Are there long-term literal copies of visually presented words?

Abstract

Evidence for the hypothesis that the appearance of visually presented words is stored in "literal copy" form is critically evaluated and shown to be inconclusive. An experiment in which students were required to retain information about zero, one, or two visual properties of words is reported. A strong version of the literal-copy hypothesis predicts that retention of both case and color should be equally good under instructions to remember one of these attributes and instructions to remember both. However, the results were inconsistent with predictions from this hypothesis. A model that assumes that each visual attribute is stored independently in abstract prepositional form provided a good quantitative fit to the data.

Is there evidence for automatic processing of spatial and color attributes present in pictures and words?

“…However, the fact that item recognition was unaffected by encoding instructions would appear to suggest that attending to color required no capacity, as the trading of item information for attribute information should have occurred for an effortful dimension. However, a similar finding of no tradeoff was reported by Light and Berger (1976), who also found otherwise strong evidence for effortful encoding of color. Since item recognition performance was quite good in both their study and the present one, it may be that evidence for trading will occur only on more difficult recognition tasks.…”

“…There were no significant effects in the analysis of variance of false alarms, due primarily to an overall low rate, as seen in Table 1 (well below a mean rate of one item per subject per condition). Light and Berger (1976) reported a similar lack of effects in their immediate recognition analysis, so these findings were expected.…”

“…None of these item analyses showed any evidence that subjects in the attribute-memory conditions performed more poorly than subjects in the items-only condition, a finding predicted by the automatic processing model. Light and Berger (1976) also reported this finding and noted their own surprise. However, as in the Light and Berger study, the attribute analysis proves to be very revealing and directly addresses the substantive theoretical concerns of the experiment.…”

“…Light, Berger, and Bardales (1975) reported a similar finding. In a third study, Light and Berger (1976) found evidence for independent as well as effortful memory for color and case attributes of words, so that the finding that it is effortful to remember color is reliable. However, little or no data exist with respect to color memory for pictures.…”

“…Given the popularity of the notion (as well as data that sometimes support it) that pictures are represented differently in memory from words (Paivio, 1971), the possibility that color memory for pictures might be different from that for words seems plausible. Thus the current study uses the methodology of Light and Berger (1976) to assess evidence for the automatic processing of the position and color attributes of pictures and words. Subjects are presented with either pictures or words for study and are instructed to study (1) only the item itself, (2) the item and its color, (3) the item and its position, or (4) the item and both attributes.…”