Are there long-term "literal copies" of visually presented words?

Evidence for the hypothesis that the appearance of visually presented words is stored in "literal copy" form is critically evaluated and shown to be inconclusive. An experiment in which students were required to retain information about zero, one, or two visual properties of words is repor...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of experimental psychology. Human learning and memory Vol. 2; no. 6; p. 654
Main Authors Light, L L, Berger, D E
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States 01.11.1976
Subjects
Color Perception
Humans
Memory
Pattern Recognition, Visual
Retention (Psychology)
Visual Perception
Online AccessGet more information

Cover

More Information
Summary:Evidence for the hypothesis that the appearance of visually presented words is stored in "literal copy" form is critically evaluated and shown to be inconclusive. An experiment in which students were required to retain information about zero, one, or two visual properties of words is reported. A strong version of the literal-copy hypothesis predicts that retention of both case and color should be equally good under instructions to remember one of these attributes and instructions to remember both. However, the results were inconsistent with predictions from this hypothesis. A model that assumes that each visual attribute is stored independently in abstract propositional form provided a good quantitative fit to the data.
ISSN:0096-1515
DOI:10.1037/0278-7393.2.6.654