ИСТИНА

Among the topical issues in cognitive psychology is the interplay between top-down and bottom-up processes in visual information processing. The striking example of top-down influences upon visual letter processing is the so-called word superiority effect (WSE), which refers to the better recognition of letters presented within words as compared to isolated letters and letters presented within nonword strings. The phenomenon has been described more than a century ago by J.M. Cattell (1886) and rediscovered for cognitive psychology by G. Reicher and D. Wheeler. In out previous studies it has been unambiguously demonstrated that such chunking (and thus the WSE) does not take place in letter-by-letter rapid serial visual presentation of words, if observers are not directly instructed to look for words. In our current study, we employed a modified selective attention test which required observers to find a prespecified letter in an array of random letters which included words, with target letters either always or never embedded in those words. In the control condition, there were no words in the array. We discovered a dissociation of letter search efficiency (no statistically significant differences between the three conditions) and subjective representation of the task (drastic differences between letters-within-words and letters-out-of-words conditions).