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Browsing by Author "Huebert, Andrew M., author"

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    Letter matching in word familiarity: comparing slot specific, relative position, and overlap coding approaches
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Huebert, Andrew M., author; Cleary, Anne M., advisor; Seger, Carol A., committee member; Graham, Daniel, committee member; Marques, Luciana, committee member
    Familiarity detection is the sense that something has been encountered before, without being able to recall specifics of the encounter. Viewed as a separable process from recalling specifics, a growing body of research suggests that familiarity detection is an important cognitive process for a variety of reasons. Familiarity detection is thought to be driven by an overlap in features between stimuli stored in memory and a current stimulus. Research on familiarity detection suggests that letters are one significant contributing feature to word familiarity. An unexamined question is the extent to which letter overlap needs to occur in the same positions between existing memory representations and the current stimulus. Research on reading suggests that letters do not need to be in the exact correct location for lexical access to occur, with different theories specifying different constraints. One theory is that letter position is coded in terms of relativity; another is that letter position is coded in terms of general location with flexibility. For this dissertation, I conducted two experiments investigating how letter position processing might operate in word recognition without identification, which is thought to be a metric of familiarity detection. The results were consistent with letters being matched in terms of general location. Letters that were out of position that also did not maintain relativity still contributed to word recognition without identification to the same extent as letters in position. Implications for the mechanism behind feature matching are discussed.
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    The role of familiarity in illusions of prediction
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2020) Huebert, Andrew M., author; Cleary, Anne M., advisor; Seger, Carol A., committee member; Folkestad, James E., committee member
    Some researchers have argued that the ability to recall (or the recollection of specific details from the past), and the mechanisms involved in doing so, are also used in imagining and predicting future events. However, the ability to recall is only one facet of memory ability. Another is the ability to detect familiarity with stimuli that relate to previously experienced episodes. One might expect that recall is needed to predict future events, as recollection of what occurred in the past might enable prediction of what happens next in a current ongoing episode. However, research on déjà vu has shown a link between familiarity-detection and illusions of prediction and suggests a role of familiarity intensity in these illusions. The purpose of the present study was to examine the role of familiarity-detection more generally in illusory feelings of prediction and to explore possible mechanisms. Increasing cue familiarity led to a systematic increase in prediction confidence despite having little to no effect on prediction accuracy. These results did not differ according to whether the decision was past or future oriented. The results also did not differ according to whether the future oriented prediction was logically possible or irrational in nature.