Investigation whether the global superiority effect is affected by the types of symbol in reaction times

Abstract
This study examined whether participant’s response times to global target were faster than local targets. Participants had to identify global and local shapes and letters as quick as possible and the response times which were recorded to the computer data. The study was a replication of Navon’s (1977), (cited in Ness Smith and Thirkettle, 2014) experiment but differed, as it was a focused attention task whereas this experiment was a divided attention task. This was the same as Yovel (2001), (cited in Ness, Smith and Thirkettle, 2014) mixed attention task study which tested the global to local accounts. The current …show more content…

Method
Design
The design used in the experiment was a two way repeated measure design (2x2). There were two Independent variables (IV) each with two levels. The first (IV) was ‘Target level’ with two levels ‘Local and Global’. The second (IV) was ‘Target Type’ and the two levels were ‘Letter and Shape’. There were four conditions in the experiment. The stimuli were larger global shapes and letters which were made up of smaller local shapes and letters. The participants had to search for a target letter which was an N aswell as a triangle shape. The dependent variable was the response time for the global letter/shape, and local letter/shape. The capital letters presented to the participants included H,A,E,F and N, and the shapes that were presented were circle, square, diamond and triangle. The global shapes had 24 local components, either a single shape or letter repeated 24 times. All of the shapes and letters appeared at both global and local levels. The 100 stimuli were made using ‘Adobe Illustrator’. The participants had to press the button when the letter N or a triangle appeared on the screen at global or local level. The 4 stimuli containing a target at both levels were removed, and only 96 stimuli were shown to the participants in random order of 3 blocks of 32 in each. The stimuli were displayed for 120ms with an inter-stimulus interval of 2 seconds.

Participants
There were 101 participants of whom all were The Open University students.