Schvaneveldt

Schvaneveldt is a surname of Dutch origin that appears in North American and other communities with Dutch heritage. In addition to its use as a family name, the term Schvaneveldt is associated with a notable concept in cognitive psychology related to semantic processing.

In psychology, the Schvaneveldt effect refers to findings from experiments on semantic priming conducted in the lexical decision paradigm. In these studies, participants are asked to decide as quickly as possible whether a string of letters forms a real word, often following a preceding prime word. When the prime and target are semantically related, participants tend to respond more rapidly than when the pairs are unrelated. This faster response is interpreted as evidence of spreading activation within a semantic network, whereby activation from the prime word facilitates processing of related concepts and words.

The effect has been widely studied and has influenced theories of how semantic memory is organized and how word recognition operates. It has also shaped experimental methods in psycholinguistics and memory research, contributing to broader discussions about automatic versus controlled processing in language comprehension.

See also semantic priming, lexical decision task, spreading activation.