2018. 5. 30. 16:15ㆍPsychology/일반
One important line of research in top-down effects comes from a series of experiments on letter identification,
starting with those of Reicher(1969) and Wheeler(1970). Participants were presented very briefly with either a letter (such as D)
or a word (such as Word).
Immediately afterward, they were given a pair of alternatives and instructed to report which alternative they had seen.
(the initial presentation was sufficiently brief that participants made a good many errors in this identification task.)
If they had been shown the letter D, they might be presented with D and K as alternatives. If they had been shown WORD,
they might be given WORD and WORK as alternatives. Note that both choices differed only in the letter D of K.
Participants were about 10% more accurate in identifying the word than in identifying the letter alone.
Thus, they discriminated between D and K better in the context of a word than as letters alone--even though, in a sense,
they had to process four times as many letters in the word context. This phenomenon is known as the Word-superiority effect.