Previous research has demonstrated that areas in the medial temporal lobe and prefrontal cortex (PFC) show increased activation during retrieval of overlapping sequences. In this study, we designed a task in which degree of overlap varied between conditions in order to parse out the contributions of hippocampal and prefrontal subregions as overlap…

The present work investigated possible temporal constraints on the posthypnotic word blindness suggestion effect. In a completely within-subjects and counterbalanced design 19 highly suggestible individuals performed the Stroop task both with and without a posthypnotic suggestion that they would be unable to read the word dimension of the Stroop…

When something unique is present in a scene, this element may become immediately visible and one has the impression that it pops out from the scene. This phenomenon, known as "pop-out" in the visual search literature, is thought to produce the fastest search possible, and response times for the detection of the pop-out target do not vary as a…

Subjects decided whether sentences as "The treaty passed" were "true" or "false," given number of votes cast for the bill and criterion that determined its status. An additive-stages model was applied to verification times from the present and prior studies, and was used to describe certain markedness and congruity…

Three experiments employed rectangles in stimulus identification tasks. It was concluded that the initial perceptual processing of rectangles is accomplished by separate dimensional analyzers operating in parallel. Observers adopt different decision strategies for negatively correlated sets and for single dimension sets when the number of…

Repeated observations of a colored form results in slower reaction-time responses to the familiarized stimulus than to a comparable novel stimulus due to alertness decrement and encoding facilitation. This two-factor theory of repetition was found to hold for words as well as for colors. (Author/BW)

Interviewees were secretly instructed to answer six questions honestly and six deceptively. Deceptive answers were hesitant and lengthy. Visual presence of the interviewer increased variability in verbal response time and decreased the length of response. Interviewers were able to discriminate between truth and falsehood. Increased hesitation and…

Three experiments examined whether the phenomena of visual search for single characters (Sternberg, 1966) generalizes to word and word-category search when target and distractor sets had varied and consistent mappings across trials. Previous results were replicated. Four principles of search are discussed within a theory of automatic/control…

A technique is introduced to study the flow of information through processing stages in choice reaction time tasks. It was designed to determine whether response preparation can begin before stimulus identification is complete ("continuous" models) or if a stimulus must be fully identified prior to any response activation…

Letter encoding is typically viewed as an automatic process that is both obligatory and interference free. In these experiments, either familiar or non-familiar primes produced significant amounts of interference even when subjects were trying to ignore the visual input. Early perceptual components of encoding are both obligatory and resource…

First and fifth graders and college students were presented with pictures or spoken names of common objects and asked to make judgments about the comparative size of the objects. Judgment response times were faster with pictures than with words and varied with the ratio of the sizes of the objects. (BC)

Three experiments tested the hypothesis that graphs convey information effectively because they can display global trends as geometric patterns that visual systems encode easily. A novel type of graph was invented in which angles/lengths of line segments joined end-to-end represented variables of rainfall and temperature of a set of months. It was…

Two experiments used the sentence-picture verification paradigm to study encoding and comparison processes with spatial information. Subjects decided whether a spatial description of a geometric figure matched a second figure. Three critical results demonstrated that task-specific variables could be the primary determinants of how subjects verify…

The time needed to process visual feedback information for the control of aimed movements was investigated in two experiments. Examination of movement patterns indicated that the average time between presentation of visual error information and initiation of a movement correction was 135 msec, which is shorter than previous estimates. (Author/RD)

Earlier research with the lexical decision task led to the hypothesis that semantic context facilitates the encoding of words related to the context. Six experiments which employed different tasks (e.g., making a lexical decision) and different experimental paradigms (e.g., tachistoscopic exposures with masking stimuli) further investigated this…