Journal of Experimental Psychology:Human Learning and Memory197S, Vol. 1, No. 6, 689-701

Memorial Consequences of Automatized Encoding

Paul A. KolersUniversity of Toronto, Canada

The first experiment tracked the acquisition of skilled reading as collegestudents read as many as 160 pages of geometrically inverted text. Thelogarithm of reading time decreased linearly as a function of the logarithmof amount of practice, and performance on inverted text approached per-formance on normal text remarkably rapidly. The second experiment as-sessed the consequence for memory of skill at reading. Students unpracticedat reading inverted text remembered for lengthy intervals the inverted sen-tences they read; when students acquired skill with the typography, theirmemory for inverted sentences was poorer. The results are interpreted interms that emphasize an operational basis to memory—pattern-analyzingprocedures rather than conscious contents. This view is contrasted withthree other accounts of recognition.

For all strange things seme . . . hard of entertain-ment at their first arrivall, till theie be acquainted:but after acquaintance theie be verie familiar andeasy to entreat. . . . Familiaritie and acquaintancewill cause facilitie, both in matter and in words.(Mulcaster, cited in Baugh, 1957, p. 264)

A standard view of perception and mem-ory emphasizes concepts, ideas, thoughts,and related cognitive contents as the coin ofmind. Semantically based theories of per-ception and memory, usually proposing hier-archical organizations of information, under-lie such work. In this view, the mind isfull of knowledge of objects and things, fullof concepts, ideas, and images; and it worksby sorting, comparing, and coding them. Analternate view holds that mind is procedure,operation, and activity; and that what itknows is what it knows how to do. Knowl-edge is expressed by the way the mind haslearned to sort, organize, and analyze, ratherthan by the results of those processes (Bart-lett, 1958; Schneirla, 1948; Werner, 1948).In three previous papers the latter view wasput forward and illustrated in the context ofexperiments on recognition memory (Kol-

This work was supported by Grant A76SS fromthe National Research Council of Canada and byGrant 382 from the Ontario Mental Health Foun-dation. I thank Linda Vettor, Stephen Israelstam,and Paul W. Smith, who collected and analyzedthe data.

Requests for reprints should be sent to Paul A.Kolers, Department of Psychology, University ofToronto, Toronto, Canada MSS 1A1.

ers, 1973, 1974; Kolers & Ostry, 1974).Some other features of this view are dis-cussed in the present paper.

The experiments just cited required collegestudents to read normally oriented sentencesand sentences in inverted typography, someonly once, others twice. The inverted sen-tences were recognized on the second readingmore frequently, more accurately, and over alonger interval than the normally oriented sen-tences. The difficulty of the inverted sen-tences and the longer reading time theyrequired might be thought to account forthe outcome—hence the importance of acontrol experiment to evaluate the roles oftime-on-task and task difficulty (Kolers,1974). The control experiment found thatsubjects not only recognized geometricallytransformed sentences more readily thannormal ones but they also distinguished be-tween two kinds of transformation, both ofwhich were hard and took long to read.Thus, time and difficulty, intuition to thecontrary notwithstanding, did not success-fully account for the results. An explana-tion in terms of pattern-analyzing operationsdirected at the graphemes was put forwardas an alternative account.

This previous work was directed againstthe view that recognition is a two-stage pro-cess in which pattern analysis of the surfacerepresentation precedes extraction of an em-bedded semantic core. It argued for the

689

690 PAUL A. KOLERS

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CONSEQUENCES OF AUTOMATIZED ENCODING 691

view that remembering, and especially rec-ognizing, can go forward as the reinstitutionat the later time of the pattern-analyzingoperations used initially to encode the pat-tern. On this view, the more extended andelaborate the original pattern analysis, thebetter the memory for the encoded material.This is not a matter of more receding dueto greater study; rather it is a matter ofmore encoding made necessary by an absenceof sophisticated pattern-analyzing skills. Itfollows from this notion that increasing aperson's skill in analyzing the relevant pat-terns might lessen his memory for the con-tents they embody. One purpose of thepresent work was to check this conclusion.

A second purpose was to study the acqui-sition of pattern-analyzing skill. It wasshown previously that the kind of patternstudied—geometrically inverted text—ismastered with some rapidity, but the train-ing was not carried very far (Kolers, Boyer,& Rosenthal, 1965). The -present work re-quired students to read a large number ofpages in a single geometric rotation andmeasured the acquisition of skill at the task.Skill was attained at a surprisingly rapidrate, which was the main finding of thefirst experiment.

EXPERIMENT 1

The main concern was to trace the acqui-sition function as otherwise literate readersmastered the skill of reading geometricallyinverted text. This text challenges thevisual pattern-recognizing system. The textembodies familiar language, thereby avoid-ing the problem that absence of understand-ing creates for study of a written language,but the graphemes are unfamiliar in appear-ance. Faced with such a challenge, howdoes the visual system respond? The ques-tion was studied with two sets of measure-ments.

MethodIn the first study, 12 undergraduates, 6 male

and 6 female, read 8 pages of inverted text on each

of 3 days, a total of 24 pages each. In the secondstudy, 8 male undergraduates each read a totalof 160 pages of inverted text over a period ofabout 2 mo. These 8 subjects read 5 or 6 pagesper day for the first several days, then graduallyincreased their daily load up to a maximum of10 pages per day, but never reading for more than1 hr at a time with rests of 1 min between pages.As with the preceding group, these readers weretested only 3 times per week, so that at least 1rest day intervened between 2 test days. The textwas transformed (inverted) by a 180° rotation ofeach line around its horizontal axis, that is, eachline turned top to bottom. It is illustrated asSample I in Kolers (1973, 1974) and in Kolers andPerkins (1975).

Before reading the first page of inverted text,and every 30 pages thereafter, the subjects reada page of normally oriented text. All readingwas aloud, into a tape recorder; the subjects mea-sured and recorded their own reading time, usinga stopwatch for the measurements. The text camefrom popular psychological sources, such as G. A.Miller's Psychology of Communication, R. Brown'sWords and Things, and the collections from Sci-entific American called Contemporary Psychologyand Perception, but the greater part came fromMiller (1962). There were about 300 words tothe page. The order of pages was scrambledfrom reader to reader. The subjects were rightdominant, as assessed by sighting tests for visionand questions regarding handedness and footed-ness, and their reading skills were restricted tolanguages using the roman alphabet. Only studentswho could read a page of normal English aloudin less than 2 min were tested. They were paidfor their participation in the experiment.

Results

The results on 24 pages from the 12 sub-jects in the first group are very similar tothe results on the first 24 pages of the 160,so. only the longer duration group will bedescribed here. Figure 1 plots the logarithmof reading time against the logarithm ofpages of text for each of the 8 readers indi-vidually; their average is shown as "meancurves." For the individual subjects, eachplotted point represents only a single ob-servation, the time to read one page ofinverted text; hence, the points are some-what "noisy." Plotted points on the meancurves represent averages of eight observa-tions. (For ease of reference, rememberthat zero on the vertical scale designates 1

FIGURE 1. Reading time as a function of practice. (Inclined lines are for inverted text, theflatter lines for normal text. Data for eight subjects individually [one observation per plottedpoint] and their average [mean curves].) Variations in size of the plotted points are distortionsin printing.

692 PAUL A. KOLERS

TABLE 1LEAST SQUARES FITS FOR READING TIME DATA

.Subject F-Intercept Exponent PSS

HYSUBRHAOLAH

BGroup average

31.6518.3217.5314.8514.5113.2811.5611.2415.75

-.548-.504-.486-.436-.414-.393-.387-.337-.438

.957

.884

.937

.932

.920

.939

.932.921.986

Note. PSS is the proportion sum of squares.

min, .3 designates 2 min, .6 designates 4min, and each additional increment of .3 logunit represents another doubling of the arith-metic values. The same is true on the hori-zontal scale, the unit properly changed, sothat log value of 2.1 marks 128 pages oftext.) The trend of the data is clearly linearon logarithmic coordinates, following theform Reading Time = kX~a, where X ispage number, —a is the slope of the line,and k accommodates differences betweensubjects or transformations. The inclinedlines are the slopes for reading invertedtext; the lower lines, usually parallel to theabscissa, are the slopes for normal text.One subject (AH) improved in readingnormal text aloud from 1.32 to 1.02 min perpage, another (El) grew somewhat worsewith practice, but most were nearly constant.All subjects improved markedly in readinginverted text aloud.

At first, the subjects took between 32.36(HY) and 10.68 (El) min to read a page ofinverted text compared with 1.46 and 1.31min for normal text. The average resultsfor the eight subjects show a gain from15.75 min per page for inverted text onPage 1 to 4.07 min on Page 24 and 1.74 minon Page 160, an overall gain in speed ofabout 9 times. The time for normal textwas near constant.

Least squares lines were calculated foreach subject separately and for the eightsubjects as a group. The arithmetic valueof the calculated F-intercept (its antilog),the slope of the line (exponent of the powerfunction), and the proportion of the totalsum of squares accommodated by the regres-

sion (proportion sum of squares, PSS) areshown in Table 1. The linear regression ofthe logarithms accommodated the data wellfor the subjects individually, and is almostperfect for the group average. The majorsource of perturbation was the first fourpages of text (see Figure 1).

A perfect correlation can be seen in Table1 between F-intercept and slope, readerswho initially took longer improving at thegreatest rate. Despite almost a threefolddifference between fastest and slowest sub-jects in initial time to read inverted text(F-intercepts), all subjects read invertedtext in nearly the same amount of time after160 pages of practice (see Figure 1).

Discussion

At the beginning of the experiment thesubjects struggled to decode inverted text,the best of them taking more than 8 times aslong and the poorest more than 22 times aslong to read inverted text as normal text.Literate college students learned the invertedtypography with readiness; after only 160pages of practice both the initially fastestand initially slowest subjects read invertedtext in only 1.3 times the time required toread normal text. A priori, we could ex-pect that all of the students would learn atthe same rate but differ in ability, or wecould expect that they would learn at differ-ent rates but differ in initial ability. Thefirst expectation would predict equal slopeswith different intercepts, that is, parallellines. The data obtained were more nearlyconsistent with the second expectation, anumber of different processes converging ona limiting value: The subjects approachedtheir asymptotic speed after exposure toabout the same number of pages of text, re-gardless of their initial level of skill. Whythe rate of learning should bear so impres-sive a relation to initial difficulty is notimmediately clear; nor is it clear what sub-jects learned or learned to do.

The proposal developed in detail belowemphasizes the acquisition and use of ana-lytical skills directed at the visual patterns,that is, the learning of pattern analyzingoperations. This postulated gain in pattern

CONSEQUENCES OF AUTOMATIZED ENCODING 693

analyzing skill has consequences for otheraspects of performance as well, as shown bythe second experiment.

EXPERIMENT 2

In previous experiments that demon-strated better memory for inverted sentencesthan for normal ones, subjects' ability toread the transformed sentences was poorerthan their ability to read normal sentences.The present experiment assessed the signifi-cance to memory of this difference in read-ing skill. In this test the difference waseliminated because the subjects were firstpracticed extensively at reading the unfa-miliar typography, as described in Experi-ment 1. The underlying theory holds "thatrecognizing occurs in terms of the encodingoperations that acquire sentences, not nec-essarily in terms of the semantic content ofthe sentences themselves; in terms of acqui-sition procedures rather than acquired con-tents (Kolers, 1975b). On this notionprotracted practice at reading inverted ty-pography should lessen the difference forrecognition memory of sentences in invertedand normal typography.

Method

The procedures of this experiment were similar tothose reported previously (Kolers, 1973; Kolers &Ostry, 1974) and used the same materials. (An errorin computation in the 1973 report is corrected inKolers, 1975a). Students read two decks of sen-tences, 60 sentences in a read deck, then 120 sen-tences in a recognise deck. Thirty of the sen-tences in the read deck were in normal orientation(N), the other 30 were inverted (I). These 60sentences reappeared in- the recognize deck, buthalf of them were then in the alternate typography.Thus the recognize deck was made up of four kindsof sentences: IS in normal orientation that hadbeen in normal orientation in the read deck also,15 in inverted orientation in both decks, 15 innormal orientation that had been in inverted orien-tation in the read deck, and 15 in the reverse order.These. four pairings are designated NN (normalorientation in both decks), II (inverted in bothdecks), NI (normal in the read deck, inverted inthe recognize deck), and IN (inverted in the readdeck, normal in the recognize deck).

In addition to these four kinds of sentences, therecognize deck contained 60 new sentences, 30 innormal orientation and 30 inverted. These aredesignated WN and WI, where W represents new.All of the sentences came from Miller (1962) ; the

old sentences of the recognize deck were the odd-numbered ones from a passage and the new sen-tences were the even-numbered ones. Old and newsentences were therefore alike in context, theme,style, and related features. None of them had ap-peared in the passages read for Experiment 1.

The subject's task was to read the sentencesaloud as rapidly and as accurately as he could.Immediately after reading each sentence of therecognize deck he placed it into one of threepiles: (a) new sentence; (b) old sentence, sameform; (c) old sentence, different form. Thesecategories are for the judgments whether the in-dividual sentences appeared for the first time inthe recognize deck (WN, WI), whether theirappearance in the recognize deck was in the sametypography as in the read deck (NN, II), or inthe alternate typography (NI, IN). Only sentencesread correctly on both encounters were includedin the results; speed of reading sentences was timedby an experimenter with a stopwatch. The studywas conducted twice—on the 12 subjects describedin Experiment 1 who had first read 24 pages ofinverted typography, and on the 8 subjects whohad first read 160 pages of inverted typography.

Analysis. The methods of signal detection the-ory were used to assess hits and false alarms.These were tallied separately for each subject andconverted to values of d', using the tables forthis purpose (Swets, 1964). The occasional in-stances of 0 and 1 in the proportions were treatedas .02 and .98, respectively, to avoid the tails ofthe d' distribution. Four levels of descriptionwere evaluated.

The first level was an overall estimate of thediscriminability of old and new sentences. Oldsentences placed in either of the old sentence pileswere taken as hits; new sentences in the old pileswere false alarms. The corresponding value iscalled d' (all).

A second level examined recognition of the sen-tences as semantic objects, but with respect totheir typography. All of the NN sentences putinto either old pile were hits for NN, and thenew sentences in normal orientation (WN) putthere were false alarms. All of the II sentencesin both old piles were hits, and the new sentencesin inverted orientation (WI) put there were falsealarms. Similarly, for IN in both old piles des-ignated as hits, WN sentences were false alarms,and for NI sentences designated as hits, WI sen-tences were false alarms. This measure is calledd' (sem); it evaluates memory for the contentof a sentence without regard to its typographicfeatures, but it measures with respect to them.

The third level requires for a hit the exactlycorrect placement of a sentence. Thus, only theNN and II sentences that were put into the sameform category, and the IN and NI sentences put intothe different form category were hits. The cor-responding false alarms were WN and WI sen-tences in the same form category, and WN andWI sentences in the different form category. Thismeasure is called d' (new) : It describes recogni-

694 PAUL A. KOLERS

TABLE 2PROPORTION OF SENTENCES THAT SUBJECTS IN THREE EXPERIMENTS

ALLOCATED TO EACH RESPONSE CATEGORY

Experiment and responsecateogry

Kind of sentence*

NN H NI IN WN WI

24 pagesSame formDifferent formNew

160 pagesSame formDifferent formNew

Kolers (197Sa)Same formDifferent formNew

a NN = normal orientation in both decksrecognize deck ; IN = inverted in read deck,WI = new in recognize deck and inverted.

.54

.14

.32

.49

.23

.28

.49

.18

.33

u II =normal

.77

.21

.01

.55

.26

.20

.77

.20

.03

inverted orientation inin recognize deck; WN

.08

.55

.37

.17

.41

.42

.14

.54

.32

both

.21

.75

.05

020296

.19 .05

.56 .04

.25 .91

.08 .03

.89 .10

.04 .87

decks; NI = normal in= new in recognize deck and

read deck,in normal

.03

.05

.92

.05

.02

.93

.07

.10

.83

inverted irorientation

tion of the content of a sentence contingent onrecognition of its typography.

The fourth level of analysis examined onlythose sentences that the subjects recognized asold. The NN and II sentences in the same formpile were hits, and the IN and NI sentences inthose piles were the corresponding false alarms.Only two values of d' are available for this com-putation, which is called d' (old) : I. designatessentences initially in inverted orientation (II andIN) and N. is for sentences initially in normalorientation (NN and NI). This measure describesrecognition of sentences primarily on the basis oftheir pictorial or typographic features, for it isconditionalized on correct recognition of the sen-tences as statements.

The four analyses span the range from a diffusediscrimination of old from new, d' (all) ; throughdiscrimination of the sentences as statements seenbefore, d' (sem) ; through memory for a sentencein respect to its typography, d' (new) ; to memorylargely in terms only of typographic features,d' (old). These last three values of d' were sub-jected to separate analyses of variance, typicallya Sentence Pairs X Subjects repeated measuresanalysis for each d'. For d' (sem) and d' (new),four pairs of old sentences entered into the anal-ysis; for d' (old), only two pairs entered.

Results

Table 2 displays the averaged results forthree groups of subjects on the sortingtests: the 12 subjects who were practicedwith 24 pages of text, the 8 subjects prac-ticed with 160 pages, and, for comparison,the 12 subjects of Experiment 1 from Kolers

(197Sa), who had only a few lines of practiceat reading inverted typography. The tableshows the kinds of sentence sorted and thecategories into which they were sorted.

Two features are especially notable in thedata for the subj ects who were first practicedwith 24 pages of text. One is the propor-tion of old sentences improperly categorizedas new. About one third of those in normalorientation in the read deck were so classi-fied when they reappeared in the recognizedeck (.32 and .37 for NN and NI, respec-tively), but only a small percentage of thosethat had appeared inverted in the read deckwere so classified (.01 and .05 for II andIN, respectively). This difference showsthat sentences initially in inverted orienta-tion in the read deck were more likely thanthe others to be correctly recognized as old.The second notable feature is the differencebetween NN and II in the same form cate-gory and between NI and IN in the differ-ent form category: .54 and .77 in the firstcomparison, .55 and .75 in the second. Thedifferences show that sentences initially ininverted orientation were the more likely tobe placed in the correct old pile.

Similar results were obtained from the 12subjects in Kolers (1975a) who classifiedsentences after only a few lines of practiceat reading inverted typography. Their val-

CONSEQUENCES OF AUTOMATIZED ENCODING 695

TABLE 3VALUES OF d' IN Two EXPERIMENTS

Experiment andmeasure

Kind of sentence"

NN II NI IN SEDM'

24 pages

d' (sem)d' (new)d' (old)

160 pages

d' (sem)d' (new)d1 (old)

2.231.991.81°

2.181.641.23°

3.492.762.24d

2.S91.79.97d

1.911.81

1.921.54

3.492.67

2.381.86

.16

.24

.22

.27

.26

.18

a NN = normal orientation in both decks; II = inverted orientation in both decks; NIrecognize deck; IN = inverted in read deck, normal in recognise deck.b Standard error of the difference between means for rows.0 Values for sentences initially in normal orientation (NN and NI).d Values for sentences initially in inverted orientation (II and IN).

' normal in read deck, inverted in

ues for same form hits (.49 and .77) anddifferent form hits (.54 and .89), and thevalues for misses (old sentences classifiedas new, .33 and .32, .03 and .04) all cameclose to those obtained from subjects prac-ticed with 24 pages of text. But amongsubjects practiced with 160 pages, the out-come was quite different. Among thosesubjects the differences between NN and IIin the same form category (.49 and .55) andbetween NI and IN in the different formcategory (.41 and .56) were substantiallyless than for the other two groups of sub-jects. In addition, the proportion of sen-tences initially in inverted orientation (IIand IN) that were improperly classified asnew increased more than fivefold to .20 and.25 respectively, whereas the proportion ofNN and NI sentences erroneously classifiedas new was about the same as in the othergroups, .28 and .42, respectively. This ap-parent loss of differentiation between nor-mally oriented and inverted sentences wasconfirmed by analysis of variance on the d'values derived from the data that were aver-aged for Table 2; these are summarized inTable 3.

The three rows of each section of Table 3show the three kinds of d' that were evalu-ated, each with a separate analysis of vari-ance : d' (sem), d' (new), and d' (old). Theseare, respectively, measures of a semanticcomponent independent of typography, a se-mantic component contingent on recognition

of typography, and a pictorial typographiccomponent fairly free of the semantic com-ponent. The overall discrimination of oldfrom new sentences by the subjects whowere first practiced with 24 pages of in-verted text ranged from .95 hits and .02false alarms, d' (all) = 3.73, to .67 hits and .07false alarms, tf (all) = 1.89 (average d' (all)= 2.60 [not shown]). Analysis of variance ofthe various levels displayed in Table 3yielded outcomes as follows. Analysis oftf (sem) yielded F(3, 33) = 55.74, MS* =.148, for the difference between sentencepairs; analysis of d' (new) yielded F(3, 33)= 8.06, MSe = .338, for the difference be-tween pairs, and analysis of d' (old) yieldedF(l, 11) =3.76, MSe= .294, for the dif-ference between I. and N.. The F values ford' (sem) and d' (new) are both significantbelow the .01 level, but the F value ford' (old) exceeds even .05. Thus, subjectswere well able to tell apart sentences theyhad read before from those they had not(old versus new), and they recognized moresentences that had initially appeared in in-verted typography than sentences initially innormal typography. However, they did notmemorize the typography in any iconic way.

The corresponding analysis for subjectspracticed with 160 pages of text yielded dif-ferent results. The overall discriminationof old from new ranged from .86 hits and.02 false alarms, d' (all) = 3.16, to .77 hitsand .39 false alarms, d' (all) = 1.03 (aver-

696 PAUL A. KOLERS

age d' (all) =2.20 [not shown]). How-ever, analysis of variance of d' (sem)yielded F(3, 21) =2.16, MSe = .301, forthe difference between sentence pairs at thesemantic level, analysis of d' (new) yieldedF(3, 21) < 1.00 for the difference contin-gent on recognition of typography, and F(l,7) = 2.02, MSe = .134 for the pictorial dis-crimination evaluated as d' (old). In noneof these three tests did the significance levelreach .05. Thus, subjects were still able todistinguish sentences they had read beforefrom those they had not (old versus new),but they recognized fewer old sentenceswhose typography was initially inverted.The increase in reading skill consequent onextended practice at reading inverted typog-raphy sharply reduced the influence of typo-graphic inversion on performance, and, as aconsequence, reduced memory for invertedsentences.

GENERAL DISCUSSION

Two kinds of data have been obtained.One set describes the speed with which acomplex pattern-analyzing skill was ac-quired. The second set describes the effectof that skill on recognizing sentences. Toreview the data, skill at reading a difficulttypographic transformation was acquired ata regular rate, expressed by the logarithmof time to read plotted as a function of thelogarithm of the quantity of practice; this issimilar to previous results (Kolers et al.,1965; Kolers & Perkins, 1975). In addi-tion to altering the speed of reading, prac-tice also altered the accuracy of recognitionof what had been read: Extended practiceat reading geometrically transformed textreduced its advantage to memory. Thepoints requiring discussion are the charac-teristics of the perceptual learning, and theoperations that mediated the loss of memora-bility. These will be described and put intoa theoretical framework, and this theory willbe contrasted with some others that are rele-vant to this task.

Pattern Analytic Aspect of Literacy

The marks read were endowed with mean-ing in normal orientation, but were disguised

by the typographic transformation; thelearning required was to see through orcompensate for the disguise. Particular pat-tern-analyzing operations were brought tobear upon the problem; two components in-volved are mastering rotation, and masteringa change in letter order (Kolers & Perkins,1975). Other operations are also present.Understanding the role of pattern analysisin the present task can be aided by consider-ing the effect of extended practice in readinginverted text, and by comparing performanceafter 24 pages of practice and after 160pages. Consider two hypotheses to accountfor the differences.

One hypothesis would hold that all of thecognitive activities present in initial readingwere also present in practiced reading, butwere carried out more quickly and neatly.On this view the change in reading time wasdue primarily to a change in the speed withwhich the component encoding operationswere carried out. A second hypothesis wouldhold that the practiced reading was differentin its constituents from the unpracticed inthat some components present initially hadfallen away or been discarded, and otherswere modified. On this second view, thechange in reading time indexes a change inthe composition of the constituent opera-tions. The first hypothesis is discussedlater; the following section expands andillustrates this second point of view.

Three Kinds of Performance

When first faced with the difficult task ofreading inverted text, the otherwise literatereader engages in visual exploration, prob-lem solving, geometric analysis, and othertactics to penetrate the disguise that typo-graphic inversion imposes on text. Thesuccessful solution of the problem requiresnot a single insight regarding the geometricrelation of inverted to normal text but theexercise of skills that encode the samples.(If the problem created by transformed textwere of the classic kind, verbal realizationof the nature of the transformation wouldbe sufficient for successful reading. Buteven telling the subject of that relation rarelyaids performance.) With repeated tries at

CONSEQUENCES OF AUTOMATIZED ENCODING 697

the typography, the reader rapidly mastersits intricacies (Figure 1). The proceduresand routines that exploration and problemsolving first revealed as the way to analyzethe texts become with practice an institution-alized, routinized way of coping with them.The problem solving gives way gradually tomastery, when performance is described asskilled.

Skilled procedures, in contrast to the un-skilled, have little problem solving or ex-ploration about them; they usually run offsmoothly, require only a little monitoring orcontrol, and typically are resistant to accu-rate, introspective description. The under-lying procedures have lost the excesses, re-dundancies, and irrelevancies that markedthe early practice. The skilled, automatizedprocedure is therefore not the unskilled runoff more rapidly; it is constituted differently,more efficiently and compactly. On thisview, extended practice enables the pattern-recognition system to select a few relevantproperties from a complex sample, and withthose analyses it establishes the correspond-ing perceptual representation.

The difference between exploration orproblem solving and routinized procedurescan be brought out in the explanations com-paring performance after 24 pages of prac-tice and after 160 pages. After 24 pagesof practice, reading time was reduced toabout one fourth of its initial duration, butit was still about three times longer thanreading time for normal text. After thislimited practice, according to the presenttheory, the reader's performance was stilllargely dominated by the same activities toread inverted text as initially; the analyticoperations were more efficient, but thegreater number of them were still present asat the beginning. After 160 pages of prac-tice, however, greater changes had occurred.Performance was more skilled; it was notonly more rapid, it was also organized dif-ferently, for many procedures that wereirrelevant to the main task of encoding hadbeen dropped. After 24 pages of practice,on this analysis, the reader read invertedand normal text in substantially differentways, but after 160 pages of practice, he

read the two samples in ways that were moresimilar. The regularity of the curves ofFigure 1 suggests that the acquisition ofskill went forward by a slow exchange ofnewer for older routines.

When procedures become highly skilledand automatized, they can be applied in ortransferred to different contexts; we speakthen of knowledge. Consideration of suchrecombinations of skilled performance willnot be undertaken here, however, except tonote the following. The data used in sup-port of some arguments for immediacy anddirectness of visual perception (e.g., Gibson,1966; Michotte, 1963) may be better ac-counted for as due to well articulated, auto-matized procedures created by familiarity ofwhat were once visual puzzles and problemsthat required analysis. In light of the speedwith which skill was attained in the presenttask—160 pages of practice at inverted textbrought readers close to the speed attainedafter thousands of pages of practice withnormal text—one may wonder how littlepractice a child needs to acquire considerableskill at visual recognition.

On this analysis, unskilled reading of in-verted text is carried out by means differentin principle from those marking skilled read-ing. The difference is this: Extensive anal-ysis of a stimulus is required for its recog-nition at early stages of practice; with re-peated encounters the pattern-recognitionsystem builds up a catalog of proceduresused in the encoding, so that after some suf-ficient practice, a subset of features of thesample is enough to actualize a recognitiveexperience of the text. Skill, therefore, notonly enhances and organizes the necessaryfeature analysis but also liberalizes featureselection, allowing many different subsets offeatures to trigger the recognitive reactionrequired for rapid reading. Depth of under-standing can, as a consequence, be associatedwith less analysis of the stimulus displayrather than more.

In sum, the view here is that as readerslearn to read inverted text, they becomemore selective in sampling features of thetarget for analysis, that is, they ignore ir-relevancies and redundancies in preference

698 PAUL A. KOLERS

to those features that distinguish the targetfrom other samples, and they improve theprocedures and articulate them more neatly.Hence, skilled performance differs from un-skilled performance in the composition andorganization of components. The transitionfrom unskilled to skilled performance andthe further transition to knowledge are ac-companied by a change in the subjectiverepresentation of the stimulus.

Effect on Memory

It has been proposed that recognition isthe reinstitution of actions and analysesundertaken earlier. A person recognizes atarget by recognizing his analysis of it. Theless skilled his processing of a sample, theless able the reader is to select the contin-gent from the constitutive and the significantfrom the irrelevant. Consequently, the moreanalyses he carries out, the more detail heencodes. The more encoding the target re-quires for its initial perception, the moreopportunity the target presents for subse-quent recognition. Typography usually is ir-relevant to the denotative aspect of text, butif a reader is not skilled at ignoring its ir-relevancies to attend primarily to the mes-sage it embodies, he will encode many of itssuperficial features, thereby enhancing op-portunities for subsequent recognition. Withthe onset of routinized procedures for en-coding typography, the words and sentencestend to be processed more in terms of theircategorial features and less as individuals.

We can see how this applies in the presentcase. After 24 pages of practice the readerswere still selecting, organizing, and articu-lating the pattern-analyzing operations, andthey encoded more than the semantic fea-tures of the sentences. As a consequence,memory for inverted sentences was superiorto memory for sentences in normal typog-raphy. After 160 pages of practice the pat-tern-analyzing operations had become moreautomatized and fewer analyses were pres-ent to distinguish inverted texts from normaltexts in memory. Consequently, perform-ance on the two typographies approachedequivalence. Less skill leads, to more en-coding of irrelevancies, hence greater oppor-

tunity for subsequent recognition; more skillimplies less analysis and a correspondingdiminution in discrimination. In fact, stereo-typing is a common consequence and a re-current danger in perceiving familiar stimulijust because they are perceived in more cate-gorial terms rather than as individuals. InMulcaster's words, "familiaritie and ac-quaintance will cause facilitie," but analysisis directed at strangeness and disparity.

Contrast with Alternatives

The explanation offered here is differentfrom most currently popular accounts of rec-ognition memory. Brief allusion to three ofthem will highlight aspects of the presentproposal. One alternative is the serial anal-ysis or stage-wise decomposition sort of the-ory. In those schemes various features areextracted from a stimulus through serialstages of analysis, with the graphemic theearliest stage and the semantic the last (seeCraik & Lockhart, 1972, for reviews). Thenotion in the present work, in contrast, isthat stimuli are not all put through the sameprogram of analysis. Quite to the contrary,the more familiar a stimulus, the fewer theencoding operations directed at it, the fewerthe features selected for analysis (otherthings remaining equal), and the more read-ily it is seen in terms of practiced skills.

There are at least two ways that selectioncould be exercised: (a) by contextual orother background information extrinsic tothe target operating in support of a difficultanalysis (Kolers, 1974) or (b) by the ac-tion of well-practiced and automatized fea-ture analyzing procedures "tuned" to par-ticular displays. In the first case, semanti-cally dominated information would be pres-ent at the beginning to aid or even to guidethe pattern analysis. This sort of supportcharacterizes even machine recognition ofcharacters in which context limits possibili-ties and samples are tested in a hypothesis-checking procedure. (In some sentence,context may suggest that the next word islikely to be a personal pronoun in the nomi-native case. Relatively little feature analysisis then required of the reader to tell he fromshe, for example.) In the second case, the

CONSEQUENCES OF AUTOMATIZED ENCODING 699

visual system would become sensitized or"tuned" to certain patterns and would per-form its analysis on a fairly large unit, suchas a syllable, word, or even phrase, ratherthan on a letter or syllable as in the earlystages of practice. Frequently occurringwords such as and and the, to take two neu-tral examples, are unlikely to need muchanalysis by a skilled reader. Such practiced,automatized analyzers would of course gofar toward achieving "direct" interpretationof the visual symbol (Kolers, 1970), "wholeword" recognition that is sometimes de-scribed as "direct access to memory"(Meyer, Schvaneveldt, & Ruddy, 1974).

An additional consideration is the effectof expertise. A particular brush stroke,curvature of a line, or seam of a casting;reflectance, shade, or crackling of a varnish;choice of a word or its syntactic embed-ding—let the expert tell one work from an-other, one maker from another, often at aglance. These are among the most trivial,superficial features of a work: the varnishin a Vermeer compared with the paintingitself (Coremans, 1949), the typography ofa Shakespeare folio compared with the sen-tences it embodies (Friedman & Friedman,1957). However, their perception can be ofthe utmost significance to interpretation. In-deed, despite their superficial nature theycan even be the message. Thus, these fea-tures can hardly be considered irrelevant,nor can the investment in their study be saidto be less or less worthwhile than the invest-ment in the study of the semantic content ofthe material. The ability of semantic infor-mation to affect encoding of the graphemes,the aggregation of graphemic elements intolarger units, and the fact that different fea-tures of an object may vary in significancefor a person, according to the task he is per-forming and his background with respect toit, all seem to be events that are incompati-ble with or missed by a notion of rigidlyprogrammed or preprogrammed stages ofanalysis.

They seem to be missed, too, by an in-sistence that production always accompanyperception, as in analysis-by-synthesis (Mac-Kay, 1951; Stevens & Halle, 1967). When

the perceiver is less than wholly skilled witha particular stimulus, production may bepresent in many aspects of perception; itmay • not be needed for all aspects (Kolers,1966). For some kinds of reading, sub-vocalized speech might be the productionmediating the perception, but this silentspeech often retards rather than enhancesreading (Edfeldt, 1960), and little sign ofsubvocal speech is found m highly skilledreading (Smirnov, 1973). Moreover, it isnot at all clear what the production wouldbe for the visual pattern-analyzing compo-nent'of reading, particularly at the advancedlevel; A weaker notion of the productiveaspect of perception can be formulated interms of motor commands or implicit speechacts; this view also assumes that recogni-tion is not automatized but is always createdanew. One consequence of skill may be tofree perception from continued dependenceon production. Perceiving in this viewwould still be a generative process, but onebased on only a limited sampling of thestimulus array. The notion of skill can playa useful role in the enterprise of formulatinga more adequate generative theory of per-ception than analysis by synthesis.

The third point concerns automatization,and the discussion of the hypothesis that wasearlier postponed. The present view is inmarked contrast with that developed re-cently by LaBerge and Samuels (1974). Intheir theory, the major difference betweenunskilled and skilled (automatized) proce-dures is the presence of attention. The un-skilled action is marked by routines executedundej- conscious control; the automatized actis composed of the same routines, but car-ried Out more rapidly and without attention.On the present view, in contrast, the well-practiced skill is thought to be composed dif-ferently, not only by loss of redundant andirrele|vant procedures present in the un-skilled act, but also by a greater reliance onstored information. Skilled processing onthis view is thus not made up of the sameactions as unskilled processing, executedmore rapidly and less attentively; skilledprocessing is a more selective and directedanalysis.

700 PAUL A. KOLERS

Consciousness and Recognition

The analytical operations that yield recog-nition are not usually aspects of consciousjudgment; rather, they are actions of thevisual system engaged in solving a task,whose outcome is sometimes a conscious ex-perience. On the present view, to resort toconscious analysis of features to encode orretrieve an event indexes a failure of skilledprocessing; typically, one resorts to con-scious supplementation as an aid to problemsolving only when the well-inculcated, au-tomatized skills fail to operate properly.Analysis at the conscious level is not the or-dinary but the extraordinary procedure.

In the theory proposed here, conscious se-lection and evaluation are not required formemory. There is no deposit of informa-tion in some memory bank or store that ismatched or referred to by a later encounter.Rather, the nervous system in its encounterswith stimuli acquires and uses skills in en-coding them; it does so by engaging in a"dialogue" with the stimuli of such a kindthat repeated encounters modify the encod-ing operations. Memory then is not tracesthat are matched to a stimulus (or viceversa) but procedures, operations, ways ofencoding the stimulus that are used, andthese change as a function of encounterswith the stimulus.

Substance and Procedure

Relating recognition to skilled analysisrather than to conscious content lets us seeagain the profit in ascertaining an influenceof procedure on performances often assignedto propositions or statements. Knowinghow to encode a sentence can be sufficient toaccommodate the knowing that the state-ment or proposition expresses. It mightprove equally useful to analyze other areasof knowing that are frequently described interms of semantic categories, semantic re-lations, semantic networks, and the like.Events taken as instances of semantic skillsand attributed to a semantic memory mightyield to an analysis that sought the transferacross tasks or contexts of encoding opera-tions—procedural knowledge acquired in onecontext and applied in another. The com-

ponents of the skills and the limits of theirtransfer then become the subject matter ofinquiry into cognitive processes.

In much contemporary theorizing, con-sciousness is given an exceptional status, andtheories of memory are often only theoriesof memory for conscious contents of mind,or verbal theories of semantic relations.Whereas consciousness clearly is character-ized by unique properties and conscious ex-periences can be recalled, consciousness itselfis only a part of cognition. The theoryproposed here supposes that what emergesin consciousness is the result of many othercognitive operations, and these, rather thanconsciousness, are the basis of recognition.

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'. (Received November 21, 1974; revisionreceived February 17, 1975)