Definite descriptions

Philosophical Studies -     

Visual search for simple volumetric shapes.

Five experiments measured reaction time (RT) to detect the presence or absence of a simple volumetric shape (target) dependent on the number of display items (distractors) and their depicted three-dimensional (3-D) orientation. Experiments 1-4 examined every pairwise combination of two different simple volumetric shapes in two 3-D orientations. Conditions exhibiting "pop-out" could be predicted by differences in their two-dimensional (2-D) features. Conditions in which search was slower support previously found search asymmetries for particular 2-D features. When the distractors were a mixture of the other shapes in the same 3-D orientation, search was serial, except when the target had a curved principal axis (Experiment 5). The results suggest that these simple volumetric shapes are not processed preattentively.     

Children's discrimination of oblique lines.

In three experiments using delayed-matching tasks with 5-year-old children (one of which also included 7-year-olds) no support was found for the hypothesis that children code for line orientation using a match-mismatch strategy. The hypothesis that errors in discrimination of obliques can be attributed mainly to confusion over the left-right direction of tilt was rejected in a fourth experiment. It was concluded that young children do not spontaneously encode orientation in relation to a matching environmental cue and that there is no evidence that memory for the direction of obliquity is inferior to memory for the degree of obliquity.     

Verbal coding and redintegrative memory for shapes.

Four experiments examined the effect of label training on redintegrative memory for novel shapes (remembering the whole shape when only a part is presented). Redintegrative memory was markedly better when subjects were trained with names as compared to unnamed control conditions. The first two experiments demonstrated that the effect of labeling was even stronger when subjects were required to use the labels during the transfer test. This result suggests that the naming effect is not due to attentional differences during training. The last two experiments explored the quality of the assigned labels and the relationship of the label to the visual stimulus. There was a slightly greater effect of relevant meaningful labels on redintegrative memory, but in general all types of names (relevant, irrelevant, and paralog) were facilitative. The experiments suggest that a verbal code can exert a strong influence in tasks that require the integration and retrieval of visual information.