Position effects in encoding briefly exposed item matrices: evidence for a reading bias or merely a matter of the selection criterion?

Position effects are frequently reported in experiments that investigate the recognition of items from briefly exposed stimulus matrices. A reliable finding is the ability to report items from the first row of the matrix more accurately than from the second row. The present experiments explore whether this position effect depends upon the selection criterion used to indicate the subgroup of items that has to be reported in a given trial. In Experiment 1, German and Chinese participants were presented with language-specific items which had to be selected by column. In Experiment 2, Germans were presented with Latin letters and the selection criterion was letter color. A strong row effect was evident in both experiments although the selection criteria did not prompt a line-by-line grouping of the items. The row effect is seen as a manifestation of top-down processing that is derived from reading habits.