20/04/12 15:05:17.20 juW0pBg5d
Conversely, suppose that only category search time, t2, is reduced when the second category instance is produced.
Such a situation would lead to the results shown in Fig.1b.
Both the category-letter and the letter-category conditions include t2, so they should be affected equally by the initial retrieval.
The final possibility is that both t1 and t2 are reduced.
This situation would predict the results shown in Fig.1c.
Here, the category-letter condition (which includes t2 but not t1) should be affected by the initial retrieval, but the letter-category condition (which includes both t, and t2) should be affected to a greater degree.
METHOD
Subjects
Eighteen Ss from the New School for Social Research received $5 for their participation in two 1-h sessions, which occurred on 2 consecutive days.
No S had previously participated in a memory experiment.
Materials
Each stimulus was printed in block letters on a 5 x 8 in. index card.
A stimulus always consisted of a category name plus a letter (e.g., fruit-P).
Eighty critical category names were selected from the Battig and Montague (1969) and Shapiro and Palermo (1970) category norms.
Each of the category names was paired with two different letters.
If “dominance" is defined as the frequency with which a word is given as an exemplar of a category, then one of the twu category-letter stimuli will be referred to as more dominant than the other.
In addition to the 160 critical stimuli (80 categories each paired with two letters), 80 filler stimuli were used.
The filler stimuli also consisted of a category plus a letter.
Some of the filler categories were used only once; others appeared twice with two different letters.
Thus, each S saw 240 unique stimuli (80 critical categories, each paired with two letters, plus 80 filler stimuli).