Effect of familiarity of Multielement matching.

The effect of stimulus familiarity on physical matching was examined in three experiments. In Experiment 1, subjects matched English and Armenian letters. String length varied from one to three items. Familiarity had no effect when two single items were compared, but it had increasingly marked effects with two- and three-item strings. The pattern of same/different responses and serial position effects implicated the comparison process for three-item matches. Experiment 2 varied stimulus onset asynchrony to assess the contribution of familiarity to speeding up encoding and/or to maintaining a representation in memory; only two-item strings were used. Encoding Armenian letters required more time than encoding English, but there was no additional decrement due to holding the representation in memory. In Experiment 3, one group of subject learned names for the Armenian letters and another group practiced drawing the letters. The availability of names did not decrease the familiarity effect. These data suggest that familiarity invariably has a strong effect on the encoding process and influences comparison processes when task requirements are sufficiently demanding.