PSY 341 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Phoneme, Prosopagnosia, Word Superiority Effect
Document Summary
Visual word recognition (reading) is a good way to examine this question because this process is heretically structured. Word frequency effect of evidence of top down processing: we are faster at recognizing words we encounter often, then words we rarely encounter. Demonstrates that learned info (top-down info) can influence the perceptual identification of word since word frequency must be stored with words on memory. Bottom-up only models of reading can"t account for word-frequency effects. Repetition effect (repetition priming): a word seen recently is easier to recognitive than a word that has not been seen recently, even if the words are equally frequent. Memory trace of previous exposure to a word influences perception of current exposure to word. Bottom-up only models cannot explain repetition effect (repetition priming) Word superiority effect: words are easier to recognize than single letters embedded in a real word or single letters in isolation (in red for expository purposes: word superiority is evidence for top-down processing.
