A Possible Connection between Categorical and Coordinate Spatial Relation Representations

Kosslyn (1987) theorized that the visual system uses two types of spatial relations. Categorical spatial relations represent a range of locations as an equivalence class, whereas coordinate spatial relations represent the precise distance between two objects. Data indicate a left hemisphere (LH) advantage for processing categorical spatial relations and a right hemisphere (RH) advantage for processing coordinate spatial relations. Although generally assumed to be independent processes, this article proposes a possible connection between categorical and coordinate spatial relations. Specifically, categorical spatial relations may be an initial stage in the formation of coordinate spatial relations. Three experiments tested the hypothesis that categorical information would benefit tasks that required coordinate judgments. Experiments 1 and 2 presented categorical information before participants made coordinate judgments and coordinate information before participants made categorical judgments. Categorical information sped the processing of a coordinate task under a range of experimental variables; however, coordinate information did not benefit categorical judgments. Experiment 3 used this priming paradigm to present stimuli in the left or right visual field. Although visual field differences were present in the third experiment, categorical information did not speed the processing of a coordinate task. The lack of priming effects in Experiment 3 may have been due to methodological changes. In general, support is provided that categorical spatial relations may act as an initial step in the formation of more precise distance representations, i.e., coordinate spatial relations.     

A transitive-chain theory of syllogistic reasoning

A new theory of syllogistic reasoning, called the transitive-chain theory, is presented. The transitive-chain theory proposes that information about set relations is represented in memory by pairs of informational components. The theory further proposes that information about set relations is integrated by applying a small set of rules to transitive chains of these set relations. The rules that are applied to these chains are specified in detail. The theory is cast in terms of information-processing models for variants of the syllogistic reasoning task, and then mathematical models that quantify each of these information-processing models are presented. In a series of five experiments, the transitive-chain theory provides a good account of the response-choice data for syllogisms with various types of content, quantifiers, and logical relations (categorical and conditional). The results of these experiments offer tentative answers to four issues in the theory of syllogistic reasoning: (a) representation of premise information; (b) combination of premise information; (c) sources of difficulty in syllogistic reasoning; and (d) generality of the processes used in syllogistic reasoning.     

Relational integration in older adults

Reasoning requires making inferences based on information gleaned from a set of relations. The relational complexity of a problem increases with the number of relations that must be considered simultaneously to make a correct inference. Previous work (Viskontas, Morrison, Holyoak, Hummel, & Knowlton, ) has shown that older adults have difficulty integrating multiple relations during analogical reasoning, especially when required to inhibit irrelevant information. We report two experiments that examined the ability to integrate multiple relations in younger, middle-aged, and older adults performing two other reasoning tasks. These tasks systematically varied relational complexity, and required either inductive reasoning (a version of the Raven's Matrices Task) or transitive inference. Our results show that as people age they have increasing difficulty in solving problems that require them to integrate multiple relations. This difficulty may stem from a decrease in working memory capacity.     

The horizontal and vertical relations in upright faces are transmitted by different spatial frequency ranges

Faces convey distinct types of information: features and their spatial relations, which are differentially vulnerable to inversion. While inversion largely disrupts the processing of vertical spatial relations (e.g. eyes’ height), its effect is moderate for horizontal relations (e.g. interocular distance) and local feature properties. The SF ranges optimally transmitting horizontal and vertical face relations were here investigated to further address their functional role in face perception. Participants matched upright and inverted pairs of faces that differed at the level of local featural properties, horizontal relations in vertical relations. Irrespective of SF, the inversion effect was larger for vertical than horizontal and featural cues. Most interestingly, SF differentially influenced the processing of vertical, horizontal and featural cues in upright faces. Vertical relations were optimally processed in intermediate SF, which are known to carry useful information for face individuation. In contrast, horizontal relations were best conveyed by high SF, which are involved in the processing of local face properties. These findings not only confirm that horizontal and vertical relations play distinct functional roles in face perception, but they also further suggest a unique role of vertical relations in face individuation.     

Children's use of “extra-list” cues to retrieve theme and category episodic information from memory

The ability of second- and fifth-grade children and college adults to use “extra-list” cues to retrieve episodic information from memory was examined in four experiments. The acquisition events were word triplets characterized by category relations (i.e., Rose-Tulip-Lily), theme cooccurrence relations (i.e., Bunny-Jelly Beans-Lily), or no relevant conceptual relation (i.e., Wood-Brick-Lily) among the triplet members, and event classification was ensured by means of an acquisition orienting question. Cued recall for the target (i.e., Lily) was assessed for extra-list Class Name cues (Flower or Easter) in Experiments 1 and 3, and Class Associate cues in Experiments 2 and 4. The classifications concerned superordinate category versus theme cooccurrence relations in Experiments 1 and 2, subordinate versus superordinate category relations in Experiment 3, and prototypical versus nonprototypical associates in Experiment 4. The results showed that effective cue use varied strongly with both the “match” of cue and event class information, and with the associative structure of permanent memory. Probable differences in this structure seem to contribute to both inherent and developmental differences in using cues to retrieve theme or category episodic information.     

Functionality and spatial relations in memory and language

We examined whether the functionality of spatial relations affects the construction and memory of information in situation models. A functional relationship involves the interaction of entities that is implied by either typical use or contextual demands. Previous research has shown that spatial relations are less likely to be encoded during comprehension unless there is extensive prior knowledge, explicit instructions to attend to spatial information, or a clear emphasis on spatial information. If the construction of a situation model is guided by a need to understand the functional structure of a situation, then functional spatial relations should be more likely to be encoded. The results of our study showed that sentences with functional spatial relations were read faster and remembered better in both recall and recognition tests than sentences with nonfunctional spatial relations.     

Poster presentations

We analysed the organisation of semantic network using associative mechanisms between different types of information and studied the progression of the use of these associative relations during development. We aimed to verify the linkage of concepts with the use of semantic associative relations. The goal of this study was to analyse the cognitive ability to use associative relations between various items when describing old and/or new concepts. We examined the performance of 100 subjects between the ages of 4 and 7 years on an experimental task using five associative relations based on verbal encoding. The results showed that children are able to use the five semantic associative relations at age 4, but performance with each of the different associative relations improves at different times during development. Functional and part/whole relations develop at an early age, whereas the superordinate relations develop later. Our study clarified the characteristics of the progression of semantic associations during development as well as the roles that associative relations play in the structure and improvement of the semantic store.     

How well is causal structure inferred from cooccurrence information?

Individual causal relations tend to form parts of larger causal systems. In five experiments the ability of participants to infer the structures of two systems involving five entities from patterns of cooccurrence was investigated. Although the systems were fully deterministic, there were no indirect causal relations, and participants were given guidance on how to infer causal structure from cooccurrence information, low rates of success were observed. Judgements were based more on information about temporal relations, even though no guidance on the use of temporal relation information for causal inference was provided. When no guidance was provided, no participants succeeded in inferring the structure of both systems. The results indicate that temporal relations may be preferred as cues to causal structure over patterns of cooccurrence.     

A left cerebral hemisphere’s superiority in processing spatial-categorical information in a non-verbal semantic format

It has been shown that the left and right cerebral hemispheres (LH and RH) respectively process qualitative or “categorical” spatial relations and metric or “coordinate” spatial relations. However, categorical spatial information could be thought as divided into two types: semantically-coded and visuospatially-coded categorical information. We examined whether a LH’s advantage in processing semantic-categorical information is observed in a non-verbal format, and also whether semantic- and visuospatial-categorical processing are differentially lateralized. We manipulated the colors and positions of the standard traffic light sign as semantic- and visuospatial-categorical information respectively, and tested performance with the divided visual field method. In the semantic-categorical matching task, in which the participants judged if the semantic-categorical information of a successive cue and target was the same, a right visual field advantage was observed, suggesting a LH’s preference for processing semantic-categorical information in a non-verbal format. In the visuospatial-categorical matching task, in which the participants judged if the visuospatial-categorical information of a successive cue and target was identical, a left visual field advantage was obtained. These results suggest that the processing of semantic-categorical information is lateralized in LH, and we discuss the dissociation between the two types of categorical information.     

Improving Intergroup Relations: The Effects of Empathy on Racial Attitudes1

Prior research indicates that information‐based intergroup relations programs are only moderately successful (MGregor, 1993; Stephan & Stephan, 1984). In order to explore a means of increasing the effectiveness of techniques used to change attitudes toward out groups, the current study examined the effects of giving Anglo American students information about everyday incidents of discrimination against African Americans either with or without empathy‐inducing instructions. The results indicate that reading about discrimination against African Americans or inducing empathy reduces in‐group‐out‐group bias in attitudes toward African Americans vs. Anglo Americans. The implications of these findings for models of the effects of empathy on intergroup relations are discussed.     

Mental models,pictures, and text: Integration of spatial and verbal information

In the past several years, there has been an acceleration in the publication of cognitive research on the interplay between linguistic and pictorial/spatial information. To report on and encourage this sort of research, we organized a symposium at the 1991 meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association. The articles in this special section ofMemory & Cognition are based on the work presented at the symposium. In this introduction, we offer a suggestion forwhy the integration of linguistic and spatial information is not only a possibility, but a requirement for effective communication. Our suggestion follows the linguistic analysis of the closed-class elements that convey spatial relations, the prepositions (Talmy, 1983). The structure of language provides but a small set of prepositions to encode the vast number of spatial relations that we can perceive. Thus, to understand a situation that a speaker or a writer is conveying, the listener or reader must combine linguistic information with (perhaps metric) spatial information derived from pictures, the environment, or memory.     

Attention to configural information in change detection for faces

In recent research the change-detection paradigm has been used along with cueing manipulations to show that more attention is allocated to the upper than lower facial region, and that this attentional allocation is disrupted by inversion. We report two experiments the object of which was to investigate how the type of information changed might be a factor in these findings by explicitly comparing the role of attention in detecting change to information thought to be 'special' to faces (second-order relations) with information that is more useful for basic-level object discrimination (first-order relations). Results suggest that attention is automatically directed to second-order relations in upright faces, but not first-order relations, and that this pattern of attentional allocation is similar across features.     

Geometric distortions affect face recognition in chimpanzees (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Pan troglodytes</Emphasis>) and monkeys (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Macaca mulatta</Emphasis>)

All primates can recognize faces and do so by analyzing the subtle variation that exists between faces. Through a series of three experiments, we attempted to clarify the nature of second-order information processing in nonhuman primates. Experiment one showed that both chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) tolerate geometric distortions along the vertical axis, suggesting that information about absolute position of features does not contribute to accurate face recognition. Chimpanzees differed from monkeys, however, in that they were more sensitive to distortions along the horizontal axis, suggesting that when building a global representation of facial identity, horizontal relations between features are more diagnostic of identity than vertical relations. Two further experiments were performed to determine whether the monkeys were simply less sensitive to horizontal relations compared to chimpanzees or were instead relying on local features. The results of these experiments confirm that monkeys can utilize a holistic strategy when discriminating between faces regardless of familiarity. In contrast, our data show that chimpanzees, like humans, use a combination of holistic and local features when the faces are unfamiliar, but primarily holistic information when the faces become familiar. We argue that our comparative approach to the study of face recognition reveals the impact that individual experience and social organization has on visual cognition.     

Social cliques as mental models

The present research investigates how a mental model derived from patterns of sentiment relations (mental clique model) interacts with social background information (membership in social categories). Testing memory for a set of sentiment relations, the data support the assumption that a strongly polarizing categorization interferes with a mental clique model derived from the learning of these sentiment relations. Such interference was claimed to occur whenever sentiment implications from the social categorization would contradict information contained in the mental clique model. In line with this reasoning, balanced triads were selectively impaired in memory as opposed to relations from unbalanced triads which did not allow construction of any clique model and which were not influenced by category interference.     

Scene perception: Detecting and judging objects undergoing relational violations

Five classes of relations between an object and its setting can characterize the organization of objects into real-world scenes. The relations are (1) Interposition (objects interrupt their background), (2) Support (objects tend to rest on surfaces), (3) Probability (objects tend to be found in some scenes but not others), (4) Position (given an object is probable in a scene, it often is found in some positions and not others), and (5) familiar Size (objects have a limited set of size relations with other objects). In two experiments subjects viewed brief (150 msec) presentations of slides of scenes in which an object in a cued location in the scene was either in a normal relation to its background or violated from one to three of the relations. Such objects appear to (1) have the background pass through them, (2) float in air, (3) be unlikely in that particular scene, (4) be in an inappropriate position, and (5) be too large or too small relative to the other objects in the scene. In Experiment I, subjects attempted to determine whether the cued object corresponded to a target object which had been specified in advance by name. With the exception of the Interposition violation, violation costs were incurred in that the detection of objects undergoing violations was less accurate and slower than when those same objects were in normal relations to their setting. However, the detection of objects in normal relations to their setting (innocent bystanders) was unaffected by the presence of another object undergoing a violation in that same setting. This indicates that the violation costs were incurred not because of an unsuccessful elicitation of a frame or schema for the scene but because properly formed frames interfered with (or did not facilitate) the perceptibility of objects undergoing violations. As the number of violations increased, target detectability generally decreased. Thus, the relations were accessed from the results of a single fixation and were available sufficiently early during the time course of scene perception to affect the perception of the objects in the scene. Contrary to expectations from a bottom-up account of scene perception, violations of the pervasive physical relations of Support and Interposition were not more disruptive on object detection than the semantic violations of Probability, Position and Size. These are termed semantic because they require access to the referential meaning of the object. In Experiment II, subjects attempted to detect the presence of the violations themselves. Violations of the semantic relations were detected more accurately than violations of Interposition and at least as accurately as violations of Support. As the number of violations increased, the detectability of the incongruities between an object and its setting increased. These results provide converging evidence that semantic relations can be accessed from the results of a single fixation. In both experiments information about Position was accessed at least as quickly as information on Probability. Thus in Experiment I, the interference that resulted from placing a fire hydrant in a kitchen was not greater than the interference from placing it on top of a mail ? in a street scene. Similarly, violations of Probability in Experiment II were not more detectable than violations of Position. Thus, the semantic relations which were accessed included information about the detailed interactions among the objects—information which is more specific than what can be inferred from the general setting. Access to the semantic relations among the entities in a scene is not deferred until the completion of spatial and depth processing and object identification. Instead, an object's semantic relations are accessed simultaneously with its physical relations as well as with its own identification.     

The role of peers and families in predicting the loneliness level of adolescents

The authors investigated the relative contribution of peer relations, family structure, and demographic variables in predicting loneliness in adolescents. Ninth-grade high school students (N = 756) from 8 different schools representing various socioeconomic status in Ankara, Turkey, completed the UCLA Loneliness Scale (D. Russell, L. A. Peplau, & M. L. Ferguson, 1978), the Family Structure Assessing Instrument (A. Gülerce, 1996), and an author-constructed questionnaire involving demographic information and variables on peer relations. Results of multiple regression analyses indicated that all three sets of variables accounted for 41% of the variance in loneliness scores. Additionally, peer relations contributed 34% of the variance, family structure 14%, and demographic variables 3%. Within the limits of the study, peer relations appear to be the best predictors of adolescent loneliness.     

Exploring the effects of similarity on mapping spatial relations

Solving a map task requires transferring information acquired in one spatial context to another context, an ability that marks an important step in cognitive development. This study investigated how preschoolers’ mapping performance was affected by the extent of similarity between spaces. Whereas prior work examined effects of similarity in tasks involving matching individual objects, our tasks required considering spatial relations among objects. We found that the accuracy of mapping between two spaces with somewhat different perceptual features was higher than the accuracy of mapping between spaces with identical features. Yet, a further increase in differences between the two spaces had a detrimental effect on mapping. The results suggest that some degree of similarity between spaces is beneficial to children’s ability to transfer relational information. However, when the spaces have the same surface features, it may draw children’s attention to individual objects and inhibit their ability to focus on common relations across contexts.     

Difficulties in comprehending causal relations among children with ADHD: the role of cognitive engagement

The present study examined whether time spent in long looks (i.e., >or=15 s), an index of cognitive engagement, would account for differences between children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and comparison children in understanding causal relations. Children viewed two televised stories, once in the presence of toys and once in their absence. Dependent variables were visual attention and questions tapping factual information and causal relations. Comparison children answered significantly more causal relations questions than did the children with ADHD, but only in the toys-present condition. Four lines of evidence revealed that the difficulties children with ADHD had in answering causal relations questions in the toys-present condition could be linked specifically to this group's decreased time spent in long looks.     

EVIDENCE FOR RELATIONAL-CODING IN CONCEPT FORMATION,AND A NOTE ON THE EFFECTS OF FEEDBACK*

The purpose of the present paper was to determine whether people encode relations among component features in experience, or whether they simply encode the occurrence of features separately as independent cues. This has become a major issue in theories of concept-formation at the present time. It is suggested in this paper that two problems have particularly obstructed a clear resolution of the issue. The first is a consistent failure to check to what extent training materials actually contain relations among features, before results are declared in favour of a particular model. The second is the use, hitherto, of only informal methods of analysing such relations, where they exist, and of predicting from them the structure of the concept. This paper describes an expression for measuring the overall relations among feature-variables in concept training materials. It also introduces a methodology, using log-linear models, for predicting concept structures on the basis of those relations. An experiment combined these methods to assess whether subjects abstracted relations among features, or whether they abstracted independent cues. A subsidiary aim was to assess how feedback, based on independent-cue information, during learning, affected the construction of the concept. The results came out strongly in favour of relational-coding and there was some evidence that feedback based on independent-cues retarded concept formation.