Abstract
The word superiority effect (WSE), recognition of letters better in words than non-words, has been observed in normal adults, but is not observed in studies done with normal children. The supported theory is that this is caused by the development of top down processing sometime during the children’s growth. A Reicher-Wheeler task will be conducted on normal children in 5 different age groups as well as adults. The expected results are to see an increasing WSE as the age of the children increases.
Key Words: Word Superiority Effect, Pseudoword Superiority Effect, Reicher Wheeler, Top Down Processing, Children, Adults.
Top Down Processing Development:
Reicher Wheeler Task Results of Middle to Late Childhood Age Children
The word superiority effect (WSE) is the phenomenon that subjects are more likely to recognize a letter accurately in a word (WINGS) than in a psuedoword, strings of letters that follow known language rules and are pronounceable (WUNGS), a non-word, strings of letters that do not follow known language rules and are not pronounceable (WCHDS), or just in a mask (TXXXX) (Coch, 2010; Grainger, 2003; Jordan, 1996). This is observed through The Reicher-Wheeler Paradigm. In this test a subject is shown a string of letters and asked to identify the letter in a specific location using a forced choice task (Grainger, 2003; Hildebrandt, 1995; Jordan 1996). The effect has been observed in many empirical studies, and has been seen in adults across
The Stroop effect is demonstrated by the reaction time to determine a color when the color is printed in a different color’s name. Participants respond slower or make more errors when the meaning of the word is incongruent with the color of the word. Despite knowing the meaning of the word, participants showed incapability of ignoring the stimulus attribute. This reflects a clear instance of semantic interference and an unfathomed failure of selective attention (Stroop, 1935).
Low levels of processing include operations like counting the letters in words and higher levels of processing might include forming semantic relationships such as understanding what the words’ meaning is. According to Craig and Lockhart who formulated this theory memory recall would improve as the information is processed in greater depth. However it has been hard to define exactly what depth is and it has been found that there are other factors that make people remember things. (Zachmeister, E.B., Nyberg 1982)
An interesting challenge arises when a task such as color naming is identified as both controlled and automatic, by varying the other task involved. Color naming is identified as a controlled process when the other task is word reading, but as an automatic process when the other task is shape naming. Cohen, Dunbar and McClelland (1990) proposed an alternative explanation of the Stroop effect, which does not distinguish between automatic and controlled processing. Instead, they proposed that automaticity is a range, and that Stroop interference depends on the relative degree of learning the particular tasks, not on processing speed.
The Stroop effect was tested on four different tasks. Nineteen Queens College students were recruited by flyer, and each were assigned to a word reading task, color reading task, color inhibition task, and word inhibition task. They were timed using a stopwatch function on a cell phone, to name the color, or word to the quickest of their ability. In the order from longest reaction time to shortest: inhibition color naming task, color naming task, inhibition word reading, and word reading. This study shows that people can read words more quickly than they can name colors, and that inhibiting an automatic response to color/word tasks will take longer to do than tasks that do not involve inhibition.
In the first phase of this study that was based around recognising global features, the letters used were large H’s or S’s. In the second phase, global letters of H, S and O were used and were made up of smaller H’s or S’s, the local characters. These make up the 3 stimulus types: congruent, neutral and conflicting. The large and small letters could be combined to create 3 types of displays: 1) Consistent, where the large and small letters were the same (H printed from small H’s, or S made of small S’s). 2) Conflicting (H made of small S’s, S made of small H’s), and 3) Neutral (H made of O’s, S made of
However, evidence from a recent series of experiments conducted by MacLeod and Dunbar (1988) suggests that the processes involved in the Stroop task may have not been inadequate. In their experiment they taught participants to use color words as names for arbitrary shapes that actually appeared in a neutral color. After 288 trials where there was a 72 trials per stimulus, participants could perform this shape-naming task without difficulty. At this point, the effect that ink color had on shape naming was tested by presenting participants with conflicting and congruent stimuli for example, shapes colored to conflict or agree with their assigned names. Ink color produced large interference and facilitation effects. However, when the task was reversed, and subjects were asked to state the color of the ink in which the
Interpretation bias has been found in studies using homophone, homonym, and the word-stem completion task. For example, Pincus et al. (1994) found individuals with chronic pain made more pain-related
The current experiment is being run to investigate whether the global superiority effect is affected by the type of symbol, using a divided attention task. In previous studies Navon (1977), cited in Ness et al. (2014), used global letters made up of local letters to test how we process visual information. However, Yovel’s (2001), cited in Ness et al. (2014), divided attention task had two parts. Firstly, to see whether participants would react more quickly to global than local letters; and secondly, that there would be no difference to global and local target letters if the local letters were larger. In the current experiment the stimuli were global shapes and letters made up of local shapes and letters. They were tested to see the impact on processing and response times. The key features of the design was a 2x2 repeated measures design, and the participants performed on all four conditions which were two (IV’S) each with two levels.
The Stroop test consisted two major posters of word lists: Incongruent list and Neutral list. Each poster included 20 words in 2 columns of 10 words each. All letters were stenciled, capitalized and 1 ¾ inches high. Both incongruent and neutral words were listed on the 56 x 71 cm posters Stopwatch with 0.01-second accuracy was used to time to measure how long participants took to read both incongruent and neutral word lists, which is a dependent variable for this experiment.
Consequently, it was hypothesised that adults visually presented with full sequences of eight letters would record higher recall accuracy scores for phonologically dissimilar letters than for phonologically similar letters. An additional aim included the examination of the impact of serial position on PSE.
McArthur, G., Kohnen, S., Jones, K., Eve, P., Banales, E., Larsen, L., & Castles, A. (2015). Replicability of sight word training and
1. The authors decided to do a replication of a study performed by of Ramachandran & Hubbard (2001) and Hubbard (2005). From this study researchers looked at individuals who had synaesthetes and how they interpreted shapes, numbers and colors. Results from their study showed that individuals who had synaesthetes performed better by interpreting certain pictures by using more of the ‘pop-out’ effect rather than using the serial search effect. It also “assumed that color and shapes are processed independently, which does not hold true for people who have synathecia, giving that some amount of grapheme processing must be required for the color to be included”(Ramachandran & Hubbard 2001b, 2003b). Due to these findings researchers decided to “correct”
Word recognition involves an individual’s ability to identify words independently without requiring related words for contextual help. A widely examined topic in the field of cognitive psychology, it deals with understanding printed letters as a word which has been kept in the lexicon. The word frequency effect is important in the recognition of words. It suggests more common words in printed language are easier, faster and more accurate to distinguish than words that appear less frequently. Outlined in their journal article, Howes and Solomon utilized Thorndike-Lorge’s word count for word frequency and measured the threshold of recognition. They found correlation coefficients of -.68 to -.75 between word frequency and threshold or duration.
This data is very similar to the study done by Huang, Tomasini, and Nikel (1977), where there was roughly a 50% difference between words presented in the beginning of the list and those presented later. The current study most resembled this study, as they both had to do with sequential positioning of words on a list, and short-term memory recall. The other two studies, performed by Asch (1946) and Furnam (1986), are harder to compare to the current study because they differ in setup, and give results in a different format. However, both studies confirmed the primacy effect theory, similarly to the current study.
We are replicating J.R. Stroop’s original experiment The Stroop Effect (Stroop, 1935). The aim of the study was to understand how automatic processing interferes with attempts to attend to sensory information. The independent variable of our experiment was the three conditions, the congruent words, the incongruent words, and the colored squares, and the dependent variable was the time that it took participants to state the ink color of the list of words in each condition. We used repeated measures for the experiment in order to avoid influence of extraneous variables. The participants were 16-17 years of age from Garland High School. The participants will be timed on how long it takes them to say the color of the squares and the color of the words. The research was conducted in the Math Studies class. The participants were aged 16-17 and were students at Garland High School. The results showed that participants took the most time with the incongruent words.