Dual Lexical Decision Task (Meyer & Schvaneveldt, 1971)

The Lexical Decision Task (LDT) is a procedure used in many cognitive behavioural studies, both in psychology and psycholinguistics experiments. The basic procedure involves measuring how quickly people classify stimuli as words or nonwords.

This basic task was expanded by Meyer and Schvaneveldt in 1971 to discover if the type of words presented made a difference to response time and accuracy. They showed that when participants were presented with pairs of words that were either related, unrelated or nonsense words (pseudowords), they responded faster and with better accuracy to the pairs of words that were related when compared with the unrelated pairs and the nonsense word pairs.

This is the task you will aim to replicate using PsychoPy Builder. Read the starter reference provided to understand the aims and rationale for the task. There is an online demonstration of a Lexical Decision Task here which you can try to see how it works for yourself.

Starter Reference

Meyer, D. E., & Schvaneveldt, R. W. (1971). Facilitation in recognizing pairs of words: Evidence of a dependence between retrieval operations. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 90, 227-234.

How to Read and Understand the Starter Reference

This video is a mini-lecture to support your understanding of the task, and how to read a method section in manageable chunks