Visual awareness of objects and their colour

At any given moment, our awareness of what we 'see' before us seems to be rather limited. If, for instance, a display containing multiple objects is shown (red or green disks), when one object is suddenly covered at random, observers are often little better than chance in reporting about its colour (Wolfe, Reinecke, & Brawn, Visual Cognition, 14, 749-780, 2006). We tested whether, when object attributes (such as colour) are unknown, observers still retain any knowledge of the presence of that object at a display location. Experiments 1-3 involved a task requiring two-alternative (yes/no) responses about the presence or absence of a colour-defined object at a probed location. On this task, if participants knew about the presence of an object at a location, responses indicated that they also knew about its colour. A fourth experiment presented the same displays but required a three-alternative response. This task did result in a data pattern consistent with participants' knowing more about the locations of objects within a display than about their individual colours. However, this location advantage, while highly significant, was rather small in magnitude. Results are compared with those of Huang (Journal of Vision, 10(10, Art. 24), 1-17, 2010), who also reported an advantage for object locations, but under quite different task conditions.     

Haptic identification of objects and their depictions

Haptic identification of real objects is superior to that of raised two-dimensional (2-D) depictions. Three explanations of real-object superiority were investigated: contribution of material information, contribution of 3-D shape and size, and greater potential for integration across the fingers. In Experiment 1, subjects, while wearing gloves that gently attenuated material information, haptically identified real objects that provided reduced cues to compliance, mass, and part motion. The gloves permitted exploration with free hand movement, a single outstretched finger, or five outstretched fingers. Performance decreased over these three conditions but was superior to identification of pictures of the same objects in all cases, indicating the contribution of 3-D structure and integration across the fingers. Picture performance was also better with five fingers than with one. In Experiment 2, the subjects wore open-fingered gloves, which provided them with material information. Consequently, the effect of type of exploration was substantially reduced but not eliminated. Material compensates somewhat for limited access to object structure but is not the primary basis for haptic object identification.     

Pigeons see correspondence between objects and their pictures

The extent to which nonhumans recognize the correspondence between static pictures and the objects they represent remains an interesting and controversial issue. Pictures displayed on computers are used extensively for research on behavioral and neural mechanisms of cognition in birds, yet attempts to show that birds recognize the objects seen in pictures have produced mixed and inconclusive results. We trained pigeons to discriminate between two identically colored but differently shaped three-dimensional objects seen directly or as pictures, and we found clear bidirectional transfer of the learned object discrimination. Transfer from objects to pictures occurred even when pigeons were trained with 12 views and only novel views of the objects were presented in transfer. This study provides the strongest evidence yet that pigeons can recognize the correspondence between objects and pictures.     

Attitudes toward the male role and their correlates

This study investigated relationships between college men's attitudes toward the male role and five theoretical concomitants of the role. It was expected that males endorsing traditional male-role norms would be more homophobic, more strongly support the Type A behavior orientation, support less self-disclosure to male and female friends, and approve of the maintenance of asymmetrical decision-making power with their intimate partner. Men from two liberal arts college in a New England metropolitan area (N=223) provided the data to test the hypotheses. Endorsement of the traditional role was associated with all predicted concomitants, expect the measure of disclosure to male friend. The results are discussed in terms of the pervasive nature of the antifemininity norm within the male role.An earlier version of this article was presented as a paper at the meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society, Boston, 1984.     

Seriality of phonological encoding in naming objects and reading their names

There is a remarkable lack of research bringing together the literatures on oral reading and speaking. As concerns phonological encoding, both models of reading and speaking assume a process of segmental spellout for words, which is followed by serial prosodification in models of speaking (e.g., Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999). Thus, a natural place to merge models of reading and speaking would be at the level of segmental spellout. This view predicts similar seriality effects in reading and object naming. Experiment 1 showed that the seriality of encoding inside a syllable revealed in previous studies of speaking is observed for both naming objects and reading their names. Experiment 2 showed that both object naming and reading exhibit the seriality of the encoding of successive syllables previously observed for speaking. Experiment 3 showed that the seriality is also observed when object naming and reading trials are mixed rather than tested separately, as in the first two experiments. These results suggest that a serial phonological encoding mechanism is shared between naming objects and reading their names.     

The interaction of semantic features of transitive verbs and their objects

Summary Proceeding from the assumption that verbs imply their potential objects, an attempt was made to vary this implication by combining specific and general verbs (e.g. to adopt/to wash) with specific or general objects, respectively (e.g. boy/child). These 4 verb-object combinations were presented visually in simple subject-predicate-object sentences in a multitrial, free recall learning experiment. A highly significant interaction was found between verb and object variation. Specific verbs were better recalled when associated with general objects while general verbs were better recalled in association with specific objects.

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Zusammenfassung Ausgehend von der Annahme, daß Verben ihre möglichen Objekte bereits implizieren, wurde versucht, die Implikation für spezifische und allgemeine Verben dadurch zu variieren, daß sie mit jeweils einem spezifischen bzw. allgemeinen Objekt kombiniert wurden. Die 4 Verb-Objekt-Kombinationen wurden in einfachen Subjekt-Prädikat-Objekt-Sätzen in einem multitrial free recall Versuch optisch zum Lernen angeboten. Es zeigte sich eine hochsignifikante Wechselwirkung zwischen Verb- und Objektvariation. Spezifische Verben werden besser mit allgemeinen Objekten, allgemeine Verben besser mit spezifischen Objekten behalten.

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The paper is based on an experiment conducted and evaluated by Anke Grashorn, as part of her diploma thesis, under the author's supervision.     

The Significance of Parents' Evaluations of their Own School for their Educational Attitudes

The study set out to examine parents' evaluations of the school they had attended and the role of these evaluations in the formation of parental attitudes towards education. A group of vocationally educated (N = 343) and a group of academically educated (N = 231) parents were asked to think back to their primary school days and evaluate the functioning of their school; they were also requested to indicate their opinions on a set of attitude statements and to predict their preschool-aged child's future direction in secondary education. The parents' evaluation of their schools averaged at satisfactory, with the highest grade given to the quality of the instruction and the lowest grades to the giving of encouragement and the capability of taking individual needs into consideration. The school evaluations were organized by the school generation and, in particular, by the educational position of the subject, so that those parents who had gone to the (new) comprehensive school and those who were university-educated gave more positive evaluations of their schools than did those who had gone to the (old) folk school and those who were vocationally educated. The critical educational attitudes corresponding to the educational position of the academically educated parents were enhanced if their evaluation of their own school was negative, whereas the positive educational attitudes corresponding to the educational position of the vocationally educated parents were enhanced if their evaluation of their own school was positive. With the vocationally educated parents, their school evaluation also organized their prediction of their child's secondary education: a positive evaluation raised and a negative evaluation lowered the likelihood of vocational education as the predicted alternative.     

Similarity between Fourier transforms of objects predicts their experimental confusions

Two sets of stimuli were presented tachistoscopically to 4 subjects. On each trial, a single stimulus was presented, and the subject was required to identify the stimulus by verbal response. An exposure duration was chosen such that the subject's identification performance fell within a range from faultless identification to chance guessing. The object-identification data of each subject obtained for all stimulus exposures were pooled to form an object confusion matrix. A model of visual processing based on two-dimensional spatial frequency content (Fourier transforms) was used to predict confusions among stimulus pairs. The model properties that appear to be the most essential are those that allow it (1) to account for the obvious dependence of the Fourier transform on the choice of an origin point; and (2) choose the point of origin for each object separately, irrespective of other objects of the set. The point of origin of the reference frame, in which Fourier transforms are performed, is chosen so as to minimize the low-frequency phase component for each object. A high correlation (up to .96) between confusion matrices and model interobject distances was attained. The results demonstrate that such a distance measure gives a good prediction of object confusability.     

Attitudes toward accompanied driving: The views of teens and their parents

In Israel, a new driver must be accompanied by an experienced driver for the first 3 months after licensure. In the case of teens, the accompanying driver is usually one of the parents. However, no previous study set to examine the relationship between parents’ and offsprings’ attitudes toward accompanied driving (ATAD), and the associations between the way parents habitually drive and their offsprings’ ATAD. The current study examined the associations between young drivers’ ATAD on the one hand, and parents’ ATADs, driving styles, and driving history, on the other. One hundred and twenty-nine young drivers completed a questionnaire assessing their ATAD, and their principal accompanying driver completed the same ATAD scale along with the Multi-dimensional Driving Style Inventory. The findings indicate a correspondence between parents’ and children’s ATAD scores, as well as significant associations between teens’ ATADs and their parents’ driving styles and involvement in car crashes. Specifically, higher Tension, Relatedness, Avoidance, Disapproval, and Anxiety reported by the young driver were positively correlated with higher reports on the same attitudes by parents. In addition, parents’ maladaptive driving styles were positively associated with their offspring’s Tension, Avoidance, Disapproval and Anxiety ATADs, whereas parents’ careful driving style was related to offspring’s higher relatedness and lower negative ATADs. Higher involvement of parents in car crashes contributed significantly to teens’ higher Tension, Disapproval, and Anxiety, and lower relatedness. The results are discussed in respect to the relationship between the parental model and the young driver’s attitude toward accompanied driving, pointing to the importance of parents’ role in promoting young drivers’ safety attitudes and behaviors.     

Observing and engaging in purposeful actions with objects influences estimates of their size

A ladle was recalled as being taller by participants who observed tedious removal of sand from it with a small teaspoon than by those who observed removal with a larger spoon. A second experiment showed that the number of darts thrown in order to hit a target correlated negatively with memory estimates of the size of the target, a finding replicated in a third experiment with size estimates made while the target was visible. The first two experiments suggest that the way an object is used can influence memory of its size. The third experiment supports the hypothesis that in vivo size estimation of familiar objects may employ a mechanism that derives size from memory and that size memory can be distorted by the way an object was used.     

Independent processing of parts and of their spatial organization in complex visual objects

A visual search experiment using synthetic three-dimensional objects is reported. The target shared its constituent parts, the spatial organization of its parts, or both with the distractors displayed with it. Sharing of parts and sharing of spatial organization both negatively affected visual search performance, and these effects were strictly additive. These findings support theories of complex visual object perception that assume a parsing of the stimulus into its higher-order constituents (volumetric parts or visible surfaces). The additivity of the effects demonstrates that information on parts and information on spatial organization are processed independently in visual search.     

Grasping objects by their handles: a necessary interaction between cognition and action

Research has illustrated dissociations between "cognitive" and "action" systems, suggesting that different representations may underlie phenomenal experience and visuomotor behavior. However, these systems also interact. The present studies show a necessary interaction when semantic processing of an object is required for an appropriate action. Experiment 1 demonstrated that a semantic task interfered with grasping objects appropriately by their handles, but a visuospatial task did not. Experiment 2 assessed performance on a visuomotor task that had no semantic component and showed a reversal of the effects of the concurrent tasks. In Experiment 3, variations on concurrent word tasks suggested that retrieval of semantic information was necessary for appropriate grasping. In all, without semantic processing, the visuomotor system can direct the effective grasp of an object, but not in a manner that is appropriate for its use.     

Actions travel with their objects: evidence for dynamic event files

Moving a visual object is known to lead to an update of its cognitive representation. Given that object representations have also been shown to include codes describing the actions they were accompanied by, we investigated whether these action codes “move” along with their object. We replicated earlier findings that repeating stimulus and action features enhances performance if other features are repeated, but attenuates performance if they alternate. However, moving the objects in which the stimuli appeared in between two stimulus presentations had a strong impact on the feature bindings that involved location. Taken together, our findings provide evidence that changing the location of an object leaves two memory traces, one referring to its original location (an episodic record) and another referring to the new location (a working-memory trace).     

Distinct roles for medial temporal lobe structures in memory for objects and their locations

The ability to learn and retain novel information depends on a system of structures in the medial temporal lobe (MTL) including the hippocampus and the surrounding entorhinal, perirhinal, and parahippocampal cortices. Damage to these structures produces profound memory deficits; however, the unique contribution to memory of each of these structures remains unclear. Here we have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to determine whether the perirhinal and parahippocampal cortices show differential memory-related activity. Based on the distinct patterns of cortical input to these two areas, we reasoned that these structures might show differential activity for spatial and object recognition memory. In each of 11 subjects, we found that the perirhinal cortex was active during both spatial and object memory encoding, while the anterior parahippocampal cortex was active only during spatial encoding. These data support the idea that MTL structures make distinct contributions to recognition memory performance.     

Recognition by humans and pigeons of novel views of 3-D objects and their photographs

Humans and pigeons were trained to discriminate between 2 views of actual 3-D objects or their photographs. They were tested on novel views that were either within the closest rotational distance between the training views (interpolated) or outside of that range (extrapolated). When training views were 60 degrees apart, pigeons, but not humans, recognized novel views of actual objects better than their pictures. Further, both species recognized interpolated views of both stimulus types better than extrapolated views, but a single distinctive geon enhanced recognition of novel views only for humans. When training views were 90 degrees apart, pigeons recognized interpolated views better than extrapolated views with actual objects but not with photographs. Thus, pigeons may represent actual objects differently than their pictures.     

Illness Attitudes Scale dimensions and their associations with anxiety-related constructs in a nonclinical sample

The Illness Attitudes Scale (IAS) is a self-rated measure that consists of nine subscales designed to assess fears, attitudes and beliefs associated with hypochondriacal concerns and abnormal illness behavior [Kellner, R. (1986). Somatization and hypochondriasis. New York: Praeger; Kellner, R. (1987). Abridged manual of the Illness Attitudes Scale. Department of Psychiatry, School of Medicine, University of New Mexico]. The purposes of the present study were to explore the hierarchical factor structure of the IAS in a nonclinical sample of young adult volunteers and to examine the relations of each illness attitudes dimension to a set of anxiety-related measures. One-hundred and ninety-seven undergraduate university students (156 F, 41 M; mean age = 21.9 years) completed the IAS as well as measures of anxiety sensitivity, trait anxiety and panic attack history. The results of principal components analyses with oblique (Oblimin) rotation suggested that the IAS is best conceptualized as a four-factor measure at the lower order level (with lower-order dimensions tapping illness-related Fears, Behavior, Beliefs and Effects, respectively), and a unifactorial measure at the higher-order level (i.e. higher-order dimension tapping General Hypochondriacal Concerns). The factor structure overlapped to some degree with the scoring of the IAS proposed by Kellner (1986, 1987), as well as with the factor structures identified in previously-tested clinical and nonclinical samples [Ferguson, E. & Daniel, E. (1995). The Illness Attitudes Scale (IAS): a psychometric evaluation on a nonclinical population. Personality and Individual Differences, 18, 463-469; Hadjistavropoulos, H. D. & Asmundson, G. J. G. (1998). Factor analytic investigation of the Illness Attitudes Scale in a chronic pain sample. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 36, 1185-1195; Hadjistavropoulos, H. D., Frombach, I. & Asmundson, G. J. G. (in press). Exploratory and confirmatory factor analytic investigations of the Illness Attitudes Scale in a nonclinical sample. Behaviour Research and Therapy; Speckens, A. E., Spinhoven, P., Sloekers, P. P. A., Bolk, J. H. & van Hemert, A. M. (1996). A validation study of the Whitley Index, the Illness Attitude Scales and the Somatosensory Amplification Scale in general medical and general practice patients. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 40, 95-104]. The Fears, Beliefs and Effects lower-order factors and the General Hypochondriacal Concerns higher-order factor, were shown to be strongly associated with anxiety sensitivity, even after accounting for trait anxiety and panic history. Implications for understanding the high degree of comorbidity between the diagnoses of panic disorder and hypochondriasis, as well as future research directions for exploring the utility of various IAS dimensions in predicting responses to lab-based bodily symptom-induction procedures, are discussed.     

Attitudes toward women and their work roles: Effects of intrinsic and extrinsic religious orientations

This study examined the effects of personal religious orientation, religious denomination, and gender on attitudes toward women and their work roles using a sample of 263 single undergraduate university students. Subjects with a high intrinsic religious orientation put significantly more emphasis on family than career in their anticipated general lifestyle relative to those with a low intrinsic religious orientation. Subjects with a high intrinsic religious orientation were also more likely to anticipate the female spouse spending less time in a profession during the children's early years. Males showed more traditional attitudes toward women than females, but there were no gender effects on measures of preferred general lifestyle, preferred child-care distribution, or preferred career involvement for the wife. Subjects belonging to mainline and conservative denomination did not differ significantly in their attitudes toward women or their work roles.     

The representation of objects and their attributes in memory: Evidence concerning memory for location

The general principle is advanced that different attributes of objects (e.g. shape and colour) are more readily associated when they are attributes of the same object than when they are attributes of different objects. Previous studies provide support for the principle, for they have shown that a shape is more readily associated with its own colour than, for example, with the colour of its background. In the present experiments, the principle was applied to the attributes of shape and location. In four experiments it was shown that a shape was more readily associated with its own location than with the location of another object. Differences in contiguity between the presentation of the shape and the location with which the shape was to be associated were controlled for, as were other factors. The results were interpreted as providing support for the general principle stated above. It was suggested that the general principle could be explained by supposing that memory is propositional in format.     

Effects of distinctive context on memory for objects and their locations in young and elderly adults

Sharps and Gollin (1987, 1988) reported that older adults' memory for both objects and their spatial location is more facilitated than that of young adults when items are studied in a distinctive visual context. They also reported that age differences in spatial memory and item memory can be ameliorated if the items are studied in a distinctive context. The goal of this study was to verify and extend these findings by examining memory for everyday objects when the objects were studied on a (a) plain surface, (b) black-and-white schematic map, or (c) colored model. In Experiment 1, item memory was examined, and in Experiment 2, spatial memory was studied. The results indicated that spatial memory improved with the addition of distinctive context but item memory did not. Moreover, there was no evidence that elderly adults were more facilitated by the distinctive context than were the young.