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Word superiority effect

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In cognitive psychology , the word superiority effect ( WSE ) refers to the phenomenon that people have better recognition of letters presented within words as compared to isolated letters and to letters presented within nonword (orthographically illegal, unpronounceable letter array) strings. Studies have also found a WSE when letter identification within words is compared to letter identification within pseudowords (e.g. "WOSK") and pseudohomophones (e.g. "WERK").

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49-455: The effect was first described by Cattell (1886), and important contributions came from Reicher (1969) and Wheeler (1970). Cattell first wrote, "I find it takes about twice as long to read...words which have no connexion as words which make sentences, and letters which have no connexions as letters which make words. When the words make sentences and the letters words, not only do the processes of seeing and naming overlap, but by one mental effort

98-524: A Presbyterian minister, became president of Lafayette College in Easton shortly after James' birth. In 1859, William Cattell married Elizabeth "Lizzie" McKeen; together, they shared Lizzie's substantial inheritance. James' uncle Alexander G. Cattell represented New Jersey in the United States Senate . Cattell entered Lafayette College in 1876 at the age of sixteen and graduated in four years with

147-738: A WSE generally implies that there is some type of access or encoding advantage that words have in the mind that pseudowords or single letters do not have. Various studies have proposed that the distinction is a result of pronounceability differences (nonwords are not pronounceable and therefore are not as easily remembered), frequency (real words are more frequently encountered and used), meaningfulness (real words have semantic value and therefore are better retained in memory), orthographic regularity (real words follow familiar spelling conventions and are therefore better retained in memory), or neighborhood density (real words tend to share more letters with other words than nonwords and therefore have more activation in

196-410: A battery of ten tests to student volunteers, and for the first time introduced the term "mental tests" as a general term for his set of tests which included measures of sensation, using weights to determine just-noticeable differences, reaction time, human memory span, and rate of movement. There are two types of perspectives on measuring intelligence which are: 1.) Derived from Aristotle that asserts it

245-408: A reader is presented with a word, each letter in parallel will either stimulate or inhibit different feature detectors (e.g. a curved shape for "C", horizontal and vertical bars for "H", etc.). Those feature detectors will then stimulate or inhibit different letter detectors, which will finally stimulate or inhibit different word detectors. Some words can be activated through these stimulations. However,

294-585: A small child psychology practice in Lancaster, Pennsylvania , and developing tests to assess the intelligence of infants. Cattell died at Lancaster General Hospital in Lancaster, Pennsylvania , on January 20, 1944, at age 83. The main street in the College Hill neighborhood of Easton, Pennsylvania , home to Lafayette College , Cattell's alma mater, is named after Cattell. David Rumelhart David Everett Rumelhart (June 12, 1942 – March 13, 2011)

343-486: A student of Cattell, demonstrated that there was no statistical relationship between scores on Cattell's tests and academic performance. The tests were finally rendered irrelevant with the development of Alfred Binet ’s intelligence measurements . Cattell was well known for his involvement in creating and editing scientific journals. He was so involved in owning and publishing journals, that his research productivity declined. Along with James Mark Baldwin , he co-founded

392-487: A tachistoscope. A string of letters, usually four or five, is flashed for several milliseconds onto a screen. Readers are then asked to choose which of two letters had been in the flashed string. For example, if "WOSK" had been flashed, a reader might have to decide whether "K" or "H" had been in "WOSK". A WSE arises when subjects choose the correct letter more consistently when letter strings are real words rather than nonwords (e.g. "WKRG") or single letters. The existence of

441-536: Is a relationship looked into through research on the WSE. Evidence shows that the WSE persists without an observer's conscious awareness of the word presented, which implies that attention is neither necessary for WSE nor involved in this phenomenon. However, attentional focus has been demonstrated to modulate the WSE which agrees with recent neurophysiological data explaining that attention, in fact, modulates early stages of word processing. The activation-verification model (AVM)

490-507: Is another model that was developed to account for reaction time data from lexical decision and naming tasks. The basic operations explored in the AVM that are involved in word and letter recognition are encoding, verification, and decision. Both the IAM and the AVM share many basic assumptions such as the fact that stimulus input activates spatially-specific letter units, that activated letter units, modulate

539-455: Is guided by the stored, or previously learned, representation of a word. Real-time processing in verification can be mimicked by a computer simulation. Lastly, the factors affecting speed and accuracy of performance in a particular paradigm depend on whether decisions are based primarily on information from encoding or verification. One of the findings of the Johnston and McClelland report was that

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588-452: Is only through the identification of intelligence that its measurement becomes possible, through identification does not necessarily imply a definition 2.) all measurement is based on comparison and that different bases of comparison are possible. When Cattell moved to Columbia University, the battery of tests became compulsory for all freshmen. Cattell believed that his mental tests were measuring intelligence; however, in 1901 Clark Wissler ,

637-411: Is presented within a word, the feature detectors, letter detectors and word detectors will all be activated, adding weight to the final recognition of the stimulus. However, when only the letter is presented, only the letter detector level will be activated. Therefore, we may remember the presented stimulus word more clearly, and thereby be more accurate in identifying its component letters, as observed in

686-634: The Science journal. He took issue with James's support for psychical research . In a letter to James, Cattell wrote that the " Society for Psychical Research is doing much to injure psychology". Cattell married Josephine Owen, the daughter of an English merchant, in 1888. Their seven children obtained their pre-college educations at home with their parents as instructors. The whole family shared in Cattell's editorial work. One daughter, Psyche Cattell (1893–1989), followed in her father's footsteps, establishing

735-785: The University of California, San Diego . In 1987 he moved to Stanford University , serving as Professor there until 1998. Rumelhart was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1991 and received many prizes, including a MacArthur Fellowship in July 1987, the Warren Medal of the Society of Experimental Psychologists , and the APA Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award. Together with James McClelland , he won

784-699: The University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia . In 1889, he returned to the U.S. to become a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1891, he moved to Columbia University , where he became department head of psychology, anthropology, and philosophy. In 1895, he was appointed president of the American Psychological Association . In 1888, he was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society . From

833-441: The back-propagation algorithm to multi-layer neural networks. This work showed through experiments that such networks can learn useful internal representations of data. The approach has been widely used for basic cognition researches (e.g., memory, visual recognition) and practical applications. The 1985 paper does not cite earlier publications of backpropagation, such as the 1974 dissertation of Paul Werbos , as they did not know

882-593: The 2002 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Psychology. Rumelhart became disabled by Pick's disease , a progressive neurodegenerative disease , and at the end of his life lived with his brother in Ann Arbor, Michigan . He died in Chelsea, Michigan . He is survived by two sons. Rumelhart was the first author of a highly cited paper from 1985 (co-authored by Geoffrey Hinton and Ronald J. Williams ) that applied

931-491: The Microstructure of Cognition with James McClelland , which described their creation of computer simulations of perceptrons , giving to computer scientists their first testable models of neural processing, and which is now regarded as a central text in the field of cognitive science . His 1986 work with McClelland ignited the "past tense debate" during the 1980s revival of neural networks. The connectionism side debated

980-516: The United States’ conscription policy during World War I . He later sued the university and won an annuity. In 1921, he used the money that he gained from the settlement to start The Psychological Corporation to foster his interest in applied psychology. Because he was never able to really explain how psychologists apply their work, the organization failed until it was taken over by other psychologists who had experience in applied psychology. Towards

1029-441: The WSE does not occur inevitably whenever we compare a word and a nonword. Rather, it depends somewhat upon the strategies that readers use during a task. If readers paid more attention to the letter in a particular position , they would experience the adverse word superiority effect. This is because the reader would no longer have the benefit of having the word detector level activated with as much weight if they neglected to focus on

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1078-418: The WSE. The AVM deals with encoding, verification, and decision operations. Encoding is used to describe the early operations that lead to the unconscious activation of learned units in memory. After encoding, verification occurs. Verification often leads to the conscious recognition of a single lexical entry from the respondents. Verification is to be viewed as an independent, top-down analysis of stimulus that

1127-478: The activity of word units, and that letter and word recognition are frequently affected by top-down processes (e.g. Reading the phrase "A cow says..." a person would guess "moo" and in checking that the word begins with 'm' ignores the rest of the letters). The WSE has proven to be an important finding for word recognition models, and specifically is supported by Rumelhart and McClelland's interactive-activation model of word recognition. According to this model, when

1176-465: The beginning of Cattell's career, many scientists regarded psychology simply as a minor field of study, or as a pseudoscience which is a collection of beliefs or practices regarded as a scientific method when it is not such as phrenology . Cattell helped establish psychology as a legitimate science, worthy of study at the highest levels of the academy. At the time of his death, The New York Times credited him as "the dean of American science." Cattell

1225-596: The beginning of his career, Cattell worked to establish psychology as a field as worthy of study as any of the hard physical sciences, such as chemistry or physics. He believed that further investigation would reveal that intellect itself could be parsed into standard units of measurements. He also established the methods of Wilhelm Wundt and Francis Galton , including mental testing, in the U.S. In 1917, Cattell and English professor Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana, grandson of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Richard Henry Dana Jr. , were fired from Columbia University for opposing

1274-409: The cued position in that word or string making the test a two-alternative forced choice (2-AFC). For example, for the letter R in the word "card", an observer might be asked to choose between the letter R and T, and will usually be more efficient in doing so than if they are asked to make the same choice with the string of letters such as "cqrd". Each possible completion with the two possible letters in

1323-459: The earlier publications. Rumelhart developed backpropagation around 1982 independently. In 1983, he showed it to Terry Sejnowski , who tried it and found it to train much faster than Boltzmann machines (developed in 1983). Geoffrey Hinton however did not accept backpropagation, preferring Boltzmann machines, only accepting backpropagation a year later. In the same year, Rumelhart also published Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in

1372-493: The end of his life, Cattell edited and published journals. To help himself in the process, he created the Science Press Printing Company in order to produce his journals. He continued his work on journals until his death in 1944. Like many eminent scientists and scholars of the time, Cattell's thought was influenced by belief in eugenics , defined as the "applied science or the bio-social movement which advocates

1421-405: The fact that there is no meaning to the combination of letters can inhibit these words which were previously activated. Each activated connection would carry a different weight, and thus the word "WORK" in the example would be activated more than any other word (and therefore recognized by a reader). According to this interactive-activation model, the WSE is explained as such: When the target letter

1470-572: The fields of artificial intelligence , anthropology , information science , and decision science . In his honor, in 2000 the Robert J. Glushko and Pamela Samuelson Foundation created the David E. Rumelhart Prize for Contributions to the Theoretical Foundations of Human Cognition. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Rumelhart as the 88th most cited psychologist of

1519-506: The full word. James McKeen Cattell James McKeen Cattell (May 25, 1860 – January 20, 1944) was the first professor of psychology in the United States, teaching at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia . He was a long-time editor and publisher of scientific journals and publications, including Science , and served on the board of trustees for Science Service, now known as Society for Science from 1921 to 1944. At

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1568-455: The highest honors. In 1883, the faculty at Lafayette awarded him an M.A. , again with highest honors. At Lafayette, Cattell spent most of his time devouring English literature and also showed a gift for mathematics . Cattell said Francis March , a philogist , was a great influence during his time at Lafayette. Cattell found his calling after arriving in Germany for doctoral studies, where he

1617-462: The importance of the senses for judgement and intelligence. Regarding the beginnings of his mental tests, in Leipzig, Cattell independently began to measure “simple mental processes ” Between 1883 and 1886, influenced by Francis Galton , Cattell published nine articles on human reaction time rates and individual differences . As a professor at the University of Pennsylvania , Cattell administered

1666-567: The journal Psychological Review . He also acquired the journal Science and, within five years of acquiring it, made it the official publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science . In 1900, Cattell purchased Popular Science Monthly from D. Appleton & Company . In 1915, the title was purchased from him and became Popular Science . He, in turn, founded and edited The Scientific Monthly , which went to

1715-410: The mind). Other studies have proposed that the WSE is heavily affected or even induced by experimental factors, such as the type of masking used after the presentation of the word, or the duration of the masks. The two popular models claiming to explain the WSE are the interactive activation model (IAM) and the dual-route coding model (DRC) Neither of these models takes attention into account; This

1764-466: The offspring of a university professor or academic professional. Cattell's research on individual differences played a significant role in introducing and emphasizing the experimental technique and importance of methodology in experimentation in America. Cattell's design of mental tests were influenced by Wundt's definition of psychology in regards to the achievements of psychophysics and by Galton's view on

1813-427: The older sciences." In 1906, Cattell became the first compiler of American Men of Science . Despite the name, two women, Grace Andrews and Charlotte Angas Scott , were listed in this first edition of American Men of Science . Cattell was skeptical of paranormal claims and spiritualism . He dismissed Leonora Piper as a fraud. He was involved in a debate over Piper with the psychologist William James in

1862-460: The subject can recognize a whole group of words or letters". G. Reicher and D. Wheeler developed the basic experimental paradigm to study the WSE, referred to as the Reicher-Wheeler paradigm. In this paradigm, an observer is presented with a word or nonword string that is followed by a mask (brief stimulus to measure effects on behavior). The observer is then asked to name one of the letters from

1911-447: The subscribers of the old Popular Science Monthly as a substitute. Cattell was the editor of Science for nearly 50 years. During that time, he did much to promote psychology as a science by seeing to it that empirical studies in psychology were prominently featured in the journal. On Cattell's editorship of Science , Ludy T. Benjamin wrote "there is no denying that it significantly enhanced psychology’s visibility and status among

1960-451: The symbolic side, represented by Jerry Fodor , Gary Marcus , Zenon Pylyshyn , Steven Pinker , etc. The debate concerned whether neural networks or symbolic programs were adequate models for how English speakers can turn a verb into its past tense. Rumelhart's models of semantic cognition and specific knowledge in a diversity of learned domains using initially non-hierarchical neuron-like processing units continue to interest scientists in

2009-629: The then-legal drug hashish . Under the influence of this drug, Cattell once compared the whistling of a schoolboy to a symphony orchestra . After completing his Ph.D. with Wundt in Germany in 1886, Cattell took up a lecturing post at the University of Cambridge in England, and became a Fellow of St. John's College at the University of Cambridge. He made occasional visits to the U.S., where he gave lectures at Bryn Mawr College in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania , and

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2058-408: The two helped to establish the formal study of intelligence . Under Wundt, Cattell became the first American to publish a dissertation in the field of psychology . The title of his German dissertation was Psychometrische Untersuchungen ( Psychometric Investigation ); it was accepted by the University of Leipzig in 1886. Cattell tried to explore the interiors of his own mind through the consumption of

2107-514: The use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population, usually referring to human populations." Cattell's belief in eugenics was heavily influenced by the research of Charles Darwin , whose theory of evolution motivated Cattell's emphasis on studying “the psychology of individual differences ”. In connection with his eugenicist beliefs, Cattell's own research found that men of science were likely to have fathers who were clergymen or professors. Incidentally, Cattell's father

2156-562: The word condition produce a word. The WSE has since been exhaustively studied in the context of cognitive processes involved during reading . Large amounts of research have also been done to try to model the effect using connectionist networks . The WSE has traditionally been tested using a tachistoscope , as the durations of the letter string presentations need to be carefully controlled. Recently, stimulus presentation software has allowed much simpler manipulation of presentation durations using computers. The WSE has also been described without

2205-419: Was an American psychologist who made many contributions to the formal analysis of human cognition , working primarily within the frameworks of mathematical psychology , symbolic artificial intelligence , and parallel distributed processing . He also admired formal linguistic approaches to cognition, and explored the possibility of formulating a formal grammar to capture the structure of stories. Rumelhart

2254-527: Was born in Mitchell, South Dakota on June 12, 1942. His parents were Everett Leroy and Thelma Theora (Ballard) Rumelhart. He began his college education at the University of South Dakota , receiving a B.A. in psychology and mathematics in 1963. He studied mathematical psychology at Stanford University , receiving his Ph.D. in 1967. From 1967 to 1987 he served on the faculty of the Department of Psychology at

2303-401: Was both. Cattell believed that he had “inherited ability", but he also credited the influence of his environment, saying "it was my fortune to find a birthplace in the sun. A germplasm fairly well compounded [good genes] met circumstances to which it was unusually fit to react”. Cattell's belief in eugenics even motivated him to offer his own children monetary gifts of $ 1,000 if they married

2352-573: Was supervised by Wilhelm Wundt at University of Leipzig . He also studied under Hermann Lotze at the University of Göttingen . An essay on Lotze won Cattell a fellowship at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore . In October 1882, Cattell left Germany for his fellowship in October 1882. The fellowship was not renewed, and Cattell returned to Leipzig the next year as Wundt's assistant. The partnership between Wundt and Cattell proved highly productive;

2401-544: Was uncompromisingly opposed to American involvement in World War I . His public opposition to the draft led to his dismissal from his position at Columbia University , which later led many American universities to establish academic tenure as a means of protecting unpopular beliefs. Cattell was born in Easton, Pennsylvania , on May 25, 1860, the eldest child of a wealthy and prominent family. His father, William Cassady Cattell ,

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