Location errors in tachistoscopic recognition: Guesses, probe errors, or spatial confusions?

Examined whether location errors in tachistoscopic visual probe tasks reflect (1) uncertainty about the actual position of items, (2) inappropriate guesses, encouraged by a requirement to respond, or (3) confusion about the position being tested. 46 undergraduates completed probe tasks in which they provided confidence ratings on each trial and tasks that substituted a color cue for a visual pointer or used a double bar probe. Results suggest that location errors on visual probe tasks reflect confusion about the spatial position of target items. Findings are consistent with data questioning the concept of iconic memory and imply that the bar-probe task cannot be used to study precategorical visual memory. (French abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cognition must be computational.

Reviews the book, Computation and Cognition: Toward A Foundation for Cognitive Science by Z. W. Pylyshyn (see record 1986-97211-000). The history of science provides many demonstrations of our intellectual debt to our tools: from Descartes forward, psychological theory has depended on metaphors based on the technology of the day. Computers are the currently exciting technology, and, from that fact alone, one might expect a book with the title Computation and Cognition to invite us to reshape psychological theory in image of the digital computer. That message is not what Pylyshyn has to sell. Instead, he examines computation at a theoretical level and shows that it involves three distinct levels of analysis: a physical, a symbolic, and a semantic level. He argues that to understand mental processes, one needs exactly the same three-level analysis, that is, cognition is computational. In spite of the book's faults, my opinion remains firmly positive: Computation and Cognition is an instant classic. It is a book which deserves to have a major influence on the shape of future work. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Representation and selection of relative position.

Part 1 concerns representation: Pop-out for a target that can be distinguished from the distractors only by the relative position of its components was demonstrated, thereby showing that simple shape information is represented preattentively. Findings are discussed in terms of early- vs late-selection debate and in terms of theories of search and texture segregation. Part 2 concerns selection: Strong learning in a varied-mapping paradigm was demonstrated, and it was shown that preattentive shape information can be used for selection. Finally, an account of the learning, namely the group scale hypothesis, is suggested and a final experiment to test it is presented. Results confirm and extend the emphasis placed by J. Duncan and G. W. Humphreys's (1989) attentional engagement theory on grouping processes in visual search. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Accuracy and order of report in tachistoscopic identification.

Presents a 2-process model which considers both encoding and rehearsal processes in a free-recall tachistoscopic identification task. It is suggested that the transfer of material from iconic storage to verbal short-term memory involves a rapid left-to-right operation (scanning) which proceeds more rapidly when dealing with familiar letter patterns. The scan loads short-term memory by converting the parallel spatial array held in the icon to a sequential one in preparation for response organization within short-term memory. Organization within short-term memory involves a relatively slow and iterative rehearsal loop established in terms of the temporal organization resulting from the scan. An experiment with 32 undergraduates is reported which illustrates some implications of the model. In particular, the experiment shows the separate contribution of scanning and rehearsal to the organization of a sequential response. It also shows that although both mechanisms exploit the structure of familiar letter patterns, they do so independently. (French summary) (27 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The extralist-feature effect: Evidence against item matching in short-term recognition memory.

The authors varied the similarity between negative probes and study items in a short-term item-recognition task. Current models treat similarity as a function of the number of occurrences of the probe's features in the study set, a factor that is often confounded with the number of the probe's features occurring in the study set. Unconfounded comparisons showed that performance reflected only the latter factor, with response time a linear function of the number of probe features in the study set. The effect was obtained for both stimuli with manipulated features (colored shapes) and words. Number of presented features is a global property of the study list, but existing global models calculate familiarity by averaging across item matches and cannot readily accommodate the data. The authors proposed that the probe's features are compared with a global representation of the study set's features. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Modeling lexical decision and word naming as a retrieval process.

Argues that rule-like phenomena in naming and lexical decision reflect the collapsing of information that occurs during retrieval from the lexicon, and that complex patterns in performance reflect the pattern of correlation that exists in the reader's lexicon rather than mapping rules wired into, or learned by, the processing apparatus. By using a lexicon built to scale, it is shown that simple retrieval operations applied to a large corpus of words correctly predict an interaction of word frequency by spelling-to-sound regularity in naming, a frequency main effect in lexical decision, sensitivity to orthographically defined syllable-like structures in lexical decision, and an interaction of number of syllables with word frequency in naming. To illustrate their position, the authors sketch a model called LEX and show that the model can account for several lexical-decision and naming phenomena. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Influence of Grammatical, Local, and Organizational Redundancy on Implicit Learning: An Analysis Using Information Theory.

People behave as if they know the structure of their environment. Because people rarely study that structure explicitly, several theorists have postulated an implicit learning system that abstracts that structure automatically. An alternative view is that people respond to local structure that derives from global structure. Measures are developed that quantify structure in a set of stimuli, in individual stimuli, and in encoded stimuli. The authors apply the measures to examine serial recall for sequences of colors generated using a stationary Markov grammar. They demonstrate that the 3 kinds of redundancy are confounded and show that the memorial advantage for grammatical stimuli reflects participants' use of local expressions of grammatical structure to aid learning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

"Iconic memory," location information, and the bar-probe task: A reply to Chow (1986).

Mewhort, Campbell, Marchetti, and Campbell (1981) argued from an analysis of errors in the bar-probe task that the decreased accuracy associated with a delayed probe reflects loss of location information at a postcategorical level, not loss of precategorical data in "iconic" memory. Chow (1986) argued that the error analysis underlying their conclusions is misconceived and that the loss associated with a delayed probe reflects decay of precategorical item information. His position is based on a bar-probe task in which subjects reported both the location (L) and the identity (I) of the item probed. He treated the conditional probabilities p(I?|?L) and p(L?|?I) as measures of identity and location information, respectively. We show that the conditional scores are not measures of identity and location information and that their pattern across probe delay is quite compatible with the late-selection position. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Response time distributions and the Stroop task: A test of the Cohen, Dunbar, and McClelland (1990) model.

The model by J. D. Cohen et al (1990) was tested for Strooplike interference tasks by studying the shape of the distribution of response latencies produced by Ss and by the model. The model correctly anticipates changes in mean response latency (MRT) across congruent and incongruent conditions. It does not, however, correctly anticipate changes in the shape of the distributions, even though changes in the shape of the distributions underlie the changes in MRT. Thus, the model predicted MRT successfully but for the wrong reason. It is concluded that the model is not an adequate account of Ss' performance in the Stroop task. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Blank characters in tachistoscopic recognition: Space has both a symbolic and a sensory role.

In a free-recall tachistoscopic task, increased letter spacing reduces the advantage of familiar pseudo-words over random letter strings. To explore this phenomenon, 2 ways of introducing "extra" space between letters were compared in 2 experiments involving 69 undergraduates. Using both a partial-report bar-probe task and a free-recall task, letter spacing was increased by (1) spreading normally sized material over a wider visual angle and (2) reducing letter size while holding the retinal position constant. In free recall, the space between letters relative to their height controlled performance by altering the size of the familiarity effect. In the probe task, however, accuracy of report depended on letter size, and the familiarity effect was independent of the size and spacing manipulations. Thus, in free-recall, the space between letters served as a blank character, but in the partial-report task, visual resolution controlled performance. (French abstract) (15 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)