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Do people access meaning when they name banknotes?

Cognitive Processing volume 14, pages 43–49 (2013)Cite this article

Abstract

Do people access the monetary value of banknotes when they say them aloud? In this study, we evaluated this question by asking people to name sequences of euro banknotes blocked by category or mixed with exemplars of other categories. The participants did not show an interference effect in the blocked context. The absence of semantic interference effect was also observed when participants named euro banknotes that did not have imprinted monetary value. These results suggest a direct connection between perceiving banknotes and accessing their names.

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Notes

  1. Previous studies have found that the semantic interference observed with the blocking paradigm is a cumulative effect that increases after a substantial number of retrieval processes from the same semantic category (Belke et al. 2005; Damian and Als 2005; Navarrete et al. 2012). To evaluate whether this effect was present in the current study, an ANOVA was performed including the category (semantic vs. euro banknotes), the context (mixed vs. blocked), and the presentation cycle (1–5 from the first to the last presentation of each category exemplar in each of the four blocks of the experiment). There was a main effect of presentation cycle, F(4, 116) = 3.85, p < .01, η 2p  = .12. However, none of the interactions including this factor were significant (all ps > .05). The lack of a presentation cycle × Context × Category interaction might be due to the fact that the current experiment was not designed to evaluate the cumulative nature of the semantic interference effect (i.e., the number of presentation cycles in this study was smaller than that of others, the number of semantic categories and exemplars in this study was different from others, etc.). However, it is important to note that regardless of these methodological differences we replicated the main effect of interference with semantic categories.

  2. A new set of twenty-six participants rated the familiarity of pictures and banknotes used in the study in a 7 point scale where 1 was very low familiarity and 7 was very high familiarity. Inter-judge reliability score was .67. The familiarity of banknotes was similar (4.68, SD = 2.08) to that of pictures (4.01, SD = 0.79), t(23) = 1.19, p > .05.

    Afterward, familiarity scores were correlated with context effects (mixed condition minus blocked condition) obtained in Experiment 1 with banknotes and semantic categories. There was a significant positive correlation between the magnitude of context effect and banknote familiarity, r = .98, p < .01, while a non–significant negative correlation was observed for pictures (r = –.23, p > .05).

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Acknowledgments

This study was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (research project PSI2012–32287) and by the Programa de Generación de Conocimiento Científico de Excelencia de la Fundación Séneca, Agencia de Ciencia y Tecnología de la Región de Murcia (research project 08741/PHCS/08).

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Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Psicología Experimental, Facultad de Psicología, Universidad de Granada, Campus de Cartuja, s/n. 18071, Granada, Spain

    Pedro Macizo

  2. University of Murcia, Murcia, Spain

    Amparo Herrera

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  1. Pedro Macizo
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  2. Amparo Herrera
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Correspondence to Pedro Macizo.

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Macizo, P., Herrera, A. Do people access meaning when they name banknotes?. Cogn Process 14, 43–49 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-012-0531-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-012-0531-3

Keywords

  • Cognitive processing of currency
  • Naming banknotes
  • Number cognition
  • Blocking paradigm