Perceiving the sequence of speech and non-speech stimuli

The task is to estimate on which syllable of a spoken sentence a click was superimposed. Experiment I confirms Ladefoged and Broadbent's finding of a systematic tendency to prepose the click (negative displacement), but shows also that the tendency is decreased when prior knowledge of the sentence is provided. Experiment II shows that acoustic prior knowledge is not necessary to produce the decrease and that it occurs also with textual prior knowledge. Experiment III shows that the negative displacement is not eliminated by short-term practice on the task, as Fodor and Bever contended. The effect of prior knowledge is inconsistent with the explanation of negative displacement in terms of attention demands suggested by Ladefoged and Broadbent. It is argued that this explanation was unnecessary, and that negative displacement can be expected in a system which analyses speech by discrete units.     

Perceiving, imaging, and preferring physiognomic stimuli

Physiognomic color responses in perception, imagery, and affect were investigated. Maluma and taketa, nonsense stimuli defined by many investigators as physiognomic, were utilized as prototypical physiognomic stimuli, along with eight other stimuli of various sorts. In Experiment 1, 22 subjects matched the colors of the stimuli; in Experiment 2, 27 subjects reported their imagery to the stimuli; and in Experiment 3, 16 subjects gave their color preferences for the stimuli. The Munsell sets of colors were employed throughout. Significant differences between the physiognomic and other stimuli were found on the brightness and saturation of color matches, images, and preferences. Other differences (e.g., the latency of color images) were also present. Distinctions were also noted between the two physiognomic stimuli. These results support the priority of innate and perceptual processes in physiognomy over those of learning and memory, although some ambiguities still remain.     

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.     

Perceiving affective content in ambiguous visual stimuli: a component of emotional intelligence

Emotional intelligence involves the accurate appraisal and expression of emotions in oneself and others and the regulation of emotion in a way that enhances living. One aspect of emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize the consensually agreed upon emotional qualities of objects in the environment. One hundred thirty-nine adults viewed 18 reproductions of faces, color swatches, and abstract designs and rated the emotional content of these visual stimuli. Three scores were extracted, including consensual accuracy, amount, and range of emotion perceived. These scores were compared with other aspects of emotional intelligence such as empathy and related to constructs such as alexithymia and neuroticism. A general ability to perceive consensual emotional content in visual stimuli was found, and it was most strongly associated with the ability to respond empathically to others.     

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.     

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.     

Perceiving and re-perceiving objects.

A number of experiments exploring priming effects and automatization in the perception of novel objects are described, and a framework for understanding the benefits and costs of re-perceiving previously seen objects is proposed. The suggestion is that perceiving an object creates a temporary representation in an object file that collects, integrates, and updates information about its current characteristics. The contents of an object file may be stored as an object token and retrieved next time the object appears. This facilitates its re-perception when all of the attributes match and may impair it if some are changed. Thus, the world molds our minds to capitalize on earlier experiences but at the same time leaves us able readily to detect and represent any novel or unexpected objects and events.     

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     

Perceiving a story outside of conscious awareness: When we infer narrative attributes from subliminal sequential stimuli

Perceiving a story behind successive movements plays an important role in our lives. From a general perspective, such higher mental activity would seem to depend on conscious processes. Using a subliminal priming paradigm, we demonstrated that such story perception occurs without conscious awareness. In the experiments, participants were subliminally presented with sequential pictures that represented a story in which one geometrical figure was chased by the other figure, and in which one fictitious character defeated the other character in a tug-of-war. Although the participants could not report having seen the pictures, their automatic mental associations (i.e., associations that are activated unintentionally, difficult to control, and not necessarily endorsed at a conscious level) were shifted to line up with the story. The results suggest that story perception operates outside of conscious awareness. Implications for research on the unconscious were also briefly discussed.     

The control of responding by auditory stimuli: interactions between different dimensions of the stimuli.

Sounds have position in addition to other dimensions, such as intensity and frequency. Position rapidly gains control of spatially contiguous responses and this may interfere with control of responding by other acoustic dimensions. These experiments investigated interference of a tone-noise discrimination by the discrimination of acoustic position. Squirrel monkeys were studied when responding was differentially reinforced in the presence of both spectral content (tone-noise) and positional differences between the stimuli, and when responding was differentially reinforced only in the presence of spectral differences. Under the first condition, responding rapidly came under the control of the position of the noise in the two monkeys tested. The position of the tone controlled responding in one monkey; in the second monkey, responding came under the control of the spectral content of the tone. Under the second condition, responding was initially under the control of the noise in all three monkeys tested. This persisted for the duration of the condition for two of the monkeys; in one monkey, responding came under the control of the spectral content of the noise. Under the second condition, responding was also initially under the control of the position of the tone for all monkeys, but control by spectral content of the tone relatively rapidly developed in two of three monkeys.     

Aging on the input versus output side: theoretical implications of age-linked asymmetries between detecting versus retrieving orthographic information

This experiment tested for age-linked asymmetries predicted under Node Structure theory (NST; D. G. MacKay & D. M. Burke, 1990) between detecting versus retrieving orthographic information. Older adults detected that briefly presented words were correctly spelled (e.g., endeavor) or misspelled (e.g., endeavuor) as readily as did young adults. However, they were less able than young adults to retrieve the correctly and incorrectly spelled words that they had seen. These age-linked asymmetries were not due to educational factors, stimulus characteristics, sensory-level factors, task complexity, floor or ceiling effects, general slowing, or cohort-related activities, but they were consistent with NST predictions and with similar asymmetries in a wide range of other studies. By contrast, repetition deficits in detecting and retrieving repeated- versus unrepeated-letter misspellings (e.g., elderdly vs. elderkly) were symmetrical or equivalent in magnitude for young and older adults. Implications for a wide range of theories of cognitive aging and of repetition deficits are discussed.     

Distinguishing between discriminative and motivational functions of stimuli.

A discriminative stimulus is a stimulus condition which, (1) given the momentary effectiveness of some particular type of reinforcement (2) increases the frequency of a particular type of response (3) because that stimulus condition has been correlated with an increase in the frequency with which that type of response has been followed by that type of reinforcement. Operations such as deprivation have two different effects on behavior. One is to increase the effectiveness of some object or event as reinforcement, and the other is to evoke the behavior that has in the past been followed by that object or event. "Establishing operation" is suggested as a general term for operations having these two effects. A number of situations involve what is generally assumed to be a discriminative stimulus relation, but with the third defining characteristic of the discriminative stimulus absent. Here the stimulus change functions more like an establishing operation than a discriminative stimulus, and the new term, "establishing stimulus," is suggested. There are three other possible approaches to this terminological problem, but none are entirely satisfactory.     

Perceiving concealment in relationships between parents and adolescents: Links with parental behavior

Although concealment in relationships is commonplace, little is known about its implications for the target of concealment. Two large‐scale studies among adolescents and their parents tested the central hypothesis that parents’ perception of child concealment predicts poorer parenting behaviors toward their child. Further, we investigated whether actual child concealment adds to the prediction of parenting behaviors through an interaction with parental perception of concealment. Study 1 yielded evidence for the hypothesized link, which was independent of actual concealment. Study 2 largely replicated these results for perceptions of both concealment and lying while controlling for perceptions of disclosure. Overall, these results suggest that parents’ perception of child concealment coincides with poorer parenting behaviors, regardless of actual child concealment.     

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...     

Perceiving the language of films.

Children appear to be familiar with the language of film makers or at least to perceive and remember films less well when the rules of this cinematic language are broken. In this experiment a simple action sequence filmed from a static viewpoint was made up into two films of four shots. One film was edited according to the rules of directional continuity specified by Hollywood cinema, that is the four shots were presented so as to preserve the subject's direction of movement across cuts. The other film was edited disregarding these rules. Apart from this difference both films were identical. Children aged seven, nine, and thirteen years watched either of these films and reconstructed the action using pictures representing the four shots. The children who saw the conventional version were better able to reconstruct what they had seen than those who saw the unconventional version.     

NMDA receptor activity and the transmission of sensory input into motor output in introverts and extraverts.

Recent research suggests that individual differences in brain dopamine functioning may be related to the personality dimension of extraversion. The major goal of the present study was to answer the question of whether a pharmacologically induced change in glutamatergic NMDA receptor activity would also differentially affect the transmission of sensory input into motor out-put in introverts and extraverts. Therefore, in a double-blind within-subjects design, either 30 mg of the NMDA receptor antagonist memantine or placebo were administered to 48 healthy male volunteers before performing a choice reaction-time task. In introverts, memantine caused a pronounced increase in lift-off time (i.e., the time required to lift the finger from a home button) compared to that in extraverts, whereas movement time (i.e., the time required to move the finger from the home button to a response button) was decreased in both groups. The pattern of results suggests that extraversion-related differential sensitivity to pharmacologically induced changes in NMDA receptor activity is limited to functions that involve an interaction between the glutamatergic and dopaminergic systems.     

Perceiving discrimination: Psychological and sociopolitical barriers

Recognizing discrimination is not always an easy thing to do. This is particularly true in North America where perpetrators’ fears of being labelled have resulted in a shift in the type of discrimination experienced. Incidents may be subtle and ambiguous. As a country of immigration, Canada provides a template for the world community. While conditions for minorities in Canada may rival other countries, improvement is needed. In this paper, narratives of East and Central African Asian Ismailis in Québec are analyzed to demonstrate that understanding the way people perceive discrimination requires not only knowledge of the psychological processes involved but also of the reasons for immigrating, the beliefs about the country of destination prior to migration, and the socio-political conditions in host and sending, societies. The results of this analysis provide policy-relevant information in order to address problems of racism and discrimination more effectively.     

On the auditory modality superiority effect in serial recall: separating input and output factors

The modality effect in immediate recall refers to superior recall of the last few items within lists presented in spoken as opposed to printed form. The locus of this well-known effect has been unclear. N. Cowan, J. S. Saults, E. M. Elliott, and M. Moreno (2002) introduced a new method to distinguish between the effects of input serial position, output serial position, and the number of items yet to be recalled and found that large modality effects occurred only in conditions in which delay and interference at output (from items already recalled) was high. The authors replicated that finding, even when the response period included output interference acoustically similar to the spoken stimuli to be recalled. However, the authors found that output delay and interference act only by lowering the level of performance to a more sensitive range. The modality effect thus originates during encoding of the list to be recalled, not during output.     

Scientific representation: against similarity and isomorphism

I argue against theories that attempt to reduce scientific representation to similarity or isomorphism. These reductive theories aim to radically naturalize the notion of representation, since they treat scientist's purposes and intentions as non-essential to representation. I distinguish between the means and the constituents of representation, and I argue that similarity and isomorphism are common but not universal means of representation. I then present four other arguments to show that similarity and isomorphism are not the constituents of scientific representation. I finish by looking at the prospects for weakened versions of these theories, and I argue that only those that abandon the aim to radically naturalize scientific representation are likely to be successful.