Abstracts 2005 - The Psychonomic Society

Posters 5073–5079 Saturday Evening
plained in terms of differing test demands. According to one hypothesis,
older adults show reduced performance on implicit tests that
allow for multiple responses that compete with the production of the
studied target response. The following experiments directly tested this
response competition theory. Older adults studied a list of words and
were then given two different implicit memory tests: word stem completion
and general knowledge. To examine the role of response competition,
each test contained items with unique solutions and items
with multiple solutions. Results showed significant priming for older
adults on both tests but no effect of response competition on priming.
Thus, results fail to support the response competition hypothesis of
age effects in implicit memory. Alternate explanations of previously
reported age reductions in implicit memory are offered.
(5073)
Experimenter Context and Perceptual Subsystems Predict Stereotyping
and Individuating. SUSAN J. PARK, ALEXANDER J. ROTH-
MAN, & CHAD J. MARSOLEK, University of Minnesota—Gender
stereotyping of an unfamiliar person can be enabled or inhibited in unintentional
manners as a function of the perceptual subsystems engaged.
In our paradigm, female and male faces are presented directly
to the left or right hemisphere, followed by centrally presented words
(some of which reflect female or male stereotypes) to which participants
make lexical decisions. Gender stereotype activation (faster processing
of stereotype words preceded by same-gender faces, rather
than by opposite-gender faces) is observed when faces are presented
directly to the left hemisphere, enabling abstract categorical face processing,
whereas gender stereotype inhibition (slower processing of
stereotype words preceded by same-gender faces, rather than by
opposite-gender faces) is observed when faces are presented directly
to the right hemisphere, enabling specific exemplar face processing.
These results are observed when the gender of the experimenter mismatches
the gender of the face cue, but not when they match, in an intriguing
interaction between perceptual processing and social context.
(5074)
Trust in Team Training. ADRIENNE Y. LEE, GARY D. BOND, &
PAMELA SCARBROUGH, New Mexico State University—This study
examined team training and transfer in a complex peacekeeping task
and the degree to which dispositional, task-based, and emergent trust
relates to performance. Teams of 3 participants completed eight simulated
missions over 2 days in an 8-h-long experiment. Task-based
trust questions were embedded in postmission questionnaires. Also,
emergent trust was obtained from each team member’s ratings of the
other 2 team members as to the extent to which the person knew and
trusted the other team members. For individuals’ dispositional comparisons
with team results, each team member completed the Rotter
Interpersonal Trust Scale at the beginning of the experiment. Results
indicated that task-based and emergent trust increases over time and
that dispositional trust is related to performance under the most difficult
task conditions.
• CONCEPTUAL IMPLICIT MEMORY •
(5075)
Testing the Longevity of Rapidly Formed New Conceptual Associations.
SUPARNA RAJARAM & HELENA BLUMEN, SUNY, Stony
Brook, & KAVITHA SRINIVAS, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center—
This research is aimed at understanding the process by which new information
is integrated into existing conceptual knowledge. In our recent
work (Srinivas, Culp, & Rajaram, 2000), we addressed this issue
by investigating implicit memory for rapidly formed new conceptual
associations. We developed a novel paradigm that eliminates the assistance
of perceptual cues and minimizes the use of explicit retrieval
strategies. As such, this paradigm is particularly suited for studying
this issue in memory-intact, as well as memory-impaired, populations.
Participants received single study exposures to scenes and dialogues
that paired incongruous objects ( flashlight) with ad hoc categories
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(mailbox). Implicit memory was observed in the form of slower rejection
of studied incongruous targets than of nonstudied incongruous
targets. In the present study, we assessed the longevity of this phenomenon
by comparing implicit memory at three delays—10 min, 2 h,
and 48 h—and found that this effect dissipated at longer intervals.
(5076)
Measuring Automatic Retrieval in a Conceptual Priming Task.
JENNIFER C. MAJOR & KEITH D. HORTON, Wilfrid Laurier University—The
speeded response technique has provided pure estimates
of automatic retrieval in perceptual memory tasks. The present research
was designed to investigate whether pure automatic retrieval
could also be evidenced in a conceptual task. In two experiments, subjects
were encouraged to generate category exemplars, using strictly
automatic retrieval, by presenting practice trials that did not allow responding
with previously studied items and by encouraging speed of
responding. The studies differed only in terms of the frequency of the
exemplars. To assess use of automatic retrieval in the speeded group,
RTs were compared with those in a baseline condition in which conscious
retrieval was not possible and an explicit condition in which
conscious retrieval was required. Target completion rates in the
speeded condition were compared with those in an implicit and a PDP
condition to measure automatic retrieval. Results are discussed in
terms of automatic retrieval of conceptual information.
(5077)
Subliminal Word Presentations Yield Conceptual Priming in the Absence
of Recognition. CHAO-WEN CHEN, Northwestern University
and National Yang Ming University, & WEN LI & KEN A. PALLER,
Northwestern University—Preserved conceptual priming among amnesic
patients with severely impaired declarative memory implies a
high degree of independence between the two memory phenomena.
Nonetheless, recognition in healthy individuals may still be driven by
processing associated with conceptual priming. We attempted to produce
conceptual priming via subliminal visual presentation of 120
words from 30 categories. Each word presentation was followed by a
subjective report on word awareness and a category selection task.
After approximately 2 min, words were presented auditorily, with visual
category labels for category verification. Higher accuracy was
observed for studied words than for new words, even though the studied
words were not remembered. Using the same paradigm, brain potentials
were recorded in another group of participants to examine
neural events associated with conceptual priming for words, as
demonstrated in these circumstances in the absence of declarative
memory for the same words.
(5078)
Semantic Flexibility Effects in a Speeded Conceptual Implicit Memory
Task. RENÉ ZEELENBERG, Erasmus University Rotterdam—The
present study investigated priming in speeded relatedness decision. In
Experiment 1, participants studied single words (dog) in either a shallowprocessing
task or a deep-processing task. In the test phase, word pairs
(cat–dog) were presented in the relatedness decision task. More priming
was obtained in the deep condition than in the shallow condition,
confirming that priming relied on conceptual processes. In Experiment
2, participants studied target words embedded in a sentence context
that emphasized meaning aspects that were more or less congruent
with the context word with which the target was subsequently
presented in the relatedness decision task. In accord with the idea that
semantic representations are flexible, faster responses were obtained
in the more congruent condition than in the less congruent condition.
Because speeded responses are required in the relatedness decision
task, it may be less prone to explicit contamination than are other conceptual
implicit tasks.
(5079)
Decomposition of Repetition Priming Processes in Bilingual Word
Translation. WENDY S. FRANCIS & GABRIELA DURÁN, Univer-