Is visual attention automatically attracted by one’s own name?

Subjects were presented with briefly exposed visual displays of words that were common first names with a length of four to six letters. In the main experiment, each display consisted of four words: two names shown in red and two shown in white. The subject’s task was to report the red names (targets), but ignore the white ones (distractors). On some trials the subject’s own name appeared as a display item (target or distractor). Presentation of the subject’s name as a distractor caused no more interference with report of targets than did presentation of other names as distractors. Apparently, visual attention was not automatically attracted by the subject’s own name.     

The associated non-targets effect: evidence of nontarget processing at and beyond the level of letter recognition

In four visual search tasks participants were asked to make a target response if either of two targets was present and to make a nontarget response if neither target was present. Some target-absent displays included only nontarget stimuli or features that never occurred in the same displays as targets, whereas other target-absent displays included nontarget stimuli or features that did sometimes occur with targets. Nontarget responses were reliably faster in the former case than in the latter. This “associated nontargets effect” indicates that nontargets are not simply classified as nontargets but in addition are discriminated from one another. Current visual search models may underestimate the degree to which nontargets are processed during search.     

Tracking recognition of spoken words by tracking looks to printed words

Eye movements of Dutch participants were tracked as they looked at arrays of four words on a computer screen and followed spoken instructions (e.g., “Klik op het woord buffel”: Click on the word buffalo). The arrays included the target (e.g., buffel), a phonological competitor (e.g., buffer, buffer), and two unrelated distractors. Targets were monosyllabic or bisyllabic, and competitors mismatched targets only on either their onset or offset phoneme and only by one distinctive feature. Participants looked at competitors more than at distractors, but this effect was much stronger for offset-mismatch than onset-mismatch competitors. Fixations to competitors started to decrease as soon as phonetic evidence disfavouring those competitors could influence behaviour. These results confirm that listeners continuously update their interpretation of words as the evidence in the speech signal unfolds and hence establish the viability of the methodology of using eye movements to arrays of printed words to track spoken-word recognition.     

The time course of negative repetition effects in post-cue naming

It has previously been shown that when picture pairs are repeated across blocks in a post-cue naming task, former distractors are named faster than former targets: the “negative repetition effect” (Mayall, Humphreys, & Kotsanis, 2002). In the present study the time course of this effect was examined. Experiment 1 demonstrated that the effect became apparent after a lag of only two intervening trials, with former targets being named faster than former distractors after a lag of zero trials. Experiment 2 used a new baseline condition with repeated picture pairs for which no response was required on the first presentation. Comparisons with this baseline indicated that the negative repetition effect is the result of suppression of former targets as opposed to facilitation of former distractors. The results support the proposal of Mayall et al. that the negative repetition effect reflects a form of speech monitoring that is applied when there is competition in the process of mapping from semantics to name representations.     

The effect of orthographic structure and lexical meaning on “same-different” judgments

Pairs of high frequency English words, orthographically acceptable pseudo-words, and non-word letter strings were presented in a “same”-“different” task. The mean reaction times for “same” judgments were ordered; real words were faster than pseudo-words, and pseudo-words were faster than non-words. The RTs for the “different”, judgments showed no differences among the three types of words, except in the first two days of practice in a blocked presentation condition when the difference between the real words and non-words was marginally significant. These and other results suggest that “same” judgments are based upon a comparison process which efficiently uses higher order semantic and orthographic information in words, whereas “different” judgments are based upon comparison process which performs a self-terminating search of the graphemic information in words. The results were also discussed with reference to hierarchical models of word perception and reading.     

Primed lexical decision: Combined effects of the proportion of related prime-target pairs and the stimulus-onset asynchrony of prime and target

Lexical decisions to word targets preceded by associatively related word primes are generally faster than those to words following neutral primes, whereas, under certain circumstances, lexical decisions to words preceded by unassociated word primes are slower than those to words following neutral primes. An experiment is reported that investigates the influence of the proportion of related prime-target pairs in the set of materials and of the stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) of prime and target on these associative priming effects. Four levels of proportion and three levels of SOA are systematically varied. Both variables are found to affect the size of the associative priming effects. Furthermore, the data suggest interdependence between them. The magnitude of priming only varies with SOA if the proportion of related pairs is relatively large. In contrast, the amount of priming varies with proportion under all SOA conditions. The data are interpreted primarily in terms of two contextual processes, viz., “prime-induced attentional processing” and “post-lexical coherence checking”.     

Acoustic factors in visual search

Previous work has shown that in searching for existing or absent “e.s” in printed prose, the presence or absence of silent “e.s” was less likely to be detected than that of pronounced “e.s.” It was suggested that the acoustic or kinaesthetic “image” was searched for evidence of an “e” in addition to the visual stimulus and that evidence from both sources was considered in making the appropriate response.

The present experiment employs mainly substitutive errors within words, which may or may not change their pronunciation. The results suggest that the form of the acoustic correlates has no bearing upon whether the words are detected as wrongly spelt, but that the presence or absence of an acoustic event corresponding in time to the spatial location of the error is important.     

Contextual validity and the effects of low-constraint sentence contexts on lexical decisions

Subjects made lexical decisions after reading either (a) low-constraint sentence contexts that did not predict the identity or meaning of congruous targets (e.g. “Mary went to her room to look at her XXXX”), or (b) control contexts that were randomly ordered lists of words. The crucial variable was the validity of the contextual information. When the sentence contexts were incongrous with the word targets as often as they were congruous (the “less-valid environment”), the congruous contexts had a slight inhibitory effect on decision latency relative to the baseline condition. In contrast, when the contexts were always congruous with the word targets (“valid environment”), they had a large facilitatory effect on decision latency. These results suggest that (a) the effects of congruous contexts can depend on the validity of the contexts across the entire experimental session, and (b) contextual facilitation may be due in part to sentence level processes.     

Mechanisms of the associated nontargets effect: processes influenced by statistical learning in a simple visual environment

In three visual search experiments participants were asked to make a target response if either of two targets was present and to make a nontarget response if neither target was present. Some target-absent displays included only nontarget features that never occurred in the same displays as target features, whereas other target-absent displays included nontarget features that did sometimes occur with target features. Nontarget responses were reliably faster in the former case than in the latter. This “associated nontargets effect” appears to arise from participants' ability to learn and to use contingencies between the presence of certain nontargets and the absence of any target.     

Attention and the processing of emotional words and names: not so special after all

Abstract— Previous research has suggested that a person's own name or emotionally charged stimuli automatically "grab" attention, potentially challenging limited-capacity theories of perceptual processing. In this study, subjects were shown two digits surrounding a word and asked to make a speeded judgment about whether the parity of the two digits matched. When the subject's own name was presented on a few scattered trials, responses were markedly slowed (replicating a previous study). However, in a subsequent block of trials in which half the words were the subject's name, the slowing did not occur. The same slowing occurred (but even more fleetingly) when an emotionally charged word was presented between the digits. When the name was embedded among multiple distractor words, it ceased to slow reaction times. The results suggest that perceptual analysis of high-priority stimuli is subject to the usual capacity limitations of other stimuli, but when enough capacity is available for a high-priority stimulus to be perceived, a transient surprise reaction may interrupt ongoing processing.     

Visual search with meaningful and non-meaningful material

Two experiments are reported which attempt to assess the effects of variations in target word, context items and instructions on performance in a visual search task. In Experiment 1, subjects were required to search through context lists of three-letter nonsense syllables (of either high or low association value) for three-letter meaningful target words (of either high or low frequency). They were given either “positive” or “negative” instructions, i.e. were told either to pick out the meaningful word or to pick out the word which was not a nonsense syllable. The results showed that visual search times were significantly influenced by both frequency of target word and association value of context items. A significant interaction was observed between type of instructions and target word frequency. The design of Experiment 2 followed that of Experiment 1, with the exceptions that nonsense syllables now became target items, and meaningful words formed the contexts. Again, nonsense syllable association value and word frequency were found to be critical in determining visual search times.     

A study of the effect of structural information and familiarity in form perception

Two experiments were carried out to investigate the influence of structural information and familiarity on the processing of visual forms. Pairs of “well” structured and nameable and “poorly” structured and non-nameable fragmented forms were employed as stimuli. The effects of structure and familiarity were assessed by manipulating the visual hemifield of presentation and the task. In Experiment 1 stimuli were judged as being either in the same orientation or mirror-reversed, a task that does not require high-level semantic information to be processed. Experiment 2 required physically identical forms to be matched, which may use either physical or name information. In Experiment 1 “same” judgements were equivalent for both types of stimuli, and “different' judgements were longer for the “poorly” structured (non-nameable) forms. In Experiment 2 there was little overall difference between “well” and “poorly” structured forms, though response times to “well” structured (nameable) forms were slowed for right-visual-field presentations. It is suggested that familiarity may not be sufficient to provide a perceptual advantage for nameable forms, as the advantage for nameable stimuli was confined to “same” judgements in Experiment 1 and response times were shorter for non-nameable stimuli in Experiment 2. Rather, performance depends upon factors such as the computation of global shape (due to structural properties of collinearity and closure) and on the use of different kinds or representations (physical versus name) in matching.     

Spontaneous speech generation

A speech generation task was performed by bilingual subjects whilst they received irrelevant messages in one ear. The irrelevant messages varied in content as well as in language. Although these messages appeared to have a significant influence on the rate of speech, this variation was not consistent with any of the three hypotheses suggested. A further speech generation experiment was then carried out in which subjects received as irrelevant auditory input, in one ear, either a prose passage or “emotional” words repeated over a period of 1 min. Although the rate of speech did not seem to be affected by the irrelevant input, a memory test for words spoken, as distinct from words heard seemed to indicate that the “emotional” words were significantly better recalled than the words from the prose passage. When a control experiment was performed with prose or repeated neutral words as auditory input, no such difference in recall was obtained. This result was seen as favouring Deutsch's model of the blocking of irrelevant speech.     

Memory of a speaker's voice: Reaction time to same- or different-voiced letters

Subjects were presented with a sequence of two letters, each letter spoken in either a male or female voice. On each trial, the subject was required to indicate, as quickly as possible, whether the two letters had the same name. Reaction times (RTs) were faster for letters spoken in the same voice for both “same” and “different” responses, even when letters were separated by 8 s. These results are incompatible with the notion of physical and name codes in auditory memory since a “different” response should always be based on a comparison of letter names and should not be influenced by voice quality. It was also found that RTs were not influenced by the phonemic distinctive feature similarity of the letters.     

Effects of visual familiarity on “same” and “different” decision processes

An experiment was conducted in which subjects matched upper and lower case versions of well-known abbreviations, such as BBC and etc, and meaningless controls. “Same” RT showed a familiarity effect for upper case versions of abbreviations such as BBC and GPO, but not for the lower case versions bbc and gpo. The converse did not occur for abbreviations such as etc, which were thought to occur most frequently in lower case. The “different” RT was inhibited by familiarity, with pairs such as IBM GPO being classified less rapidly than their lower case versions or controls. These effects occurred for subjects instructed to report “No” for “same” displays and “Yes” for “different” displays as well as for subjects given a conventional decision-report assignment. Some implications of these results for an account of the manner in which familiarity affects graphemic comparison processes are considered.     

A conjunctive feature similarity effect for visual search

Traditional models of visual search assume interitem similarity effects arise from within each feature dimension independently of other dimensions. In the present study, we examine whether distractor-distractor effects also depend on feature conjunctions (i.e., whether feature conjunctions form a separate “feature” dimension that influences interitem similarity). Spatial frequency and orientation feature dimensions were used to generate distractors. In the bound condition, the number of distractors sharing the same conjunction of features was higher than that in the unbound condition, but the sharing of features within frequency and orientation dimensions was the same across conditions. The results showed that the target was found more efficiently in the bound than in the unbound condition, indicating that distractor-distractor similarity is also influenced by conjunctive representations.     

Some properties of the visual imagery system investigated through backward spelling

Kosslyn (1973) and Kosslyn, Ball and Reiser (in press) have claimed that a quasi perceptual “scanning” process operates on visual images. Lea (1975) has suggested that this process should be redescribed in terms of iteration through an underlying list structure. It is known that images are subject to capacity limitations. This restriction of processing capacity suggests a model of imagery in which only information displayed in the image may be scanned, while iteration operates between such successive information displays. Three experiments on backward spelling from images support this view. Words of greater length involve more iteration problems. In Experiment I, backward spelling took longer than forward spelling for 8-letter but not for 4-letter words. Experiment II provides evidence for a directional scanning process, using a Brooksian interference technique. Experiment III demonstrates that the structure of the internal representation affects the manner in which it is iterated and that subjects can modify their iteration strategies.     

Bigram frequency counts and anagram lists

In the first part of this paper bigram frequency counts are given for the first letter-pairs, last letter-pairs and “other” letter-pairs of words of more than three letters. A short discussion of the use and relevance of such tables is given. In the second part, lists of anagram-pairs of words are given for words of length three or more letters, together with approximate percentages of occurrence of such “anagrammatical” words in the English language.     

The role of two types of outcome on storage and retrieval processes in memory

Two experiments are reported which demonstrate the typical finding of better performance on responses given positive outcomes as compared to performance on resiponses given negative and neutral outcomes. These effects of reinforcement are studied in more detail in the context of storage and retrieval processes. “Right” or “wrong” and monetary gain or loss were used as outcomes in the experiments. Both these types of outcome were found to have similar effects on storage, while the former tended to affect retrieval more than the latter outcomes did. The results clearly reject the notion that an outcome is stored along with the response to facilitate retrieval. A prerequisite for such a facilitation is a presentation of cues for retrieval at the time of test.