Search

The present work examined the extent to which evaluations of actions could be biased by the strategic use of euphemistic (agreeable) and dysphemistic (disagreeable) terms. Across multiple studies, we demonstrate that evaluations of actions are made more favorable by replacing a disagreeable term (e.g., torture) with a semantically related agreeable term (e.g., enhanced interrogation) in an act’s description. Notably, the influence of these terms was reduced (but not eliminated) when actions were described in a less ambiguous (i.e., more detailed) manner. Despite their influence, participants judged both agreeable and disagreeable action descriptions as largely truthful and distinct from lies, and judged agents using such descriptions as more trustworthy and moral than liars. Overall, the present findings suggest that a strategic speaker can, through the careful use of language, sway the opinions of others while avoiding many of the reputational costs associated with less subtle forms of linguistic manipulation (e.g., lying).

Two experiments combined a spatial cueing manipulation (valid vs. invalid spatial cues) with a stimulus repetition manipulation (repeated vs. nonrepeated) in order to assess the hypothesis that familiar items need less spatial attention than less familiar ones. The magnitude of the effect of cueing on reading aloud time for items that were repeated throughout the experiment was smaller than the magnitude of the cueing effect for items that were not repeated within the experiment. These results are consistent with the idea that familiarity within an experiment modulates the spatial attentional demands of word processing. Implications for understanding spatial attention's role in reading are discussed. (Contains 3 figures and 3 footnotes.)

Two lexical decision experiments examined the joint effects of stimulus quality, semantic context, and cue-target associative strength when all factors were intermixed in a block of trials. Both experiments found a three-way interaction. Semantic context and stimulus quality interacted when associative strength between cue-target pairs was strong, and the interaction was eliminated when the strength was weak. These results support a role for a "local" mechanism that relies on "trial specific" information, in addition to a mechanism that makes use of "global" information available "across" a block of trials. The absence of an interaction between the joint effects of semantic context and stimulus quality is attributed to blocking the feedback from the semantic system to the orthographic system, functionally separating the orthographic and semantic modules. (Contains 5 footnotes, 2 tables, and 3 figures.)

Proportion compatible manipulations are often used to index strategic processes in selective attention tasks. Here, a subtle confound in proportion compatible manipulations is considered. Specifically, as the proportion of compatible trials increases, the ratio of complete repetitions and complete alternations to partial repetitions increases on compatible trials but decreases on incompatible trials. This confound is demonstrated to lead to an overestimation in the magnitude of the proportion compatible effect in the context of both a Stroop and a Simon task. Implications for previous research and directions for future research using proportion compatible manipulations are discussed. (Contains 4 figures, 3 tables, and 3 footnotes.)

Contrary to the received view that reading aloud reflects processes that are "automatic," recent evidence suggests that some of these processes require a form of attention. This issue was investigated further by examining the effect of a prior presentation of exception words (words whose spelling-sound translation are atypical, such as pint as compared with mint, hint, or lint) and pseudohomophones (nonwords that sound identical to words, such as brane from brain) on reading aloud in the context of the psychological refractory period paradigm. For exception words, the joint effects of repetition and stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) yielded an underadditive interaction on the time to read aloud, replicating previous work--a short SOA between Task 1 and Task 2 increased reaction time (RT) and reduced the magnitude of the repetition effect relative to the long SOA. For pseudohomophones, in contrast, the joint effects of repetition and SOA were additive on RT. These results provide converging evidence for the conclusion that (a) processing up to and including the orthographic input lexicon does not require central attention when reading aloud, whereas (b) translating lexical and sublexical spelling to sound requires the use of central attention.

Two lexical-decision experiments investigated the effects of semantic priming and stimulus intensity when target location varied and was cued by an abrupt onset. In Experiment 1, the spatial cue was a good predictor of target location, and in Experiment 2 it was not. The results indicate that word recognition processes were postponed until spatial attention was focused on the target and that whether attention further affected word recognition depended on cue validity. The joint effects of cue validity and priming interacted when cue validity was high but were additive when cue validity was low. The joint effects of stimulus intensity and semantic priming also varied according to cue validity (i.e., interactive when high and additive when low). The results are discussed in terms of their implications for visual word recognition, the distinction between exogenous and endogenous spatial attention, and how attention is affected by visual word recognition processes.

Semantic and morphological contexts were manipulated jointly with stimulus quality under conditions where there were few related prime-target pairs (i.e., low relatedness proportion) in a lexical decision experiment. Additive effects of semantic context and stimulus quality on RT were observed, replicating previous work. In contrast, morphological context interacted with stimulus quality. This dissociation is discussed in the context of Besner and colleagues' evolving multistage framework. The essence of the account is that 1) stimulus quality affects feature and letter levels, but not later levels, 2) feedback from semantics to the lexical level is inoperative under low relatedness proportion conditions (hence stimulus quality and semantic context yield additive effects), whereas 3) feedback from the lexical level to the letter level is intact, hence stimulus quality and morphological context produce an interaction by virtue of them affecting a common stage of processing.

Increasing cue duration impairs performance in bar-probe partial report when cues are presented peripherally, but not centrally (P. Dixon, R. Gordon, A. Leung, & V. Di Lollo, 1997). Three experiments examined whether this cue-duration effect reflects processes of exogenous attention. The effect of cue duration on partial report performance with peripheral, but not central, cues was replicated (Experiment 1). Further experiments manipulated the degree that exogenous versus endogenous modes of selection were favored and found that the cue-duration effect for peripheral cues was reduced (a) when blocks contained a high proportion of central cues (Experiment 2) and (b) when the color of the cue indicated the location of the target (Experiment 3). These findings challenge the view that the cue-duration effect is restricted to exogenous attention and are discussed in terms of the process of disengaging attention from the cue to reallocate attention to the target representation.

A common view in the reading literature is that words are often recognized by recourse to phonological recoding. The question addressed here concerns whether phonological recoding can be controlled, or whether it is computed (a) even when it is completely irrelevant to the task, and (b) can only hurt performance. Two Stroop type experiments are reported in which participants used a key press to indicate the print colour of an (irrelevant) letter string that sounded like a colour word (e.g., BLOO). The sound of the colour 'word' was always incongruent with the required response. Colour identification performance was impaired by the irrelevant letter strings relative to two baseline conditions. These results and others are consistent with the conclusion that a phonological code is computed under a variety of circumstances.

A robust semantic priming effect typically occurs in visual word recognition if the prime is read prior to a response to the target. M. C. Smith, D. Besner, and H. Miyoshi (1994) reported that this semantic priming effect is markedly reduced for short-duration primes randomly intermixed with longer duration primes, and they offered a signal-detection account of their results. This general finding is replicated and extended in 3 experiments, which demonstrate the importance of list context for this prime duration effect and suggest that a center-surround attentional mechanism provides a better account of the results to date.

Two lexical-decision experiments examined the influence of relatedness proportion (RP, the proportion of word-context-word-target trials sharing a semantic relation) and context-target stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) on the typically observed interaction between the effects of context and stimulus quality. The standard overadditive interaction of context effects being larger for response times (RTs) to degraded than to nondegraded targets was observed when RP was .50. In contrast, additive effects of context and stimulus quality on RT were observed when RP was .25. These effects were seen at both 200-ms and 800-ms SOAs, even though context effects increased with increasing RP only at the 800-ms SOA. These results (a) undermine the view that expectancy is responsible for producing the standard overadditive Context x Stimulus Quality interaction, (b) delineate conditions under which context and stimulus quality have additive and interactive effects on RT, and (c) show that RP has 2 dissociable effects on semantic context effects.