Pitch as a phonemic cue

Three experiments that were designed to determine how pitch information is represented in auditory memory are reported. A same-different reaction time was used in all three experiments. Previous experiments have interpreted the finding of faster “same” responses to acoustically identical pairs than to pairs that are phonemically identical but acoustically distinct as indicating that there is a memory that preserves auditory information. It has been assumed that this can be used to match “same” pairs only if the formant frequencies of the members of the pair are the same. In the first experiment, the size of this matching advantage for pairs with identical formant frequencies was not altered when the members of the pair were on different pitches. This indicates that pitch is represented separately from the formants at the auditory level. The second and third experiments used a bigger pitch difference when the pairs were on a different pitch, which, for one of the stimulus sets, resulted in a change in vowel quality but not in the identity of the consonant. In the other stimulus set, both phonemes of the syllable remained the same when presented on different pitches. The matching advantage was reduced when the stimuli were on different pitches for both stimulus sets. This indicates that a difference in pitch can prevent matching at the auditory level under some circumstances. An additional finding, a reduced residual matching advantage when the syllable changes, indicates that at least a syllable-length representation is held in auditory memory. The results are discussed with respect to how the representation in auditory memory might be used in the perception of speech produced by different speakers.     

Motion as a cue for viewpoint invariance

Natural face and head movements were mapped onto a computer rendered three-dimensional average of 100 laser-scanned heads in order to isolate movement information from spatial cues and nonrigid movements from rigid head movements (Hill & Johnston, 2001). Experiment 1 investigated whether subjects could recognize, from a rotated view, facial motion that had previously been presented at a full-face view using a delayed match to sample experimental paradigm. Experiment 2 compared recognition for views that were either between or outside initially presented views. Experiment 3 compared discrimination at full face, three-quarters, and profile after learning at each of these views. A significant face inversion effect in Experiments 1 and 2 indicated subjects were using face-based information rather than more general motion or temporal cues for optimal performance. In each experiment recognition performance only ever declined with a change in viewpoint between sample and test views when rigid motion was present. Nonrigid, face-based motion appears to be encoded in a viewpoint invariant, object-centred manner, whereas rigid head movement is encoded in a more view specific manner.     

Perceived causality as a cue to temporal distance

The three experiments reported show that judgments of elapsed time between events depend on perceived causal relations between the events. Participants judged pairs of causally related events to occur closer together in time than pairs of causally unrelated events that were separated by the same actual time interval. The causality-time relationship was first demonstrated for time judgments about historical events. Causally related events were judged to be significantly closer together in time than causally unrelated events. In two subsequent experiments, perceived causality was manipulated by providing expert information and by asking the participants themselves to imagine causal relationships between the to-be-judged events. Again, substantial and reliable effects of perceived causality were obtained. Our results suggest that people use strength of perceived causality as a cue to infer temporal distance.     

Remembering can cause inhibition: retrieval-induced inhibition as cue independent process

Previous experiments have mostly relied on recall as a dependent measure to assess whether retrieval of information from memory causes inhibition of related information. This study aimed to measure this inhibition in a more direct way. In Experiment 1, it was shown that repeated retrieval of exemplars from a category resulted in longer recognition latencies to nonretrieved exemplars from that same category, compared with recognition latencies to control exemplars. Experiment 2 obtained the same pattern of results using a lexical decision task. This was the 1st time that retrieval-induced forgetting was demonstrated on an implicit test of memory. To exclude noninhibitory explanations of the data, the exemplars were presented in both experiments without their categories as cues.     

Price as a quality or sacrifice cue: Role of goal orientation

Prior research seems to have neglected the factors that influence consumers to use price information as an indicator of quality or sacrifice. Based on the concept of 'goal looms larger', Study 1 in the present research demonstrated that the extent to which consumers use price information as an indicator of quality or sacrifice is a function of consumer goal (promotion focus vs prevention focus). Study 2 demonstrated that extremeness aversion is a function of consumer goal. The extent of extremeness aversion is significantly greater for prevention-focused consumers than for promotion-focused consumers.     

Separating cue relevance from cue importance within models of judgment and decision making

Many investigations concerned with human decision making have centered their attention on the issues of cue integration and cue importance. Unfortunately, an equally important issue—that of cue relevance—has been either neglected or equated with the importance issue. Two experiments tested the ability of information integration theory (N. H. Anderson, 1981, Foundations of information integration theory, New York: Academic Press) to disentangle cue relevance and cue importance formally as well as empirically. The decision environment was divided into two components: aspects of the information present during a decision (information context) and aspects of the situation surrounding a decision (situation context). It was hypothesized that variations in information context would affect cue importance while changes in situation context would affect cue relevance. Furthermore, it was hypothesized that the weight parameter (w) of information integration theory would reflect the information context manipulations but not situation context manipulations. Results supported previous findings showing the influence of information context on w. As predicted situation context did not affect w; however, it did affect the variability of the responses to a cue's values. The relationship between perceived variability and situation context suggests that the scale dispersion parameter σ of information integration theory may be used as a measure of relevance (K. L. Norman, 1980, Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 25, 289–310).     

Motion parallax as an independent cue for depth perception.

The perspective transformations of the retinal image, produced by either the movement of an observer or the movement of objects in the visual world, were found to produce a reliable, consistent, and unambiguous impression of relative depth in the absence of all other cues to depth and distance. The stimulus displays consisted of computer-generated random-dot patterns that could be transformed by each movement of the observer or the display oscilloscope to simulate the relative movement information produced by a three-dimensional surface. Using a stereoscopic matching task, the second experiment showed that the perceived depth from parallax transformations is in close agreement with the degree of relative image displacement, as well as producing a compelling impression of three-dimensionality not unlike that found with random-dot stereograms.     

Visual analysis of gait as a cue to identity

For humans, the ability to discriminate between, and to identify, others is paramount. The most obvious way this is accomplished is by means of face recognition. However, this is not the only method available. The present article reports on two experiments designed to see whether gait can be used as a reliable cue to identity. Experiment One showed that the human visual system was sophisticated enough to learn to identify six individuals on the basis of their gait signature under conditions of simulated daylight, simulated dusk and point‐light displays. It thus appeared that gait‐related judgements could be made, and furthermore, that these judgements were possible without reliance on shape information. Experiment Two suggested that even under adverse viewing conditions involving a single brief exposure, humans could identify a target from a ‘walking identity parade’ at greater than chance levels. These results emerged regardless of the lighting conditions, and were largely independent of the gender of the target walker. As such, the present results suggest that gait could be used as a reliable means of discriminating between individuals, and the importance of such an identity cue, in conditions in which the face is obscured, are discussed. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Reprocessing as a recognition cue

The use of mental operations as recognition cues was investigated. Two experiments support the hypothesis that processing details are retained in memory and that a re-creation of those processing details can effectively cue recognition. Four subjects performed a mental arithmetic task that emphasized speed and accuracy while discouraging memorization of the numbers. Recognition was cued either by single numbers or by a pair of numbers that, when added, replicated an episode of the original task. Reprocessing an episode was the most effective recognition cue. Of the two single-number cues, the intermediate subtotals were recognized, whereas the numbers that had been physically displayed were not. The study suggests: (1) that the sequence of mental operations is retained in memory, (2) that reprocessing uses this trace to facilitate performance, and (3) that the detection of facilitated reprocessing aids recognition.     

People use the memory for past-test heuristic as an explicit cue for judgments of learning

When people estimate their memory for to-be-learned material over multiple study–test trials, they tend to base their judgments of learning (JOLs) on their test performance for those materials on the previous trial. Their use of this information—known as the memory for past-test (MPT) heuristic—is believed to be responsible for improvements in the relative accuracy (resolution) of people’s JOLs across learning trials. Although participants seem to use past-test information as a major basis for their JOLs, little is known about how learners translate this information into a judgment of learning. Toward this end, in two experiments, we examined whether participants factored past-test performance into their JOLs in either an explicit, theory-based way or an implicit way. To do so, we had one group of participants (learners) study paired associates, make JOLs, and take a test on two study–test trials. Other participants (observers) viewed learners’ protocols and made JOLs for the learners. Presumably, observers could only use theory-based information to make JOLs for the learners, which allowed us to estimate the contribution of explicit and implicit information to learners’ JOLs. Our analyses suggest that all participants factored simple past-test performance into their JOLs in an explicit, theory-based way but that this information made limited contributions to improvements in relative accuracy across trials. In contrast, learners also used other privileged, implicit information about their learning to inform their judgments (that observers had no access to) that allowed them to achieve further improvements in relative accuracy across trials.     

Spectral content as a cue to perceived auditory distance.

Changes in the spectral content of wide-band auditory stimuli have been repeatedly implicated as a possible cue to the distance of a sound source. Few of the previous studies of this factor, however, have considered whether the cue provided by spectral content serves as an absolute or a relative cue. That is, can differences in spectral content indicate systematic differences in distance even on their first presentation to a listener, or must the listener be able to compare sounds with one another in order to perceive some change in their distances? An attempt to answer this question and simultaneously to evaluate the possibly confounding influence of changes in the sound level and/or the loudness of the stimuli are described in this paper. The results indicate that a decrease in high-frequency content (as might physically be produced by passage through a greater amount of air) can lead to increases in perceived auditory distance, but only when compared with similar sounds having a somewhat different high-frequency content, ie spectral information can serve as a relative cue for auditory distance, independent of changes in overall sound level.     

Multiple-landmark piloting in pigeons (Columba livia): landmark configuration as a discriminative cue

Using the landmark-transformation technique, researchers have shown that pigeons (Columba livia) tend to encode a goal location relative to 1 landmark, even when multiple landmarks are in the vicinity of the goal. The current experiments examined pigeons' ability to use configural information from a set of landmarks by making the arrangement of 4 landmarks a discriminative cue to the location of buried seeds. Results showed that pigeons used information from the 3 consistently placed landmarks to search accurately when 1 landmark was displaced. Findings indicate that pigeons are able to search for a goal using information from multiple landmarks instead of just 1 and that landmark use by these birds may be more flexible than previously theorized.     

Domain familiarity as a cue for judgments of learning

Students differ in how much they already know about topics within and across their courses. Few studies, however, have examined the relationship between participants’ levels of knowledge across topics (i.e., their “domain familiarity”) and their learning of information from those topics, their study choices related to those topics, and their subjective self-assessments of their learning about the topics. As such, in two studies we had participants (Study 1, college students; Study 2, Mturk workers) rank their domain familiarity for several to-be-studied domains (e.g., chemistry, history), rate their efficacy and interest in those domains, study and make judgments of learning (JOLs) for facts from each domain, and finally complete a short-answer test over those facts. Participants’ efficacy and interest ratings for the topics were linearly related to their topic rankings, as were their recall of and JOLs for facts from those domains. Although the JOLs were consistently overconfident, they were more overconfident for better-known than for lesser-known topics. Participants’ study times were not related to their topic rankings (Studies 1 and 2), but participants did use domain familiarity to strategically decide which domains to restudy before the test (Study 2). Participants typically chose to restudy their least-familiar topics, but chose to restudy their best-known topic under extremely limited restudy conditions. As a whole, the results suggest that participants effectively use their domain familiarity as a basis for their JOLs and restudy choices, but to some extent overuse this factor to assess their learning, and underuse it to guide initial study.     

Effects of food deprivation upon cue utilization as measured by novelty-incentive

A series of three experiments was done to test the hypothesis that high levels of food deprivation would adversely affect cue utilization from a complex stimulus goal as tested by its novelty-incentive value when that goal was later opposed to food for hungry subjects in a T-maze. It was found that the hunger drive level under which the male rats had originally experienced the complex stimulus goal determined its later incentive value, whether the original experience was in a latent learning type II situation (Experiment I, 20 subjects), a drive-shift situation (Experiment II, 40 subjects), or a free exploration situation (Experiment III, 30 subjects). In each experiment, having first experienced the complex goal under low levels of deprivation significantly decreased the frequency of choices of that goal in a later test relative to the performance of the more deprived animals. The data was interpreted as indicating that utilization of cues, in the sense of input and possibly retention of information, was hindered by the higher levels of deprivation.     

Convergence as a cue to depth

A test that presents conflicting monocular and vergence cues to depth shows that approximately two-thirds of the population can use convergence as a cue to depth. The remaining one-third apparently cannot use this cue. These differences in the role of convergence in depth perception reflect individual differences in the neural mechanisms underlying depth perception.     

Frequent frames as a cue for grammatical categories in child directed speech

This paper introduces the notion of frequent frames, distributional patterns based on co-occurrence patterns of words in sentences, then investigates the usefulness of this information in grammatical categorization. A frame is defined as two jointly occurring words with one word intervening. Qualitative and quantitative results from distributional analyses of six different corpora of child directed speech are presented in two experiments. In the analyses, words that were surrounded by the same frequent frame were categorized together. The results show that frequent frames yield very accurate categories. Furthermore, evidence from behavioral studies suggests that infants and adults are sensitive to frame-like units, and that adults use them to categorize words. This evidence, along with the success of frames in categorizing words, provides support for frames as a basis for the acquisition of grammatical categories.     

Anger as a cue to truthfulness

A fairly robust finding in the deception literature is that lie-tellers show more negative emotion than truth-tellers. Ekman (1985), however, has reasoned that a specific type of negative emotion - anger - is especially difficult to feign and therefore should be more prevalent in truth-tellers who are falsely accused of a transgression than in lie-tellers who are guilty. To our knowledge, Ekman’s prediction has not yet been empirically tested. By comparing the verbal and nonverbal cues associated with truths and lies across a number of lie-eliciting situations, we demonstrate that truth-tellers accused of a wrongdoing do show more anger, both verbally and nonverbally, than lie-tellers accused of the same act, but only in situations where students choose to commit a transgression (or not) and actually believe themselves to be in trouble. Results underlie the importance of taking into consideration the type of lie being told in order to accurately predict deceptive cues.     

The importance of cue familiarity and cue distinctiveness in prospective memory

Abstract

Both retrospective cued-memory tasks and event-based prospective memory tasks require that cue and target information be associated, and that aspects of that association be reinstated for successful remembering. These functional similarities between retrospective memory and prospective memory were the bases for the hypothesis that the familiarity and the distinctiveness of the target event (cue) would influence prospective memory performance. Experiment 1, focusing on target familiarity, found a nominal advantage in prospective memory with unfamiliar target events. Experiment 2 showed a significant benefit for unfamiliar target events, as well as for target events that were distinctive relative to the local context. Additionally, prospective memory performance did not reliably correlate with explicit retrospective memory tasks (recall and recognition), but did correlate with an indirect retrospective memory task (word fragment completion). This pattern suggests and helps specify the general view that prospective memory processes may be similar to those involved in both direct and indirect tests of retrospective memory.     

A slippery directional slope: Individual differences in using slope as a directional cue

Navigators rely on many different types of cues to build representations of large-scale spaces. Sloped terrain is an important cue that has received recent attention in comparative and human spatial research. However, the studies to date have been unable to determine how directional slope information leads to more accurate spatial representations. Moreover, whereas some studies have shown that the inclusion of slope cues improves performance on spatial tasks across participants (Kelly, 2011; Restat, Steck, Mochnatzki, & Mallot, 2004), other research has suggested individual differences in the benefits of slope cues (Chai & Jacobs, 2010; Nardi, Newcombe, & Shipley, 2011). We sought to clarify the role of sloped terrain in improving the representation of large-scale environments. In Experiment 1, participants learned the layout of buildings in one of two desktop virtual environments: either a directionally sloped terrain or a completely flat one. Participants in the sloped environment outperformed those in the flat environment. However, participants used slope information as an additional cue, rather than as a preferred reference direction. In Experiment 2, the two virtual environments were again either flat or sloped, but we increased the complexity of the relations between the slope and the path. In this experiment, better performance in the sloped environment was only seen for participants with good self-reported senses of direction. Taken together, the studies show that slope provides useful information for building environmental representations in simple cases, but that individual differences emerge in more complex situations. We suggest that good and bad navigators use different navigational strategies.     

Recognition is used as one cue among others in judgment and decision making

Three experiments with paired comparisons were conducted to test the non-compensatory character of the recognition heuristic (D. G. Goldstein & G. Gigerenzer, 2002) in judgment and decision making. Recognition and knowledge about the recognized alternative were manipulated. In Experiment 1, participants were presented pairs of animal names where the task was to select the animal with the larger population. In Experiment 2, participants chose the safer 1 out of 2 airlines, and 3 knowledge cues were varied simultaneously. Recognition effects were partly compensated by task-relevant knowledge. The compensatory effects were additive. Decisions were slower when recognition and knowledge were incongruent. In Experiment 3, compensatory effects of knowledge and recognition were found for the city-size task which had originally been used to demonstrate the non-compensatory character of the recognition heuristic. These results suggest that recognition information is not used in an all-or-none fashion but is integrated with other types of knowledge in judgment and decision making.