| Abstract: | Investigated the effects of complexity on processing objects by testing 3 graduate students and 7 staff members on a 3-dimensional analog of J. Hochberg's (1968) aperture viewing paradigm, the orthogonal slices task developed by J. Metzler and R. N. Shepard (1974), and a sequence matching task. In Exp I, Ss constructed, transformed, and compared mental representations of Shepard-Metzler figures varying in the number of component parts. Findings show that processing time increased with complexity. The results of Exp II show no effects of complexity on processing time when Ss merely judged the equivalence of the patterns used in Exp I presented in sequence. Rather, constructed mental representations appeared to preserve some of the spatial character of the corresponding objects. This conclusion was strengthened by the results of recognition tasks that showed that discrimination of constructed objects from appropriate distractors was better after Ss did the 1st (orthogonal slices) task than after they did the 2nd (sequence matching) task. (25 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
