The Development of Automatic and Conscious Components of Contextual Facilitation

SIMPSON, GREG B., and LORSBACH, THOMAS C. The Development of Automatic and Conscious Components of Contextual Facilitation. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1983, 54, 760-772. 2 experiments examined the processes underlying contextual facilitation effects in second, fourth, and sixth graders and adults. In the first, subjects decided whether 2 letters were identical; in the second, they read single words aloud. Stimuli were preceded by related, unrelated, or neutral context. The first experiment varied the amount of time to process the context; the second varied the proportion of stimuli preceded by a related context. In both experiments the patterns of response latencies indicate that, for the youngest children, the facilitation for stimuli presented in a related context was attributable to an automatic activation process. The use of a second component, the conscious allocation of attention, increased with age.