COMPARING PERCEPTUAL INTERFERENCE WITH PICTURES AND CUE DEPRECIATION WITH WORDS

Perceptual Interference (PI) refers to the lower identification rate of pictures that are initially more degraded then made more whole than pictures only presented at the least degraded level (Bruner & Potter, 1964). Cue Depreciation (CD) is a similar effect with words (Peynircioğlu & Watkins, 1986), although, unlike PI, it has been limited only to previously restricted words. This study investigates CD and PI through the lens of the Competitive Activation Model (Bruner & Potter, 1964; Luo & Snodgrass, 1994) and the Mismatch Theory (Wang & Reinitz, 2001). We compare the two paradigms directly, using both between- and within-participant designs, while also testing PI in studied-pictures conditions for the first time. Results support the Mismatch Theory and indicate that in the presence of studied pictures, PI effects become restricted to only items that were previously studied suggesting that CD and PI are indeed more similar than different.