Personal values and visual thresholds in a complex recognition task.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston UniversityThe purpose of the present experiment was to study the relationship between motivation and perception, specifically between visual recognition thresholds of words related to specific areas of personal value. The context of this experiment is provided by those studies in perception which found the evidence for a relationship between positive motivational states of the perceiver such as reward states, needs, etc., and the speed with which the perceiver recognizes motivationally congruent stimuli. Of these studies, those utilizing personal value as the motivational factor have engendered much theoretical and methodological criticism. One such critique proposed to explain the obtained relationship between high personal value and low tachistoscopic visual recognition thresholds for relevant high value words on the basis of the perceiver's familiarity with the stimulus words used. In that experiment it was demonstrated that the value factor was insignificant when common words, as measured by word counts of samples of popular literature, were used. [TRUNCATED