Abstract
College students searched for single target letters in word and unpronounceable nonword displays of four, five, or six letters in length. The displays were typed in either intact upper-or lowercase form or in an alternating mixture of upper- and lowercase letters. Response times and error rates were less for words than for nonwords. Search rates, as measured by the slopes of the functions relating response time to display length, were greater for nonwords than for words. The search process apparently self-terminated for nonword displays, as the negative slope was about twice the positive slope. The positive and negative slope differences were less for words and were about equal for words in intact form. Case mixtures resulted in slower responses for words only, and this effect was apparently limited to encoding rather than to search or comparison processes. The relevance of these findings for similar results in same-different judgment tasks is discussed.
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Sternberg, S. Scanning a persisting visual image vs. a memorized list. Paper presented at the meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association, Boston, 1967.
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This research was supported by Biomedical Sciences Grant RR-07037 to the University of Kansas, National Science Foundation Grant BMS74-12801, University of Kansas General Research Fund Grant 3339-5038, and National Institute of Education Grant NIE-G-77-0010 to the third author. The first author also received support from an undergraduate research participation award from the University of Kansas. The project presented or reported herein was performed pursuant to a grant from the National Institute of Education, Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. However, the opinions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the position or policy of the National Institute of Education, and no official endorsement by the National Institute of Education should be inferred.
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McNamara, T., Ward, N. & Juola, J.F. Visual search for letters in intact and mixed-case words and nonwords. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 12, 297–300 (1978). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03329688
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03329688