Thesis (PH.D.) -- Syracuse University, 2007. / "Publication number AAT 3281730"

Diss. (sammanfattning) Uppsala : Univ., 2002. / Härtill 3 uppsatser.

Thesis (M.A.)--York University, 2004. Graduate Programme in Psychology. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 101-122). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url%5Fver=Z39.88-2004&res%5Fdat=xri:pqdiss &rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:MR11899

Lexical decision and pronunciation tasks were used to investigate semantic priming, the finding that a word is quicker to recognize when it is preceded by a related than an unrelated stimulus. The first experiment involved a lexical decision task (LDT) in which skilled and less-skilled readers made decisions about letter strings that were preceded by conceptually-related or unrelated stimuli. The effects of time to process the prime and type of prime (word or picture) were examined. Word and picture priming effects were observed at short and long time intervals with skilled and less-skilled groups. Finding word priming was not surprising; there are prior studies that have documented priming by words. However, prior experiments on picture priming have methodological flaws such as multiple presentations of stimuli that make it unclear whether pictures can prime word targets through semantic and nonstrategic routes. The facilitation of word targets following word primes may be due to semantic relations as well as associative relations. While picture priming provides evidence of semantic priming, picture priming cannot be associative at a lexical level because no orthographic features are displayed. During the processing of a picture, information about the picture and its related concepts are activated which facilitates processing of a subsequently presented word. The effect of priming was greater with picture primes than word primes, perhaps because the associations were stronger between the picture-word pairs than the word-word pairs. Because priming in a LDT may be attributed to postlexical checking, priming was further investigated in a pronunciation task in which the strategy is not helpful. In Experiment 2, in which subjects pronounced words that were preceded by related or unrelated pictures, the priming effect was significant. Finding a picture priming effect is important; it supports the interactive view that pictures provide a context that affects the processes that occur before word recognition. Priming must be due to semantic associations between the picture prime and the words corresponding to related concepts. Word and picture priming can be explained by current models of lexical access.

Is letter information processed in parallel or serially when readers encounter words? Kwantes and Mewhort (1999a; 1999b) addressed this question by introducing the concept of a word's orthographic uniqueness point (OUP). A word's OUP refers to the letter position in a word where that letter pattern uniquely identifies the word. They found faster naming times for words with an early OUP versus words with a late OUP. They argued that the faster naming times for the early OUP words is inconsistent with parallel implementations of models of letter processing. However, the overall letter overlap between the target word and other words that a reader knows was not controlled (Lamberts, 2003) and might account for the differences in naming times rather than for differences in the position of a word's OUP. Readers might be sensitive to any difference in the degree of letter overlap with other words and parallel letter processing accounts could be sensitive to this difference. Two experiments were conducted to extend OUP findings to a more natural reading context by monitoring eye movements while readers read sentences. The first experiment used stimuli with a relatively large difference in the position of a word's OUP. The second experiment matched the early and late OUP words in terms of the overall letter overlap with other words and unconfounded the initial trigram frequency. In both experiments, readers did not benefit from a word possessing an early OUP. The results were discussed in terms of potential serial and parallel letter processing accounts.

The purpose of the dissertation was to investigate how we store and access affixed English words by monitoring participants' eye movements during sentence reading. Previous research (Niswander, Pollatsek & Rayner, 2000) indicated that both the frequency of the root morpheme and the frequency of the whole word affect the fixation time on a suffixed word while reading. The current research findings confirm the effects of both root and whole-word frequencies for prefixed words in English. In addition, the current research indicates that word length plays an important mediating role: for prefixed words, there is clear evidence that for long words the effect of root frequency is dominant, whereas for short words, the effect of word frequency is dominant. This effect mirrors a finding in Finnish (Bertram & Hyönä, 2003) for compound words In contrast, the word length by frequency results were less clear for the suffixed word sets. Finally, the effect of affixal homonymy was investigated. Reading times on words containing homonymic affixes were compared to words whose affixes were not homonymic, and there was some evidence that a homonymic affix interferes in the processing of the word. Models of complex word processing were discussed in the context of the research findings.

Theories of serial-order memory either include specialized mechanisms to represent order or claim that sequences of events are represented in memory by structures that are constructed during encoding. Unfortunately, both approaches have many shortcomings, and neither can explain how the order of arbitrary event sequences (i.e., sequences that are not intentionally learned; e.g., trips to the grocery store) are remembered. This paper presents an alternative approach to serial-order memory, one in which order is not directly represented in memory but is instead reconstructed during retrieval. This reconstructive theory is presented in two parts. The first demonstrates how the components of episodic memory (as implemented in the Search of Associative Memory model of Raaijmakers & Shiffrin's, 1981b) that are necessary to encode, represent, and retrieve information about events in memory are sufficient to account for key aspects of serial-order memory. Several emergent properties of the reconstructive model allow it to explain phenomena that have been problematic for other theories of serial-order memory (e.g., recency effects). The second part of this paper focuses on how contextual information is used to reconstruct memory for order. Four experiments that examine the role of context in serial-order memory are presented. Experiment 1 evaluated three assumptions of the Raaijmakers and Shiffrin (1981b) model; the results support the model and indicate that people (1) attend to and remember the contexts in which items are presented, (2) represent contextual changes in memory, and (3) are better at remembering the contexts of items near the beginnings of sequences and following changes in context. Experiment 2 extends these results by showing that people use contextual information to make judgments about the relative order of two items. Experiment 3 replicates this result using a slightly different paradigm. Finally, Experiment 4 attempted to find out whether or not people use the most general contextual information available to make order judgments. The results of Experiment 4 are less conclusive than those of Experiments 1-3; several sources of this discrepancy are discussed.

In three experiments, subjects read passages containing one or two candidates for an anaphoric reference that differed in their distance from the reference and their strength of association to the categorical anaphor. Eye movements were recorded in Experiment 1. When a distractor was present, readers spent longer on the anaphoric noun when the antecedent was high-typical; however, they spent longer on the words following the anaphoric noun when the antecedent was low-typical. This effect, accompanied by an increase in regressions to the disambiguating adjective for the target region when the antecedent was low-typical and a distractor was present, indicate that, in this condition, the distractor was identified before the antecedent. Recognition probes in Experiment 2 showed that near, high-typical distractors were more available than far, low-typical antecedents; however, a facilitation effect for the antecedents suggest that the anaphor was successfully resolved. Delayed long-term memory probes were used in Experiment 3 to investigate the result of the resolution process. The results from the three experiments are discussed in terms of a general framework for anaphor resolution.

Eye movements during a scene rotation task were measured in two experiments. Two desktop scenes (each consisting of three office objects on a square desktop) were presented consecutively. Participants judged the identity of the two scenes. On same trials, the two scenes were either identical or one was a rotated version of the other. On different trials, the scene frame was as on the same trials, but either the locations or the orientations of some of the objects were changed. Eye movement measures were obtained as real-time indices of information processing. During the task, the eyes dwell on an object region longer when a scene was rotated further (i.e. gaze duration increased) only after the first 900ms of scanning. This result accords to a model in which (a) initial encoding takes place before an alignment process is initiated and (b) alignment is piecemeal and takes place on a gaze-by-gaze basis. As in previous scene rotation experiments, the slope of a mental rotation function differed between conditions. Response latencies increased more strongly with rotation angle in the orientation-change condition than in the location-change condition. This difference was mainly observed for gaze duration. On the other hand, response times in the Y (vertical)-axis rotation conditions were longer than those in the X (horizontal)- and Z (line-of-sight)-axis rotation conditions. This difference corresponds to an increase in the number (rather than the duration) of gazes in the Y-axis rotation conditions. Furthermore, when objects switched their locations, the changed object was fixated earlier than an unchanged object. In accordance with this result, it was assumed that the detection of the location-change is handled not only by foveal vision, but also by parafoveal vision. In Experiment: 2, the desktop was removed from the scene in half of the conditions. In these conditions location-changed objects no longer were fixated earlier than unchanged objects. Another consequence of removing the desktop was that the eyes need to visit objects more often. This means that desktop frame facilitates the piecemeal alignment process. The results were discussed in terms of viewpoint-dependent models of object recognition.

It was hypothesized that the early part of mathematical problem solving, specifically the processes of model integration and analogical mapping, tap spatial abilities. Testing the hypothesis, this study explored the potential for spatial reasoning in both the early and late processes of problem solving. An interference paradigm that employed memory for spatial dot patterns and number sequences demonstrated that the early part of solving a math problem requires more spatial resources than the late portion. Additional data from two spatial tasks offered insight into the specific forms of spatial reasoning that may support mathematical performance.