Expert performance in solving word puzzles: From retrieval cues to crossword clues

Crossword enthusiasts were first clasified as expert or intermediate on the basis of their performance with a previously unseen set of clues, and then participated in five laboratory experiments designed to capture different aspects of their skilled performance: experiment 1 required the generation of words from a fixed set of letters; experiment 2 monitored the solution of anagrams; experiment 3 required the comipletion of a word of given meaning with only three letters presented; experiment 4 was a lexical decision task with suffixed and pseudosuffixed words and non-words; and experiment 5 was a synonym judgement task with prefixed and suffixed words Subjects also completed psychometric tests of reasoning and vocabulary. A discriminant function analysis sucessfully predicted the crossword ability of all subjects on the basis of measures of the generation of words from given letters, the number of anagrams solved, sensitivity to a suffix in a non-word (lexical decision task), sensitivity to a pseudosuffix in a word (synonym judgement task), and vocabulary score. Cryptic crossword puzles are solved by a combination of component subskills, including lexical retrieval, clue recognition, and the manipulation of components of words.     

Long-term age of acquisition effects in famous name processing

The age of acquisition (AoA) effect refers to the processing advantage that words, objects, and people learnt earlier in life hold over those acquired later. We explored the long-term effects of AoA on performance, using naturally occurring famous names, acquired by participants cumulatively over three decades. We manipulated AoA by selecting celebrities who had first become known to our participants in the 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s and explored the effects of age by testing participants aged in their 40s, 50s, or 60s. Seventy-two participants made push-button 'Yes-No' familiarity decision judgements to the printed names of celebrities. We found a significant AoA effect. A linear increase in reaction time was uncovered, with the participants being fastest to respond to the 1960s celebrities, followed by those from the 1970s, and being slowest to respond to celebrities from the 1980s. There was no age × AoA interaction, although the AoA effect was most pronounced in the oldest participant group. Our data demonstrate the long-term persistent influence of AoA on processing speed. Moreover, they indicate that the effects of AoA are much more subtle than simply reflecting a difference between the earliest acquired stimuli in a processing domain and all later acquired items.     

The PDQ-8: Development and validation of a short-form parkinson's disease questionnaire

Abstract

The Parkinson's Disease Questionnaire (PDQ-39) is a disease specific measure of health status which covers eight dimensions of ill-health, and contains 39 questions. The development of the questionnaire has been outlined in full elsewhere and is briefly outlined in this paper. Psychometric techniques are used here to derive a single index figure from the PDQ-39, transformed to a score range from 0 (good health) to 100 (poor health). A sub-set of items is then selected from the PDQ-39 to create a shorter form version, the PDQ-8. Each item selected is the one most highly correlated with the overall domain score to which it contributes: in cases where more than one item correlated equally strongly with the total then the item which received the highest completion rate was selected. The items were summed together and transformed onto a score from 0 to 100. The results gained from the single index gained from the PDQ-39 are compared with that gained from the PDQ-8, and are found to be remarkably similar. The use of the PDQ-8 is recommended over the PDQ-39 where a shorter form measure is required and where a single index measure of overall health status is acceptable or desirable.     

The effects of age of acquisition on object perception

The age at which an item is acquired has been shown to affect naming latency of words, objects, and faces. The phonological completeness hypothesis situates the effects of age of acquisition (AoA) at speech output. Ellis and Lambon Ralph (2000) argue that the effects of age of acquisition result from a “mapping” between representations of orthography to phonology. However, neither “phonological completeness” nor “mapping” of phonological representations can account for the effects of age of acquisition on familiarity decisions to celebrities' faces and names (Moore & Valentine, 1999). This is because a familiarity decision requires a push button response rather than a verbal response. Moore and Valentine argued that exposure to new exemplars of information peg out the parameters of recognition for that type of information that will facilitate subsequent learning. Thus, the prediction is derived that age of acquisition will affect other perceptual classifications of any familiar stimulus class. We report two object classification experiments, where participants were required to decide whether the pictures of objects, presented at brief exposures, were real or not real. Age of acquisition and word frequency were manipulated in separate experiments. An advantage for early acquired objects was observed, which we argue, cannot be attributable to an effect of word frequency. We further argue, that a phonological locus alone cannot account for the advantage for early acquired objects in this classification task. The results are discussed in terms of additional multiple perceptual input loci as proposed by the Moore and Valentine (1999) set up of a specialised processing system hypothesis (SSPS).     

Stimulus generation, ratings, phoneme counts, and group classifications for 696 famous people by British adults over 40 years of age

Matching stimuli across a range of influencing variables is no less important for studies of face recognition than it is for those of word processing. Whereas a number of corpora exist to allow experimenters to select a carefully controlled set of word stimuli, similar databases for famous faces do not exist. This article, therefore, provides researchers in the area of face recognition with a useful resource on which to base their stimulus selection. In the first phase of the investigation, British adults over 40 years of age were requested to generate the names of famous people (or celebrities) that they thought they would recognize and to write these down. The most frequently named celebrities were then rated by adults from the same age population for familiarity, distinctiveness, and age of acquisition. The result is a database of 696 famous people, with an indication of their relative eminence in the public consciousness and rated for these important variables. Phoneme counts are also provided for each famous person, together with family name frequency counts in the general population, where available. Materials and links may be accessed at www.psychonomic.org/archive.