A syntactic complexity effect with visual patterns: evidence for the syntactic nature of the memory representation.
In a series of 3 experiments, participants learned visual patterns that contained the same number of visual features but varied in the complexity of the interrelations among the features. The results indicate a large and orderly effect of the pattern's syntactic complexity on recognition speed. Evidence is provided that this effect was not due to physical characteristics, target-foil similarity, speed-accuracy trade-off, or level of pattern learning. A multiple-encoding explanation of the effect is described. According to this framework, there is an initial, automatically generated encoding of the pattern as a short-term pictorial representation that becomes the basis for the construction of a second syntactic-propositional encoding. In this model, the participant's "sense of familiarity" for a particular stimulus is associated only with the syntactic-propositional encoding.
Chechile
R A
RA
Psychology Department, Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts 02155, USA. rchechil@pearl.tufts.edu
Anderson
J E
JE
Krafczek
S A
SA
Coley
S L
SL
D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall; D009949:Orientation; D010153:Paired-Associate Learning; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011930:Reaction Time