How is the alphabet stored? Using priming to distinguish direct association from serial search
Liesbeth Flobbe, Hedderik van Rijn · 2005
Alphabetic retrieval is a prototypical task that is studied to gain insight into how humans learn and process long lists. We shall study two conflicting models of this process: serial search and direct association. To distinguish between these models, we shall derive predictions about priming effects that occur when items are paired. In a new experiment, we measure these priming effects. Although the small data set does not allow strong conclusions, it shows that a pure associational model alone is too simplistic. How is the alphabet stored? How do people retrieve letters from the alphabet? Different accounts of how humans store and access the alphabet, or other long lists with little explicit structure, have been proposed. A good model must be able to explain human performance, and especially reaction times (RTs), in experimental tasks. Tasks that have been studied in experiments include: reciting the alphabet from a specific letter, saying the next letter, judging whether two letters are in the correct alpha-betic order, etc. All these experiments have found an increase in reaction times towards