results suggest that short-term perceptual priming supports spacing effects in cued-memory tasks for unfamiliar stimuli.     

Masked priming with orthographic neighbors: a test of the lexical competition assumption

In models of visual word identification that incorporate inhibitory competition among activated lexical units, a word's higher frequency neighbors will be the word's strongest competitors. Preactivation of these neighbors by a prime is predicted to delay the word's identification. Using the masked priming paradigm (K. I. Forster & C. Davis, 1984, J. Segui and J. Grainger (1990) reported that, consistent with this prediction, a higher frequency neighbor prime delayed the responses to a lower frequency target, whereas a lower frequency neighbor prime did not delay the responses to a higher frequency target. In the present experiments, using English stimuli, it was found that this pattern held only when the primes and targets had few neighbors; when the primes and targets had many neighbors, lower frequency primes delayed responses to higher frequency targets essentially as much as higher frequency primes delayed responses to lower frequency targets. Several possible explanations for these findings are discussed along with their theoretical implications. Considered together, the results are most consistent with activation-based accounts of the masked priming effect.     

Sublexical and lexical representations in speech production: effects of phonotactic probability and onset density

Phonotactic probability, neighborhood density, and onset density were manipulated in 4 picture-naming tasks. Experiment 1 showed that pictures of words with high phonotactic probability were named more quickly than pictures of words with low phonotactic probability. This effect was consistent over multiple presentations of the pictures (Experiment 2). Manipulations of phonotactic probability and neighborhood density showed only an influence of phonotactic probability (Experiment 3). In Experiment 4, pictures of words with sparse onsets were named more quickly than pictures of words with dense onsets. The results of these experiments provide additional constraints on the architecture and processes involved in models of speech production, as well as constraints on the connections between the recognition and production systems.     

Competition, cooperation, and the effects of others on me

Four studies were conducted to test the notion that whether one competes against or cooperates with a comparison target can serve as an important determinant of the direction (contrast or assimilation) of self-evaluative social comparison effects. In Study 1, cooperative-competitive orientation was treated as an individual difference variable, and it was shown that social comparison led to contrast for individuals with a more competitive orientation, whereas assimilation occurred for individuals with a more cooperative orientation. Study 2 replicated this result, treating cooperative-competitive orientation as a contextual variable. In Study 3, it was demonstrated that to obtain this pattern of results it is not necessary for perceivers to believe that they will be either competing or cooperating with the comparison target. Simply activating the relevant concepts is sufficient. The final studies demonstrated that competition activates a "difference" focus and cooperation activates a "similarity" focus.     

Tracking the transition from sublexical to lexical processing: On the creation of orthographic and phonological lexical representations

Participants read aloud nonword letter strings, one at a time, which varied in the number of letters. The standard result is observed in two experiments; the time to begin reading aloud increases as letter length increases. This result is standardly understood as reflecting the operation of a serial, left-to-right translation of graphemes into phonemes. The novel result is that the effect of letter length is statistically eliminated by a small number of repetitions. This elimination suggests that these nonwords are no longer always being read aloud via a serial left-to-right sublexical process. Instead, the data are taken as evidence that new orthographic and phonological lexical entries have been created for these nonwords and are now read at least sometimes by recourse to the lexical route. Experiment 2 replicates the interaction between nonword letter length and repetition observed in Experiment 1 and also demonstrates that this interaction is not seen when participants merely classify the string as appearing in upper or lower case. Implications for existing dual-route models of reading aloud and Share's self-teaching hypothesis are discussed.     

Demystifying the role of emotion in behaviour: toward a goal-directed account

ABSTRACT

The paper sketches the historical development from emotion as a mysterious entity and the source of maladaptive behaviour, to emotion as a collection of ingredients and the source of also adaptive behaviour. We argue, however, that the underlying mechanism proposed to take care of this adaptive behaviour is not entirely up for its task. We outline an alternative view that explains so-called emotional behaviour with the same mechanism as non-emotional behaviour, but that is at the same time more likely to produce adaptive behaviour. The phenomena that were initially seen as requiring a separate emotional mechanism to influence and cause behaviour can also be explained by a goal-directed mechanism provided that more goals and other complexities inherent in the goal-directed process are taken into account.     

A unified account of the effects of distinctiveness, inversion, and race in face recognition

A framework is outlined in which individual faces are assumed to be encoded as a point in a multidimensional space, defined by dimensions that serve to discriminate faces. It is proposed that such a framework can account for the effects of distinctiveness, inversion, and race on recognition of faces. Two specific models within this framework are identified: a norm-based coding model, in which faces are encoded as vectors from a population norm or prototype; and a purely exemplar-based model. Both models make similar predictions, albeit in different ways, concerning the interactions between the effects of distinctiveness, inversion and race. These predictions were supported in five experiments in which photographs of faces served as stimuli. The norm-based coding version and the exemplar-based version of the framework cannot be distinguished on the basis of the experiments reported, but it is argued that a multidimensional space provides a useful heuristic framework to investigate recognition of faces. Finally, the relationship between the specific models is considered and an implementation in terms of parallel distributed processing is briefly discussed.     

Dissociative prime-probe contextual similarity effects on negative priming and repetition priming: a challenge to episodic retrieval as a unified account of negative priming

This study examined the dependence of repetition priming (RP) and negative priming (NP) as a function of prime-probe contextual similarity in a paradigm in which participants were required to respond to a letter flanked by incompatible distractor letters (e.g., ABA). Experiment 1 used prime and probe displays containing a pair of "+" symbols that were presented horizontally or vertically. Experiments 2 and 3 manipulated whether the letter triplets contained the "!" symbol. In all experiments, regardless of whether the RP trials were intermixed with the NP trials (Experiment 2) or not (Experiment 3), RP was stronger in the prime-probe similar conditions than in the prime-probe dissimilar conditions, but NP was independent of prime-probe contextual similarity. These findings suggest that NP is not necessarily stronger in conditions in which episodic retrieval of the prime is more likely.     

The oral and written side of word production in young and older adults: generation of lexical neighbors

The aim of the present study was to investigate the effects of aging on both spoken and written word production by using analogous tasks. To do so, a phonological neighbor generation task (Experiment 1) and an orthographic neighbor generation task (Experiment 2) were designed. In both tasks, young and older participants were given a word and had to generate as many words as they could think of by changing one phoneme in the target word (Experiment 1) or one letter in the target word (Experiment 2). The data of the two experiments were consistent, showing that the older adults generated fewer lexical neighbors and made more errors than the young adults. For both groups, the number of words produced, as well as their lexical frequency, decreased as a function of time. These data strongly support the assumption of a symmetrical age-related decline in the transmission of activation within the phonological and orthographic systems.     

Joint effects of semantic priming and repetition in a lexical decision task: Implications for a model of lexical access

An experiment is reported which showed that in a lexical decision task semantic priming by a related preceding word and repetition of target words produce additive effects on decision latency. Previous models of lexical access and modifications of them are discussed, and it is argued that some such models predict an interaction of priming and repetition, while others are insufficiently precise to make a prediction. It is suggested that the generality of effects across tasks requiring lexical access must be established and the components of complex effects must be separated before an adequate model can be devised to account for the data.     

Being ourselves and knowing ourselves: an adverbial account of mental representations

This paper takes an evolutionary approach to what we are, namely autopoietic systems with a first person perspective on our surroundings and ourselves. This in contrast with Thomas Metzinger's views in his Being No One. Though perception does involve internal processing and representations, it is argued that perception is direct. We track real features of the world, but fallibly, in a certain way. Moreover, it is claimed that mental representations are quite different from internal neural representations. They are best construed in an adverbial way. What we perceive, the object of perception, is the real world. Internal neural representations are the means by which we perceive the world. And mental representations are the way in which we experience the world, the adverbial content of perception. Finally, what goes for the world goes for ourselves as well: in self-consciousness we track real features of ourselves, but fallibly, in a certain way.     

Roots, stems, and the universality of lexical representations: evidence from Hebrew

Is the structure of lexical representations universal, or do languages vary in the fundamental ways in which they represent lexical information? Here, we consider a touchstone case: whether Semitic languages require a special morpheme, the consonantal root. In so doing, we explore a well-known constraint on the location of identical consonants that has often been used as motivation for root representations in Semitic languages: Identical consonants frequently occur at the end of putative roots (e.g., skk), but rarely occur in their beginning (e.g., ssk). Although this restriction has traditionally been stated over roots, an alternative account could be stated over stems, a representational entity that is found more widely across the world's languages. To test this possibility, we investigate the acceptability of a single set of roots, manifesting identity initially, finally or not at all (e.g., ssk versus skk versus rmk) across two nominal paradigms: CéCeC (a paradigm in which identical consonants are rare) and CiCúC (a paradigm in which identical consonants are frequent). If Semitic lexical representations consist of roots only, then similar restrictions on consonant co-occurrence should be observed in the two paradigms. Conversely, if speakers store stems, then the restriction on consonant co-occurrence might be modulated by the properties of the nominal paradigm (be it by means of statistical properties or their grammatical sources). Findings from rating and lexical decision experiments with both visual and auditory stimuli support the stem hypothesis: compared to controls (e.g., rmk), forms with identical consonants (e.g., ssk, skk) are less acceptable in the CéCeC than in the CiCúC paradigm. Although our results do not falsify root-based accounts, they strongly raise the possibility that stems could account for the observed restriction on consonantal identity. As such, our results raise fresh challenge to the notion that different languages require distinct sets of representational resources.     

Individual and developmental differences in semantic priming: empirical and computational support for a single-mechanism account of lexical processing

Existing accounts of single-word semantic priming phenomena incorporate multiple mechanisms, such as spreading activation, expectancy-based processes, and postlexical semantic matching. The authors provide empirical and computational support for a single-mechanism distributed network account. Previous studies have found greater semantic priming for low- than for high-frequency target words as well as inhibition following unrelated primes only at long stimulus-onset asynchronies (SOAs). A series of experiments examined the modulation of these effects by individual differences in age or perceptual ability. Third-grade, 6th-grade, and college students performed a lexical-decision task on high- and low-frequency target words preceded by related, unrelated, and nonword primes. Greater priming for low-frequency targets was exhibited only by participants with high perceptual ability. Moreover, unlike the college students, the children showed no inhibition even at the long SOA. The authors provide an account of these results in terms of the properties of distributed network models and support this account with an explicit computational simulation.     

Competition, cooperation, satisfaction, and the performance of complex tasks among air force cadets

Forty-eight U.S. Air Force Academy cadets were studied to examine the effects of individual attitudes and organizational reward structures on the performance of a complex, integrative task. An attitudinal survey was used to measure each subject’s preference for cooperative or competitive situations. Distinctly different group environments were created by giving four groups of six subjectscompetitive instructions and another four groupscooperative instructions. The performance criterion was the “sum” score across eight trials of a complex arcade-type computer game which required one subject to control horizontal movement and another to control vertical movement. Although neither attitude nor reward structure alone influenced performance, their interaction was found to be very significant; subjects performed poorly when the reward structure did not match their individual orientation. Implications for military and professional training programs are discussed.     

Absence of lexical and orthographic effects in a same-different task

Two experiments are reported that investigate whether the lexical and orthographic effects typically found in a simultaneous matching task are due to the facilitating effect of linguistic context on letter identification. The first experiment used a delayed matching task (2-sec SOA), with serial incremental display of the letters of the second stimulus (e.g., B, BR, BRA, BRAI, BRAIN). Lexical and orthographic effects were clearly demonstrated when the letters of the second stimulus were displayed rapidly (40 msec/letter), but these effects were absent at a slower speed (400 msec/letter). The same results were obtained in a second experiment, in which the letters of both stimuli were synchronously presented at either the fast rate or the slow rate. These results were interpreted in terms of a multilevel race model that assumes no interaction between levels of processing and attributes the effects to differing degrees of decision-processing lag.     

The effects of sensation seeking and misattribution of arousal on attraction toward similar or dissimilar strangers

While previous research has indicated that certain situational variables can mediate the typical positive relationship between attitudinal similarity and attraction, investigations focusing on the impact of individual difference variables on this relationship have typically yielded unimpressive results. The present experiment was conducted to test the prediction that individual differences in sensation seeking do moderate this relationship. The major results showed that, as predicted, high sensation seekers were more attracted than low sensation seekers to dissimilar others, whereas low sensation seekers were more attracted than high sensation seekers to people with similar attitudes. The data also indicated that a misattribution of arousal manipulation serves to increase attraction under certain conditions. Specifically, misattribution of aversive arousal increased low sensation seekers' attraction to a dissimilar stranger and increased high sensation seekers' attraction to a similar stranger.