Perceiving imitatible stimuli: consequences of isomorphism between input and output.

For more than a century, psychologists have been intrigued by the idea that mental representations of perceived human actions are closely connected with mental representations of performing those same actions. In this article, connections between input and output representations are considered in terms of the potential for imitation. A broad range of evidence suggests that, for imitatible stimuli, input and output representations are isomorphic to one another, allowing mutual influence between perception and motoric planning that is rapid, effortless, and possibly obligatory. Thus, the cognitive consequences of imitatibility may underlie such diverse phenomena as phoneme perception; imitation in neonates; echoic memory; stimulus-response compatibility; conduction aphasia; maintenance rehearsal; and a variety of developmental and social activities such as language acquisition, social learning, empathy, and monitoring one's own behavior.     

Relationship between vection and motion perception in depth

This study examined the effects of cues to motion in depth – namely, stereoscopic (i.e., changing-disparity cues and interocular velocity differences) and changing-size cues on forward and backward vection. We conducted four experiments in which participants viewed expanding or contracting optical flows with the addition of either or both cues. In Experiment 1, participants reported vection by pressing a button whenever they felt it. After each trial, they also rated the magnitude of the vection (from 0 to 100). In Experiments 2 and 3, the participants rated the perceived velocity and motion-in-depth impression of the flows relative to standard stimuli, respectively. In Experiment 4, the participants rated the perceived depth and distance of the display. We observed enhancements in vection, motion-in-depth impression, and perceived depth and distance when either or both types of cues indicated motion-in-depth, as compared to those when the cues did not (Experiments 1, 3, and 4). The perceived velocity changed with cue conditions only for the high velocity condition (Experiment 2). Correlational analyses showed that the vection can be best explained by the motion-in-depth impression. This was partially supported by the multiple regression analyses. These results indicate that the enhancement of vection caused by cues is related to the impression of motion-in-depth rather than the perceived velocity and perceived three-dimensionality.     

Relationship between self-consciousness, autonomic perception, and psychosomatic disorders

The Self-consciousness Scale, Autonomic Perception Questionnaire, and the Medical History Questionnaire were administered to 127 undergraduate students in psychology. Although scores on self-consciousness were not related to those on any other measure, autonomic perception was significantly correlated with a self-report of psychosomatic disorders.     

Visual perception of technical execution and aesthetic quality in biological motion

This study tests the contributions of structural and transformational information in the perception of technical execution and aesthetic quality in gymnastics judging. A focal question was whether the quality of human movement usually called aesthetic belongs to some category different from mere transformations of position over time, i.e., kinematics. Qualified gymnastics judges (Elite/Class I and Class III) and naive observers rated 30 performances of a 30-sec pass from a compulsory balance beam routine (Class III girls). The same performances were rated for technical execution and aesthetic quality under point-light and normal viewing conditions. Within observer groups there were no differences in scores for technical execution or aesthetic quality. Correlation analyses indicated that all three groups of observers rated performances with similar trends across point-light and normal display conditions for technical execution (range 0.67–0.87). Significantly lower correlations were found for aesthetic quality within all three groups(range 0.46–0.56). Naive observers showed the highest correlations between technical execution and aesthetic quality in both point-light and normal display conditions. Results suggest that transformational information provides much of necessary information for the evaluation of technical execution and aesthetic quality although observer experience affects the pick-up of this information.     

Relationship between academic placement and perception of abuse of the voice

Informal polling of public school speech-language pathologists indicated that special education teachers referred more children for disorders of voice than did regular classroom educators. This study evaluated the effect of academic placement (regular or special education settings) upon children's and their teachers' ratings of abuse of the voice. Analysis showed the two groups of teachers' criteria for judging abusive vocal behaviors differed while the children's ratings from each setting did not differ. The special educators appeared to perceive their students' vocal behavior as more abusive possibly due to environmental constraints, training or the social affective interactions of their students.     

Stroop interference: An input and an output phenomenon

Three theories of Stroop interference are considered: perceptual conflict theory (Hock and Egeth, 1970), response competition theory (Morton, 1969) and conceptual encoding theory (Seymour, 1977). The first two fail to provide a full explanation of the available data, and Seymour's evidence is incomplete. Two experiments are reported. In the first, typical Stroop interference occurs in naming colour patches. In the second, subjects responded to colour patches with learned letter name responses. Both stimulus-related (incongruent colour names) and response-related (incongruent letters) distractors produced interference. These results indicate that any theory which assumes only a single locus for interference is incomplete. Conceptual encoding conflict and a modified form of response competition are suggested as possible dual mechanisms for Stroop interference effects.     

Comparisons of target output monitoring and source input monitoring

Five experiments were conducted to compare source memory to target memory. For the current purposes, source memory was defined as information that was learned from two sources (i.e. information input) whereas target memory was defined as information that was delivered to two sources (i.e. information output). The paradigm that we developed involved receiving concrete objects from two people in the source‐monitoring conditions or giving away these same objects to two people in the target‐monitoring conditions. This procedure allowed a direct comparison of source monitoring to target monitoring holding all other experimental variables constant. Target‐monitoring performance exceeded source monitoring except when the decision component of target monitoring was eliminated and incorporated into source monitoring. Commonalities and differences between source and target monitoring are discussed as are the real‐world implications of target memory for social behavior and facilitating communication. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The contextualization of input and output events in memory

Summary Several observations from everyday life suggest that people are deficient in monitoring their own actions, often forgetting that they have already performed a planned act, or experiencing doubt as to whether they have done so. These observations appear inconsistent with the many laboratory studies that indicate that people are quite efficient in monitoring their own actions. Towards the resolution of this discrepancy we proposed that: (a) output monitoring in real life often requires the retrieval of a specific, contextually framed episode rather than mere familiarity with an event, and (b) output events are less strongly integrated with their environmental contexts than input events are. Therefore, despite the output advantage that is frequently reported in occurrence memory, context memory should be relatively less efficient for output than for input events. This hypothesis received some support in Experiment 1, in which generated verbal responses were remembered better than read responses, but the difference was significantly smaller for context than for occurrence memory. Experiment 2 employed a task simulating a two-person interaction. While occurrence memory was superior for self-performed tasks to that for other-performed tasks, context memory was in fact inferior for the former tasks. These results were seen to suggest that self-initiated actions tend to undergo a weaker contextual integration than events that originate from a source external to the person.     

A concept approach to input/output logic

This paper provides a semantics for input/input output logic based on formal concept analysis. The central result shows that an input/output logic axiomatised by a relation R is the same as the logic induced by deriving pairs from the concept lattice generated by R using a ∧- and ∨-classical Scott consequence relation. This correspondence offers powerful analytical techniques for classifying, visualising and analysing input/output relations, revealing implicit hierarchical structure and/or natural clusterings and dependencies. The application of all formal developments are illustrated by a worked example towards the end.     

The subjective organization of input and output events in memory

In order to study the organization of memory for self-performed actions, 80 participants were presented with 20 action phrases for ten consecutive study-test cycles. Enactment was manipulated both in the input phase and in the output phase by having participants say or enact the phrases during encoding and/or during testing. Enactment at input or output generally enhanced both the quantity and the accuracy of recall and also improved output monitoring. More important, subjective organization, as indexed by the tendency to recall the same two phrases successively across repeated recall tests, was significant for all conditions, even on the first pair of trials, and increased systematically with repeated study-test cycles. Enactment neither impaired nor enhanced the amount of organization, and in all conditions a positive correlation was obtained between recall and subjective organization. Some commonalities in the nature of memory organization were found across all conditions. The results suggest that enactment may lead to more differentiated memory traces, resulting in more accurate recall. Although subjective organization was clearly observed when enactment was involved, its contribution to the enhancement of recall deserves further examination. Received: 12 November 1997 / Accepted: 2 June 1998     

The relative roles of input and output mechanisms in directed forgetting

Memory & Cognition - When Ss are presented a first set of items (Set A) followed by a second set (Set B), a postinput cue to recall only Set B results in better recall of Set B than does a cue...     

Differences in the transmission of sensory input into motor output between introverts and extraverts: Behavioral and psychophysiological analyses

The present study was designed to investigate extraversion-related individual differences in the speed of transmission of sensory input into motor output. In a sample of 16 introverted and 16 extraverted female volunteers, event-related potentials, lateralized readiness potentials (LRPs), and electromyogram (EMG) were recorded as participants performed a visual choice reaction time task. As additional behavioral indicators of performance, measures of reaction time (RT) and response dynamics were obtained. Although extraversion-related differences were found neither for behavioral measures nor for the N1 and P3 components of the evoked potential, introverts showed a reliably shorter latency in stimulus-locked LRP than extraverts. This latter finding supports the notion of faster stimulus analysis in introverts compared to extraverts. Furthermore, there was no indication of extraversion-related individual differences in speed of response organization and response execution as indicated by response-locked LRP and EMG latencies, respectively. However, a significantly higher EMG amplitude observed with introverts pointed to a less accurately adjusted motor output system of introverts compared to extraverts.     

Slow movement execution in event-related potentials (P300)

We examined whether slow movement execution has an effect on cognitive and information processing by measuring the P300 component. 8 subjects performed a continuous slow forearm rotational movement using 2 task speeds. Slow (a 30-50% decrease from the subject's Preferred speed) and Very Slow (a 60-80% decrease). The mean coefficient of variation for rotation speed under Very Slow was higher than that under Slow, showing that the subjects found it difficult to perform the Very Slow task smoothly. The EEG score of alpha-1 (8-10 Hz) under Slow Condition was increased significantly more than under the Preferred Condition; however, the increase under Very Slow was small when compared with Preferred. After performing the task. P300 latency under Very Slow increased significantly as compared to that at pretask. Further, P300 amplitude decreased tinder both speed conditions when compared to that at pretask, and a significant decrease was seen under the Slow Condition at Fz, whereas the decrease under the Very Slow Condition was small. These differences indicated that a more complicated neural composition and an increase in subjects' attention might have been involved when the task was performed under the Very Slow Condition. We concluded that slow movement execution may have an influence on cognitive function and may depend on the percentage of decrease from the Preferred speed of the individual.     

On the specification of input units in speech perception.

The first part of this paper considers the experimental evidence concerning a primary recognition unit in speech decoding. Considerations of general human information processing abilities lead to the suggestion that this primary unit must be a fairly long, but clearly identifiable, stretch of speech. Further evidence for the need of a primary recognition unit arises from a consideration of human abilities to identify the order of sounds in a repeated sequence of nonspeech sounds. In spite of the obvious ease with which the order of elements is perceived in speech, listeners have a great deal of difficulty determining the order of sounds in a repeated sequence of nonspeech sounds. Yet there is quite compelling evidence that speech and the perception of order are functions of the same cerebral hemisphere, and, further, that aphasic deficits are accompanied by deficits in the perception of temporal order. The data in the literature suggest that syllables, and phrases defined by suprasegmentals, might function as primary recognition units.In the second part of the paper, the results of an experiment are reported, showing that if a sequence of nonspeech sounds is provided with organization analogous to the organization provided by suprasegmentals in speech then normal subjects' performance on the task of determining the temporal order of the sequence is improved. Aphasic patients, however, appear to be unable to take advantage of such organizing parameters since their performance is not significantly affected by providing organization of the stimulus.