Место издания:Изд-во "Институт психологии РАН" Москва
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Аннотация:When searching for a prespecified letter in large letter arrays containing words, observers often don’t notice words in the arrays, especially if target letters are never embedded in the words (Falikman 2014). According to our recent eyetracking data, when observers perform letter search in such arrays containing words, word areas are fixated no more often than inter-word intervals (Falikman, Yazykov 2015). However, when searching for words in the same arrays, like in the classical Hugo Muensterberg’s selective attention test (Burtt 1917), people fixate both word areas and inter-word intervals significantly more often than in letter search. Thus, there is a clear evidence for the difference in the search strategy between the two conditions. But what it is still unclear is whether words could be extracted without conscious access to their orthography and meaning, and whether their extraction during letter search would guide attention towards their location in word search. To address these issues, we used a modification of an implicit learning paradigm.
Method. Three groups of participants (82 students and postgraduates of Moscow and Saint-Petersburg State Universities, 67 female, native Russian speakers, right-handed, mean age — 21 y. o.) searched for 24 six-letter mid-frequency Russian words embedded in 10 random letter strings, 60 letters each, for 1 minute. Before that, one of the groups performed a letter search task in the same letter array (search for a Russian letter H which appeared also 24 times in the array, never within the words), and one more group performed a letter
search task in an array which didn’t contain words. The 3 rd group performed word search only.
Results. We didn’t find any significant differences in search for embedded words between all three groups (p=0.686). Neither we found difference in letter search performance between those subjects who performed letter search before word search and either noticed or didn’t notice any words during search. There was no significant correlation between letter search and word search performance in those participants who performed both tasks: r = 0.221, p = 0.106.
Discussion. This lack of implicit use of information which could have been obtained from letter search in large letter arrays containing words could be explained from our earlier eyetracking data (Falikman, Yazykov 2015). Almost letter-by-letter search when searching for words, which we interpret as search for word boundaries, does not allow to use information about a word noticed “somewhere” in the array. If finding a word requires location of its beginning and ending or probably the “word identification point” (Tyler, Marslen-Wilson, 1986), then a word spontaneously noticed during letter search cannot guide attention to its exact location. It other words, unitization seems to happen only after the information might have been useful to locate a word in the array.