Further explorations of perceptual speed abilities in the context of assessment methods, cognitive abilities, and individual differences during skill acquisition.

Measures of perceptual speed ability have been shown to be an important part of assessment batteries for predicting performance on tasks and jobs that require a high level of speed and accuracy. However, traditional measures of perceptual speed ability sometimes have limited cost-effectiveness because of the requirements for administration and scoring of paper-and-pencil tests. There have also been concerns about the validity of previous computer approaches to administering perceptual speed tests (e.g., see Mead & Drasgow, 1993). The authors developed two sets of computerized perceptual speed tests, with touch-sensitive monitors, that were designed to parallel several paper-and-pencil tests. The reliability and validity of the tests were explored across three empirical studies (N = 167, 160, and 117, respectively). The final study included two criterion tasks with 4.67 and 10 hours of time-on-task practice, respectively. Results indicated that these new measures provide both high levels of reliability and substantial validity for performance on the two skill-learning tasks. Implications for research and application for computerized perceptual speed tests are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Intertrial effects of immediate self-committal in a continuous social influence situation.

A perceptual task consisting of the judgment of dot numerosity on tachistoscopically presented slides was presented to Ss. Present in the experimental room as each S was being tested was a "role-player" who also made a judgment. In one group the "role-player's" judgment preceded the S's judgment; in another, it followed the S's judgment; and in a third group, the S was required to judge the stimulus both before and after the "role-player." The results show that "once an S has expressed a judgment of a stimulus, he is generally reluctant to change his response to any great degree. The S may still be heavily influenced in the situation, however, the effects of which are reflected in subsequent committal responses." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Perceptual recognition as a function of anxiety, motivation, and the testing situation.

The hypothesis was made that degree of anxiety and motivation would influence S's performance on tasks measuring skill in discovering objects embedded in a stimulus field, particularly as the situation was structured to be stressful or not. Ss low in anxiety and high in motivation performed significantly better than Ss high in anxiety but with low motivation. In the nonstressful situation, Ss low in anxiety and motivation performed significantly poorer than their counterparts. It is recommended, therefore, that situational task variables be considered as crucial factors in analysing behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Levels of perceptual organization and cognition: Conflicting evidence.

Low relations generally have been found between performance on perceptual and cognitive tasks. This experiment was designed to test the high relation reported by Krech & Calvin (see 28: 2250) between the ability to organize a group of dots into an articulated pattern and scores on the vocabulary section of the Wechsler Bellevue. The Krech measure yielded a higher relation than other perceptual measures to verbal test performance, although lower than that obtained by Krech & Calvin. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Suggestibility in children as a function of chronological age.

4 measures of visual perceptual suggestibility were obtained on a sample of 290 school children in Grades 1-12. Suggestibility was found to decrease with increasing chronological age. The relationship was significant and curvilinear (p = .001). In order of influence on the children the 4 measures of suggestion could be ranked as follows: prestige suggestion with ambiguous stimuli; conformity suggestion with ambiguous stimuli; prestige suggestion with unambiguous stimuli; baseline or selfsuggestion (p = .001). No sex differences were found. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Personality through perception.

Reviews the book "Personality through perception," by H. Witkin, H. B. Lewis, M. Hertzman, K. Machover, P. B. Meissner, & S. Wapner (see record 1954-08566-000). The promise held out in the title of this book has not been fulfilled. If the study of perception is, indeed, the royal road to the understanding of personality, this road is still beset with many dangers for the unwary or overenthusiastic investigator: analysis by metaphor, far-fetched analogies, circular reasoning, ad hoc and post hoc arguments. In a peculiarly negative sense, this book makes an important contribution: it brings out in bold relief the methodological and theoretical weaknesses of the intemperate "clinicizing" of behavior. The evidence offered by the authors is doubtful and the logic of inference is often faulty and forced. The major purpose of the book is to relate individual differences in perceptual functioning to significant dimensions of personality. The basic research hypothesis is that variations in the mode of perception are related to central traits of personality. The perceptual responses of the individual reflect these central traits just as does his behavior in other situations. The perceptual function chosen for investigation is space orientation, as measured by the perception of the upright. The final conclusions concerning the relationship between perceptual performance and personality are these. Those who depend primarily on the visual field "tend to be characterized by passivity in dealing with the environment; by unfamiliarity with and fear of their own impulses, together with poor control over them; by lack of self-esteem; and by the possession of a relatively primitive undifferentiated body image" (p. 469). So-called analytic perceivers are characterized by the opposites of these traits. And women show a high degree of dependence on the visual field because both their anatomy and the culture in which they live prescribe a passive dependent role for them! As we have tried to show, the conclusions are not warranted by the evidence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of different conditions of acceptance upon conformity to group norms.

"In experimental groups of Ss, 2 different norms were developed: one concerning a social value judgment; the other, a simple perceptual judgment. The Ss were experimentally made to feel different degrees of being accepted by the other members and were then given opportunities and incentives to deviate from the norms. Subsequent conformity, participation, and attitudes toward the group were studied in relation to the different conditions of acceptance. The results point to 2 contrasting patterns of conformity evolved by different conditions of acceptance. The first appears to consist of a high degree of genuine adherence to the norms… . The second pattern is marked by high conformity only under public conditions." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effect of alcohol on perceptual field dependence.

The stability of perceptual field dependence, as determined from rod-and-frame test (RFT) performance, when alcohol is ingested by nonalcoholic Ss was investigated. Ss randomly assigned to the experimental (Alcohol) and the control (No Alcohol) groups were found not to differ significantly on pretest RFT scores. A significant increase in perceptual field dependence occurred on the posttest for the Alcohol group, while the No Alcohol group showed no significant change. The difference between the change scores for the 2 groups was significant at p     

The influence of stress on the perception of incongruity.

The results of two experiments "support the hypothesis that psychological stress results in (a) premature closure and (b) a tendency to adhere to expectancies (prerecognition hypothesis) in ambiguous task situations. From these two sets of data it is inferred that stress or anxiety results in cognitive and perceptual processes that tend to preserve a familiar perceptual and behavioral field for the individual." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Intact perceptual and conceptual priming in temporal lobe epilepsy: Neuroanatomical and methodological implications.

Explicit memory appears to be supported by medical temporal lobe structures, whereas separate neocortical regions may mediate perceptual and conceptual implicit memory. Children and adults with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) and matched controls were administered experimental verbal memory tests. Performance on implicit tests--word identification and word generation--was contrasted with explicit recognition and recall. Encoding conditions emphasized either conceptual or perceptual aspects of study words and were crossed with presentation modality. The priming performance of participants with TLE did not differ from controls, but participants with TLE did show deficits on recognition and recall measures. Thus, intact left temporal cortex does not appear to be necessary for normal implicit memory performance, even when conceptual processing is emphasized at study or test. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sources of reports of visual and auditory sensations in perceptual-isolation experiments.

The review analyzes the experiments on perceptual isolation with special reference to the phenomena of reported visual and auditory sensations. Variables analyzed include: methods of confinement and restriction, conditions of illumination, duration of isolation, set, instructions and suggestions, reporting or verbalization instructions, sleep, S populations, prior knowledge and expectations, intelligence and personality characteristics of Ss, stress response, and methods of obtaining reported visual and auditory sensations. The relevance of some of the findings to physiological, psychoanalytic, cognitive, and social psychological theories of perceptual isolation are discussed. Variables which seem important in the phenomena discussed are set, verbalization instructions, S's alertness, and E's methods of obtaining responses. (2 p. ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A correlational analysis of skill specificity: Learning, abilities, and individual differences.

Skill specificity, the notion that task performance is based on unique underlying information-processing components at skilled levels of performance, is examined from the perspective of the ability determinants of individual differences in task performance during skill acquisition. The current investigation uses a dynamic ability-skill theoretical perspective to evaluate how individual differences in procedural learning for a complex criterion task relate to learning of procedures for other more basic tasks such as choice and simple reaction time (RT). An experiment with 86 college students was performed using a simulated Air Traffic Controller (ATC) task for assessment of procedural learning, along with practice on several perceptual speed measures and assessment of reference abilities. When Ss are allowed to practice tests of perceptual speed and psychomotor ability, some measures increase in their power to predict skilled performance on the complex ATC criterion task, a direct disconfirmation of the skill-specificity thesis. Discussion is devoted to the use of individual-differences approaches to address general transfer and skill specificity issues. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Perceptual processes in matching and recognition of complex pictures.

The role of perceptual feature sampling in speeded matching and recognition was explored in 4 experiments. Experiments 1-3 involved a perceptual matching task with pictures of various objects and scenes. In Experiments 2 and 3, same-different judgments were given under time pressure. The main objective of the matching task was to obtain measures of the perceptual processing rates of different object features. Experiment 4 was an old-new recognition experiment, in which the same stimuli as those in the matching task were used. Response signals were used to limit processing time in the recognition task. The results demonstrated that it is possible to predict speeded recognition performance from performance in perceptual matching. A simple stochastic feature-sampling model provides a unified account of the data from the 4 experiments. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Midazolam amnesia and conceptual processing in implicit memory.

Prominent theories of implicit memory (D. Schacter, B. Church, & J. Treadwell, 1994) emphasize the dominant role of perceptual processing in mediating priming on perceptual implicit memory tests. Examinations of the effects of conceptual processing on perceptual implicit memory tests have produced ambiguous results. Although a number of investigations (e.g., J. Toth & R. Hunt, 1990) have demonstrated that variations in conceptual processing affect priming on perceptual implicit memory tests, these effects may arise because of the contaminating effects of explicit memory. The current experiment examined this controversy using midazolam, a benzodiazepine that produces a dense, albeit temporary, anterograde amnesia when injected prior to study. The experiment examined whether the effects of generation found on the implicit memory test of perceptual identification were affected by a midazolam injection prior to study. Results demonstrated that midazolam substantially diminished generation effects in free and cued recall, as well as overall performance on these tests, but had no detectable effect on the generation effect in perceptual identification. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A comparison of three predictors of an individual's memory performance: The individual's feeling of knowing versus the normative feeling of knowing versus base-rate item difficulty.

Compared the memory performance predictions of 168 undergraduates with normative item-difficulty predictions and with normative feeling-of-knowing (FOK) predictions. Ss attempted to recall the answers to general-information questions, made FOK judgments on nonrecalled items, and were subsequently administered a criterion test (relearning, perceptual identification, or 1 of 2 versions of recognition). Results indicate that, for predicting an S's criterion performance, the S's own FOK predictions were intermediate between 2 kinds of normative predictions: Ss' FOK predictions were more accurate than predictions derived from normative FOK ratings but were less accurate than predictions derived from base-rate item difficulty (normative probabilities of correct recall). Subsidiary analyses showed that factors other than unreliability were responsible for the partial inaccuracy of Ss' FOK. Possible ways to improve the accuracy of an individual's FOK predictions are discussed. (32 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The role of perceptual load in object recognition.

Predictions from perceptual load theory (Lavie, 1995, 2005) regarding object recognition across the same or different viewpoints were tested. Results showed that high perceptual load reduces distracter recognition levels despite always presenting distracter objects from the same view. They also showed that the levels of distracter recognition were unaffected by a change in the distracter object view under conditions of low perceptual load. These results were found both with repetition priming measures of distracter recognition and with performance on a surprise recognition memory test. The results support load theory proposals that distracter recognition critically depends on the level of perceptual load. The implications for the role of attention in object recognition theories are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Changes in perceptual, motor and reading test scores in a remedial reading group.

Two matched groups each composed of nine children with reading problems were compared on a number of perceptual, motor, and reading tests. One group was thereafter exposed to a special remedial program. On retest this group showed significant gains in reading as well as in some of the perceptual and motor areas. No similar improvement was detected in the control group denied the remedial treatment. Not all perceptual tests showed a parallel improvement with reading and the implications of this finding are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Antisemitism, judgmental processes, and displacement of hostility.

"The present study was designed to test a theoretical argument used to explain the different results in various investigations of the scapegoat theory of prejudice… . it is suggested that the index of hostility displacement employed by Berkowitz… [see 34: 2746] was more affected by judgmental processes than the indices of fantasy aggression used by… other investigators, and that highly prejudiced people make different kinds of judgments under stress than do people lower in prejudice." 2 groups of high and low feelings of anti-Semitism were placed in stressful and non-stressful, non-ego-involving situations. The results tend to support the hypotheses. Difference in capacity for perceptual discrimination was seen as affecting results rather than conceptual rigidity. From Psyc Abstracts 36:04:4GD10B. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)