The statistical structure of a given language likely drives our sensitivity to words' morphological structure. The current work begins to investigate to what degree morphological processing effects observed in visual word recognition can be attributed to statistical regularities between orthography and semantics in English, without any prior…

Extensive evidence has shown that presentation of a word (target) following a related word (prime) results in faster reaction times compared to unrelated words. Two primes preceding a target have been used to examine the effects of multiple influences on a target. Several studies have observed greater, or additive, priming effects of multiple…

Most sinograms (i.e., Chinese characters) are phonograms (phonetic compounds). A phonogram is composed of a semantic radical and a phonetic radical, with the former usually implying the meaning of the phonogram, and the latter providing cues to its pronunciation. This study focused on the sub-lexical processing of semantic radicals which are…

In most current models of word recognition, the word recognition process is assumed to be driven by the activation of letter units (i.e., that letters are the perceptual units in reading). An alternative possibility is that the word recognition process is driven by the activation of grapheme units, that is, that graphemes, rather than letters, are…

Models of cue weighting in judgment have typically focused on how decision-makers weight cues individually. Here, the authors propose that people might recognize and weight "groups" of cues. They examine how judgments change when decision-makers focus on cues individually or as parts of groups. Several experiments demonstrate that people can…

Combining regulatory focus theory (Higgins, 1997) and novelty categorization theory (Forster, Marguc, & Gillebaart, 2010), we predicted that novel stimuli would be more positively evaluated when focused on growth as compared with security and that familiar stimuli would be more negatively evaluated when focused on growth as compared with security.…

How are spatial and object attention coordinated to achieve rapid object learning and recognition during eye movement search? How do prefrontal priming and parietal spatial mechanisms interact to determine the reaction time costs of intra-object attention shifts, inter-object attention shifts, and shifts between visible objects and covertly cued…

Mediated priming refers to the activation of a target (e.g., "stripes") by a prime (e.g., "lion") that is related indirectly via a connecting mediator (e.g., tiger). In previous mediated priming studies (e.g., McNamara & Altarriba, 1988), the mediator was associatively related to the prime. In contrast, pure mediated…