Sequential effects in the lexical decision task: the role of the item frequency of the previous trial.
Two lexical decision experiments were conducted to determine whether there is a specific, localized influence of the item frequency of consecutive trials (i.e., first-order sequential effects) when the trials are not related to each other. Both low-frequency words and nonwords were influenced by the frequency of the precursor word (Experiment 1). In contrast, high-frequency words showed little sensitivity to the frequency of the precursor word (Experiment 2), although they showed longer reaction times for word trials preceded by a nonword trial. The presence of sequential effects in the lexical decision task suggests that participants shift their response criteria on a trial-by-trial basis.
Universitat de València, València, Spain. mperea@uv.es
Manuel
M
Perea
Manuel
M
Carreiras
D003657:Decision Making; D005403:Fixation, Ocular; D006801:Humans; D010507:Periodicity; D011930:Reaction Time; D014825:Vocabulary