Single-letter recognition accuracy benefits from advance cuing of location

Abstract

With single-item visual displays, the facilitating effects of foreknowledge of item location have been demonstrated by using latency and accuracy as the dependent variables in detection tasks and by using latency as the dependent variable in recognition tasks. Evidence of such facilitat-ing effects obtained by using accuracy as the dependent variable in recognition tasks is scarce and rather ambiguous. One of the difficulties in demonstrating the beneficial effects of location cuing in recognition accuracy may be the fact that in these tasks a performance baseline of no cuing is used that leaves only relatively little room for improvement. Therefore, in the present experiments, we varied the performance baseline by presenting letters on one of three imaginary circles at different distances from the fixation point, and determined, for each subject, a presentation time that resulted in an overall no-cue accuracy rate of .75. In the experimental trials, three cue conditions were used: position cue (cuing 1 of 15 possible positions), ring cue (cuing 5 positions, all on one of the three circles), and no cue (cuing all 15 possible locations). In Experiment 1, the cue conditions were randomized. In Experiment 2, the cue conditions were blocked. Significant beneficial effects of foreknowledge of position were found in both experiments. Beneficial effects of ring cuing were found only in Experiment 2. In both experiments, the benefits of cuing are positively related to room for improvement. Partial correlations show that it is, indeed, room for improvement, and not the covarying factor of distance from fixation point, that determines cuing benefits. The theoretical implications of the beneficial effects of ring cuing under blocked presentation conditions are discussed. © 1987 Psychonomic Society, Inc.