| Abstract: | Observers received glimpses of 4-word arrays and were probed for the locations of particular words. Familiar words were repeated across arrays but novel words were not. Accuracy was higher for familiar than for novel arrays, but this baseline difference was diminished when a single novel word appeared with 3 familiar words. In these arrays, accuracy rose above baseline for novel words, defining novel popout (NPO), and fell below baseline for familiar words, defining familiar sink-in (FSI). In Exps 1–4, NPO remained intact and FSI actually increased as duration of array exposure was reduced from 200 msec to as brief as 33 msec. At brief exposures, even familiar words popped out from fields in which they had never before appeared. NPO is attributed to the distribution of locations associated with bottom-up-top-down mismatches. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
