Hi! I have a question for language researchers with experience in Picture Word Interference tasks, what's the best option for presenting the picture and the word in the screen: superimposed or with the word above the picture? A or B? (See image). Because in a preliminary test I am finding a facilitation in RTs instead of an interference, when presenting a related word above the picture. I did not find an univocal explanation for this. Many thanks for any help!
Laura
I think that superimposition is the standard approach, because PWI is supposed to require cognitive control rather than spatial attention. I've never heard of your 'above' display before (and would be surprised if it had been used in published studies), so can only imagine that it emerges from research methods sections that use imprecise terms to describe superimposition.
Thanks for your response! Indeed, a lot of studies only describe the stimuli without showing the actual display, so this might have been misleading. However, see for example this study:
Gauvin et al.(2019). The Shape of Things to Come in Speech Production: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study of Visual Form Interference during Lexical Access. Journal of cognitive neuroscience, 1-9.
They use the distractor words below the pictures. So, I assumed from this that it was not a matter of spatial attention, as both stimuli representations would be activated. But it's true that in this paper the distractor words appear in red, and this captures more attention.
Interesting; that paper indicates that it adapted its display methods from another study (published with almost the same title) that was coauthored by Jescheniak and Opperman, whom I'd trust to know about standard methods and boundary conditions for that paradigm (assuming that they contributed to designing and constructing the experiment). In that case, it seems potentially interesting if you found that distractor placement robustly changed the polarity of the effect, as I'm not sure how most accounts of the phenomenon would explain that.
But I just checked the Schriefers et al (1990) paper, which I think was the beginning of the Nijmegen group's use of PWI, and it does specify that the distractor was superimposed, so I'd assume that that is the more standard display.
Yes, I agree, I'd rather stick to the standard supermiposed display. Though it's still hard to interpret why I might find a facilitation of naming latency using the 'above' version. Besides, my RTs are very slow (around 900 msec, wich is much higher than other studies). So I'm thinking it's mostly related to the long presentation time that allows a lot of voluntary control and back and forth fixations in the image and the word. I'll adjust the protocol :)
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