The role of relation between stimulus exhibition duration and psychometric reaction time in lexical decision tasks

The experiment proposes to identify the minimum required time of exposure to generate decoding and meaning at visual lexical items and identify the relation between type of stimulus, reaction times and stimulus exhibition duration. A group of 50 persons was tested at a lexical decision task using lists of intermixed word, pseudoword, non-words and non-letters string of symbols and it was presume that different lenght, novelty of stimuli and duration of exposure are factors which can affect decision reaction times. Results demonstrated that word decoding times was faster and need shorter exposure duration to be decoded than for non-word, pseudowords, and strings of symbols. The minimum exposure duration of stimuli allowed getting at least 40% of true responses have a progressive increases from words to pseudowords, non-words to non-graphemic symbols. The relation between exposure duration and reaction time shows highest performance in RTs around 200 ms at exposure duration more than 100 ms. Less than 100 ms, the reaction time latency increased exponentially.