Categorization by People and Pigeons: The Twenty-second Bartlett Memorial Lecture

In one set of experiments, the experience of categorizing sets of variable exemplars of two categories enhanced subjects' ability to discriminate between two new instances of one of these categories. In a second set, subjects that had categorized two sets of exemplars responded more accurately to the hitherto unseen prototype than to a new exemplar close to the category boundary; but in some cases they responded even more accurately to a new exemplar, even further from the category boundary, than to the prototype. In both sets of experiments, people and pigeons behaved in similar ways. The implication is that at least in some situations human behaviour is controlled by a relatively simple set of associative processes, whose operations have been elucidated by conditioning experiments in animals.     

Pleasure and Complexity: Berlyne Revisited

D. E. Berlyne (1960, 1974) posited an increasing linear function for complexity with an inverted U-shaped function for pleasure. Berlyne's theory of aesthetic response was tested through the presentation of 6 color reproductions of paintings to 92 participants and the gauging of their responses. When participants' pleasure was compared with interest, that hypothesis was upheld. However, when complexity was compared with pleasure, Berlyne's theory was not supported.     

The 28th Bartlett Memorial Lecture Causal learning: An associative analysis

The concordance between performance and judgements of the causal effectiveness of an instrumental action suggests that such actions are mediated by causal knowledge. Although causal learning exhibits many associative phenomena—blocking, inhibitory or preventative learning, and super-learning—judgements of the causal status of a cue can be changed retrospectively as a result of learning episodes that do not directly involve the cue. In order to explain retrospective revaluation, a modified associative theory is described in which the learning processes for retrieved cue representations are the opposite to those for presented cues, and this theory is evaluated by studies of the role of within-compound associations in retrospective revaluation and blocking. However, this modified theory only applies when the within-compound association represents a contiguous rather than a causal cue relationship.     

Rates of change in psychological processes

The reasons for the attractiveness of the hypothesis of preservation of the products of early experience are discussed with reference to the different types of constructs in developmental theory. It is suggested that a scholar's attitude for or against preservation of a child's qualities will depend, in part, on the nature of the specific evidence.     

The 26th Bartlett Memorial Lecture From Truths of Bartlett to Illusions of Vision

This is an informal account of Sir Frederic Bartlett's department at the time I was a student and started research in the late 1940s and 1950s, developing some themes of his influence and how his ideas, with Craik's, have had a major effect on experimental psychology ever since. As one of the diminishing tribe of those who knew 'Sir Fred', it seems appropriate to make this quite a personal statement, representative of his influence on us, rather than a formal paper. His interests were very great, including not only memory, but thinking and social issues largely based on anthropology, as well as practical problems of selection for skill, and design of machines to be appropriate for humans. A 'subliminal' theme is errors of perception. It is this that will be developed here as, following his influence as my teacher, this has been the central interest of my work, which took off from the Cambridge Psychology Department of that time.     

Simple additivity of stochastic psychological processes: Tests and measures

In this article, some additive models of behavioral measures are defined, and distributional tests of them are proposed. Major theoretical results include (a) conditions for additivity of components to predict the highest level of dominance in a model-free stochastic dominance hierarchy, (b) methods of identifying the shape of the hazard rate function of an added component from certain relationships among the observable density and distribution functions, and (c) effects of stochastic dependence between components on the distributional tests. Feasibility and usefulness of the methods are demonstrated by application to choice RT and ratings experiments.The author was supported by grants MH44640 to Roger Ratcliff and AFOSR 90-0246 (jointly funded by NSF) to Gail McCoon. Parts of this work were presented at the European Mathematical Psychology meetings of 1991. My thanks to F. Gregory Ashby, Bruce Bloxom, Roger Ratcliff, W. Schwarz, Jim Townsend, and an anonymous reviewer for their many helpful suggestions.     

Mirror reversal simply explained without recourse to psychological processes

This paper proposes a simple and definitive solution to the mirror reversal problem, “Why does a mirror reverse left and right but not up and down?” The solution is given by combining the inversion caused by the optical process of mirroring and the definition of the left-right axis. Thus the left-right reversal of mirror images essentially does not involve psychological processes, in contrast to the multiprocess hypothesis recently proposed by Takano.