STEP: Perceptual Enhancement: Persistent Effects of an Experience [35169]

This article applies to:
E-Prime 3.0
E-Prime 1.0

 
Detail
Experiment Author: Adapted from STEP and used with permission of Brian MacWhinney
 
Experiment Description
This experiment investigates how perceptual enhancement is similar to recognition memory. In it, participants are presented with a series of words that they are to read quickly. Then they are given a task where they see a word for a very short duration, followed by a mask and are asked to identify it. They tend to identify the words they saw in the original list more often than new words.

Experiment Instructions
This experiment has two blocks of trials. In the first block, participants are presented a word and must read it aloud. Pressing the spacebar will present a new word. Participants are to respond as quickly and accurately as possible. There are 90 samples that will be presented in this way. In the second block of trials, a fixation point will appear for 500 milliseconds followed by a word for 35 milliseconds. Participants will type the word into a dialogue box that appears after each word. 100 words will appear, 90 that were presented in the previous section and 10 that were not presented.
 
Experiment Citation
Jacoby, L.L. (1983). Perceptual Enhancement: Persistent Effects of an Experience. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 9 (1), 21-38

Cited Experiment Abstract
Presenting a word enhances its later perceptual identification. This article focuses on the relation between this effect on perception and recognition memory. Prior experiments have revealed that perceptual enhancement persists over days but, like recognition memory, is influenced by manipulations of retrieval conditions. I conclude that both perceputal and memory tasks rely on the retrieval of memory for whole prior processing episodes but can differ in terms of the number an nature of retrieval cues that they provide. I describe perception and memory within a common framework.
 
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