Motor and verbal reaction times to words and drawings

Abstract

Verbal reaction time to drawings is always a little longer than verbal reaction time to words. In previous experiments this findinghad been interpreted in terms of the greater uncertainty when naming a drawing than when reading a word. In the present experiment, it is shown that the discriminability of the two categories of stimuli cannot explain the differences in VRT since the motor reaction time and the recognition threshold are a little higher for words than for drawings.As a result of the work done by J. McK. Cattell, it is known that the time for naming (verbal reaction time) an object (or a color, a geometric figure, a drawing) is longer than the time for reading the name of that object. This result has been conflfmed by Lund (1927), Ligon (1932), Fraisse (1964, but the explanation of this phenomenon is still disputed.In attempting to explain the difference between the time for naming an object (object-naming) and the time for reading the corresponding name (word-reading), Brown (1915), Ligon (1932), Fraisse (1964) have studied the role of practice. However, it is to be noted that practice reduces but does not suppress the difference.It is surprising that with young children who have just learned to read, word-naming is shorter than object-naming (Ligon, 1932). Fraisse (1964) has shown that when the number of objects to be named (uncertainty) increases, the verb~J reaction time increases, whereas uncertainty has no influence on word-naming as Pierce & Karlin (1957) and Conrad (1962) have stated. This result leads to the conclusion that S-R compatibility is high in word-naming, while it is low in object-naming. It is obvious that for a person who knows how to read there is only one verbal response to a written word, whereas several synonymous responses, at least a specific and a categorical one, may correspond to an object (Fraisse, 1965, Segui & Fraisse, 1968. The increase of reaction time in object-naming would correspond to response uncertainty, a fact which confirms a general finding revealed by many authors (Pollack, 1959, Morin & Forrin, 1963, Fraisse & Voillaume, 1966.However, this explanation remains unsatisfactory. Naming words and their corresponding objects leads to the same response, but two other variables playa role: the nature of the relations between Sand R which we try to elucidate and the nature of the stimuli which are different: words and objects.It is known that the relative discriminability of the stimuli has an influence on reaction time (Henmon, 1906) and the role of discriminability was confirmed in experiments on verbal reaction time (Fraisse, 1964 a, b). If objects were less discriminable than words, that alone would explain the higher reaction time in object-naming than in word-naming. We have already attempted to clear up the role of stimuli discriminability in a previous experiment with only one stimulus, namely a circle. This stimulus may be coded as object-naming (circle) in a set of geometric figures or as word-naming (letter 0) in a set of letters. The results have sho...

Referential processing: Reciprocity and correlates of naming and imaging

“…Picture-naming RT also decreases as name frequency increases (Oldfield & Wingfield, 1964, increases as age of word acquisition increases (Carroll & White, 1973b), and decreases with practice (Fraisse, 1960(Fraisse, , 1968, especially for unfamiliar pictures (Bartram, 1973;Oldfield & Wingfield, 1964 and line drawings (Bartram, 1974). Although consistent with the assumption that the strengths of individual referential connections vary with experience, the loci of these familiarity, practice, and transfer effects in picture naming are ambiguous (e.g., see Bartram, 1974;Warren & Morton, 1982), because such experiences undoubtedly affect more than the .…”

“…Picture naming is slower than responding in tasks that do not entail referential translation, such as the reading of words (e.g., see Cattell, 1886;Moore, 1915;Potter & Faulconer, 1975) or the identification of objects (e.g., see Fraisse, 1968;Moore, 1915). Practice reduces but does not erase the reading advantage (Brown, 1915;Fraisse, 1960Fraisse, , 1968, suggesting that structural constraints, such as the hypothesized referential connections, underlie the difference. Similar evidence for multiple phases to imagery has been obtained from image generation tasks (e.g., by Paivio, 1971).…”

The semantic nature of response competition in the picture-word interference task

“…That is, whenever a word or a picture is perceived, the appropriate node is accessed in memory. Whenever Table 1 Mean (Fraisse, 1968), this interaction may serve only to increase the viability of the word's name as a response, causing it to be more interfering. Thus, it would be possible to explain Rosinski's (1977) original results within the framework of a semantic network model.…”

Planning and Representing Intentional Action

“…As pointed out above, stimuli tend to facilitate actions with which they feature overlap: left and right stimuli facilitate left-and right-hand manual actions, static and dynamic gestures facilitate movements that look the same, and words faciliate naming them [74,75,76,77,78,79]. Similarly, watching an object-oriented action activates motor structures in the brain that are involved in producing those actions [80,81,82,83,84].…”

“…Indeed, it is long known that feature overlap between stimuli and responses speeds up reaction time, the so-called stimulus-response compatibility effect [72,73]. For instance, choosing between a left and right response is easier if the corresponding stimulus also appears on the left or right side, respectively [74,75]; moving a finger up or down goes faster in view of a up-or down-going finger [76]; flexing and extending one's hand is initiated more quickly vis-à-vis a picture showing a flexed or extended hand [77]; and uttering a word is easier if signalled by that word [78,79]. That is, if one can already see or hear what needs to be done, planning to do it is facilitated, apparently because perceiving an event that is similar to the required action already activates part of the codes that make up the appropriate plan [10,18,41,60].…”