Familiarity seekers are fast and novelty seekers are slow

Abstract

Christie and Klein (1995) demonstrated that a familiar item (word) rapidly attracts attention when presented simultaneously with an unfamiliar item (nonword). However, this finding has never been replicated. The current study is an attempt at such a replication. Participants were presented a familiar word and unfamiliar nonword in the experimental condition. At varying times after stimulus onset one of the items moved, and the participant reported the direction of the movement. A replication of Christie and Klein would be obtained if performance was better for movement discrimination of the familiar item shortly after onset but not at later intervals. The original finding was replicated in fast participants while slower participants show a different effect. A potential individual difference variable is suggested to explain this difference between the fast and slow participants.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Susan Hall, and Patti Devlin for assisting with drafts of this paper. Thanks to Raymond M. Klein for all his assistance as an editor. Patti Devlin was most helpful and diligent in recruiting participants. And, thanks to all those who participated for volunteering their time. This research was funded by a National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada grant to Raymond M. Klein.

Notes

One might additionally be concerned with what happens on trials with eye movements. Posner, Snyder, and Davidson (1980) said that performance will be worse. On trials in which eyes move, errors, RT variance, and RT will all increase. The target stimulus may be missed if the target occurs during an eye movement. This will cause errors. Furthermore, if the target is not missed eye movements will have the effect of potentially improving or diminishing the quality of the target perception because the participant will be foveating, or be farther away from the target location. This will increase variance. Consequently, because RTs are not normally distributed, with a long tail to the right, this increased variance will result in slower RTs. However, eye movements will occur rarely because it is of no benefit to the participant to move their eyes.

Five of the discarded participants had overall performance less than chance (50%). These were considered to be merely guessing or failing to follow instructions. Performance of the remaining excluded participants was 82% on average. The main problem with those participants was that many of the errors were restricted to only a few cells in the design. When accuracy is very low in a cell the RT cannot be considered to be reliable.

Analyses were performed on the nonwords only parsed for pronounceability. They were first rated independently by the experimenter and a research assistant for pronounceability on a scale of 1 to 5. After parsing the scale into low (1–2) and high (3–5) there was 100% agreement by the raters (see Appendix 1 for ratings). Furthermore, the bivalent parsing makes certain that no cells were dropped in the split of results and allowed for an analysis comparable to those above. No effects of pronounceability were significant in any of the experimental conditions or in the control condition with fast participants, all Fs < 1. There was one odd and seemingly inexplicable significant effect with slow participants at the 100-ms SOA in the control condition that was much larger than the word–nonword effect. RT for high pronounceability was 727 while low was 670, F(1, 30) = 8.08, p < .01.