In 6 experiments, the authors investigated the form of serial position functions for identification of letters, digits, and symbols presented in strings. The results replicated findings obtained with the target search paradigm, showing an interaction between the effects of serial position and type of stimulus, with symbols generating a distinct…

A rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) technique was used to investigate the role of the nature of processing carried out on targets in the Lag-1 sparing phenomenon. Lag-1 sparing refers to a higher accuracy in the task associated with the 2nd target when the 2 targets are immediately successive in the RSVP stream relative to when there are 1…

Three eye movement experiments were conducted to examine the role of letter identity and letter position during reading. Before fixating on a target word within each sentence, readers were provided with a parafoveal preview that differed in the amount of useful letter identity and letter position information it provided. In Experiments 1 and 2,…

Attempts to settle the question of whether reading units are ever larger than letters and considers the variables expected to influence the size of the reading unit. (Author/RK)

A familiarity effect in these experiments is defined as a subject's ability to respond more rapidly to a familiar stimulus than to an unfamiliar stimulus. Evidence indicates that familiarity does not affect an initial encoding process, but it can affect a comparison process. (Editor/RK)

Three experiments assessed the effect of visual familiarity of words on "same-different" reaction times (RTs) in a simultaneous-matching task. All three studies showed visual familiarity to be responsible for differences in slope over sequence length between words and nonwords. (Editor/RK)