Showing papers in "Psychonomic Bulletin & Review in 2010"
TL;DR: The authors reviewed the evidence for the inhibition of task sets and argued that most of these findings, such as switch cost asymmetries, are ambiguous and focused on n-22 task repetition costs, which currently constitute the most convincing evidence for inhibition.
Abstract: The concept of inhibition plays a major role in cognitive psychology. In the present article, we review the evidence for the inhibition of task sets. In the first part, we critically discuss empirical findings of task inhibition from studies that applied variants of the task-switching methodology and argue that most of these findings— such as switch cost asymmetries—are ambiguous. In the second part, we focus on n-22 task-repetition costs, which currently constitute the most convincing evidence for inhibition of task sets. n-22 repetition costs refer to the performance impairment in sequences of the ABA type relative to CBA, which can be interpreted in terms of persisting inhibition of previously abandoned tasks. The available evidence suggests that inhibition is primarily triggered by conflict at selection of stimulus attributes and at the response level. Author Note
434 citations
TL;DR: The results strongly supported the two-factor model, with fully orthogonal factors accounting for performance in the number-limited and resolution-limited conditions and the reliable relationship between WM capacity and fluid intelligence was exclusively supported by the number factor.
Abstract: A key motivation for understanding capacity in working memory (WM) is its relationship with fluid intelligence. Recent evidence has suggested a two-factor model that distinguishes between the number of representations that can be maintained in WM and the resolution of those representations. To determine how these factors relate to fluid intelligence, we conducted an exploratory factor analysis on multiple number-limited and resolution-limited measures of WM ability. The results strongly supported the two-factor model, with fully orthogonal factors accounting for performance in the number-limited and resolution-limited conditions. Furthermore, the reliable relationship between WM capacity and fluid intelligence was exclusively supported by the number factor (r=.66), whereas the resolution factor made no reliable contribution (r=−.05). Thus, the relationship between WM capacity and standard measures of fluid intelligence is mediated by the number of representations that can be simultaneously maintained in WM, rather than by the precision of those representations.
358 citations
TL;DR: In this article, a novel working memory (WM) training paradigm was used to test the malleability of WM capacity and to determine the extent to which the benefits of this training could be transferred to other cognitive skills.
Abstract: In the present study, a novel working memory (WM) training paradigm was used to test the malleability of WM capacity and to determine the extent to which the benefits of this training could be transferred to other cognitive skills. Training involved verbal and spatial versions of a complex WM span task designed to emphasize simultaneous storage and processing requirements. Participants who completed 4 weeks of WM training demonstrated significant improvements on measures of temporary memory. These WM training benefits generalized to performance on the Stroop task and, in a novel finding, promoted significant increases in reading comprehension. The results are discussed in relation to the hypothesis that WM training affects domain-general attention control mechanisms and can thereby elicit far-reaching cognitive benefits. Implications include the use of WM training as a general tool for enhancing important cognitive skills.
324 citations
TL;DR: Individual differences in the performance of “supertaskers” help to sharpen the theoretical understanding of attention and cognitive control in naturalistic settings.
Abstract: Theory suggests that driving should be impaired for any motorist who is concurrently talking on a cell phone. But is everybody impaired by this dual-task combination? We tested 200 participants in a high-fidelity driving simulator in both single- and dual-task conditions. The dual task involved driving while performing a demanding auditory version of the operation span (OSPAN) task. Whereas the vast majority of participants showed significant performance decrements in dual-task conditions (compared with single-task conditions for either driving or OSPAN tasks), 2.5% of the sample showed absolutely no performance decrements with respect to performing single and dual tasks. In single-task conditions, these "supertaskers" scored in the top quartile on all dependent measures associated with driving and OSPAN tasks, and Monte Carlo simulations indicated that the frequency of supertaskers was significantly greater than chance. These individual differences help to sharpen our theoretical understanding of attention and cognitive control in naturalistic settings.
244 citations
TL;DR: The main findings were that fast readers had a larger perceptual span than did slow readers and that the span was not affected by whether or not the text was fixed width or proportional width.
Abstract: The perceptual span or region of effective vision during eye fixations in reading was examined as a function of reading speed (fast readers were compared with slow readers), font characteristics (fixed width vs. proportional width), and intraword spacing (normal or reduced). The main findings were that fast readers (reading at about 330 wpm) had a larger perceptual span than did slow readers (reading about 200 wpm) and that the span was not affected by whether or not the text was fixed width or proportional width. In addition, there were interesting font and intraword spacing effects that have important implications for the optimal use of space in a line of text.
220 citations
TL;DR: It is suggested that sequence learning is not predetermined with respect to one particular type of information but, rather, develops according to an overall principle of activation contingent on task characteristics.
Abstract: This article presents a review on the representational base of sequence learning in the serial reaction time task. The first part of the article addresses the major questions and challenges that underlie the debate on implicit and explicit learning. In the second part, the informational content that underlies sequence representations is reviewed. The latter issue has produced a rich and equivocal literature. A taxonomy illustrates that substantial support exists for associations between successive stimulus features, between successive response features, and between successive response-to-stimulus compounds. We suggest that sequence learning is not predetermined with respect to one particular type of information but, rather, develops according to an overall principle of activation contingent on task characteristics. Moreover, substantiating such an integrative approach is proposed by a synthesis with the dual-system model (Keele, Ivry, Mayr, Hazeltine, & Heuer, 2003).
180 citations
TL;DR: Studying forensic examiners can contribute to the understanding of expertise and decision making, as well as have implications for forensic science and other areas of expertise.
Abstract: Many forensic disciplines require experts to judge whether two complex patterns are sufficiently similar to conclude that both originate from the same source Studies in this area have revealed that there are a number of factors that affect perception and judgment and that decisions are subjective and susceptible to extraneous influences (such as emotional context, expectation, and motivation) Some studies have shown that the same expert examiner, examining the same prints but within different contexts, may reach different and contradictory decisions However, such effects are not always present; some examiners seem more susceptible to such influences than do others—especially when the pattern matching is “hard to call” and when the forensic experts are not aware that they are being observed in an experimental study Studying forensic examiners can contribute to our understanding of expertise and decision making, as well as have implications for forensic science and other areas of expertise
137 citations
TL;DR: P pigeons show suboptimal choice behavior by choosing an alternative that provides 20% reinforcement over another that provides 50% reinforcement, which results in one of two stimuli, each of which predicts reinforcement 50% of the time.
Abstract: Contrary to the law of effect and optimal foraging theory, pigeons show suboptimal choice behavior by choosing an alternative that provides 20% reinforcement over another that provides 50% reinforcement. They choose the 20% reinforcement alternative—in which 20% of the time, that choice results in a stimulus that always predicts reinforcement, and 80% of the time, it results in another stimulus that predicts its absence—rather than the 50% reinforcement alternative, which results in one of two stimuli, each of which predicts reinforcement 50% of the time. This choice behavior may be related to suboptimal human monetary gambling behavior, because in both cases, the organism overemphasizes the infrequent occurrence of the winning event and underemphasizes the more frequent occurrence of the losing event.
118 citations
TL;DR: It is demonstrated that even when people have rich established knowledge and visual information about events, linguistic framing can shape event construal, with important real-world consequences.
Abstract: When bad things happen, how do we decide who is to blame and how much they should be punished? In the present studies, we examined whether subtly different linguistic descriptions of accidents influence how much people blame and punish those involved. In three studies, participants judged how much people involved in particular accidents should be blamed and how much they should have to pay for the resulting damage. The language used to describe the accidents differed subtly across conditions: Either agentive (transitive) or nonagentive (intransitive) verb forms were used. Agentive descriptions led participants to attribute more blame and request higher financial penalties than did nonagentive descriptions. Further, linguistic framing influenced judgments, even when participants reasoned about a well-known event, such as the “wardrobe malfunction” of Super Bowl 2004. Importantly, this effect of language held, even when people were able to see a video of the event. These results demonstrate that even when people have rich established knowledge and visual information about events, linguistic framing can shape event construal, with important real-world consequences. Subtle differences in linguistic descriptions can change how people construe what happened, attribute blame, and dole out punishment. Supplemental results and analyses may be downloaded from http://pbr.psychonomic-journals .org/content/supplemental.
118 citations
TL;DR: This article showed that exemplar models can be used to perform a sophisticated form of Monte Carlo approximation known as importance sampling and thus provide a way to perform approximate Bayesian inference, which can often account for human performance with only a few exemplars, for both simple and relatively complex prior distributions.
Abstract: Probabilistic models have recently received much attention as accounts of human cognition. However, most research in which probabilistic models have been used has been focused on formulating the abstract problems behind cognitive tasks and their optimal solutions, rather than on mechanisms that could implement these solutions. Exemplar models are a successful class of psychological process models in which an inventory of stored examples is used to solve problems such as identification, categorization, and function learning. We show that exemplar models can be used to perform a sophisticated form of Monte Carlo approximation known as importance sampling and thus provide a way to perform approximate Bayesian inference. Simulations of Bayesian inference in speech perception, generalization along a single dimension, making predictions about everyday events, concept learning, and reconstruction from memory show that exemplar models can often account for human performance with only a few exemplars, for both simple and relatively complex prior distributions. These results suggest that exemplar models provide a possible mechanism for implementing at least some forms of Bayesian inference.
115 citations
TL;DR: The results suggest that deceptive processes may be detectable when action is allowed to covary with thought, and traditional response time measures that capture latent competition alone are extended.
Abstract: A convincing deceiver must act in discordance with their knowledge of the truth. To do so requires the deceiver to resolve competition between what is known to be true and what is intended to be false. We investigated the temporal signature of this competition by examining the action dynamics of arm movement while participants responded falsely or truthfully to autobiographical information. The participants answered no or yes by navigating a Nintendo Wii Remote to no and yes regions on a large projector screen. Trajectory analyses of the fine-grained arm movements show increased complexity in false responding relative to truthful responding, with the greatest difference in false yes answers. The dynamic motor movements also reveal greater strength of competition during the act of false responding, thereby extending traditional response time measures that capture latent competition alone. These results suggest that deceptive processes may be detectable when action is allowed to covary with thought. Supplemental figures and a list of the sentence stimuli may be downloaded from http://pbr.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.
TL;DR: It is suggested that sharing gaze can be more efficient than speaking when people collaborate on tasks requiring the rapid communication of spatial information.
Abstract: To better understand the problem of referencing a location in space under time pressure, we had two remotely located partners (A, B) attempt to locate and reach consensus on a sniper target, which appeared randomly in the windows of buildings in a pseudorealistic city scene. The partners were able to communicate using speech alone (shared voice), gaze cursors alone (shared gaze), or both. In the shared-gaze conditions, a gaze cursor representing Partner A’s eye position was superimposed over Partner B’s search display and vice versa. Spatial referencing times (for both partners to find and agree on targets) were faster with shared gaze than with speech, with this benefit due primarily to faster consensus (less time needed for one partner to locate the target after it was located by the other partner). These results suggest that sharing gaze can be more efficient than speaking when people collaborate on tasks requiring the rapid communication of spatial information. Supplemental materials for this article may be downloaded from http://pbr.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.
TL;DR: It is demonstrated that the reverse is also true: Language production and comprehension, and the encoding of the products of comprehension into memory, are less accurate when one is driving.
Abstract: It is well known that conversation (e.g, on a cell phone) impairs driving. We demonstrate that the reverse is also true: Language production and comprehension, and the encoding of the products of comprehension into memory, are less accurate when one is driving. Ninety-six pairs of drivers and conversation partners engaged in a story-retelling task in a driving simulator. Half of the pairs were older adults. Each pair completed one dual-task block (driving during the retelling task) and two single-task control blocks. The results showed a decline in the accuracy of the drivers’ storytelling and of their memory for stories that were told to them by their nondriving partners. Speech production suffered an additional cost when the difficulty of driving increased. Measures of driving performance suggested that the drivers gave priority to the driving task when they were conversing. As a result, their linguistic performance suffered.
TL;DR: This work generalizes the recognition heuristic to tasks with multiple alternatives, proposing a model of how people identify the consideration sets from which they make their final decisions, and addresses concerns about the heuristic’s adequacy as a models of behavior.
Abstract: The recognition heuristic is a noncompensatory strategy for inferring which of two alternatives, one recognized and the other not, scores higher on a criterion. According to it, such inferences are based solely on recognition. We generalize this heuristic to tasks with multiple alternatives, proposing a model of how people identify the consideration sets from which they make their final decisions. In doing so, we address concerns about the heuristic’s adequacy as a model of behavior: Past experiments have led several authors to conclude that there is no evidence for a noncompensatory use of recognition but clear evidence that recognition is integrated with other information. Surprisingly, however, in no study was this competing hypothesis—the compensatory integration of recognition—formally specified as a computational model. In four studies, we specify five competing models, conducting eight model comparisons. In these model comparisons, the recognition heuristic emerges as the best predictor of people’s inferences.
TL;DR: The results suggest that the trade-off originates through a bottleneck that restricts the development of overall visualization resources, rather than through preferential experience in one type of visualization.
Abstract: Previous research indicates relative independence between the ventral and dorsal visual pathways, associated with object and spatial visual processing, respectively. The present research shows that, at the individualdifferences level, there is a trade-off, rather than independence, between object and spatial visualization abilities. Across five different age groups with different professional specializations, participants with above-average object visualization abilities (artists) had below-average spatial visualization abilities, and the inverse was true for those with above-average spatial visualization abilities (scientists). No groups showed both above-average object and above-average spatial visualization abilities. Furthermore, while total object and spatial visualization resources increase with age and experience, the trade-off relationship between object and spatial visualization abilities does not. These results suggest that the trade-off originates through a bottleneck that restricts the development of overall visualization resources, rather than through preferential experience in one type of visualization.
TL;DR: Observers searched for targets that were unpredictably red or green, preceded by spatial cues that were red, green, or blue, and all three cue types produced evidence of capture, consistent with a general set for color singletons rather than the maintenance of multiple control settings.
Abstract: Previous spatial cuing studies have shown that the capture of spatial attention is contingent on top-down attentional control settings whose specificity varies as a function of the certainty of the defining features of the target. For example, when the target is a singleton defined by one specific color, observers adopt a control setting for that color. When the target can be one of two possible colors, however, observers appear to adopt a control setting for color singletons in general (see, e.g., Folk & Remington, 2008). The present study tested whether such results instead reflect the simultaneous maintenance of control settings for multiple colors (Adamo, Pun, Pratt, & Ferber, 2008). Observers searched for targets that were unpredictably red or green, preceded by spatial cues that were red, green, or blue. All three cue types produced evidence of capture, consistent with a general set for color singletons rather than the maintenance of multiple control settings.
TL;DR: The analysis of speed-accuracy trade-off functions revealed that monetary reward increased attentional effort, leading to an enhanced quality of stimulus coding, and little evidence was found that reward also improved selective spatial attention.
Abstract: An important question is whether monetary reward can increase attentional effort in order to improve performance. Up to now, evidence for a positive answer is weak. Therefore, in the present study, the flanker task was used to examine this question further. Participants had to respond sooner than a certain deadline in a flanker task. One group of participants received a performance-contingent monetary reward, whereas the other group earned a fixed amount of money. As a result, monetary reward significantly improved performance in comparison with the control group. The analysis of speed-accuracy trade-off functions revealed that monetary reward increased attentional effort, leading to an enhanced quality of stimulus coding. Little evidence was found that reward also improved selective spatial attention.
TL;DR: A go/ no-go task was used to differentiate between the attention account and the freezing account, which suggested that the presentation of emotional stimuli should be detrimental to performance on go trials, but beneficial for performance on no- go trials.
Abstract: Previous research has shown that emotional stimuli interfere with ongoing activities. One explanation is that these stimuli draw attention away from the primary task and thereby hamper the correct execution of the task. Another explanation is that emotional stimuli cause a temporary freezing of all ongoing activity. We used a go/ no-go task to differentiate between these accounts. According to the attention account, emotional distractors should impair performance on both go and no-go trials. According to the freezing account, the presentation of emotional stimuli should be detrimental to performance on go trials, but beneficial for performance on no-go trials. Our findings confirm the former prediction: Pictures high in emotional arousal impaired performance on no-go trials.
TL;DR: The present study examined the extent to which differences in strategic encoding and contextual retrieval account for the relation between individual differences in working memory capacity (WMC) and variation in episodic recall.
Abstract: The present study examined the extent to which differences in strategic encoding and contextual retrieval account for the relation between individual differences in working memory capacity (WMC) and variation in episodic recall. Participants performed a continual distractor task under either incidental- or intentional-encoding conditions. High-WMC individuals outperformed low-WMC individuals across both encoding conditions and, notably, to a greater degree in the intentional-encoding condition. These results suggest that WMC differences in episodic recall are likely due to a combination of differences in both contextual-retrieval and strategic-encoding processes. These findings are consistent with prior work showing that high-WMC individuals are better at engaging in strategic-encoding processes during the presentation of items than are low-WMC individuals and are better at using contextual cues to focus the search on correct items during retrieval.
TL;DR: Overall, although some fast-and-frugal heuristics indeed seem to predict behavior at times, there is little to no evidence for others and the empirical evidence available does not warrant the conclusion that heuristic are pervasively used.
Abstract: In several recent reviews, authors have argued for the pervasive use of fast-and-frugal heuristics in human judgment. They have provided an overview of heuristics and have reiterated findings corroborating that such heuristics can be very valid strategies leading to high accuracy. They also have reviewed previous work that implies that simple heuristics are actually used by decision makers. Unfortunately, concerning the latter point, these reviews appear to be somewhat incomplete. More important, previous conclusions have been derived from investigations that bear some noteworthy methodological limitations. I demonstrate these by proposing a new heuristic and provide some novel critical findings. Also, I review some of the relevant literature often not—or only partially—considered. Overall, although some fast-and-frugal heuristics indeed seem to predict behavior at times, there is little to no evidence for others. More generally, the empirical evidence available does not warrant the conclusion that heuristics are pervasively used.
TL;DR: Individual differences in personality traits related to positive affect, negative affect, and cognitive flexibility were used to predict individual differences in AB magnitude, and greater extraversion and openness predicted smaller ABs and greater openness predicted higher overall target accuracy.
Abstract: Accuracy for a second target is reduced when it is presented within 500 msec of a first target. This phenomenon is called the attentional blink (AB). A diffused attentional state (via positive affect or an additional task) has been shown to reduce the AB, whereas a focused attentional state (via negative affect) has been shown to increase the AB, purportedly by influencing the amount of attentional investment and flexibility. In the present study, individual differences in personality traits related to positive affect, negative affect, and cognitive flexibility were used to predict individual differences in AB magnitude. As hypothesized, greater extraversion and openness predicted smaller ABs. Greater openness also predicted higher overall target accuracy. Greater neuroticism predicted larger ABs and lower overall target accuracy. Conscientiousness, associated with less cognitive flexibility, predicted lower overall target accuracy. Personality may modulate the AB by influencing overinvestment via dispositional tendencies toward more or less stringent or capable cognitive control.
TL;DR: This paper found that reward-associated cues slowed response at cued locations, as compared with equally familiar punishment-associated or no-value cues, and had no effect when targets were presented at uncued locations.
Abstract: In familiar environments, goal-directed visual behavior is often performed in the presence of objects with strong, but task-irrelevant, reward or punishment associations that are acquired through prior, unrelated experience. In a two-phase experiment, we asked whether such stimuli could affect speeded visual orienting in a classic visual orienting paradigm. First, participants learned to associate faces with monetary gains, losses, or no outcomes. These faces then served as brief, peripheral, uninformative cues in an explicitly unrewarded, unpunished, speeded, target localization task. Cues preceded targets by either 100 or 1,500 msec and appeared at either the same or a different location. Regardless of interval, reward-associated cues slowed responding at cued locations, as compared with equally familiar punishment-associated or no-value cues, and had no effect when targets were presented at uncued locations. This localized effect of reward-associated cues is consistent with adaptive models of inhibition of return and suggests rapid, low-level effects of motivation on visual processing.
TL;DR: An experiment in which total time for learning was fixed, thereby creating a trade-off between spending time receiving feedback and spending time on other learning activities, suggests that providing feedback is not universally beneficial.
Abstract: It seems uncontroversial that providing feedback after a test, in the form of the correct answer, enhances learning. In real-world educational situations, however, the time available for learning is often constrained— and feedback takes time. We report an experiment in which total time for learning was fixed, thereby creating a trade-off between spending time receiving feedback and spending time on other learning activities. Our results suggest that providing feedback is not universally beneficial. Indeed, under some circumstances, taking time to provide feedback can have a negative net effect on learning. We also found that learners appear to have some insight about the costs of feedback; when they were allowed to control feedback, they often skipped unnecessary feedback in favor of additional retrieval attempts, and they benefited from doing so. These results underscore the importance of considering the costs and benefits of interventions designed to enhance learning.
TL;DR: An alternative parametric approach is developed based on the linear ballistic accumulator decision model (Brown & Heathcote, 2008), which uses the model’s parameter estimates to measure processing capacity and shows that these two methods have complementary strengths.
Abstract: Does processing more than one stimulus concurrently impede or facilitate performance relative to processing just one stimulus? This fundamental question about workload capacity was surprisingly difficult to address empirically until Townsend and Nozawa (1995) developed a set of nonparametric analyses called systems factorial technology. We develop an alternative parametric approach based on the linear ballistic accumulator decision model (Brown & Heathcote, 2008), which uses the model's parameter estimates to measure processing capacity. We show that these two methods have complementary strengths, and that, in a data set where participants varied greatly in capacity, the two approaches provide converging evidence.
TL;DR: The findings suggest that individuals with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder are less likely to use overall average similarity when forming categories or making categorical decisions.
Abstract: Children with autism spectrum disorder process many perceptual and social events differently from typically developing children, suggesting that they may also form and recognize categories differently. We used a dot pattern categorization task and prototype comparison modeling to compare categorical processing in children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder and matched typical controls. We were interested in whether there were differences in how children with autism use average similarity information about a category to make decisions. During testing, the group with autism spectrum disorder endorsed prototypes less and was seemingly less sensitive to differences between to-be-categorized items and the prototype. The findings suggest that individuals with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder are less likely to use overall average similarity when forming categories or making categorical decisions. Such differences in category formation and use may negatively impact processing of socially relevant information, such as facial expressions. A supplemental appendix for this article may be downloaded from http://pbr.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.
TL;DR: It is advocated greater attention to potential cognitive processes during deliberation that might explain the transition between predeliberation preferences and a jury’s ultimate verdict.
Abstract: Despite much psychological research regarding jury decision making, surprisingly little is known about the deliberation process that gives rise to jury verdicts. We review classic jury decision-making research regarding the importance of deliberation and more recent research, investigating deliberation and hung juries, that challenges the view that deliberation does not have an important impact on verdicts. We advocate greater attention to potential cognitive processes during deliberation that might explain the transition between predeliberation preferences and a jury’s ultimate verdict. We then review cognitive work in the group context generally, and the jury context specifically, illustrating the promise of a cognitive perspective on jury deliberation. Finally, we identify cognitive phenomena likely to be particularly valuable in illuminating deliberation behavior.
TL;DR: The present article enlarges the set of candidate models with a discrete-state model, a straightforward extension of Bayen, Murnane, and Erdfelder's (1996) multinomial model of source discrimination to confidence ratings, and provides a better account of the data than do Hautus et al.'s models.
Abstract: In source-monitoring experiments, participants study items from two sources (A and B). At test, they are presented Source A items, Source B items, and new items. They are asked to decide whether a test item is old or new (item memory) and whether it is a Source A or a Source B item (source memory). Hautus, Macmillan, and Rotello (2008) developed models, couched in a bivariate signal detection framework, that account for item and source memory across several data sets collected in a confidence-rating response format. The present article enlarges the set of candidate models with a discrete-state model. The model is a straightforward extension of Bayen, Murnane, and Erdfelder's (1996) multinomial model of source discrimination to confidence ratings. On the basis of the evaluation criteria adopted by Hautus et al., it provides a better account of the data than do Hautus et al.'s models.
TL;DR: Findings support the view that the order of the root letters is allowed only a minimum degree of perceptual noise to avoid the negative impact of activating the “wrong” root family.
Abstract: Two key issues for models of visual word recognition are the specification of an input-coding scheme and whether these input-coding schemes vary across orthographies Here, we report two masked-priming lexical decision experiments that examined whether the ordering of the root letters plays a key role in producing transposed-letter effects in Arabic--a language characterized by non-concatenative morphology In Experiment 1, letter transpositions involved two letters from the root, whereas in Experiment 2, letter transpositions involved one letter from the root and one letter from the word pattern Results showed a reliable transposed-letter priming effect when the ordering of the letters of the root was kept intact (Experiment 2), but not when two root letters were transposed (Experiment 1) These findings support the view that the order of the root letters is allowed only a minimum degree of perceptual noise to avoid the negative impact of activating the "wrong" root family
TL;DR: This commentary argues that evidence for differential priming of semantically transparent and semantically opaque morphological pairs under masked presentation conditions should not call into question the theory that morphologically structured words undergo a segmentation process based solely on form.
Abstract: Feldman, O’Connor, and Moscoso del Prado Martin (2009) reported evidence for differential priming of semantically transparent (talker—talk) and semantically opaque (corner—corn) morphological pairs under masked presentation conditions. The present commentary argues that these data should not call into question the theory that morphologically structured words undergo a segmentation process based solely on form, because (1) these results do not contradict existing evidence for morphoorthographic segmentation, (2) funnel plots suggest that the lack of priming observed for semantically opaque items in this study is inconsistent with findings in the existing literature, and (3) orthographic characteristics of the semantically opaque pairs in this study (rather than semantic factors) are the most likely explanation for these discrepant results.
TL;DR: The focus here was on the degree of integration for probed-for information with the experienced environment, and visual probes were used to better coordinate what was seen with the nature of the memory probe.
Abstract: Memory for objects declines when people move from one location to another (the location updating effect). However, it is unclear whether this is attributable to event model updating or to task demands. The focus here was on the degree of integration for probed-for information with the experienced environment. In prior research, the probes were verbal labels of visual objects. Experiment 1 assessed whether this was a consequence of an item-probe mismatch, as with transfer-appropriate processing. Visual probes were used to better coordinate what was seen with the nature of the memory probe. In Experiment 2, people received additional word pairs to remember, which were less well integrated with the environment, to assess whether the probed-for information needed to be well integrated. The results showed location updating effects in both cases. These data are consistent with an event cognition view that mental updating of a dynamic event disrupts memory.