Effects of an auditory model on the learning of relative and absolute timing

The effects of an auditory model on the learning of relative and absolute timing were examined. In 2 experiments, participants attempted to learn to produce a 1,000- or 1,600-ms sequence of 5 key presses with a specific relative-timing pattern. In each experiment, participants were, or were not, provided an auditory model that consisted of a series of tones that were temporally spaced according to the criterion relative-timing pattern. In Experiment 1, participants (n = 14) given the auditory template exhibited better relative- and absolute-timing performance than participants (n = 14) not given the auditory template. In Experiment 2, auditory and no-auditory template groups again were tested, but in that experiment each physical practice participant (n = 16) was paired during acquisition with an observer (n = 16). The observer was privy to all instructions as well as auditory and visual information that was provided the physical practice participant. The results replicated the results of Experiment 1: Relative-timing information was enhanced by the auditory template for both the physical and observation practice participants. Absolute timing was improved only when the auditory model was coupled with physical practice. Consistent with the proposal of D. M. Scully and K. M. Newell (1985), modeled timing information in physical and observational practice benefited the learning of the relative-timing features of the task, but physical practice was required to enhance absolute timing.     

Market entry decisions: effects of absolute and relative confidence

In a market entry game, the number of entrants usually approaches game-theoretic equilibrium quickly, but in real-world markets business start-ups typically exceed market capacity, resulting in chronically high failure rates and suboptimal industry profits. Excessive entry has been attributed to overconfidence arising when expected payoffs depend partly on skill. In an experimental test of this hypothesis, 96 participants played 24 rounds of a market entry game, with expected payoffs dependent partly on skill on half the rounds, after their confidence was manipulated and measured. The results provide direct support for the hypothesis that high levels of confidence are largely responsible for excessive entry, and they suggest that absolute confidence, independent of interpersonal comparison, rather than confidence about one's abilities relative to others, drives excessive entry decisions when skill is involved.     

Increasing capacity: practice effects in absolute identification

In most of the long history of the study of absolute identification--since Miller's (1956) seminal article--a severe limit on performance has been observed, and this limit has resisted improvement even by extensive practice. In a startling result, Rouder, Morey, Cowan, and Pfaltz (2004) found substantially improved performance with practice in the absolute identification of line lengths, albeit for only 3 participants and in a somewhat atypical paradigm. We investigated the limits of this effect and found that it also occurs in more typical paradigms, is not limited to a few virtuoso participants or due to relative judgment strategies, and generalizes to some (e.g., line inclination and tone frequency) but not other (e.g., tone loudness) dimensions. We also observed, apart from differences between dimensions, 2 unusual aspects of improvement with practice: (a) a positive correlation between initial performance and the effect of practice and (b) a large reduction in a characteristic trial-to-trial decision bias with practice.     

Effects of speech rate on the absolute and relative timing of apraxic and conduction aphasic sentence production

The purpose of this investigation was to provide a constructive replication of the Kent and McNeil (1987, In Phonetic approaches to speech production in aphasia and related disorders. San Diego: College-Hill Press) study of the speech timing characteristics of apraxic and conduction aphasic speakers. Acoustic analysis was used to obtain absolute utterance durations, segment durations, and vowel formant trajectories from utterances produced under control, fast, and slow rate conditions. Segment-to-whole ratios and slope values were calculated. Results support the hypothesis presented by Kent and McNeil (1987) that there is a phonetic-motoric component contributing to the speech patterns of both the apraxic and conduction aphasic speakers sampled. Theories of rate control in normal and disordered speakers are discussed.     

Word frequency and memory: effects on absolute versus relative order memory and on item memory versus order memory

Word frequency can produce opposite effects on recognition and order memory: Low-frequency words produce greater recognition accuracy, whereas high-frequency words produce superior order memory. The present experiments further delineate the relationship between word frequency and order memory. Experiment 1 indicates that low-frequency words produce worse performance on a measure of absolute order memory but not on a test of relative order, which is consistent with the idea that different forms of information underlie different types of order judgments (Greene, Thapar, & Westerman, 1998). Experiment 2 contrasted high-, low-, and very low-frequency words on recognition memory and absolute order memory. In comparison with high-frequency words, low-frequency words enhanced recognition, whereas very low-frequency words did not. Both low- and very low-frequency words, however, produced worse memory for absolute order. Thus, the relationship between frequency and item memory is an inverted U-shaped function, whereas the relationship between frequency and absolute order memory is direct. This implies that the item-enhancing effects of lower word frequency may be dissociated from its order-disrupting effects.     

Sensitivity to relative and absolute motion.

The threshold of sensitivity to movement could be governed by mechanisms that are sensitive either to change in spatial position, or directly to the movement itself. The use of spatially complex patterns (random-dot patterns) has been suggested to eliminate the former strategy allowing examination of the movement detecting mechanisms in isolation. By means of such a technique, thresholds for directional judgements were determined for patterns which underwent either a simple displacement or a shearing displacement. Thresholds for shearing motion were found to be around one half of those for simple motion, suggesting that relative, rather than absolute, motion governs performance for small displacements. This contrasts with previous experiments which showed that absolute motion governs performance for much larger displacements.     

Comparing effects of the horizontal-vertical illusion on grip scaling and judgment: relative versus absolute, not perception versus action

The discovery that the prehension component of an open-loop, two-fingered reach is largely immune to certain salient pictorial illusions has been used to suggest that humans possess 2 distinct visual systems, 1 that subserves perceptual judgment and 1 that mediates visually controlled action. In this article, the authors present evidence that suggests that the critical distinction is not that of reaching and judgment but of relative and absolute perception. Experiment 1 extends the findings of S. Aglioti, J. F. X. DeSouza, and M. A. Goodale (1995) and suggests that the manual prehension component of open-loop reaching is affected by the horizontal-vertical illusion to a much smaller degree than perceptual size judgments. In Experiments 2 and 3, however, when perceptual size judgment is directed at a single element of the display, this difference vanishes. Experiment 4 demonstrates that grip scaling is strongly affected by the illusion when a single reach is scaled to both the horizontal and vertical components of a triangular figure.     

Concurrent-chain performance: Effects of absolute and relative terminal-link entry frequency

Six pigeons were trained in a concurrent-chain procedure with constant variable-interval 6-s variable-interval 12-s terminal links. Five groups of conditions were arranged. Within a group of conditions, the duration of one initial-link schedule was held constant and the duration of the other initial link was varied. The duration of the varied initial link was always longer than, or equal to, the constant initial-link duration. The duration of the shorter initial link was varied across groups of conditions from 5 s to 70 s. The data from each group were well described by the generalized matching law. Sensitivity (a) to the terminal-link entry ratio increased as the shorter initial-link duration increased, but appeared to reach an asymptote at shorter initial-link durations greater than 32 s. Terminal-link bias did not change with changes in shorter initial-link duration for the response-allocation data, but showed a small increase with increasing shorter initial-link duration for the time-allocation data.     

Sensitivity to relative reinforcer rate in concurrent schedules: independence from relative and absolute reinforcer duration

Twelve pigeons responded on two keys under concurrent variable-interval (VI) schedules. Over several series of conditions, relative and absolute magnitudes of reinforcement were varied. Within each series, relative rate of reinforcement was varied and sensitivity of behavior ratios to reinforcer-rate ratios was assessed. When responding at both alternatives was maintained by equal-sized small reinforcers, sensitivity to variation in reinforcer-rate ratios was the same as when large reinforcers were used. This result was observed when the overall rate of reinforcement was constant over conditions, and also in another series of concurrent schedules in which one schedule was kept constant at VI ached 120 s. Similarly, reinforcer magnitude did not affect the rate at which response allocation approached asymptote within a condition. When reinforcer magnitudes differred between the two responses and reinforcer-rate ratios were varied, sensitivity of behavior allocation was unaffected although response bias favored the schedule that arranged the larger reinforcers. Analysis of absolute response rates ratio sensitivity to reinforcement occurrred on the two keys showed that this invariance of response despite changes in reinforcement interaction that were observed in absolute response rates on the constant VI 120-s schedule. Response rate on the constant VI 120-s schedule was inversely related to reinforcer rate on the varied key and the strength of this relation depended on the relative magnitude of reinforcers arranged on varied key. Independence of sensitivity to reinforcer-rate ratios from relative and absolute reinforcer magnitude is consistent with the relativity and independence assumtions of the matching law.     

The effect of age on relative timing variability and transfer

The purpose of this study was to investigate potential qualitative differences in relative timing across age both within and across speed conditions. Forty right-handed males performed 48 trials of a five-component coincident-timing task at one speed and then 16 more at a different speed. The independent variables were age (5-7, 8-10, 11-13 years, and adult), speed (slow and fast), and block order (training and transfer). The results indicated that within-speed relative timing consistency improved with increasing age for movement-time and pause-time components, while across-speed transfer improved with age only for pause time. movement velocity emerged as a more stable timing parameter than movement time across speeds for all groups. The last movement-time component correlated highly with the total response times, suggesting that coincident-timing accuracy was controlled to a large degree by a final, fine-tuning correction. These results imply that developmental deficits in relative timing increase the attention demands of a given task, thereby reducing a child's capacity to concurrently control his movements and monitor events in the environment.     

Visual movement perception: A comparison of absolute and relative movement discrimination

It is proposed that there are two types of visual movement perception, absolute and relative. The former occurs when an object is seen to move in an otherwise homogeneous (or at least locally homogeneous) visual field. Relative judgments occur when one object is seen to move with respect to another, i.e., the separation between them is seen to change. Quantitative models for both processes are developed, and an experiment reported for which the models seem appropriate. The results appear relevant to a theory of size of length perception as well as to the general perceptual issue of absolute and relative judgments.     

Confidence-accuracy calibration in absolute and relative face recognition judgments

Confidence-accuracy (CA) calibration was examined for absolute and relative face recognition judgments as well as for recognition judgments from groups of stimuli presented simultaneously or sequentially (i.e., simultaneous or sequential mini-lineups). When the effect of difficulty was controlled, absolute and relative judgments produced negligibly different CA calibration, whereas no significant difference was observed for simultaneous and sequential mini-lineups. Further, the effect of difficulty on CA calibration was equivalent across judgment and mini-lineup types. It is interesting to note that positive (i.e., old) recognition judgments demonstrated strong CA calibration whereas negative (i.e., new) judgments evidenced little or no CA association. Implications for eyewitness identification are discussed.     

Revisiting absolute and relative judgments in the WITNESS model

The WITNESS model (Clark in Applied Cognitive Psychology 17:629–654, 2003) provides a theoretical framework with which to investigate the factors that contribute to eyewitness identification decisions. One key factor involves the contributions of absolute versus relative judgments. An absolute contribution is determined by the degree of match between an individual lineup member and memory for the perpetrator; a relative contribution involves the degree to which the best-matching lineup member is a better match to memory than the remaining lineup members. In WITNESS, the proportional contributions of relative versus absolute judgments are governed by the values of the decision weight parameters. We conducted an exploration of the WITNESS model’s parameter space to determine the identifiability of these relative/absolute decision weight parameters, and compared the results to a restricted version of the model that does not vary the decision weight parameters. This exploration revealed that the decision weights in WITNESS are difficult to identify: Data often can be fit equally well by setting the decision weights to nearly any value and compensating with a criterion adjustment. Clark, Erickson, and Breneman (Law and Human Behavior 35:364–380, 2011) claimed to demonstrate a theoretical basis for the superiority of lineup decisions that are based on absolute contributions, but the relationship between the decision weights and the criterion weakens this claim. These findings necessitate reconsidering the role of the relative/absolute judgment distinction in eyewitness decision making.     

Perception of relative and absolute age in facial photographs

Longitudinal series of photographs of faces of secondary school students were used to evaluate observers’ ability to perceive age. Information in individual stimuli was manipulated by masking out parts of the photographs, while information provided by the relations among stimuli was manipulated by task conditions. The ability to perceive relative age was assessed in two tasks requiring subjects to order photographs by age. Absolute age perception was studied in a third task requiring age estimates in years to photographs presented one at a time. While judgments were beyond chance accuracy in all combinations of masking and task conditions, a decrease in either type of information generally produced a decrease in accuracy.

     

Spaced retrieval: absolute spacing enhances learning regardless of relative spacing

Repeated retrieval enhances long-term retention, and spaced repetition also enhances retention. A question with practical and theoretical significance is whether there are particular schedules of spaced retrieval (e.g., gradually expanding the interval between tests) that produce the best learning. In the present experiment, subjects studied and were tested on items until they could recall each one. They then practiced recalling the items on 3 repeated tests that were distributed according to one of several spacing schedules. Increasing the absolute (total) spacing of repeated tests produced large effects on long-term retention: Repeated retrieval with long intervals between each test produced a 200% improvement in long-term retention relative to repeated retrieval with no spacing between tests. However, there was no evidence that a particular relative spacing schedule (expanding, equal, or contracting) was inherently superior to another. Although expanding schedules afforded a pattern of increasing retrieval difficulty across repeated tests, this did not translate into gains in long-term retention. Repeated spaced retrieval had powerful effects on retention, but the relative schedule of repeated tests had no discernible impact.