Citation

Chechile RA, Anderson JE, Krafczek SA, Coley SL. J. Exp. Psychol. Learn. Mem. Cogn. 1996; 22(3): 654-669.

Affiliation

Psychology Department, Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts 02155, USA. rchechil@pearl.tufts.edu

Copyright

(Copyright © 1996, American Psychological Association)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

8656151

Abstract

In a series of 3 experiments, participants learned visual patterns that contained the same number of visual features but varied in the complexity of the interrelations among the features. The results indicate a large and orderly effect of the pattern's syntactic complexity on recognition speed. Evidence is provided that this effect was not due to physical characteristics, target-foil similarity, speed-accuracy trade-off, or level of pattern learning. A multiple-encoding explanation of the effect is described. According to this framework, there is an initial, automatically generated encoding of the pattern as a short-term pictorial representation that becomes the basis for the construction of a second syntactic-propositional encoding. In this model, the participant's "sense of familiarity" for a particular stimulus is associated only with the syntactic-propositional encoding.

Language: en