Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology

Testing for the Presence of 1/F Noise in Continuation Tapping Data

A number of recent papers have suggested that the series of time intervals produced in continuation tapping may have fractal properties. This proposition, nevertheless, was only based on the visual appraisal of graphical results, and was not statistically supported. In the present study, we applied the ARMA/ARFIMA modeling procedures proposed by Wagenmakers, Farrell, and Ratcliff (2005) to test for the presence of long-range dependencies in continuation tapping data. Our results demonstrate t...

Long-Term Priming of Neighbours Biases the Word Recognition Process: Evidence From a Lexical Decision Task

The role of orthographically similar words (i.e., neighbours) in the word recognition process has been studied extensively using short-term priming paradigms (e.g., Colombo, 1986). Here we demonstrate that long-term effects of neighbour priming can also be obtained. Experiment 1 showed that prior study of a neighbour (e.g., TANGO) increased later lexical decision performance for similar words (e.g., MANGO), but decreased performance for similar pseudowords (e.g., LANGO). Experiment 2 replicat...

Les Enfants En Cours d'Apprentissage de La Lecture Perçoivent-Ils La Syllabe À l'Écrit ?

Cette traduction des lettres en sons de parole nécessite que le lecteur procède à une analyse de l'écrit, de façon à segmenter le mot en unités lettres et à identifier chacune d'entre elles. Plusieurs travaux ont mis en évidence que la connaissance du nom des lettres était un pré requis à l'apprentissage de la lecture (pour une revue, Treiman, 2006).

Amorçage de La Couleur Typique d'Un Objet Lors d'Une Tâche de Catégorisation

In order to test the hypothesis of an automatic activation of knowledge related to the typical colour of objects drawn in black and white, we have devised two priming experiments where the priming and target drawings maintain two types of relations, one related to the colour and the other, the category. In Experiment 2, after increasing the time elapsed between the beginning of the presentation of the primer and the beginning of the presentation of the target (i.e., pushing the SOA from 350 ...

Temporal Information Processing and Pitch Discrimination As Predictors of General Intelligence

In the present study, the relationship between performance on temporal and pitch discrimination and psychometric intelligence was investigated in a sample of 164 participants by means of an experimental dissociation paradigm. Performance on both temporal and pitch discrimination was substantially related to psychometric intelligence (r = .43 and r =.39). Regression analysis and structural equation modeling suggested that both psychophysical domains can be considered as valid predictors of psy...

The Locus of Location Repetition Latency Effects

We examined the processing locus (location vs. response) of location repetition effects in terms of the event [target (t) or distractor (d)] that initially occupied and then re-occupied the repeated location (i.e., t-to-t, t-to-d, d-to-t, d-to-d). Trials were presented in pairs (prime, then probe) and 2:1 location-to-response mappings were used. Generally, for all repetition conditions, perceptual processing at the repeated location itself was facilitated (location locus), while re-activated ...

Neural Synchrony in Stochastic Resonance, Attention, and Consciousness

We describe briefly three of our lab's ongoing projects studying the role of neural synchrony in human perception and cognition. These projects arise from two main interests: the role of noise both in human perception and in neural synchrony, and neural synchrony as a basis for integration of functional modules in the brain. Our experimental work on these topics began with a study of the possibility that noise-influenced neural synchrony might be responsible for the fact that small amounts of...