Biomedical subjects

Michael E J Masson

Publications and source records attributed to Michael E J Masson.

15 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Cognitive control in children: stroop interference and suppression of word reading.

The development of cognitive control and its relation to overcoming Stroop interference was assessed in a sample (N= 65) of elementary-school children. Subjects alternately performed Stroop color-naming trials and word-reading trials. In separate blocks, the colored Stroop items were non-color words (incongruent condition) or rows of asterisks (neutral condition). Younger children showed both larger Stroop interference in error rates and a greater slowing of word reading in the incongruent condition compared with older children. We conducted analyses of response time distributions that assessed the degree of word-reading suppression applied by younger and older children. Surprisingly, these analyses indicated that younger children engaged in stronger suppression than older children. We propose that greater Stroop interference among younger children is not due to lack of ability to suppress word reading, but instead is the result of a failure to consistently maintain the task set of color naming.

Child↗

PubMed2006

Repetition proportion biases masked priming of lexical decisions.

Although subjects have little or no awareness of masked primes, Bodner and Masson (2001) found that priming of lexical decisions is often enhanced when masked repetition primes occur on a high proportion of trials. We used baseline prime conditions to specify the locus of this repetition proportion (RP) effect. In Experiments 1A and 1B, a .8-RP group showed more priming than did a .2-RP group, and this RP effect was due to both (1) increased facilitation from repetition primes and (2) increased interference from unrelated primes. In Experiment 2, we used the baseline condition to show that subjects are sensitive to RP rather than to the proportion of unrelated primes. Direct comparisons of a given prime condition (repetition, unrelated) across RP conditions were more stable than were comparisons relative to the baseline condition. The increased costs and benefits of repetition priming when RP is higher implicate a context-sensitive mechanism that constrains accounts of masked priming.

Attention↗

PubMed2005

False memory following rapidly presented lists: the element of surprise.

This article examines a false memory phenomenon, the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) effect, consisting of high false alarms for a prototype word (e.g., SLEEP) following a study list consisting of its associates (NIGHT, DREAM, etc.). This false recognition is thought to occur because prototypes, although not presented within a study list, are highly activated by their semantic association with words that are in the list. The authors present an alternative explanation of the effect, based on the discrepancy-attribution hypothesis. According to that account, false (and true) familiarity results when a comparison between expectations and outcomes within a processing episode causes surprise. Experiment 1 replicates the DRM effect. Experiment 2 shows that a similar effect can occur when participants are shown lists of unrelated words and are then surprised by a recognition target. Experiments 3 and 4 show that the DRM effect itself is abolished when participants are prevented from being surprised by prototypes presented as recognition targets. It is proposed that the DRM effect is best understood through the principles of construction, evaluation, and attribution.

Humans↗

PubMed2005

Repetition blindness in rapid lists: activation and inhibition versus construction and attribution.

The authors examine the repetition blindness effect--the failure to report one of the occurrences of a word presented twice in a rapid list. This phenomenon has been ascribed to inhibitory processes that prevent immediate tokenization of the 2nd occurrence of a repeated word. The authors present several kinds of evidence against that account, including observations that repetition blindness (a) does not occur when repetitions are not embedded in a list of familiar orthographic units, (b) is alleviated by precuing the subject with the identity of the word that may repeat within a rapid list, and (c) can be caused by cues presented after the list, when the opportunity for inhibition has passed. It is proposed that repetition blindness can better be understood through the principles of construction and attribution.

Attitude↗

PubMed2004

Category specificity in normal episodic learning: applications to object recognition and category-specific agnosia.

Studies of patients with category-specific agnosia (CSA) have given rise to multiple theories of object recognition, most of which assume the existence of a stable, abstract semantic memory system. We applied an episodic view of memory to questions raised by CSA in a series of studies examining normal observers' recall of newly learned attributes of familiar objects. Subjects first learned to associate arbitrarily assigned colors or textures to objects in a training phase, and then attempted to report the newly learned attribute of each object in a recall task. Our subjects' pattern of recall errors was similar both quantitatively and qualitatively to the identification deficits among patients with CSA for biological objects. Furthermore, errors tended to reflect conceptually and structurally based confusions. We suggest that object identification involves recruitment and integration of information across distributed episodic memories and that this process is susceptible to interference from objects that are structurally similar and conceptually related.

Agnosia↗

PubMed2004

When words collide: facilitation and interference in the report of repeated words from rapidly presented lists.

Inhibited encoding is the basis of some accounts of repetition blindness--impaired report of the second occurrence of a repeated word in a rapidly presented word sequence. The author presents evidence for the claim that repetition effects arise from constructive processes of perception and memory that occur to some extent after the word sequence has been presented. Unpredictable postlist cues prompted subjects to report either the entire list or just the final word in the list. Repetition impaired the report of the second occurrence of a repeated word under full report but facilitated the report of such items when only the final word had to be reported. The author modulated this dissociation by presenting repeated words in sentences rather than unrelated word lists. The sensitivity of the effects of repetition to postlist cues supports a construction rather than an encoding inhibition account of repetition blindness.

Cognition↗

PubMed2004

Beyond binary judgments: prime validity modulates masked repetition priming in the naming task.

Bodner and Masson (2001) reported that masked repetition priming of lexical decisions is often greater when the repetition primes appear on a high, rather than a low, proportion of trials. They suggested that processing episodes are constructed for masked primes and that recruitment of those episodes is affected by the probability that the prime will be useful for processing the target. If context-sensitive recruitment of primes is a general mechanism, a similar effect should also occur in a nonbinary response task. In accord with this hypothesis, using the naming task and a 45-msec prime duration, we show that masked repetition priming effects for uppercase words, case-alternated words, and pseudohomophones were greater when .8 rather than .2 of the trials involved repetition (vs. unrelated) primes. Prime validity effects are consistent with a memory recruitment view of priming but may be difficult to explain using activation-based mechanisms.

Attention↗

PubMed2003

Modulation of word-reading processes in task switching.

The authors examined modulation of the simple act of word naming induced by the conflict arising when that task competes with color naming in a task-switching paradigm. Subjects alternated between naming a word printed in black and naming the color of a stimulus in 2 conditions. In the incongruent condition, the colored stimulus was an irrelevant word generating conflict, and in the neutral condition, color was carried by a row of asterisks. Subjects took substantially longer to name a word printed in black in the incongruent condition, implying a form of suppression. This modulation of the word-naming response was adaptive in that it led to more efficient color naming. The modulation effect was replicated using phoneme detection instead of word naming but not with lexical decision or visual comparison, implicating a phonological encoding process.

Adult↗

PubMed2003

Using confidence intervals for graphically based data interpretation.

As a potential alternative to standard null hypothesis significance testing, we describe methods for graphical presentation of data--particularly condition means and their corresponding confidence intervals--for a wide range of factorial designs used in experimental psychology. We describe and illustrate confidence intervals specifically appropriate for between-subject versus within-subject factors. For designs involving more than two levels of a factor, we describe the use of contrasts for graphical illustration of theoretically meaningful components of main effects and interactions. These graphical techniques lend themselves to a natural and straightforward assessment of statistical power.

Humans↗

PubMed2003

The effect of perceptual distinctiveness on the prospective and retrospective components of prospective memory in young and old adults.

In two experiments, the effect of perceptual distinctiveness of cues on prospective memory performance was examined. Young and older adults completed a visual search task with embedded prospective memory instructions. On each trial, participants were asked to indicate the position of a target letter in a letter string, unless either of two letters previously identified as prospective memory cues was presented. Each prospective cue was associated with a specific response. Perceptual distinctiveness was manipulated by spatially displacing a single letter. The prospective component (successful detection of the cue) and the retrospective memory component (recalling the correct response when a cue is detected) were measured separately. Perceptual displacement of cues modulated performance of the prospective component but not the retrospective component. Young adults successfully detected a larger proportion of cues (prospective component) than older adults. However, there were minimal effects of age and no effect of cue displacement on participants' ability to recall the intention once they detected a cue (retrospective component performance). Results are discussed within the context of current theoretical models of prospective memory.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2003

Gesturing and naming: the use of functional knowledge in object identification.

Studies using functional imaging show reliable activation of premotor cortex when observers view manipulable objects. This result has led to the view that knowledge of object function, particularly the actions associated with the typical use of objects, may play a causal role in object identification. To obtain relevant evidence regarding this causal role, we asked subjects to learn gesture-color associations and then attempt to identify objects presented in colors denoting functional gestures that were congruent or incongruent with the objects' use. A strong congruency effect was observed when subjects gestured the use of an object, but not when they named an object. We conclude that our procedure constitutes a sensitive measure of the recruitment and causal role of functional knowledge and that this recruitment is not present during object naming. Preliminary evidence, however, indicates that gestures evoked by the volumetric shape of an object do contribute to object naming.

Adult↗

PubMed2003

Beyond spreading activation: an influence of relatedness proportion on masked semantic priming.

Semantic priming in the lexical decision task has been shown to increase when the proportion of related-prime trials is increased. This finding typically is taken as evidence for a conscious, strategic use of primes. Three experiments are reported in which masked semantic primes displayed for only 45 msec were tested in high- versus low-relatedness proportion conditions. Relatedness proportion was increased either by using a high proportion of semantically related primes or a large set of repetition-primed filler trials. Semantic priming was consistently enhanced relative to a low-relatedness proportion condition. These relatedness proportion effects were not due to conscious, strategic use of primes: Exclusion of prime-aware subjects did not attenuate the effects, and better performance in a prime classification task was not associated with larger semantic priming effects. These results are interpreted within a retrospective account of semantic priming in which recruitment of a prime event is modulated by prime validity.

Awareness↗

PubMed2002

Covert operations: orthographic recoding as a basis for repetition priming in word identification.

When a word is generated from a semantic cue, coincident orthographic visualization of that word may cause priming on a subsequent perceptual identification test. A task was introduced that required subjects to visualize the orthographic pattern of auditorily presented words. When used at study, this task produced a pattern of priming similar to that produced by a generate study task. When used at test, equal priming on the orthographic task was produced by read and generate study tasks but not by a generate study task that failed to invite orthographic visualization. Priming on perceptually based word identification tests that results from a generate study episode may be largely due to orthographic recoding of the target rather than to conceptual processing.

Analysis of Variance↗

PubMed2002

Diagnostics of phonological lexical processing: pseudohomophone naming advantages, disadvantages, and base-word frequency effects.

Phonological lexical access has been investigated by examining both a pseudohomophone (e.g., brane) base-word frequency effect and a pseudohomophone advantage over pronounceable nonwords (e.g., frane) in a single mixed block of naming trials. With a new set of pseudohomophones and non-words presented in a mixed block, we replicated the standard finding in the naming literature: no reliable base-word frequency effect, and apseudohomophone advantage. However, for this and two of three other sets of stimuli--those of McCann and Besner (1987), Seidenberg, Petersen, MacDonald, and Plaut (1996), and Herdman, LeFevre, and Greenham (1996), respectively--reliable effects of base-word frequency on pseudohomophone naming latency were found when pseudohomophones were presented in pure blocks prior to nonwords. Three of the four stimulus sets tested produced a pseudohomophone naming disadvantage when pseudohomophones were presented prior to nonwords. When nonwords were presented first, these effects were diminished. A strategy-based scaling account of the data is argued to provide a better explanation of the data than is the criterion-homogenization theory (Lupker, Brown, & Colombo, 1997).

Humans↗

PubMed2002

Bias in masked word identification: unconscious influences of repetition priming.

The beneficial influence of a prior study episode on subsequent identification of a word includes a large bias component, revealed in the forced-choice variant of the masked word identification test. In that type of test, subjects show a preference for a studied probe over a nonstudied probe, regardless of which one matches the masked target word. The forced-choice test was used in the present experiments to test the possibility that this bias effect is due to conscious recollection. Results show that bias was strongly attenuated (1) by changes in modality between study and test, and (2) under certain conditions, by using a conceptually driven study task. The bias effect was found only when probes were orthographically similar to one another, as predicted by the counter model (Ratcliff & McKoon, 1997). These results provide strong evidence that the bias effect is not mediated by conscious recollection.

Adult↗