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Abstract:
A conceptual fan effect is the finding that as participants
study more items related to a concept, retrieval latency and errors
for any particular item increases. Previous behavioral research in
our laboratory suggests that the perceptual features of the
stimulus influence memory in a manner that is analogous to the
influence of conceptual features; that is, we have demonstrated a
perceptual fan effect in explicit recognition judgments. These
experiments involve presenting words in different, distinctive
fonts. The number of fonts studied with a word and the number of
words studied with a font were manipulated. Each word-font pair was
presented five times during the encoding phase. The subject's task
was to recognize whether the probe represented a word that had been
studied in that font during the encoding phase. In our behavioral
research, we found performance decrements in both latency and
accuracy when the target word had been studied with multiple fonts
or the font of the target had been studied with multiple words. In
an event-related fMRI experiment, scans were obtained during the
test phase. Here too we found an effect of perceptual interference
(i.e., fan). With more interference, there was greater activation
in perceptual processing regions, for example, bilateral
extrastriate cortex. This suggests that explicit memory judgments
are not independent of perceptual processing.
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