This paper introduced the letter insertion and letter deletion tasks. In these tasks participants are presented with letter strings and are instructed to insert or delete a letter to create a word. Experiment 1 demonstrated facilitation priming and established these tasks as sensitive indirect measures of memory. Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated interference priming effects. In Experiment 4 the process dissociation paradigm was applied to investigate the contributions of automatic and consciously controlled processes to performance on the letter insertion task. (...) In addition, performance in the exclusion condition demonstrated an interference effect caused by automatic retrieval. Potential applications for the letter insertion and letter deletion tasks are discussed. (shrink)

It is argued here that a critical prediction of the E-Z Reader model is that experimental manipulations that disrupt early encoding of visual and orthographic features of the fixated word without affecting subsequent lexical processing should influence the processing difficulty of the fixated word without producing any processing effect on the next word. This prediction is explained and illustrated.

A critical prediction of the E-Z Reader model is that experimental manipulations that disrupt early encoding of visual and orthographic features of the fixated word without affecting subsequent lexical processing should influence the processing difficulty of the fixated word without affecting the processing of the next word. We tested this prediction by monitoring participants’ eye movements while they read sentences in which a target word was presented either normally or altered. In the critical condition, the contrast between the target word (...) and the background was substantially reduced. Such a reduction in stimulus quality is typically assumed to have an impact that is largely confined to a very early stage of word recognition. Results were consistent with the E-Z Reader model: This faint presentation had a robust influence on the duration of fixations on the target word without substantially altering the processing of the next word. (shrink)

& The present study investigated saccadic inhibition in both voluntary and stimulus-elicited saccades. Two experiments examined saccadic inhibition caused by an irrelevant flash occurring subsequent to target onset. In each trial, participants were required to perform a single saccade following the presentation of a black target on a gray background, 48 to the left or to the right of screen center. In some trials (flash trials), after a variable delay, a 33-msec flash was displayed at the top and bottom third (...) of the monitor (these regions turned white). In all experimental conditions, histograms of flash-to-saccade latencies documented a decrease in saccadic frequency, forming a dip, time-locked to the flash and occurring as early as 60–70 msec following its onset. The fast latency of this effect strongly suggests a low-level, reflex-like, oculomotor effect, which was referred to as saccadic inhibition. A novel procedure was developed to allow comparisons of saccadic inhibition even across conditions, which in the absence of a flash (no-. (shrink)

Whenever knowledge of the possible interpretation or conceptualization of some- thing helps in perceiving that thing, we say the processing is conceptually driven. That is, the process starts with conceptualization of what might be present and then looks for confirming evidence, biasing the processing mechanisms to give the expected result... Conceptually driven processing and data-driven processing almost always occur together, with each direction of processing contributing something to the total analysis. (Lindsay and Norman 1977, p. 13).

The present study employed the gaze-contingent window paradigm to investigate parafoveal and peripheral cueing and masking effects on saccadic selectivity in a triple-conjunction visual search task. In the cueing conditions, the information shown outside the gaze-contingent window was restricted to the feature or feature pair shared between the target and a particular distractor type. In the masking conditions, no stimulus features were shown outside the window. Significant cueing and masking effects on saccadic selectivity were observed for saccades directed at items (...) within the window, where all features were visible across experimental conditions. Cueing a particular feature or feature pair biased saccadic selectivity towards this feature or feature pair, while masking generally reduced saccadic selectivity. These findings support the concept of visual guidance being a preattentive process that operates in parallel across the display. © 2001 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. (shrink)

In 5 experiments, participants read text that was briefly replaced by a transient image for 33 ms at random intervals. A decrease in saccadic frequency, referred to as saccadic inhibition, occurred as early as 60 –70 ms following the onset of abrupt changes in visual input. It was demonstrated that the saccadic inhibition was influenced by the saliency of the visual event (Experiment 3) and was not produced in response to abrupt but irrelevant auditory stimuli (Experiment 1). Display changes restricted (...) to an area either inside or outside the perceptual span required for normal reading produced strong saccadic inhibition (Experiment 2). Finally, Experiments 4 and 5 demonstrated higher level cognitive or attentional modulation of the saccadic inhibition effect. (shrink)

The Area Activation Model (Pomplun, Reingold, Shen, & Williams, 2000) is a computational model predicting the statistical distribution of saccadic endpoints in visual search tasks. Its basic assumption is that saccades in visual search tend to foveate display areas that provide a maximum amount of task‐relevant information for processing during the subsequent fixation. In the present study, a counterintuitive prediction by the model is empirically tested, namely that saccadic selectivity towards stimulus features depends on the spatial arrangement of search (...) items. We find good correspondence between simulated and empirically observed selectivity patterns, providing strong support for the Area Activation Model. (shrink)

Reingold and MerikleÕs (1988, 1990) critique of the classic dissociation paradigm identified several issues as inherent problems that severely undermine the utility of this paradigm. Erdelyi (2004) extending his prior analysis (Erdelyi, 1985, 1986) points out several additional factors that may complicate the interpretation of empirically obtained dissociations. The goal of the present manuscript is to further discuss some of these commonly neglected interpretive difficulties. Ó 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The present study used eye tracking methodology to examine rereading benefits for spatially transformed text. Eye movements were monitored while participants read the same target word twice, in two different low-constraint sentence frames. The congruency of perceptual processing was manipulated by either applying the same type of transformation to the word during the first and second presentations , or employing two different types of transformations across the two presentations of the word . Perceptual specificity effects were demonstrated such that fixation (...) times for the second presentation of the target word were shorter for the congruent condition compared to the incongruent condition. Moreover, we demonstrated an additional perceptually non-specific effect such that second reading fixation times were shorter for the incongruent condition relative to a baseline condition that employed a normal typography during the first presentation and a transformation during the second presentation. Both of these effects were similar in magnitude for high and low frequency words, and both effects persisted across a 1 week lag between the first and second readings. We discuss the present findings in the context of the distinction between conscious and unconscious memory, and the distinction between perceptually versus conceptually driven processing. (shrink)

A Buchner and E. Erdfelder (this volume) provide a commentary on our analysis of response bias correction in the process dissociation procedure. Unfortunately, this commentary fails to address the substantive issues that were raised in M. J. Wainwright and E. M. Reingold (1996). In the present article, we attempt to clarify some of their misrepresentations and the inconsistency inherent in their position. ©1996 Academic Press..

The ArgumentOver the years national styles have been invoked or denigrated in the writing of the history of science. This paper is an attempt to give the concept of national style a degree of precision and clarity enabling scholars to understand when and how it may be invoked and when and how its use would be dubious or even forbidden. The example of the United States of America is used because the history of the sciences in the United States was (...) often written loosely in terms supposedly conducive to national style analyses. We first discuss the problem of commonalities, factors widely present within all countries in the Western tradition, which, by definition, cannot be exclusive national attributes. Here the problem is to somehow determine whether the supposed national style attribute is a case of a significantly different degree of intensity than some presumed norm in the Western tradition.The principal thesis advanced is that pre-existing historiographic assumptions largely determine whether or not a scholar finds or does not find a national style. This is discussed in terms of some examples for the U.S. case. More particularly, a number of examples are discussed from the three principal genres or schools in current writing in the history of science: the knowledge-centered; the doing-science; and the context-oriented. Based on the analysis of the examples, an attempt is made to sketch an approach to a more rigorous use of the concept of national style. (shrink)

The present paradigm involved manipulating the congruency of the perceptual processing during the study and test phases of a recognition memory task. During each trial, a gaze-contingent window was used to limit the stimulus display to a region either inside or outside a 108 square centred on the participant’s point of gaze, constituting the Central and Peripheral viewing modes respectively. The window position changed in real time in concert with changes in gaze position. Four experiments documented better task performance when (...) viewing modes at encoding and retrieval matched than when they mismatched (i.e., perceptual specificity effects). Viewing mode congruency effects were demonstrated with both verbal and non-verbal stimuli. The present research is motivated and discussed in terms of theoretical views proposed in the 1970s including the levels-of-processing framework and the proceduralist viewpoint. In addition, implications for current processing and multiple systems views of memory are outlined. (shrink)

The divergence point analysis procedure is aimed at obtaining an estimate of the onset of the influence of an experimental variable on response latencies (e.g., fixation duration, reaction time). The procedure involves generating survival curves for two conditions, and using a bootstrapping technique to estimate the timing of the earliest discernible divergence between curves. In the present paper, several key extensions for this procedure were proposed and evaluated by conducting simulations and by reanalyzing data from previous studies. Our findings indicate (...) that the modified versions of the procedure performed substantially better than the original procedure under conditions of low experimental power. Furthermore, unlike the original procedure, the modified procedures provided divergence point estimates for individual participants and permitted testing the significance of the difference between estimates across conditions. The advantages of the modified procedures are illustrated, the theoretical and methodological implications are discussed, and promising future directions are outlined. (shrink)

Three experiments introduced a recognition memory paradigm designed to investigate reported subjective awareness during retrieval. At study, in Experiments 1A and 2, words were either generated or read , while modality of presentation was manipulated in Experiment 1B. Word pairs were presented during test trials, and participants indicated if they contained an old word by responding “remember”, “know” or “new” in Experiments 1A and 1B, and by responding “strong no”, “weak no”, “weak yes”, or “strong yes” in Experiment 2. Participants (...) were then required to decide which of the 2 words was old. We demonstrated that the proportion measures used in the Remember Know paradigm substantially underestimated the influence of generation on familiarity resulting in an artificial dissociation between indices of knowing and remembering . We also found a qualitatively different pattern of forced-choice recognition performance as a function of claimed awareness. (shrink)

Buchner, Erdfelder, and Vaterrodt-Plunnecke (1995) advocated an exposition of the process dissociation procedure within the framework of multinomial modeling. Among the misleading aspects of this exposition is its tendency to obscure the overlap between processes. In contrast, clarifying these crucial interactions leads to a general classification of response bias corrections to the process dissociation procedure. This scheme, in which corrective models are classified on the basis of process interactions, clarifies the assumptions underlying previously proposed corrections. As an illustration of the (...) framework, three such corrections are derived. These corrective models are evaluated by applying them to the data reported by Buchner et al. (1995). © 1996 Academic Press, Inc. (shrink)

The coming of mathematicians to the United States fleeing the spread of Nazism presented a serious problem to the American mathematical community. The persistence of the Depression had endangered the promising growth of mathematics in the United States. Leading mathematicians were concerned about the career prospects of their students. They feared that placing large numbers of refugees would exacerbate already present nationalistic and anti-Semitic sentiments. The paper surveys a sequence of events in which the leading mathematicians reacted to the foreign-born (...) and to the spread of Nazism, culminating in the decisions by the American Mathematical Society to found the journal Mathematical reviews and to form a War Preparedness Committee in September 1939. The most obvious consequence of the migration was an enlarged role for applied mathematics. (shrink)

In two experiments during the study phase participants read unrelated context-target word pairs presented below a line drawing of the context word. During test the strong cue group was presented with context words, line drawings, and stems of target words. The line drawings were not presented in the weak cue group. Stems were paired with the same context words as at study , paired with different context words , or corresponded to unstudied words . In Experiment 1 participants were instructed (...) to complete stems with the first word that came to mind . The priming effect for new associations was twice as large in the strong cue group. In Experiment 2 the process dissociation procedure was applied and participants completed stems with studied words or with unstudied words . Results indicated that consciously controlled and automatic retrieval processes mediated the associative effect in both groups. (shrink)