Bottlenosed dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) comprehend the referent of both static and dynamic human gazing and pointing in an object-choice task

The authors tested 2 bottlenosed dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) for their understanding of human-directed gazing or pointing in a 2-alternative object-choice task. A dolphin watched a human informant either gazing at or pointing toward 1 of 2 laterally placed objects and was required to perform a previously indicated action to that object. Both static and dynamic gaze, as well as static and dynamic direct points and cross-body points, yielded errorless or nearly errorless performance. Gaze with the informant's torso obscured (only the head was shown) produced no performance decrement, but gaze with eyes only resulted in chance performance. The results revealed spontaneous understanding of human gaze accomplished through head orientation, with or without the human informant's eyes obscured, and demonstrated that gaze-directed cues were as effective as point-directed cues in the object-choice task.     

Incidental retrieval processes influence explicit test performance with data-limited cues

In two experiments, the influence of incidental retrieval processes on explicit test performance was tested. In Experiment 1, subjects studied words under four conditions (auditory-shallow, auditory-deep, visual-shallow, and visual-deep). One group of subjects received auditory and visual word-fragment completion; another group received auditory and visual word-fragment cued recall. Results indicated that changes in sensory modality between study and test reduced both recall and priming performances; levels of processing significantly affected only the cued recall test. These results indicated that incidental retrieval processes might affect explicit test performance when retrieval cues are data limited. Experiment 2 supported this conclusion by showing an effect of matching study and test modalities on explicit test performance with fragment but not with copy cues. Taken together, these results support Roediger and McDermott’s (1993) suggestion that explicit test performance is influenced by incidental retrieval processes when data-limited retrieval cues are used.     

On the prevalence of directly retrieved autobiographical memories

In this study, we used process measures to understand how people recall autobiographical memories in response to different word cues. In Experiment 1, participants provided verbal protocols when cued by object and emotion words. Participants also reported whether memories had come directly to mind. The self-reports and independent ratings of the verbal protocols indicated that directly recalled memories are much faster and more frequent than generated memories and are more prevalent when cued by objects than emotions. Experiment 2 replicated these results without protocols to eliminate any demand characteristics or output interference associated with the protocol method. In Experiment 3, we obtained converging results using a different method for assessing retrieval strategies by asking participants to assess the amount of information required to retrieve memories. The greater proportion of fast direct retrievals when memories are cued by objects accounts for reaction time differences between object and emotion cues, and not the commonly accepted explanation based on ease of retrieval. We argue for a dual-strategies approach that disputes generation as the canonical form of autobiographical memory retrieval and discuss the implication of these findings for the representation of personal events in autobiographical memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Examining inhibition of return with onset and offset cues in the multiple-cuing paradigm

Three experiments examined inhibition of return (IOR) with onset and offset cues in a multiple-cuing paradigm. In the first two experiments, five sequential cues either appeared and remained present (onset cues) or disappeared and remained absent (offset cues). In the third experiment, the cues were either onset cues or on-off cues (appeared and then disappeared quickly after). With placeholders present, onset and offset cues produced similar declines in IOR from the most recently cued location (Experiment 1). In contrast, onset cues produced overall more IOR than on-off cues (Experiment 3). With placeholders absent (Experiment 2), no IOR was found for either onset or offset cues. The results suggest that even in a complex multiple-cuing paradigm, onsets and offsets are treated similarly by the attentional system. Furthermore, it appears that onset cues are easier to encode as previously searched than on-off cues, suggesting a role of working memory in IOR. Finally, when multiple locations are cued sequentially by onsets and offsets they must be marked by placeholders for inhibition to occur.     

Impoverished cue support enhances subsequent retention: Support for the elaborative retrieval explanation of the testing effect

In three experiments, we investigated the role of transfer-appropriate processing and elaborative processing in the testing effect In Experiment 1, we examined whether the magnitude of the testing effect reflects the match between intervening and final tests by factorially manipulating the type of intervening and final tests. Retention was not enhanced for matching, relative to mismatching, intervening and final tests, contrary to the transfer-appropriate-processing view. In Experiment 2, we examined final retention as a function of the number of cues needed to retrieve items on intervening cued recall tests. In this case, fewer retrieval cues were associated with better memory on the final test. Experiment 3 replicated the findings of Experiment 2 while controlling for individual item difficulty and directly manipulating the number of cues present. These findings suggest that an intervening test may be most beneficial to final retention when it provides more potential for elaborative processing     

Perceptual complexity and form class cues in novel word extension tasks: how 4-year-old children interpret adjectives and count nouns

Two experiments examined the role of perceptual complexity, object familiarity and form class cues on how children interpret novel adjectives and count nouns. Four-year-old children participated in a forced-choice match-to-target task in which an exemplar was named with a novel word and children were asked to choose another one that matched the exemplar in either shape or material In experiment 1, 56 children were provided with lexical form class cues suggestive of adjectives. The results of Experiment 1 showed that perceptual complexity and not object familiarity determined whether children made material or shape matches. In Experiment 2, 56 children were provided with lexical form class cues suggestive of count nouns. The results of Experiment 2 showed that neither perceptual complexity nor object familiarity affected children's selections in the matching task. When provided with lexical form class cues suggestive of a count noun, children selected shape matches. Thus the results suggest that the perceptual properties of the objects presented to children coupled with the particular lexical form class cue determine which features of objects children attend to when interpreting novel words.     

Inhibition of return with rapid serial shifts of attention: implications for memory and visual search

Horowitz and Wolfe (2001) suggested that inhibition of return (IOR) should not be observed in tasks that involve rapid deployments of attention. To examine this issue, five of six possible locations were sequentially cued with either short-duration peripheral cues (50 msec) or long-duration peripheral cues (500 msec). As was expected, IOR was observed in the first two experiments at every cued location with the long-duration cues, with the magnitude of IOR decreasing for earlier cued locations relative to later cued locations. In the short-cue condition, IOR was observed at only one cued location (the second to last). The pattern of results for the short-duration cues was found regardless of whether the fixation cue was of a short (Experiment 1) or a long (Experiment 2) duration. In Experiment 3, the final fixation cue was removed, and IOR was again observed at virtually all locations in both the short- and the long-cue conditions. These findings indicate that IOR can be observed at multiple locations when attention is shifted rapidly between locations.     

The recovery of identity and relative position from visual input: Further evidence for the independence of processing of what and where

Four experiments examined the manner in which item identity and relative position are recovered from visual input. A successivesame/different matching paradigm was designed in which each trial contained a prime and a target display. Each display contained a reference object (i.e., a “+”) and a located object (i.e., a letter, which fell to either the right or the left of the “+”). In Experiment 1, subjects carried out identity judgments on the letters. Experiment 2 examined relative position judgments; in Experiment 3, subjects had to judge both item identity and relative position information. Overall, these initial data suggested that identity and positional information are recovered via independent mechanisms and that these operate concurrently. This suggestion was supported by the results of Experiment 4, which in turn disconfirmed an alternative response account of performance.     

Spontaneous pointing by bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus)

Two bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) participating in a symbolic communication project spontaneously developed behaviors that resembled pointing and gaze alternation. The dolphins' behavior demonstrated several features reminiscent of referential communicative behavior. It was triadic, involving a signaler, receiver, and referent. It was also indicative, specifying a focus of attention. The dolphins' points were distinct from the act of attending to or acting on objects. Spontaneous dolphin pointing was influenced by the presence of a potential receiver, and the distance between that receiver and the dolphin. These findings suggest that dolphins are capable of producing referential gestures. Accepted after revision: 14 August 2001 Electronic Publication     

Directed forgetting and directed remembering in visual working memory

A defining characteristic of visual working memory is its limited capacity. This means that it is crucial to maintain only the most relevant information in visual working memory. However, empirical research is mixed as to whether it is possible to selectively maintain a subset of the information previously encoded into visual working memory. Here we examined the ability of participants to use cues to either forget or remember a subset of the information already stored in visual working memory. In Experiment 1, participants were cued to either forget or remember 1 of 2 groups of colored squares during a change-detection task. We found that both types of cues aided performance in the visual working memory task but that observers benefited more from a cue to remember than a cue to forget a subset of the objects. In Experiment 2, we show that the previous findings, which indicated that directed-forgetting cues are ineffective, were likely due to the presence of invalid cues that appeared to cause observers to disregard such cues as unreliable. In Experiment 3, we recorded event-related potentials and show that an electrophysiological index of focused maintenance is elicited by cues that indicate which subset of information in visual working memory needs to be remembered, ruling out alternative explanations of the behavioral effects of retention-interval cues. The present findings demonstrate that observers can focus maintenance mechanisms on specific objects in visual working memory based on cues indicating future task relevance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Memory error in recognizing a pre-change object

People often fail to detect a change between two visual scenes and retrieval failure has been suggested as a reason. We investigated the possibility that retrieval blocking underlies this failure by examining the error pattern in recognizing the pre-change object. The results of Experiment 1 showed that participants were biased toward selecting the lure that was similar to the post-change object when they failed to recognize the pre-change object. This bias was also observed in Experiment 2 when there was sufficient time to encode and consolidate the pre-change object and the bias was as strong as correct recognition in Experiment 3 when participants divided attention during encoding and comparison. The bias in memory error remained significant even when participants had the option to select an “I don’t remember” response in Experiment 4. In Experiment 5, the bias was observed after participants successfully detected a change at an invalidly cued location and after they failed to detect a change at a validly cued location. These findings suggest that blocking can lead to retrieval failure in change detection when participants are aware of a change yet unable to retrieve verbatim traces and also when participants are unaware of a change and use the post-change object to retrieve the identity of the previous object at the same location.     

Part-set cuing effects in younger and older adults

In 3 experiments, the authors examined part-set cuing effects in younger and older adults. Participants heard lists of category exemplars and later recalled them. Recall was uncued or cued with a subset of studied items. In Experiment 1, participants were cued with some of the category names, and they remembered fewer never-cued categories than a free-recall condition. In Experiment 2, a similar effect was observed for category exemplar cues. There was also an age difference: By some measures, a small number of cues impaired older adults more than younger. Experiment 3 replicated this result and found that older adults were disproportionately slow in the presence of cues. Across experiments, older adults showed robust part-set cuing effects, and sometimes, they were disproportionately impaired by cues.     

Head-centred meridian effect on auditory spatial attention orienting

Six experiments examined the issue of whether one single system or separate systems underlie visual and auditory orienting of spatial attention. When auditory targets were used, reaction times were slower on trials in which cued and target locations were at opposite sides of the vertical head-centred meridian than on trials in which cued and target locations were at opposite sides of the vertical visual meridian or were not separated by any meridian. The head-centred meridian effect for auditory stimuli was apparent when targets were cued by either visual (Experiments 2, 3, and 6) or auditory cues (Experiment 5). Also, the head-centred meridian effect was found when targets were delivered either through headphones (Experiments 2, 3, and 5) or external loudspeakers (Experiment 6). Conversely, participants showed a visual meridian effect when they were required to respond to visual targets (Experiment 4). These results strongly suggest that auditory and visual spatial attention systems are indeed separate, as far as endogenous orienting is concerned.     

Can dogs use vocal intonation as a social referencing cue in an object choice task?

Evidence from the literature indicates that dogs’ choices can be influenced by human-delivered social cues, such as pointing, and pointing combined with facial expression, intonation (i.e., rising and falling voice pitch), and/or words. The present study used an object choice task to investigate whether intonation conveys unique information in the absence of other salient cues. We removed facial expression cues and speech information by delivering cues with the experimenter’s back to the dog and by using nonword vocalizations. During each trial, the dog was presented with pairs of the following three vocal cues: Positive (happy-sounding), Negative (sad-sounding), and Breath (neutral control). In Experiment 1, where dogs received only these vocal cue pairings, dogs preferred the Positive intonation, and there was no difference in choice behavior between Negative or Breath. In Experiment 2, we included a point cue with one of the two vocal cues in each pairing. Here, dogs preferred containers receiving pointing cues as well as Negative intonation, and preference was greatest when both of these cues were presented together. Taken together, these findings indicate that dogs can indeed extract information from vocal intonation alone, and may use intonation as a social referencing cue. However, the effect of intonation on behavior appears to be strongly influenced by the presence of pointing, which is known to be a highly salient visual cue for dogs. It is possible that in the presence of a point cue, intonation may shift from informative to instructive.     

A configural dominant account of contextual cueing: Configural cues are stronger than colour cues

Previous work has shown that reaction times to find a target in displays that have been repeated are faster than those for displays that have never been seen before. This learning effect, termed “contextual cueing” (CC), has been shown using contexts such as the configuration of the distractors in the display and the background colour. However, it is not clear how these two contexts interact to facilitate search. We investigated this here by comparing the strengths of these two cues when they appeared together. In Experiment 1, participants searched for a target that was cued by both colour and distractor configural cues, compared with when the target was only predicted by configural information. The results showed that the addition of a colour cue did not increase contextual cueing. In Experiment 2, participants searched for a target that was cued by both colour and distractor configuration compared with when the target was only cued by colour. The results showed that adding a predictive configural cue led to a stronger CC benefit. Experiments 3 and 4 tested the disruptive effects of removing either a learned colour cue or a learned configural cue and whether there was cue competition when colour and configural cues were presented together. Removing the configural cue was more disruptive to CC than removing colour, and configural learning was shown to overshadow the learning of colour cues. The data support a configural dominant account of CC, where configural cues act as the stronger cue in comparison to colour when they are presented together.     

Tests of the generality of the principle of encoding specificity

Two empirical tests of the principle of encoding specificity are reported. In Experiment I, the normative strength of the cues presented on the input and on the recall trial was varied factorially. To lessen the emphasis on strictly associative learning, only half the items were cued in each phase of the study-recall cycle. Recall was higher when the cues remained the same than when they changed. However, regardless of the condition of input cuing, strong output cues were substantially more effective than weak ones. In Experiment II, the to-be-remembered words were shown in the presence of weak cues on the input trial. Recognition in the context of strong extralist cues was compared with recall to the original input cues. On the test of cued recognition, the target words were either generated by the subjects as free associates or presented to them as items on a test constructed by the experimenter. Contrary to previous findings, recall was not found to be superior to recognition. The phenomena of cue-dependent forgetting that have been interpreted as evidence for the principle of encoding specificity appear to have limited generality.     

No two cues are alike: Depth of learning during infancy is dependent on what orients attention

Human infants develop a variety of attentional mechanisms that allow them to extract relevant information from a cluttered multimodal world. We know that both social and nonsocial cues shift infants’ attention, but not how these cues differentially affect learning of multimodal events. Experiment 1 used social cues to direct 8- and 4-month-olds’ attention to two audiovisual events (i.e., animations of a cat or dog accompanied by particular sounds) while identical distractor events played in another location. Experiment 2 directed 8-month-olds’ attention with colorful flashes to the same events. Experiment 3 measured baseline learning without attention cues both with the familiarization and test trials (no cue condition) and with only the test trials (test control condition). The 8-month-olds exposed to social cues showed specific learning of audiovisual events. The 4-month-olds displayed only general spatial learning from social cues, suggesting that specific learning of audiovisual events from social cues may be a function of experience. Infants cued with the colorful flashes looked indiscriminately to both cued locations during test (similar to the 4-month-olds learning from social cues) despite attending for equal duration to the training trials as the 8-month-olds with the social cues. Results from Experiment 3 indicated that the learning effects in Experiments 1 and 2 resulted from exposure to the different cues and multimodal events. We discuss these findings in terms of the perceptual differences and relevance of the cues.     

Pointing gestures modulate domestic dogs’ search behavior for hidden objects in a spatial rotation problem

In the spatial domain, domestic dogs are highly inclined to search at the last location where they saw an object disappear and cannot infer that a hidden object has moved imperceptibly from one location to another. In the current study, we examined whether exposure to human social cues modulates dogs’ search behavior for hidden objects. In Experiment 1, twenty dogs were first trained to find an object they saw disappear inside a stationary container in the presence (social group) or absence (non-social group) of pointing gestures. In tests, the containers were rotated 180° around a central axis. The dogs in the non-social group systematically searched at the initial (now incorrect) hiding location, whereas the dogs in the social group chose correctly significantly above chance. In Experiment 2, we tested whether pre-exposure to human pointing has an impact on dogs’ use of gestures. No gestures were given during training and both the social and non-social conditions were administered to each of the ten dogs. In contrast to Experiment 1, the performance of dogs in the social condition dropped significantly and varied substantially from one dog to another. Overall, this study suggests that dogs’ tendency to use human signals is so strong that it even outweighs their spatial bias to search where they saw an object disappear; however, this penchant to use human gestures appears to be dependent on the degree of familiarity of the dog with these signals.     

Selective access in cued recall: The roles of retrieval cues and domains of encoding

The purpose of these experiments was to determine whether retrieval access in cued recall can be selectively restricted to a single domain of encoding when information has been encoded within two domains as different as word sound and word meaning. In Experiment 1, the subjects studied pairs of rhyming words differing in rhyme set size under verbal-repetition or interactive-imagery instructions. Recall was cued with study-context rhymes, with extralist rhymes, or with extralist associates. The results indicated that rhyme set size and instructional effects were found no matter how recall was cued, indicating that both domains of encoding were always accessed. In Experiment 2, potential effects of study time and overt naming of the test cues were explored. These results indicated that both domains of encoding were accessed, except when long study times were available and subjects did not have to name the rhyme test cues. Rhyme set-size effects were eliminated under these conditions, suggesting that selective access to encoded meaning is possible in cued recall. Retrieval access in this task appears to be more controlled by domains of encoding than by information directly available in the cue, and access to encoded information can be restricted to a single domain.     

It's not what you say but the way you say it: matching faces and voices

Recent studies have shown that the face and voice of an unfamiliar person can be matched for identity. Here the authors compare the relative effects of changing sentence content (what is said) and sentence manner (how it is said) on matching identity between faces and voices. A change between speaking a sentence as a statement and as a question disrupted matching performance, whereas changing the sentence itself did not. This was the case when the faces and voices were from the same race as participants and speaking a familiar language (English; Experiment 1) or from another race and speaking an unfamiliar language (Japanese; Experiment 2). Altering manner between conversational and clear speech (Experiment 3) or between conversational and casual speech (Experiment 4) was also disruptive. However, artificially slowing (Experiment 5) or speeding (Experiment 6) speech did not affect cross-modal matching performance. The results show that bimodal cues to identity are closely linked to manner but that content (what is said) and absolute tempo are not critical. Instead, prosodic variations in rhythmic structure and/or expressiveness may provide a bimodal, dynamic identity signature.