Janet Gibson - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Janet Gibson

SUMMARY This study examined internal and external factors that could influence the occurrence of ... more SUMMARY This study examined internal and external factors that could influence the occurrence of insight. Fourteen older adults and 25 younger adults were assigned to one of three environmental conditions: a facilitatory condition, an inhibitory condition, and a neutral condition. The predictive powers of the environmental factors for the occurrence of insight, measured by problem solving time, and of internal factors, such as creativity, vocabulary, and optimal time of day, were examined. We found a pattern in the data consistent with our environmental hypothesis, but it was not statistically significant. There was a significant effect of age on solving time: younger participants were faster in solving the problem than older participants. Also, for older adults, vocabulary level was correlated with solving time. The optimal time of day for older adults was morning and for younger was evening. Findings suggest that creativity is not related to problem solving time.

Psychology and Aging, 1993

The experiments reported here investigated whether changes of typography affected priming of word... more The experiments reported here investigated whether changes of typography affected priming of word stem completion performance in older and younger adults. Across all experiments, the typeface in which a word appeared at presentation either did or did not match that of its 3-letter stem at test. In Experiment 1, no significant evidence of a typography effect was found when words were presented with a sentence judgment or letter judgment task. However, subsequent experiments revealed that, in both older and younger adults, only words presented with a syllable judgment task gave rise to the typography effect . Specifically, performance was greater when the presentation and test typeface matched than when they did not. Experiment 5, which used stem-cued recall, did not reveal a difference between syllable and letter judgment tasks. These findings highlight the complex nature of word stem completion performance.

Memory & Cognition, 1999

This paper describes a series of experiments in which we demonstrated that "dysphonemic" word ste... more This paper describes a series of experiments in which we demonstrated that "dysphonemic" word stems, which are likely not pronounced in isolation as they are within a word (e.g.,MUS in MUSHROOM or LEG in LEGEND), showed less priming than did "phonemic stems" (e.g., MUS in MUSTARD or LEG in LEGACY). Furthermore, words with either dysphonemic or phonemic three-letter stems gave rise to equivalent levels of priming when test cues were four-letter stems (LEGE) or word fragments (L_G_ND). Moreover, the difference between phonemic and dysphonemic stems persisted when nonpresented completion rates were matched. A [mal cued-recall experiment revealed that performance was greater for phonemic stems than for dysphonemic stems and that this difference was greater for older participants than for younger ones. These results are not readily accounted for by extant theoretical approaches and point to important methodological issues regarding stem completion.

Memory, 1993

Little attention has been focused on the spontaneous mnemonic strategies that people use to remem... more Little attention has been focused on the spontaneous mnemonic strategies that people use to remember proper names. In the experiment reported here, groups of younger (&amp;lt; 25 years old) and older subjects (&amp;gt; or = 55 years old) were shown a series of 12 name-face pairs and instructed to remember them. In a subsequent test, they were shown the same faces and asked to recall the corresponding names. After the recall task, subjects completed a questionnaire about the mnemonic strategies they used. Our analyses revealed not only that the younger subjects recalled more names than did the older subjects, but also that older and younger subjects reported using certain strategies more frequently than other strategies. Moreover, regression analyses indicated that use of certain mnemonic strategies accounted for a significant proportion of recall performance beyond that accounted for by age alone. Older-old subjects (&amp;gt; or = 70 years old) recalled fewer names than did younger-old subjects (&amp;gt; or = 55 and &amp;lt; 70 years old), but they did not differ in the extent to which they used specific mnemonic strategies. Our results suggest that the use of spontaneous mnemonic strategies may play a role in the difference in proper name recall between younger and older adults.

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 1988

Two experiments evaluated the hypothesis that perceptual fluency is used to infer prior occurrenc... more Two experiments evaluated the hypothesis that perceptual fluency is used to infer prior occurrence. Subjects heard (Experiment 1) or saw (Experiment 2) a list of words and then were presented in the same modality with both these and other words twice in succession: first in a more or less impoverished fashion, and then in clear fashion. For the first of these two presentations, the subjects tried to identify the word; for the second, they gave a recognition judgment. As predicted by the perceptual fluency hypothesis, and as has been found in previous research, the recognition judgments were more positive for identified words than for unidentified words. However, degree of impoverishment, by which apparent perceptual fluency was brought under experimental control, did not affect the recognition judgments. The perceptual fluency hypothesis was therefore not supported, and the observed relation between identification and recognition was attributed to an item selection effect.

Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 1988

Cognitive psychology is finding increasing use for the word fragment completion test, in which wo... more Cognitive psychology is finding increasing use for the word fragment completion test, in which words have to be completed from a subset of their letters (e.g., horizon from --r-z--). Researchers often try to restrict their fragments to those that can be completed with only one word, but this is difficult to do and probably never has been achieved. To help resolve this problem, a list is provided of 1,086 three-to eight-letter words, each of which is uniquely specified by a two-letter fragment, where uniqueness is defined on the basis of two sizable word collections.