Cognitive Psychology Concerns Itself with the Processes by Which the Mind Functions

Cognitive psychology concerns itself with the processes by which the mind functions.

Cattell's (1886) study was lack of accuracy by modern standards however the same result was replicated in 1969 by Reicher. Reicher (1969) presented strings of letters half the time real words and half the time not , for short periods. The participants were asked if one of two letters were contained in the string, for example D or K.

Cattell (1886) supported the word shape model because it provided the best explanation of the available experimental data. Cattell (1886) is the one that discovered a captivating effect that is called the Word Superiority Effect. Reicher (1969) found that subjects were more accurate at recognizing D when it was in the context of WORD than when in the context of ORWD. This supports the word shape model because the word allows the subject to quickly recognize the familiar shape. Once the shape has been recognized, then the subject can deduce the presence of the correct letter long after the stimulus presentation. This supports word shape because subjects are able to quickly recognize the familiar word shape and deduce the presence of letter information after the stimulus presentation has finished while the non word can only be read letter by letter.

Reicher flashed either a single letter of a word on a screen. The subject's task was to indicate whether a specific letter was present. What Reicher found was that people were faster at identifying the letter when it appeared in the word than when it appeared by itself (the word superiority effect or WSE). Now on first blush, this may seem a counter-intuitive finding. A common-sense model tells you that you first have to identify the letters before you can identify the word, so the reverse finding might be expected.

There have been several explanations of the WSE over the years. One early explanation is that a word provides constraints on guessing. So, if you get the word "NURSE" flashed at you and are cued for what the second letter might have been, if you didn't actually see the letter long enough to identify it, you might still guess "U" because there are only two possibilities, and "nurse" is a more familiar word in English than is "Norse." In any case, you would not guess that the missing letter was a J. However, this doesn't really provide much explanation for why people are likely to miss some information when they see a single letter on screen, but seem to get enough information when they get multiple letters forming a word.

While, studies by Neisser (1963) confirm that people use features to recognize letters.

Neisser had his participants performed a visual search task in which they were

presented with