Visual and semantic effects in a serial word classification task

Subjects were asked to decide as quickly as possible whether each of a series of items was one of the four target words, ‘dog’, ‘rat’, ‘boar’ and ‘mole’. The relationship of distractors to the targets was varied. Distractors which were of high visual similarity to the targets took longer to reject than those which were of lower visual similarity, and distractors which were semantically related to the targets took longer to reject than those which were unrelated. These effects were independent. There was no effect of familiarity, with non-animal distractors and pronounceable non-words rejected equally quickly. These results are qualitatively the same as those earlier found with faces (Bruce, 1979).