Familiarity effects and word unitization in visual comparison tasks.
The decision that two words are identical is made more quickly than the decision that two non-words are identical. This familiarity effect was shown to be larger in a simultaneous matching task than in a sequential matching task. In the simultaneous task, two words were not matched as quickly as a single letter and a letter in a predesignated location within a word. The latter finding rules out a perceptual unitization account of the familiarity effect (Silverman, 1985). The familiarity effect was interpreted to be due to the facilitated encoding of a comparison item when a holistic cognitive unit representing the target is activated in memory.
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Marmurek
D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D005556:Form Perception; D006801:Humans; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011930:Reaction Time; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics