Latency and Response Complexity

Two experiments were conducted in which the latency of movement responses of varying complexity was investigated. The complexity of an arm sweep movement was varied by (a) increasing the extent of movement from 6 in. to 18 in., (b) reversing the movement, and (c) by making two or three pauses in an on-going movement. The results only partially supported the hypothesis that the latency of a response is related to the complexity of the movement pattern. Specifically RT was longer when the response involved significant changes in the temporal organization of the movement pattern.     

生命之灯

贫道回到故乡,在一个漆黑的夜晚,来到一个荒僻的村落中,在羊肠小径,村民们默默的来来往往着。正想离开此地,看见远处有一点微弱的灯亮移动过来。这时身旁的一个人说:“瞎子过来了。”贫道百思不得其解。一个双目失明的盲人,他没有一丝白天与黑夜的概念,他看不到庄严的神像,看不     

Multiple Visual Latency

It has long been known that a dark visual stimulus is seen later than a bright one, with a delay up to several 10s of milliseconds. Systematic studies of various phenomena demonstrating this delay have revealed that the perceptual latency decreases monotonically as the stimulus intensity increases. Because latencies measured by psychological methods and cortical evoked responses are very similar to electroretinogram latencies, it has become a common belief that there is little in the intensity-dependent latency function that cannot be explained by retinal processes. In this study, we report evidence that there is no one absolute visual delay common to the whole visual system, but rather that the delay varies considerably in different perceptual subsystems. The relative visual latency was found to be considerably shorter in the task involving detecting the direction of movement than in other perceptual tasks that presume visual awareness of the beginning or temporal order of visual events.     

Categorization of sounds

The authors conducted 4 experiments to test the decision-bound, prototype, and distribution theories for the categorization of sounds. They used as stimuli sounds varying in either resonance frequency or duration. They created different experimental conditions by varying the variance and overlap of 2 stimulus distributions used in a training phase and varying the size of the stimulus continuum used in the subsequent test phase. When resonance frequency was the stimulus dimension, the pattern of categorization-function slopes was in accordance with the decision-bound theory. When duration was the stimulus dimension, however, the slope pattern gave partial support for the decision-bound and distribution theories. The authors introduce a new categorization model combining aspects of decision-bound and distribution theories that gives a superior account of the slope patterns across the 2 stimulus dimensions.     

Processing emotions in sounds: cross-domain aftereffects of vocal utterances and musical sounds

Nonlinguistic signals in the voice and musical instruments play a critical role in communicating emotion. Although previous research suggests a common mechanism for emotion processing in music and speech, the precise relationship between the two domains is unclear due to the paucity of direct evidence. By applying the adaptation paradigm developed by Bestelmeyer, Rouger, DeBruine, and Belin [2010. Auditory adaptation in vocal affect perception. Cognition, 117(2), 217–223. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2010.08.008], this study shows cross-domain aftereffects from vocal to musical sounds. Participants heard an angry or fearful sound four times, followed by a test sound and judged whether the test sound was angry or fearful. Results show cross-domain aftereffects in one direction – vocal utterances to musical sounds, not vice-versa. This effect occurred primarily for angry vocal sounds. It is argued that there is a unidirectional relationship between vocal and musical sounds where emotion processing of vocal sounds encompasses musical sounds but not vice-versa.     

Learned Reduction of Drinking Latency

Arguments have been presented claiming that personality structure in the questionnaire medium can only be found by factor analyzing item data. To test this assumption, Cattell's 16PF, which was developed through factoring of parcels, was administered to 264 undergraduate students at the University of Illinois. Item data was factor analyzed, yielding essentially the same factor structure as produced by the original parceling.     

Similarity and categorization of environmental sounds

Four experiments investigated the acoustical correlates of similarity and categorization judgments of environmental sounds. In Experiment 1, similarity ratings were obtained from pairwise comparisons of recordings of 50 environmental sounds. A three-dimensional multidimensional scaling (MDS) solution showed three distinct clusterings of the sounds, which included harmonic sounds, discrete impact sounds, and continuous sounds. Furthermore, sounds from similar sources tended to be in close proximity to each other in the MDS space. The orderings of the sounds on the individual dimensions of the solution were well predicted by linear combinations of acoustic variables, such as harmonicity, amount of silence, and modulation depth. The orderings of sounds also correlated significantly with MDS solutions for similarity ratings of imagined sounds and for imagined sources of sounds, obtained in Experiments 2 and 3--as was the case for free categorization of the 50 sounds (Experiment 4)--although the categorization data were less well predicted by acoustic features than were the similarity data.     

Latency of autokinesis and convergence of the eyes

It is suggested that one of the determinants of autokinesis is noise associated with a hypothesized eye-in-head position monitor within the oculomotor system. It is argued that a decrease in convergence of the eyes is associated with a decrease in the magnitude of the signal relating to eye position. The prediction is that this will thereby produce an increase in the effectiveness of noise as a spurious signal. An experiment is described in which a just-visible oscilloscope spot was viewed in a dark room at four distances along the subject's median sagittal plane. The latency of appearance of autokinetio movement was measured in each of these conditions. It was found that as distance increased, i.e. as convergence decreased, latency decreased also. This result is consistent with the prediction.     

Modularity in locating Wh-gaps

In this paper we report our finding that the parsing routine responsible for locating the deep-structure position of a wh-phrase operates independently of semantic/pragmatic knowledge, suggesting a modular organization of the human sentence processor. Specifically, wh-phrases that were semantically implausible as a direct object of the matrix verb were nonetheless reactivated in that position. Further, reactivation of the wh-phrase was observed despite the fact that the matrix verbs were three-place predicates (e.g.,remind) — a class of verbs which, some experiments suggest, allow interactive effects (e.g., Tanenhaus, Boland, Garnsey, & Carlson, 1989). We argue that this disparity in findings is due to the difference between the cross-modal lexical priming (CMLP) task used in the present study, and the tasks used by Tanenhaus et al.We gratefully acknowledge Penny Prather, Catherine Stern, and David Swinney for their technical assistance, and also Brian Hickok. This work has also benefitted from helpful discussions with Michael Tanenhaus and Stephen Crain, as well as from the comments of two anonymous reviewers.