Perceptual Recognition of Meaningfulness of Stimulus Material - Research Paper Example

Processing - In psychology, processing refers to the operations performed to input information. It does not refer to those operations requiring attention.

Stimulus - In the context of psychology, stimulus refers to the pattern of energy such as sound or light, which the body senses register (Reicher, 1968).

Independent variables - The independent variables used in the experiment were context. These variables are in two levels (the target letters represented in a word and the target letter represented in isolation (Reicher, 1968).

The dependent variables - Dependent variable in the experiment was the percentage of the correct identification of the target letters. These variables are in two levels (correct recognition and incorrect recognition) (Reicher, 1968).

Procedure-Determine the duration to be used by each S in identifying single letters in section one. The duration range of the Ss is 35-85 msec and the difference between the two durations (longest and shortest) is 25 msec. The six forms of materials were arranged into 48 stimulus blocks with each containing a single material with a critical letter in all eight positions. The cards were randomly placed in each block to ensure the critical item position and the type of material was random. During the experiment, three blocks were shown one at a time. On alternating days, each S was verbally given the alternative letters before exposure to each stimulus and repeated them. In every trial, S was to wait until signaled by E and S could therefore initiate the stimulus using a hand switch. After the response alternative appeared, S could respond by pronouncing the letter she thought appeared on the display (Reicher, 1968).

Main effects - The main finding of the WSE experiment is that word superiority does not necessarily occur inevitably when one compares a word and a non-word. However, the word superiority depends on the strategies used by readers during a particular task. If the readers could have more attention to notice a letter in a position, this would enable them to experience unfavorable word superiority effects. The reason is that the reader would not have the benefit of a word detector activated if they failed to concentrate on the whole word (Reicher, 1968).

Conclusion - Accordingly, the experiment’s results reveal that a single word processor is faster than a single letter processing. Since a particular S did marvelous in single letter recognition and poor in single words, it is a suggestion that the scanning form with S is dependent on a strategy or a set. Therefore, a reader will find it easy to recognize single letters rather than the whole word.

The general implications of the WSE effect - One of the main implications of Word Superiority toward an understanding of the reading process is that the shape of the world does not affect its recognition. According to the experiment, readers recognize the component letters of a word and then use the visual information to recognize that word. Additionally, people use contextual information in ordinary reading to assist the recognize words (Reicher, 1968).

Sentence superiority effects - A “Sentence superiority effect” refers to a condition whereby a particular word present in a context of a certain grammatical sentence is well remembered and accurately recognized than when the same word is presented along with random words. For instance, a reader recognizes 64 % of words represented in random words, whereas the same reader recognizes 77% of words represented in a sentence. This is consistent with the sentence superiority effect (Reicher, 1968).