Motivational influences on word recognition: II. Affective coding

Abstract

The effects of motivation and affective word content on tachistoscopic recognition were assessed in two experiments. Even with arousal heightened by white noise and with the word exposure slowed (15 vs. 10 msec) per trial, the earlier finding (Ferguson, 1988) was replicated, that under parafoveal viewing hunger, compared to satiation, fails to have a significant effect. Hemispheric asymmetry in affective bias for pleasant and unpleasant words was not found. However, strong evidence was found for significant affective word coding at the lexical stage: for categories with comparable interletter and word frequencies, food words required fewer trials for word recognition, and negatively emotional words required the most trials. In contrast, the reaction times, which likely are more representative of postlexical processing, were fastest for animal words.Previous work by Ferguson (1983Ferguson ( , 1988 has revealed that hunger as an approach motivation facilitates word recognition, but only under foveal, not parafoveal, viewing. Moreover, in two of the foveal-viewing experiments, under separate motivation manipulations of hunger and anxiety, affective word content had a significant effect. When food words, animal words, and negatively emotional words were equated across affective categories for word frequency and interletter associations, food words were most easily recognized, whereas negatively emotional words were least readily recognized. No needrelevance effects were evident, and affective word content had a comparable and significant effect regardless of which type of motivation was examined. Affective word content had less effect with laterally presented stimuli, for both foveal and parafoveal viewing (Ferguson, 1988), possibly due to differential recognition difficulty of left and right off-center word presentation.In the above studies, the stimuli were presented very rapidly (for 10 msec) and repeated until correct word recognition occurred. The task differs in crucial ways from lexical decisions and word-naming studies. This task is akin to the purchasing of information until no more information is needed for correct recognition. Each trial consists of a stimulus exposure that provides a small amount of information. The dependent variable consists of trials to word recognition rather than reaction time (RT), with the two measures yielding somewhat disparate effects. For example, under foveal viewing, hungry subjects required less information purchasing (fewer trials to correct recognition) than did satiated subjects, but the recognized words were not named faster (Ferguson, 1988 In following up the above research concerning motivational influences on word recognition, the present investigation additionally addresses itself to questions concerning affective word content. One question is whether affective word content provides a code for lexical processing (see Chiarello, 1988, on the differentiation of prelexical, lexical, and postlexical processes). If recognition difficulty for off-center parafoveal present...

Motivational influences on word recognition: IV. Cortical magnification does not explain parafoveal versus foveal differences

“…That is, under foveal viewing, hungry subjects required fewer presentations (less information purchase) before correctly recognizing very briefly projected words. Under parafoveal viewing, not only were hungry subjects found not to show the significant facilitation, but, under some circumstances (Ferguson, 1989), the satiated subjects actually performed (nonsignificantly) better than the hungry subjects. In a number of additional ways, parafoveal word recognition did not follow the norm found for foveal processing.…”

“…No corrective feedback occurred until the subject correctly identified the word on 2 consecutive presentations, and after 29 presentations, the word exposure was systematically increased. To permit assessment of information purchasing within each study over a constant stimulus duration , and to permit comparison with data from prior studies (Erw in & Ferguson , 1979;Ferguson, 1983Ferguson, , 1988Ferguson, , 1989Ferguson, , 1992, data from thepresent investigation are presented as trials to first correct recognition and not as trial s to crite rion.…”

“…Assessment of the visual field representation in the human striate cortex (Horton & Hoyt, 1991) confirms earlier estimates. In Ferguson's (1988Ferguson's ( , 1989Ferguson's ( , 1992 studies, the stimuli were of equal size for both foveal and parafoveal viewing, as is the custom in typical studies of reading that compare foveal with parafoveal viewing (e.g., Balota & Rayner, 1991). However, to stimulate an equivalent amount of cortical area, the parafoveal words need to be enlarged.…”

“…In prior studies by Ferguson (Erwin & Ferguson, 1979;Ferguson, 1983Ferguson, , 1988Ferguson, , 1989Ferguson, , 1992, with the use of an "information purchasing" procedure, it was found that word recognition under foveal but not under parafoveal viewing was facilitated by hunger as opposed to satiation. That is, under foveal viewing, hungry subjects required fewer presentations (less information purchase) before correctly recognizing very briefly projected words.…”

“…To magnify the input and still permit the words to fall within the parafoveal region (between 2 0 and 60 of center fixation), 17-rnrn words were utilized; this is approximately double the size of the words used in the earlier foveal studies with the same apparatus (Ferguson 1988(Ferguson , 1989(Ferguson , 1992.…”