Set-size effects for identification versus localization depend on the visual search task

In both behavior and neuroscience research, it is debated whether the processing of identity and location is closely bound throughout processing. One aspect of this debate is the possibly privileged processing of identity or location. For example, processing identity may have unlimited capacity, while processing location does not. The authors have investigated the possibility of such privileged processing by measuring set-size effects for a variety of identification and localization tasks. In particular, set-size effects in accuracy visual search are measured with either 1 or 2 possible targets. For 1-target tasks, set-size effects are smaller for identification than localization; for 2-target tasks, set-size effects are larger for identification than localization. The observed crossover interaction is inconsistent with a privileged processing hypothesis for either identity or location. Furthermore, this interaction is predicted by an independent channel model based on signal detection theory, in which the details of each decision determine the relative magnitude of the set-size effects. This result is consistent with the similar processing of identity and location, and it refutes the privileged processing hypothesis for either identity or location.     

Deep dyslexia, imageability, and ease of predication

A development of existing theories of deep dyslexia is outlined. It proposes that the effects of imageability upon the ease of reading of words by deep dyslexics occur as a result of variation in the ease with which individual words summon semantic predicates, on the basis of which reading responses can be made. Ease-of-predication scores are obtained for a corpus of nouns and found to be, as hypothesized, closely related to imageability scores. It is shown that the other major characteristics of deep dyslexia can also be accounted for by this proposed mechanism. These include the well-established effects of syntactic category (in particular, of the distinction between content and function words) upon reading. Further evidence is provided that this effect may be attributed to variation in ease of predication.     

Search behaviour of cats (Felis catus) in an invisible displacement test: cognition and experience

An invisible displacement test was administered to cats in order to test the hypothesis that search behaviour in this species is influenced by their limited capacity for object permanence as well as by their previous experience with the environment. Experiment 1 compared three groups of cats in a five-choice hiding task in which the hiding places could be discriminated by their spatial positions. Two groups received a visible displacement training before the invisible displacement test and one group did not. Experiment 2 compared two groups of trained subjects in the same task, but the hiding places could be discriminated by spatial and visual cues. The results confirmed that cats are unable to solve problems with invisible displacements. The visible displacement training improved their performance, but was not sufficient to make them succeed. Experience with the hiding potential of the covers also gives more persistence to search behaviour. Finally, the distribution of search attempts is not determined by the proximity to the target and is influenced only partially by the subjects' previous experience. Like Stage 5 infants, cats rely mainly on their immediate perception. They search for an object in the last location they have seen it disappear or under the nearest cover from this location.     

Focused spatial attention is independent of rapid resumption of an interrupted search

In three experiments, we examined possible relationships between the spatial focus of attention and the rapid resumption of a visual search following a brief interruption. In Experiment 1, we tested the role of involuntary (exogenous) spatial orienting to one region (quadrant) of a search display; in Experiment 2, we tested the role of voluntary (endogenous) spatial orienting to the same region; and in Experiment 3, we tested the role of voluntary orienting to the specific location in which the target item appeared. All three experiments indicated that spatial orienting speeds correct responding and greatly increases the probability of search success in the look immediately following the presentation of a spatial cue. However, these benefits of spatial cues were also shown to be completely independent of the rapid resumption effect, which depends on observers’ forming a perceptual hypothesis about a target in one look, but being unable to confirm that hypothesis until a second one (Lleras, Rensink, & Enns, 2005).     

空间相对位置效应的时间特征

用方位箭头作探测刺激,研究故事阅读产生的想象空间中物体搜索任务的反应时模式。结果发现：(1)方位箭头的指向对物体搜索有影响,反应时模式为：左=右=前＜后,说明方位箭头作探测刺激时的物体搜索过程不涉及人一物空间关系的转换;(2)目标物体与注意物体的相对位置对物体搜索有影响,反应时模式为注意点＜注意点对面＜注意点左侧=注意点右侧,说明相对位置效应与人物空间关系的转换无关。本研究结果支持了两阶段理论。     

Investing in the real me: Preference for experiential to material purchases driven by the motivation to search for true self-knowledge

One mechanism underlying the hedonic benefits of experiential purchases is that one’s core self is more centrally reflected in experiential purchases. However, little is known about whether people consume experiential purchases as a means of discovering their true self. The present research explored the possibility that people value experiential purchases as a potential tool for understanding their true self. Consistent with the hypothesis, Study 1 demonstrated that experiential purchases were perceived to be a more valuable source of gaining knowledge about one’s true self compared to material purchases. Using correlational methods, Study 2 found that the motivation to search for true self-knowledge positively predicted preference for experiential purchases over material purchases. Finally, Study 3 showed a causal effect of motivation to search for true self-knowledge on a tendency to prefer experiential purchases to material purchases. Implications and future directions for well-being research and marketing are discussed.     

Place versus response as the basis of spatial errors made by young infants

Nine-month-old infants search successfully for an object which they have seen hidden in one position, but they frequently continue to search for it there after observing it being hidden in a new position. This error can be explained in terms either of egocentric response perseveration or of perseveration to a particular place in space. In order to distinguish between these hypotheses, 80 infants were presented with a problem consisting of several different conditions which separated response, position on a table, and absolute spatial position as factors leading to errors in search for hidden objects. The results strongly support the egocentric response hypothesis. The reason for this response perseveration strategy is discussed in terms of the lack of active experience of spatial displacements among 9-month-old infants.     

Infant search tasks reveal early concepts of containment and canonical usage of objects

It is difficult to gain unambiguous evidence on the use of concepts by infants. Many results can be accounted for in terms of action-based strategies. The evidence reported here fulfils the minimal criteria for the operation of working concepts in infants. Search tasks are used with a filled interval which forces memory-search, and the object is hidden in containers which fulfil their customary job or violate it. Infants treat an upright cup as a more reliable location marker than an inverted one. A series of experiments probes the phenomenon. The results indicate that the infants have a working concept of containment which can be triggered by the provision of containers in their canonical orientation. Even “object permanence tasks” lead infants to access their knowledge of the relationships into which things typically enter in the world outside the laboratory.     

Experiential Avoidance as an Emotion Regulatory Function: An Empirical Analysis of Experiential Avoidance in Relation to Behavioral Avoidance,Cognitive Reappraisal,and Response Suppression

The purpose of the present study was to empirically test the suggestion that experiential avoidance in an emotion regulation context is best understood as an emotion regulatory function of topographically distinct strategies. To do this we examined whether a measure of experiential avoidance could statistically account for the effects of emotion regulation strategies intervening at different points of the emotion-generative process as conceptualized by Gross' (1998) process model of emotion regulation. The strategies under examination were behavioral avoidance, cognitive reappraisal, and response suppression. The specific hypotheses to be tested were (1) that behavioral avoidance, cognitive reappraisal, and response suppression would statistically mediate the differences in measures of psychological well-being between a clinical and nonclinical sample, but that (2) these indirect effects would be reduced to nonsignificant levels when controlling for differences in experiential avoidance. The results provide clear support for the first hypothesis with regard to all the studied strategies. In contrast to the second hypothesis, the results showed the predicted outcome pattern only for the response-focused strategy “response suppression” and not for cognitive reappraisal or behavioral avoidance. The results are interpreted and discussed in relation to theories on experiential avoidance and emotion regulation.     

Is “Inhibition of Return” due to the inhibition of the return of attention?

Inhibition of Return (IOR) is usually explained in terms of orienting–reorienting of attention, emphasizing an underlying mechanism that inhibits the return of attention to previously selected locations. Recent data challenge this explanation to the extent that the IOR effect is observed at the location where attention is oriented to, where no reorienting of attention is needed. To date, these studies have involved endogenous attentional selection of attention and thus indicate a dissociation between the voluntary attention of spatial attention and the IOR effect. The present work demonstrates a dissociation between the involuntary orienting of spatial attention and the IOR effect. We combined nonpredictive peripheral cues with nonpredictive central orienting cues (either arrows or gaze). The IOR effect was observed to operate independent of involuntary spatial orienting. These data speak against the “reorienting hypothesis” of IOR. We suggest an alternative explanation whereby the IOR effect reflects a cost in detecting a new event (the target) at the location where another event (a cue) was coded before.     

A test of parallel versus serial processing applied to memory retrieval

Townsend has identified necessary and sufficient conditions that reaction time distributions meet if they are produced by two underlying processes that are parallel and within-stage independent. This paper describes an attempt to use one of these conditions to assess the assumption of independent parallel memory retrieval in Anderson's ACT theory. In the experimental test, subjects studied profession-location pairs, with each profession and location included in two pairs. One pair had a high frequency of presentation and the other had low. When cued with a profession (or location), subjects responded with the first of the two studied locations (or professions) that came to mind. The reaction times to these responses were used to test the ACT assumption of independent parallel search. The problems encountered in trying to apply Townsend's abstract test to a concrete situation included the need to consider mixtures and convolutions of distributions and empirical, rather than theoretical, distributions. These difficulties are discussed at length and some formal analyses concerning their effect on the test are given. Despite these problems, we were able to use Townsend's test and the results of the experiment support the within-stage independent parallel assumption of ACT.     

Components of the location probability effect in visual search tasks

In visual search tasks, targets are detected more rapidly when they appear in locations that commonly contain a target than when they appear in locations that rarely contain a target. Five experiments were conducted to investigate two specific properties of this location probability effect: its dependence on spatial location versus relative position and its dependence on or independence of target identity. In Experiment 1 spatial location of a stimulus row was varied to determine whether high location probability facilitates target detection in a particular location in visual space or a particular relative position within the row. Both were facilitated to approximately the same extent. In Experiment 2 an inducing target occurred with high probability in one of four display locations, and a test target occurred with equal probability in all four locations. Both targets were found more quickly in the high-probability location than in the other locations, but the advantage associated with targets in the high-probability location was larger for the inducing target than for the test target. In Experiments 3-5 the correspondence between the components observed in Experiments 1 and 2 was examined. The overall pattern of results was compatible with a model in which the location probability effect is produced partly by an attentional spotlight, which facilitates processing of any stimulus appearing in a particular location in visual space, and partly by a network of position-specific letter detectors, which facilitates detection of a particular letter in a particular relative position within a display. Models with flexible scanning strategies were also considered.     

The privileged role of location in visual working memory

Reports have conflicted about the possible special role of location in visual working memory (WM). One important question is: Do we maintain the locations of objects in WM even when they are irrelevant to the task at hand? Here we used a continuous response scale to study the types of reporting errors that participants make when objects are presented at the same or at different locations in space. When several objects successively shared the same location, participants exhibited a higher tendency to report features of the wrong object in memory; that is, they responded with features that belonged to objects retained in memory but not probed at retrieval. On the other hand, a similar effect was not observed when objects shared a nonspatial feature, such as color. Furthermore, the effect of location on reporting errors was present even when its manipulation was orthogonal to the task at hand. These findings are consistent with the view that binding together different nonspatial features of an object in memory might be mediated through an object’s location. Hence, spatial location may have a privileged role in WM. The relevance of these findings to conceptual models, as well as to neural accounts of visual WM, is discussed.     

Probing attentional modulation of contextual cueing

The repetition of spatial layout implicitly facilitates visual search (contextual cueing effect; Chun & Jiang, 1998). Although a substantial number of studies have explored the mechanism underlying the contextual cueing effect, the manner in which contextual information guides spatial attention to a target location during a visual search remains unclear. We investigated the nature of attentional modulation by contextual cueing, using a hybrid paradigm of a visual search task and a probe dot detection task. In the case of a repeated spatial layout, detection of a probe dot was facilitated at a search target location and was inhibited at distractor locations relative to nonrepeated spatial layouts. Furthermore, these facilitatory and inhibitory effects possessed different learning properties across epochs (Experiment 1) and different time courses within a trial (Experiment 2). These results suggest that contextual cueing modulates attentional processing via both facilitation to the location of “to-be-attended” stimuli and inhibition to the locations of “to-be-ignored” stimuli.     

Interactions between spatial and kinetic dimensions in movement aftereffect

In some conditions, the surface of the test figure on which one sees an aftereffect of movement does not fit with that part of the visual field previously adapted to a movement. Such an effect, called kinetic-figural effect, may be conceived of as resulting from an interaction between two perceptual systems, each one giving specific information: one for the kinetic aspects which are spatially defined, the other for the spatial relationship inside the visual field. Experiments are presented which indicated the validity of a “law of location” for a movement aftereffect, together with some effects of the spatial relationships between adapting and test fields upon the movement aftereffect.     

The effect of object alignment on the representation of depth in young children's drawings.

Light and Humphreys (1981, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 31, 521-530) provided evidence that young children's drawings, despite infrequently showing view-specific occlusion, do systematically reflect spatial relations within an array. The present research tested the hypothesis that young children's preferences for canonical "best views" interact with array-faithful tendencies to increase early uses of occlusion. Forty-three children between 4 and 7 years of age drew arrays like Light and Humphreys' end-to-end alignments, with end-on views of objects in depth, and arrays aligned side-to-side, with canonical side-views of objects in depth. Significantly fewer single-object, view-specific occlusions were produced for end-to-end than for side-to-side alignments. Nevertheless, the former reveal that more children are able to use the vertical dimension to depict multiple objects in depth. Other comparisons suggest an interaction in multiple-object depictions of canonicality with spatial dimension and graphic complexity.     

Spatial Mapping in Preschoolers: Close Comparisons Facilitate Far Mappings

To test the hypothesis that comparison processes facilitate schema extraction, we studied the effect of making comparisons on 3-year-olds' ability to perform mapping tasks. In 3 studies, children were tested on their ability to find a hidden toy in a model room after being shown its location in a perceptually different room. In Experiment 1 we found that seeing 2 similar hiding events-permitting a sequential comparison-improved 3-year-olds' performance on the mapping task. Experiment 2 showed a more striking effect: Simply comparing the initial hiding model with another nearly identical model helped children to succeed on the subsequent mapping task. Experiment 3 showed that the comparison effect was not simply due to an opportunity to interact with 2 examples, but was specific to comparing them. We conclude that comparing examples can facilitate children's noticing common relational schemas-in this case, a spatial relational schema-and their ability to use this system of relations in subsequent tasks.Our central hypothesis is that the process of comparison is a major force in children's learning and development. In this work, we test the specific claim that drawing comparisons among similar spatial arrays fosters insight into the common spatial relations, as assessed in a subsequent spatial mapping task.     

Children's uncertainty about the interpretation of ambiguous messages

Three investigations were made into relationships between children's uncertainty about the correctness of their interpretation of an ambiguous message, and their judgment of the quality of that message. In the first two investigations, we compared one condition under which 5-to 6-year-olds made a single interpretation of an ambiguous message, with another condition under which they could make both possible interpretations. It was found that making both interpretations had no effect on children's confidence about the correctness of a particular one of the interpretations. Children who made both interpretations were often confident about the correctness of one of them. In the second investigation, we found that children who were uncertain about the correctness of one particular interpretation, did not necessarily realize that they could not tell which of the two possible interpretations was correct. They did not necessarily recognize the ambiguity in the message. In the third investigation, we identified children who correctly identified messages as ambiguous after they knew that they had made the wrong interpretation, but who were confident of the correctness of their interpretation of ambiguous messages before they knew the outcome. Hence awareness of uncertainty when making an interpretation may not be necessary for the development of understanding ambiguity. The results are discussed in terms of the significance of the child's awareness of uncertainty for development of understanding about message ambiguity.     

Are spatial selection and identity extraction separable when attention is controlled endogenously?

Visual search for a target involves two processes: spatial selection and identity extraction. Ghorashi, Enns, and Di Lollo (2008) found these processes to be independent and surmised that they were carried out along distinct visual pathways: dorsal and ventral, respectively. The two experiments that are described in the present article evaluated this hypothesis. Attentional-blink methodology was combined with voluntary spatial cuing in a visual search task: Intertarget lag was used to manipulate identity extraction; predictive cues were used to signal target locations. Central digit cues in Experiment 1 required participants to identify digits before voluntarily directing attention to a corresponding location, whereas flashed dots in Experiment 2 (indicating an opposite location) required attentional redeployment without prior cue identification. Consistent with the dual-pathway hypothesis, cuing was impaired only when the first target and the number cue competed for ventral-pathway mechanisms. Collectively, the results support the dual-pathway account of the separability of spatial selection and identity extraction.     

Dependent spatial channels in visual processing

The present experiments were designed to test whether or not processing in visual information channels defined by spatial position is independent in the visual search paradigm. In Experiment 1 subjects were asked to judge whether or not a red square was present in a display of two colored geometric figures. Their mean reaction time (RT) to respond no to a “divided target” display in which one figure was red and the other was a square was about 100 msec longer than to control displays containing either two red circles or two green squares. This result is inconsistent with a spatially serial independent-channel model and with many spatially parallel independent-channel models. The relatively slow responding to divided target displays was replicated in Experiments 2 and 3, when subjects judged whether or not an “A” was present in a display of two alphanumeric characters, and a divided target display was one which contained two features of “A.” Experiments 4 and 5 demonstrated that the dependence observed in the first three experiments was probably the result of two mechanisms: crosstalk integration, whereby the target features are integrated across the two spatial channels, and repetition facilitation, whereby processing is facilitated (in some cases) when the two figures in the display are physically identical. Experiment 6 suggested that subjects organized the display in terms of spatial channels even when the task allowed subjects to ignore spatial location.