The present series of papers by Johnson, Martin, Melton, Postman and Bums, Restle, and Wickens are minor modifications of talks that were presented at a symposium at the Midwestern Psychological Association in Cleveland, May 1972. The papers by Johnson, Martin, and Wickens are variants upon chapters that appear inCoding Processes in Human Memory. The full reference to this book is given in the References at the end of Wickens’s paper.
The objective of the symposium was to present different views of the coding processes under conditions leading to discussion, with overall reactions to and critiques of the papers being given by Melton.Delos D. Wickens
Abstract
This paper presents the results of a series of experiments using the release from proactive inhibition technique for identifying the salient encoding attributes of words. The technique uses the Brown-Peterson paradigm, but, after three trials on words of one class, a fourth trial is given with words of another class. The power of the class encoding is inferred from the extent of gain (release from PI) found on the shift trial. The studies reported show a high degree of effectiveness for semantic variables; practically no effectiveness for grammatical variables; a moderate amount for physical variables (i.e., figure-ground shift); and varying amounts for other shifts such as word frequency, imagery, language of the presentation to bilingual Ss. Some evidence is also given for the occurrence of simultaneous multiple encoding.
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References
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The research reported here was supported in part by two grants: OEG-5-9-450276 from the USQE and GB-33680 from the National Science Foundation.
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Wickens, D.D. Some characteristics of word encoding. Memory & Cognition 1, 485–490 (1973). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03208913
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03208913