A study of the effect of structural information and familiarity in form perception

Two experiments were carried out to investigate the influence of structural information and familiarity on the processing of visual forms. Pairs of “well” structured and nameable and “poorly” structured and non-nameable fragmented forms were employed as stimuli. The effects of structure and familiarity were assessed by manipulating the visual hemifield of presentation and the task. In Experiment 1 stimuli were judged as being either in the same orientation or mirror-reversed, a task that does not require high-level semantic information to be processed. Experiment 2 required physically identical forms to be matched, which may use either physical or name information. In Experiment 1 “same” judgements were equivalent for both types of stimuli, and “different' judgements were longer for the “poorly” structured (non-nameable) forms. In Experiment 2 there was little overall difference between “well” and “poorly” structured forms, though response times to “well” structured (nameable) forms were slowed for right-visual-field presentations. It is suggested that familiarity may not be sufficient to provide a perceptual advantage for nameable forms, as the advantage for nameable stimuli was confined to “same” judgements in Experiment 1 and response times were shorter for non-nameable stimuli in Experiment 2. Rather, performance depends upon factors such as the computation of global shape (due to structural properties of collinearity and closure) and on the use of different kinds or representations (physical versus name) in matching.     

Upward power tendencies in a hierarchy: Power Distance Theory versus bureaucratic rule

Two contrasting notions concerning upward power tendencies within hierarchically structured groups are investigated. Power Distance Theory assumes that people have a desire for power that results in a tendency to reduce the power distance towards a more powerful other, and this tendency is assumed to be stronger the smaller the power distance. The bureaucratic rule implies that a vacant position may only be taken over by someone from the level immediately below the vacant position. In Experiment 1, power distance from the top position of a hierarchy was manipulated by assigning 120 subjects to a higher or a lower position in a power hierarchy. Results showed that only the motivation derived from the bureaucratic rule (i.e. entitlement) mediated the relationship between power distance and upward tendencies. In Experiment 2, a more pertinent test of the two theoretical notions was performed by assigning 139 subjects to one of three positions. The main results were consistent with the bureaucratic rule: (1) subjects immediately below the top position showed a stronger upward tendency towards this position than subjects in the two lower positions, whereas no differences were found between subjects in these two lower positions; (2) again only entitlement mediated the relationship between power distance and upward tendencies.     

RT patterns and chunks in SRT tasks: a reply to Jiménez (2008)

Previous research has shown that the formation of units or chunks contributes to sequence learning in serial reaction time (SRT) tasks (Koch & Hoffmann, Psychological Research 63:22–35, 2000). However, some of these results were assumed to be unrelated to sequence learning and to reflect preexistent response tendencies (Jiménez, Psychological Research 72:387–396, 2008). In the Experiment of this study, we aimed to evaluate this issue. One group of participants responded to a strongly structured sequence of digits by pressing one out of six response keys depending on digit identity. In a second experimental group, a weakly structured sequence was presented, which contained comparable transitions among the single items, but did not have series of ascending and descending triplets of successive digits. The results indicated that serial learning in general as well as response tendencies to certain fragments of the sequence were modulated by the manipulation of the strength of relational patterns. The data are consistent with the notion that relational patterns contribute to the formation of chunks as suggested in the original study.     

Stimulus-feature specific negative priming

We report the results of two experiments that showed that the time needed to respond to a feature of a stimulus increases when that particular feature of that particular stimulus previously had to be ignored. The data of Experiment 2 argue against the hypothesis that the observed stimulus-feature specific negative priming was due to a response conflict instigated by automatic episodic retrieval of prime responses. Experiment 2 also showed that the effects were not caused by difficulties in switching between prime and probe tasks and provided additional evidence for the fact that priming effects were stimulus-feature specific. The present results suggest that the selective inhibition or episodic encoding mechanisms that are assumed to underlie negative priming can operate in a more specific and powerful manner than has been previously assumed.     

Phases in Movement After-Effects and their relationship to the kinetic figural effect

Summary A Movement After-Effect (MAE) observed on a structured test figure contains generally two successive phases. The initial one is non-contingent upon the test figure and is assumed to result from an adaptation process. The second phase is shown to be contingent upon the features of the test figure and their similarity with those of the generating figure. A conditioning process is assumed to share in its appearance. In Experiment I, it is shown that the areal spread of MAE which may appear in the contingent phase is likely to result from a generalization process in which part of the test figure corresponding to an unstimulated area becomes transiently effective in generating a MAE. In Experiment II distributed practice of the MAE is shown to lead to an increase in the duration of the effect when the generating and test figures are similar. This last result suggests that the true conditioning stimulus is the generating figure as such.     

Choice between response units: The rate constancy model

In a conjoint schedule, reinforcement is available simultaneously on two or more schedules for the same response. The present experiments provided food for key pecking on both a random-interval and a differential-reinforcement-of-low-rate (DRL) schedule. Experiment 1 involved ordinary DRL schedules; Experiment 2 added an external stimulus to indicate when the required interresponse time had elapsed. In both experiments, the potential reinforcer frequency from each component was varied by means of a second-order fixed-ratio schedule, and the DRL time parameter was changed as well. Response rates were described by a model stating that time allocation to each component matches the relative frequency of reinforcement for that component. When spending time in a given component, the subject is assumed to respond at the rate characteristic of baseline performance. This model appeared preferable to the absolute-rate version of the matching law. The model was shown to be applicable to multiple-response concurrent schedules as well as to conjoint schedules, and it described some of the necessary conditions for response matching, undermatching, and bias. In addition, the pigeons did not optimize reinforcer frequency.     

How infants process addition and subtraction events

Three experiments are described that assess 5‐month‐old infants’ processing of addition and subtraction events similar to those reported by Wynn (1992a ). In Experiment 1, prior to each test trial, one group of infants was shown an addition event (1 + 1) while another group was shown a subtraction event (2 ? 1). On test trials, all infants were shown outcomes of 0, 1, 2 and 3. The results seemed to require one of two dual‐process models. One such model assumed that the infants could add and subtract but also had a tendency to look longer when more items were on the stage. The other model assumed that infants had a preference for familiarity along with the tendency to look longer when more items were on the stage. Experiments 2 and 3 examined the assumptions made by these two models. In Experiment 2, infants were given only the test trials they had received in Experiment 1. Thus, no addition and subtraction or familiarity was involved. In Experiment 3 infants were familiarized to either one or two items prior to each test trial, but experienced no actual addition or subtraction. The results of these two experiments support the familiarity plus more items to look at model more than the addition and subtraction plus more items to look at model. Taken together, these three experiments shed doubt on Wynn’s (1992a ) assertion that 5‐month‐old infants can add and subtract. Instead they indicate the importance of familiarity preferences and the fact that one should be cautious before assuming that young infants have sophisticated numerical abilities.     

The dispositional shift in attribution over time

Two experiments examined the effect of time on causal attributions. In Experiment I, subjects who described themselves into a tape recorder assumed more personal responsibility for their behavior after 3 weeks' time than others who explained their behavior immediately after its occurrence. In Experiment II, actor-subjects took part in a getting acquainted conversation and explained their behavior more dispositionally and less situationally after 3 weeks' time than they had initially, while observer-subjects experienced no change over time. Results were interpreted in terms of an altered self-perspective in memory and the diminished salience of situational details over time.     

Analogical encoding facilitates knowledge transfer in negotiation

Information learned in one situation often fails to transfer to a similarly structured situation. However, prior findings suggest that comparing two or more instances that embody the same principle can promote abstraction of a schema that can be transferred to new situations. In two lines of research, we examined the effects of analogical encoding on knowledge transfer in negotiation situations. In Experiment 1, undergraduates were more likely to propose optimal negotiation strategies and less likely to propose compromises (a suboptimal strategy) when they received analogy training. In Experiment 2, graduate management students who drew an analogy from two cases were nearly three times more likely to incorporate the strategy from the training cases into their negotiations than were students given the same cases separately. For both novices and experienced participants, the comparison process can be an efficient means of abstracting principles for later application.     

Memorability, word frequency and negative recognition

Brown (1976) has provided an analysis of the effect of the memorability of an item on the confidence with which it is accepted or rejected in a test of recognition or recall. When the subject has no clear recollection of the inclusion of an item in an input list, he is assumed to evaluate its memorability in the context of the experiment before he decides whether to accept or reject it. If the judged memorability is high, the absence of a clear recollection is stronger evidence against the item than if it is low. A specific prediction is that memorable distractors in a recognition test will be more confidently rejected than non-memorable ones. This prediction was tested and confirmed in three experiments in which recognition was tested by 4-category rating. Except in Experiment I, items memorable to individual subjects were identified by administering a questionnaire. For example, in Experiment III forenames of immediate family were assumed to have high memorability. This experiment also included word frequency as a variable. Low-frequency distractors were rejected significantly more firmly than high-frequency distractors: extraction of memorable names enhanced this effect. The relationship of memorability to word frequency is discussed.     

Keeping it in‐house: how audience affects responses to group criticism

It is often assumed that group‐directed criticism is best kept ‘in‐house’, but the effects of audience on responses to criticism have not been directly examined. Consistent with predictions, ingroup members who criticized the group to an outgroup audience were seen to be making a less appropriate choice of audience (Experiments 2 and 3), aroused more negative feelings (Experiment 1), were downgraded more strongly on personality traits (Experiment 2), and were seen to be doing more damage to the group (Experiment 2) than were ingroup members who kept their criticisms in‐house. Experiment 3 showed that, whereas moderate identifiers agreed with the comments less and showed weaker friendly intentions toward the critic when an outgroup audience as compared to an ingroup audience was chosen, high identifiers agreed with the criticisms just as strongly—and showed more friendly intentions toward the critic—when they were made to an outgroup as compared to an ingroup audience. Results are discussed in light of the broader literature on identity threat. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Human movement initiation: specification of arm, direction, and extent

This article presents a method for discovering how the defining values of forthcoming body movements are specified. In experiments using this movement precuing technique, information is given about some, none, or all of the defining values of a movement that will be required when a reaction signal is presented. It is assumed that the reaction time (RT) reflects the time to specify those values that were not precued. With RTs for the same movements in different precue conditions, it is possible to make detailed inferences about the value specification process for each of the movements under study. The present experiments were concerned with the specification of the arm, direction, and extent (or distance) of aimed hand movements. In Experiment 1 it appeared that (a) specification times during RTs were longest for arm, shorter for direction, and shortest for extent, and (b) these values were specified serially but not in an invariant order. Experiment 2 suggested that the precuing effects obtained in Experiment 1 were not attributable to stimulus identification. Experiment 3 suggested that subjects in Experiment 1 did not use precues to prepare sets of possible movements from which the required movement was later selected. The model of value specification supported by the data is consistant with a distinctive-feature view, rather than a hierarchical view, of motor programming.     

Chickadees discriminate contingency reversals presented consistently,but not frequently

Chickadees are high-metabolism, non-migratory birds, and thus an especially interesting model for studying how animals follow patterns of food availability over time. Here, we studied whether black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus) could learn to reverse their behavior and/or to anticipate changes in reinforcement when the reinforcer contingencies for each stimulus were not stably fixed in time. In Experiment 1, we examined the responses of chickadees on an auditory go/no-go task, with constant reversals in reinforcement contingencies every 120 trials across daily testing intervals. Chickadees did not produce above-chance discrimination; however, when trained with a procedure that only reversed after successful discrimination, chickadees were able to discriminate and reverse their behavior successfully. In Experiment 2, we examined the responses of chickadees when reversals were structured to occur at the same time once per day, and chickadees were again able to discriminate and reverse their behavior over time, though they showed no reliable evidence of reversal anticipation. The frequency of reversals throughout the day thus appears to be an important determinant for these animals’ performance in reversal procedures.     

Judgments of Grammaticality of Japanese Sentences Violating the Principle of Full Interpretation

Two experiments investigated the linguistic intuition of Japanese speakers in which they judged the grammaticality of sentences violating Chomsky's principle of Full Interpretation. Experiment 1 used bitransitive sentences, which included an extra argument that assumed a role of either subjective, dative, or objective on the one hand and that specified semantically a preceding argument or stood in par with it on the other. Findings showed that the speakers judged ungrammatical sentences involving a dative or an objective extra argument as more grammatical than those involving a subjective extra argument. Ungrammatical sentences with an extra specified argument were judged more grammatical than those with an extra par argument when the extra argument was objective. Experiment 2 used sentences that included a verbal noun (VN) comprising a noun followed by a verb, shita (did). Ungrammatical VN sentences contained two arguments given the same objective marker. These sentences were judged to be highly grammatical despite the violation of the principle. Findings suggest that speakers' actual knowledge of language is not fully consistent with the knowledge they are alleged by Chomsky to possess, including the principle of Full Interpretation.     

Short-term flavour memory in the rat

In a series of experiments, rats were exposed twice to a flavour at times T1 and T2, and the second of these exposures was followed by toxicosis. The level of the subsequent aversion was viewed as an index of whether the flavour had been recognised as familiar at T2, with a familiar flavour accruing less aversiveness than an unfamiliar one. A flavour was recognised as familiar at time T2 after a long flavour-exposure at time T1 (Experiment Ia) when moderate (3·5 h) and long (27·5 h) T1-T2 intervals were employed but was so recognised after a brief exposure at T1 (Experiment Ib) only when a moderate T1-T2 interval was employed. The memorial processes underlying flavour recognition after a brief flavour exposure were assumed, therefore, to be transient. The remaining experiments employed a brief flavour exposure at T1 and moderate T1-T2 intervals in various attempts to disrupt flavour recognition. Recognition at T2, however, was not disrupted when one (Experiment II), or three (Experiment IV) distractor flavours were interpolated between the target flavour's presentations at T1 and T2. This failure was not due to the distractor having proactively interfered with the associability of the target flavour with illness at T2 (Experiment III). Further, recognition was not disrupted when the position of the target flavour's presentation at T1 was varied across a list of distractor flavours (Experiment V), nor when the similarity of the distractor and the target flavour was varied (Experiment VI). The results indicate that the processes subserving recognition after a brief presentation of that flavour, although transient, are resistant to interference and were discussed in terms of current theories of short-term memory in animals.     

The programming of structural properties of movement sequences

Summary The present paper investigates the role of abstract structural properties in the programming and execution of movement sequences. Three experiments, using converging methods, demonstrate that the motor system represents the abstract structural properties of movement sequences. The first two experiments show that hierarchical structures over a sequence of tapping movements can be used to prepare the motor program, even if the specific elements of the sequence are still unknown. Experiment 2 also shows that the preliminary programming of structural properties of a movement sequence takes more time than the programming of specific elements ( start elements). Experiment 3 suggests that abstract structural properties can be generalized from a special sequence and that they are transferable to other sequences. Abstract structural properties are assumed to be an important component of generalized motor programs.     

Is eye gaze direction always determined without intent?

It is widely assumed that processing of gaze direction occurs “automatically,” in the sense that it is reflexive (unfolds in the absence of intention). We assessed this view in a task in which participants saw a schematic face in which the eyes were gazing left or right, along with a second directional target (an arrow in Experiment 1; a directional word in Experiment 2). The eyes and other directional target were sometimes congruent and other times incongruent. On each trial, participants were cued with a tone to respond to either the direction the eyes were gazing, or the direction the noneye target indicated. The time between the onset of the task cue and the onset of the face was manipulated so that on half the trials the face and the cue were presented at the same time. Regardless of the type of target, the congruency effect was the same size at the zero SOA as it was at the 750 SOA, suggesting that eyes were not processed until participants knew what task to perform. These results are consistent with the claim that processing of gaze direction is, at least some of the time, secondary to an intent (i.e., it is not reflexive).     

Reactions to threat by defensive and congruent internals and externals: A self-esteem analysis

The hypothesis that vulnerable self-esteem internals and externals would react more defensively to negative intellectual and personality feedback than congruent (more secure self-esteem) internals and externals was investigated in two experiments. The defensive (DE)-congruent (CE) external distinction was strongly confirmed in both cases. In Experiment 1, DEs assumed less personal responsibility for failure than for success, while CEs assumed little personal responsibility for either outcome. Defensive externals performed more poorly than CEs on a task described as an IQ test, suggesting greater anxiety in the face of possible failure. In Experiment 2, DEs rated themselves more favorably and derogated evaluator's competence more than CEs following receipt of negative information regarding their interpersonal skills. Congruent internals (CI) performed more poorly than defensive internals (DI) on the “IQ” task, while male DIs attributed responsibility for outcomes more defensively. It was suggested that a consistently internal view of causation may increase stress in evaluative situations. Implications of these findings for better understanding the relationship between locus of control and maladjustment were discussed, and suggestions for future research were presented.     

Time perception is enhanced by task duration knowledge: Evidence from experienced swimmers

The present study deals with the impact on temporal estimation of previous knowledge about the duration of a specific task (referred to as ??task duration knowledge??). Athletes were recruited in this study because they are assumed to have high levels of task duration knowledge in their discipline. In Experiment 1, 28 elite swimmers had to estimate the time it would take to swim a given distance using two different strokes for which they had different task duration knowledge levels. The swimmers estimated duration more accurately and with less uncertainty in the high-knowledge than in the low-knowledge condition. In Experiment 2, the swimmers had to produce 36?s of swimming in various contexts that altered the retrieval of their task duration knowledge, with and without a secondary task. When swimmers could not rely on their task duration knowledge, their productions were more affected by the secondary task. In Experiment 3, the swimmers were more precise at producing time when visualising something that they knew well (swimming) rather than something that they had never experienced, which shows that physical execution is not a mandatory requirement for observing the enhancement effect resulting from task duration knowledge. These three converging experiments suggest that task duration knowledge is strongly involved in time perception.