The study largely relied on the procedures employed in our previous continuous word recognition memory studies (Kayser et al., 1999, 2003, 2007, 2009), substituting those tasks with the current visual paradigm using common words or unknown faces. During the presentation of words or faces (4 blocks each), participants indicated for each item whether it was new (never presented in the series) or old (presented previously) by pressing one of two buttons on a response pad. Words were 320 English nouns selected from the MRC Psycholinguistic database (Coltheart, 1981) used in our prior studies, and faces were 320 black-and-white photographs (160 for each gender) selected from a larger stimulus pool (674 faces) taken from a recent college yearbook. These visual stimuli were arranged in eight separate block sequences (114 trials each, 912 trials total) alternating between word (W) and face (F) sequences (FWWF-WFFW or WFFW-FWWF). Ratings for word frequency (Kucera and Francis, 1967) and concreteness (Paivio et al., 1968) were balanced across word blocks. Likert scale ratings of attractiveness (+3: very attractive or pleasant; −3: very unattractive or unpleasant) and distinctiveness
