Temporal bisection with trial referents

In temporal bisection, the subject is required to compare the similarity of a probe duration with two referent durations. Two bisection experiments with human subjects are reported in which performance under three referent conditions was compared. In two of the conditions, no-referent and fixed-referent, the referent pair was constant throughout the session and was varied between sessions. In the noreferent condition, samples of the referents were presented at the beginning of a block of trials, but not on the probe trials. In contrast, in the fixed-referent condition, the referent pair was presented on each probe trial. In the third referent condition, roving-referent, the referent pair was also presented on each probe trial, but the values of the pair varied during a session rather than between sessions. The pseudologistic Model (PLM; Killeen, Fetterman, & Bizo, 1997) provided an excellent account of the data from all referent conditions and indicated that (1) the scalar variability was located in the perception of the probe and was independent of the structure of the bisection task, (2) the role of the referents was to set the criterion, (3) the probe was compared with the criterion rather than with the referents, and (4) the comparison of the probe with the criterion occurred even when trial referents were available.     

Temporal bisection in children

Children aged 3, 5, and 8 years received training on a temporal bisection task, with standard short and long durations being presented as visual stimuli lasting 1 and 4 s or 2 and 8 s. Nonstandard comparison stimuli were spaced linearly between the standards. Psychophysical functions showed increasing proportions of "long" responses (responses appropriate to the long standard) with increasing stimulus duration, but were flatter in the younger children than in the 8-year-olds. Bisection points (the stimulus duration giving rise to 50% "long" responses) were close to the arithmetic mean of the short and long standards in most conditions. Statistical analyses and results from different theoretical models of the data all suggested that temporal sensitivity was higher in the 8-year-olds than in the younger groups, even when the possibility of random responding was controlled for.     

Establishing and accessing referents in discourse

Memory & Cognition - Four experiments explored the processes by which people understand references. Subjects read naturalistic stories one sentence at a time, and their reading-comprehension...     

Some referents and measures of nonverbal behavior

This paper summarizes some of the measures of nonverbal behavior that have been found to be significant indicators of a communicator’s attitude toward, status relative to, and responsiveness to his addressee. The nonverbal cues considered include posture, position, movement, facial, and implicit verbal cues. In addition to providing criteria for the scoring of these cues, experimental findings that relate to the various cues are summarized.     

Accessibility of potential referents following categorical anaphors

In 4 experiments, the authors investigated the accessibility of potential antecedents that were either referents or nonreferents of categorical anaphors using several methodologies. In 2 preliminary experiments, using an immediate probe recognition task, the authors replicated previous findings of inhibition for nonreferents following categorical anaphors. In Experiments 1-3, naming times to nonreferent probes were inhibited, but only at a delay and at the end of the sentence. Eye movements were monitored in Experiment 4, and reading times were found to be slower in end-of-sentence regions following the remention of the nonreferent but not on the nonreferent itself. These results suggest that decreases in nonreferent accessibility are due to postanaphoric processes, such as integrating the nonreferent into the discourse structure, and are not due to more immediate changes in activation occurring as part of the resolution process. Further, some inhibition effects may result from the use of probe tasks that require decisions.     

Predictors of motivation to comply with social referents regarding one's romantic relationship

This research examined predictors of motivation to comply with social referents regarding one's romantic relationship. Two variables are argued to predict motivation to comply with the opinions of social network members: (a) social consequences of compliance and (b) perceived relationship expertise. Three studies examined the association of these variables with motivation to comply. Study 1 used survey research to demonstrate that these variables predict motivation to comply. Studies 2 and 3 experimentally manipulated social consequences of compliance and perceived relationship expertise, respectively, providing evidence of a causal connection between these variables and motivation to comply. Across three studies, the results support the role of social consequences of compliance and perceived relationship expertise in understanding social influences on romantic decision making.     

Representational pseudoneglect in line bisection

"Representational pseudoneglect" refers to a bias toward the left side of space that occurs when visual information is remembered. Recently a number of demonstrations of such representational pseudoneglect have appeared. In the present article, we report an experiment in which we adopted the classic line bisection paradigm to study representational pseudoneglect. Participants bisected horizontal lines that were shown in extrapersonal space. When the lines were visible on the screen, there was no evidence of any leftward bias. However, when lines were bisected from memory, the participants demonstrated a clear bias to the left. This is the first demonstration of a leftward bias in the bisection of remembered visually presented lines.     

Cognition in the bisection task

Bisecting a visually presented stimulus is a sensitive test for attentional and motor biases in both healthy and brain-damaged participants. There are, in addition, perceptual effects on performance and several idiosyncratic biases. Experiments that manipulated the stimulus attributes have suggested that higher-level cognitive processes can also influence bisection accuracy. These observations encourage a wider diagnostic use of the bisection procedure.     

In search of referents for nouns and pronouns

In comprehending a sentence, people normally try to identify the objects, events, and states referred to by its definite noun phrases. In Experiment 1, subjects took less time comprehending a sentence when the referents of such noun phrases were mentioned one sentence back than when they were mentioned two or three sentences back. There appeared to be a discontinuity between the first and second sentences back. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that it was most likely the first clause back, not the first sentence back, that was critical. These findings suggest that, independent of other factors, the last clause processed grants the entities it mentions a privileged place in working memory. They are readily available to be referred to by nouns and pronouns.     

Temporal Predication with Temporal Parts and Temporal Counterparts

If ordinary objects have temporal parts, then temporal predications have the following truth conditions: necessarily, (a is F) at t iff a has a temporal part that is located at t and that is F. If ordinary objects have temporal counterparts, then, necessarily, (a is F) at t iff a has a temporal counterpart that is located at t and that is F. The temporal-parts account allows temporal predication to be closed under the parthood relation: since all that is required to be F at t is to have a temporal part, a t, that is located at t and that is F, every object that has a t as a temporal part is F at t. Similarly for the temporal-counterparts account. Both closure under parthood and closure under counterparthood are shown to have unacceptable consequences. Then strategies for avoiding closure are considered and rejected.     

Selecting one among many referents in spatial situation models

Five experiments related anaphor resolution to a classic memory variable, namely, interference created by multiple uses of a given object-concept, and by spatial distance of the referent from the reader's focus of attention. Participants memorized a diagram of a building with rooms containing objects, and then read narratives describing characters' activities there. Reading was self-paced word by word. Accessibility was measured by readers' time to understand anaphoric sentences containing a definite noun phrase referring to an object in its room. Spatial distance between the object and the current focus of attention increased reading times for names of the object, the room, and sentence wrap-up. Multiple examples of a target-object increased its reading time only if they were scattered across different rooms. An associative model of memory retrieval during text comprehension was used to interpret the complex pattern of results.     

Human performance on the temporal bisection task

The perception and processing of temporal information are tasks the brain must continuously perform. These include measuring the duration of stimuli, storing duration information in memory, recalling such memories, and comparing two durations. How the brain accomplishes these tasks, however, is still open for debate. The temporal bisection task, which requires subjects to compare temporal stimuli to durations held in memory, is perfectly suited to address these questions. Here we perform a meta-analysis of human performance on the temporal bisection task collected from 148 experiments spread across 18 independent studies. With this expanded data set we are able to show that human performance on this task contains a number of significant peculiarities, which in total no single model yet proposed has been able to explain. Here we present a simple 2-step decision model that is capable of explaining all the idiosyncrasies seen in the data.     

Children's conceptions of the relationship between pictures and their referents

In five investigations we examined 3- and 4-year-olds' conceptions of the relationship between pictures and their referents. In the first two studies, we confirmed that some children judge wrongly that a picture has a feature of the real object it represents, although that feature was added to the real referent after the picture was drawn. Children also judged that a picture that was changed would reacquire its original features, thereby keeping in match with its real referent. In the third, fourth, and fifth studies we included a more difficult no change condition in which the picture slightly mismatched the real referent from the outset. Even children who answered correctly under the previous change conditions wrongly attributed to the picture a visual feature which was present only on the real referent. Such confusions did not occur when children agreed the mismatching picture was not of the real object. We conclude that preschool children have difficulty holding in mind the distinct properties of picture and real referent, just as they tend to confuse the literal and intended meanings of utterances.