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A F Monk

Publications and source records attributed to A F Monk.

6 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1993

Perceptual grouping in visual word recognition.

Four experiments are presented in which printed texts are read for their meaning. Some of the texts were mutilated by altering the size of selected letters. In Experiments 1, 2, and 3, the number of words mutilated per passage and the number of letters changed per word were both manipulated. In all three experiments, reading was slowed as a function of the number of words changed per passage, while the number of letters changed per word had a much smaller effect. The interaction between the number of words and number of letters changed was not significant in any of the experiments. It is difficult to explain these results merely in terms of changes in the discriminability of letters. In Experiment 2 all uppercase text was used, which argues against an explanation in terms of supraletter features such as word envelope. We propose an explanation in terms of visual attention and the perceptual grouping required prior to feature recognition. The last experiment supports this explanation through the counterintuitive finding that adding letters of intermediate size can improve legibility by allowing grouping processes to associate large and small letters as belonging to the same word object.

Adult↗
PubMed1983

Evidence for distinct verbal memory pathologies in severely and mildly disturbed schizophrenics.

It is well known that schizophrenics have difficulty in effectively encoding verbal materials into their long-term memories and consequently show a deficit in recall. Recently, orienting tasks were introduced as a method for achieving equivalent to normal encoding and mnemonic organization in schizophrenics; consequently, their deficit in recall disappeared. A detailed review of the literature, however, showed that such effective orienting tasks had only been applied to mildly disturbed schizophrenics (nonchronic, in a good condition). This report presents three experiments which show that more severely disturbed (chronic, hospitalized) schizophrenics, unlike mildly disturbed patients, have memory deficits that cannot be located at the encoding stage. Severely disturbed schizophrenics show (1) a recall deficit, even after effective encoding and mnemonic organization are induced; (2) excessive forgetting over 24- and 48-hour periods; and (3) a recognition memory deficit. These deficits are in addition to their encoding deficit. The use of a matched-tasks check in experiments 2 and 3 suggests that this postencoding deficit is a differential deficit and does not is a differential deficit and does not simply reflect the schizophrenic generalized deficit. Theoretical implications, also supported by the use of various organizational indices (e.g., clustering, hierarchical clustering schemes, and hierarchical grouping analysis), are discussed.

Adult↗
PubMed1980

Sorting consistency as a diagnostic tool for schizophrenics and normals.

This report demonstrates the potential of the Sorting Consistency Task, both for assessing the degree of schizophrenic disturbance in patients, and for screening normals for schizophrenic tendencies. The task can be administered quickly and adapted for individual or group testing. Experiment 1 demonstrated a strong relationship between the Sorting Consistency Task and indicators of schizophrenic disturbance. Experiment 2 used normals and demonstrated that the Sorting Consistency Task could discriminate between subjects who score high or low on the Physical Anhedonia Scale of Chapman et al. (1976).

Adult↗