Effects of varying modality, surface features, and retention interval on priming in word-fragment completion

Abstract

Subjects in Experiment 1 studied a list of words under varying presentation conditions (visual or auditory) and in two typographies within the visual condition (typed or hand printed) and then received a word-fragment completion test (e.g., _YS_E _ Y for mystery) in which the test cues also varied in typography. The main findings were that (1) priming occurred for all study items, relative to nonstudied items, but greater priming occurred for visual than for auditory presentation, and (2)performance in the visual conditions was better when typographies matched between study and test than when the typographies mismatched, but only for words studied in hand-printed form. These findings were generally replicated when the test was delayed 1 week, although priming declined across this retention interval (Experiment 2). In Experiment 3 subjects studied words that were either in focus or blurred and showed greater priming when test fragments were presented in the same manner as at study. Priming in the word-fragment completion task depends on matching surface characteristics of items between study and test and exemplifies the requirement of performing similar mental operations at study and test for maximizing performance (transfer-appropriate processing).In the present series of experiments, we explored a task for investigating memory that was introduced by Tulving, Schacter, and Stark (1982). Following presentation of a list of words, their subjects received two forms of test either 1 h or I week later. One test was a standard yeslno recognition test in which previously studied target words were intermixed with an equal number of new words, and the subjects' task was to identify the target words. In the novel task, subjects were presented with fragmented versions of the words (half studied, half not) and told to complete them with the first word that came to mind. The fragmented words constituted word frames that permitted only a single completion (e.g., A __A __IN for assassin). This fragment completion task represents a variant of other tasks in which subjects receive various parts of words and attempt to complete them (Warrington & Weiskrantz, 1970), although the more usual forms of the task involve perceptually degrading all letters in the word or presenting only the first few letters of the word (e.g., dre-for dream). This last type of test has been most frequently studied (e.g., Graf, Squire, & Mandler, 1984); relative to words in the fragment completion task under study here, target words in This research was supported by Grant ROI HD-15054 from the Nationallnstitute of Child Health and Human Development. We thank Bradford Challis, Alice Healy, Neal Johnson, James Neely, Douglas Nelson, and Endel Tulving for their comments on previous versions of this paper. A preliminary report of these results was presented at the meeting ofthe Psychonomic Society in San Diego in November, 1983 that task are typically of higher frequency (at least 10 completions are possible) and subjects respond more rapidly. The measure of ...

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