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How a hobby can shape cognition: visual word recognition in competitive Scrabble players
Ian S Hargreaves1, Penny M Pexman, Lenka Zdrazilova
1Department of Psychology, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
Memory & Cognition
|August 13, 2011
Summary
Competitive Scrabble players show enhanced visual word recognition, particularly with vertically presented words. Expertise in Scrabble improves cognitive processing, demonstrating how experience shapes the adult word recognition system.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Neuroscience
- Linguistics
Background:
- Competitive Scrabble involves extensive word recognition experience.
- The impact of such expertise on laboratory-based visual word recognition is not well understood.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate if Scrabble expertise is linked to superior performance in a visual word recognition task.
- To explore how experience shapes the adult word recognition system.
Main Methods:
- Utilized a lexical decision task (LDT) with horizontal and vertical word presentation and a concreteness manipulation.
- Compared performance of expert Scrabble players against age-matched nonexpert controls.
- Administered cognitive assessments to differentiate expertise-specific skills.
Main Results:
- Scrabble players and controls differed mainly in Scrabble-specific skills like anagramming.
- Scrabble expertise was associated with improved vertical fluency (processing vertical words).
- Scrabble players exhibited a semantic deemphasis effect (smaller concreteness effects).
Conclusions:
- Visual word recognition is significantly shaped by experience.
- Expertise, such as that gained from competitive Scrabble, can lead to processing efficiencies in adults.
- Specific cognitive advantages can emerge from specialized skill acquisition.
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