[Martin Taylor 2004.11.18.17.29]
I hope this subject hasn't entirely faded from memory!
[From Rick Marken (2004.11.05.0930)]
I suggested a very simple experiment that could "operationalize" this
phenomenon: ask people to indicate, as quickly as possible, the appropriate
category (name) after being shown a picture of an instance of that category,
and vice versa. A "qualitative" model based on PCT leads to the prediction
that the time to identify the category given the instance will be less than
the time to identify the instance given the category.I'm still looking to see whether this experiment has been done. I'm sure it
has but it's hard to find because it's probably nestled in some study that
has to do with "priming and processing" or some such.
I said I'd check with Lochlan Magee about his thesis work on
Picture-word Stroop. Yesterday, he gave me his unpublished thesis
(UofToronto 1981 -- perhaps available from University Microfilms, or
whatever is the modern equivalent), and one reprint. He said he
remembered having a couple of other relevant papers, one in
Psychonomics, presumably around 1980. The one he gave me was "Tracing
the time Course of Picture-Word processing", M. C. Smith and L. E.
Magee, J. Exp. Psych: General, 1980, 109 #4 , 373-392.
I haven't had time to read either the thesis or the paper (I read the
thesis when it came out, but not since, and he's never published most
of the work in it, so the paper, based on the early part of his work,
is what you can get easily). Here's a part of the abstract:
-----------------Smith and Magee abstract------------
[Earlier results] suggest that words access articulatory information
more rapidly than do pictures. Experiment 1 [required] subjects to
verify the category of the target stimulus. In accordance with the
hypothesis that pictures access the semantic code more rapidly than
words, there was a reversal in the interference pattern: Word
categorization suffered considerable disruption, whereas picture
categorization was minimally affected by the presence of an
incongruent word.
Experiment 2 ...[examined] memory for pictures and words following
naming or categorization. Categorized words were better recognized
than named words, whereas the reverse was true for pictures. ... The
last experiment extended the investigation of memory differences to a
situation in which subjects were required to generate the
superordinate category name. Here, memory for categorized pictures
was as good as memory for named pictures. ... for words, memory
performance [following category generation] was superior to that
following a yes-no verification of category membership.
These experiments suggest a model of information access whereby
pictures access semantic information more readily than name
information, with the reverse being true for words. ...
---------------------End abstract----------------
In the thesis, Magee did more Stroop experiments, varying the
relative onset times of the presentation of the picture and the word,
and asking the subjects to name or to categorize, but until I read
the thesis rather than its abstract (which is less informative than
the JEP abstract), I can't tell you exactly what he did.
I think these results, or at least the direction in which they lead,
is relevant to the question initially asked, about the mutual effects
of pictures and their labels.
Martin
PS. I'm pretty tied up these days, so expect my contributions to be
sporadic. All the same, I have another thread to initiate, based on
work I've mentioned from time to time, so I will at least write one
more message today.