ON THE GENERALITY OF THE PERCEPTUAL CLOSURE EFFECT

Perceptual closure is a process whereby an incomplete stimulus is perc eived to be complete. J. G. Snodgrass and K. Feenan (1990) argued that perceptual closure during a study episode is an important factor in p roducing large priming effects in picture fragment identification. The y found that a moderately fragmented study picture produced more primi ng than either a very fragmented or an intact study picture and argued that this inverted U-shaped function is a signature of the perceptual closure effect. The experiments in this Study extend these results to word fragment identification by showing that (a) the most effective p rime for both unspeeded and speeded word fragment identification is a moderately fragmented study word; (b) the sharpness of the U-shaped gr adient is the same whether the perceptual feedback during study is a w ord (in a font different from that of the fragmented study word) or a picture; and (c) although a fragmented study picture primes subsequent word fragment identification, it does not produce the inverted U-shap ed function, thereby showing that perceptual closure reflects perceptu al rather than conceptual priming.