Syftet med studien var att studera effekten av priming vid ordstamskomplettering. Mina frågeställningar var 1) har priming en effekt på kompletteringen av sammansatta ords ordstammar? 2) är en svarstid på fyra sekunder för kort för kompletterandet av en ordstam? 3) kompletteras ordstammarna med det första ordet försökspersonerna kommer på? För att besvara mina frågeställningar utförde jag ett experiment. Den oberoende variabeln var priming eller inte priming av sammansatta ord, och den beroende variabeln var antalet korrekt kompletterade ordstammar. Svarstiden var fyra sekunder och antalet ordstammar var 226. Efteråt ställde jag dem frågor om hur de gått tillväga när de svarat. Antalet korrekt kompletterade ordstammar var signifikant högre för de sammansatta ord som försökspersonerna hade primats på (p<.001), vilket visar att priming har effekt på kompletteringen av sammansatta ords ordstammar, samt att hela ord kan användas som ordstam. En svarstid på fyra sekunder korrelerade inte med ett stort antal missade svar (M = 9, SD = 4), vilket visar att en svarstid på fyra sekunder inte är för kort. Enligt försökspersonerna svarade de, på i snitt 4% av ordstammarna (M = 10, SD = 9), inte med det första ordet de kom på, vilket antyder om att ordstammar nästan uteslutande kompletteras med det första ordet försökspersoner kommer på. / The purpose of the study was to examine if priming has an effect on word stem completion. The questions I wanted to answer was 1) does priming have an effect on the completion of the word stems of compound words? 2) is a response time of four seconds too short for the completion of a word stem? 3) are the word stems completed with the first word that comes to the subject’s minds? To answer my questions, I performed an experiment. The independent variable was priming or not priming of compound words, and the dependent variable was the number of correctly completed word stems. The response time was four seconds and the number of word stems was 226. Afterwards I asked them questions about how they did when they answered. The number of correctly completed word stems was significantly higher for the compound words that the subjects had been primed for (p<.001), which shows that priming has an effect on the completion of the word stems of compound words, and that a whole word can be used as a word stem. A response time of four seconds did not correlate with a big number of missed answers (M= 9, SD = 4), which shows that a response time of four seconds is not too short. According to the subjects they, on an average of 4% of the word stems (M = 10, SD = 9), did not answer with the first word that came to mind, which suggests that word stems almost exclusively are completed with the first word that comes to subject’s minds.

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The mere exposure effect, positive affect elicited by exposure to a previously unfamiliar stimulus, is considered one of the most well established findings in the psychological literature. Yet its mechanism remains unknown. In Experiments 1 - 5, memory encoding was examined to determine whether the mere exposure effect was a form of conceptual or perceptual implicit priming, and, if not either, whether cardiovascular psychophysiology could reveal its nature. Experiment 1 examined the effects of study phase level of processing on recognition, the mere exposure effect, and word identification implicit priming. Deep relative to shallow processing improved recognition, but did not influence the mere exposure effect or word identification implicit priming. Experiments 2 and 3 examined the effect of study-test changes in font and orientation, respectively, on the mere exposure effect and word identification implicit priming. Different study-test font and orientation reduced word identification implicit priming, but had no influence on the mere exposure effect. The combined results from Experiments 1-3 suggested that conceptual and perceptual processing do not drive the mere exposure effect. Experiments 4 and 5 developed and used, respectively, an innovative cardiovascular psychophysiological implicit priming paradigm to examine whether stimulus-specific cardiovascular reactivity at study predicted the mere exposure effect at test. At encoding, stimulus-specific peripheral vasodilatation had predictive value for the mere exposure effect, but not for word identification implicit priming. Experiments 6 and 7 examined whether sustained or transitory anxiety (i.e., trait or state, respectively) would influence the mere exposure effect. Greater trait and state anxiety reduced the mere exposure effect. Together, the findings from these experiments (N = 362) identify a novel affective mechanism of implicit priming that is influenced by cardiovascular psychophysiology and variations in trait and state anxiety.

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The purpose of this qualitative study is to compare five teachers’ beliefs about their students’ learning of vocabulary and compare that with current theories and recommended practices in the field. The method for collecting data was semi-structured interviews with teachers who teach English in both lower secondary and upper secondary schools in Sweden. The data from these interviews were then analyzed by way of thematic analysis. The results were then compared with previous research in the field of vocabulary learning drawing on studies and works of researchers such as Stuart Webb and Paul Nation among others. The results reveal a lot of similarities with the latest research on vocabulary learning. The findings of this study also indicate some differences between teacher beliefs and research. Apart from research done in the field of vocabulary learning this study has also taken the proven experience of the teachers into account. Since this study is of a qualitative kind, these results cannot be generalized in regard to Swedish teachers of English as a group but rather what some of them portray when talking on the topic of vocabulary.

<p>Cognitive psychologists have long been interested in the nature of the representations that underlie human behaviours. In the domain of human memory, two main accounts have been forwarded to explain how memory is represented. The multiple memory systems account posits that different phenomenological experiences of memory are the result of separate and distinct representations. In contrast, the processing account posits that there is one memory system, and that different phenomenological experiences of memory are the result of the processes engaged in when probing memory. The explanatory power of these two accounts has been evaluated in a number of domains, where it has been shown that a processing view can accommodate many of the key findings that previously led researchers to propose a separate systems framework. The goal of this thesis was to extend this work by assessing the nature of the representations that underlie implicit sequence learning. The empirical portions of this thesis provide preliminary evidence suggesting that contextual features are incorporated into implicit sequence learning. Overall, the results reported in the empirical chapters of this thesis are consistent with a processing account, as they indicate that the episodic representations that are involved in explicit remembering also support performance in implicit memory tasks.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

A robust associative self network automatically biases attention, memory, and impression formation in a heuristic-like way. This thesis examines whether this self-heuristic underlies association formation of novel person and object representations to the self network and how this structure influences perceptions. This was tested across three experiments. The first employed an implicit task to assess whether self-similar individuals were represented with greater association strength to self-concept than self-dissimilar individuals. The second used an implicit task to measure whether newly-owned, previously-owned, and unowned objects exhibited different association strength with self-concept. The third determined the impact of minimal self-similarity to another individual, presented either before or after encoding, on memory for encoded information about them. Results of these experiments support three conclusions summarizing how a self-heuristic affects perceptions of novel stimuli. First, self-relevance automatically biases cognitive representation of novel self-similar (versus self-dissimilar) people and owned (versus unowned) objects, evidenced by stronger implicit association strength between these stimuli and self-concept. Next, this representation biases memory accuracy and errors in favour of heuristic-consistent information, even in contexts of minimal self-similarity. Finally, representation of self-similar people and owned objects relative to the self network biases perception through first-order effects, whereby unrelated concepts sharing an association to the self-network can influence one-another. Owned objects were automatically more favourably evaluated due to a first-order association with self-positivity. Perception of well-established self-knowledge was malleable based on response pairing with first-order associated self-similar or self-dissimilar individuals. Finally, when memory retrieval for self-similar and self-dissimilar individuals failed, responses were predicted based on first-order associated personality traits. These conclusions provide novel support for the existence of an automatic and ubiquitous self-heuristic that biases representation formation and subsequent perception of novel people and objects. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / A highly accessible network of self-representation biases attention and memory in favour of self-relevant information. I investigated how this network mediates representation of novel people and novel objects, stimulus categories that have received little attention in the social cognitive literature. An implicit test of cognitive association strength (i.e. the Implicit Association Test) revealed that novel self-similar (versus self-dissimilar) people and owned (versus unowned) objects are immediately associated to the self network. The new representations led to perceptual biases through first-order associations, whereby strictly self-relevant information was generalized to self-similar people and owned objects. For instance, even minimal self-similarity to a novel individual biased memory retrieval and reconstruction so that the retrieved information was consistent with the expectation of self-similarity. Together, the findings highlight the ubiquity and automaticity with which self-associations mediate cognitive representations and consequent perceptions of novel people and objects in realistic social situations.

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