Moray revisited: High-priority affective stimuli and visual search

Previous research offers conflicting suggestions about whether “high-priority” verbal stimuli such as an individual's own name or emotionally charged words automatically grab attention and/or can be detected without the usual capacity limitations. Nine experiments investigated this issue, using visual search through displays of words. In speeded search tasks, the subject's own name was detected more quickly than other targets, but in no case were search slopes flat enough to suggest parallel search or “pop-out”. Further, names were not found to be unusually potent distractors. Emotionally charged words were neither more readily detected as targets nor more potent as distractors than neutral words. Acomparison of observers' accuracy in searching briefly exposed simultaneous vs. successive displays provided further evidence that search for “high-priority” word targets is subject to the same severe capacity limitations as those that are found with search for neutral words.     

Reversing the word-length effect: A comment on Caplan, Rochon, and Waters

Caplan, Rochon, and Waters (1992) report a failure to observe the poorer immediate serial recall for words of longer spoken duration obtained by Baddeley, Thomson, and Buchanan (1975) and subsequently replicated by others. Indeed, they find a significant reversal of this effect. We present evidence that the material used by Caplan et al. differs only minimally in spoken duration under speeded articulation conditions (Exp. 1 = 1.9%, Exp 2 = 2.31%), in contrast to a clear difference in the case of the original Baddeley et al. material (24.5%). It is further suggested that the reversal of the word-length effect may result from differences in acoustic similarity between the “long” and “short” word sets used by Caplan et al. We conclude that the evidence continues to indicate that longer spoken duration is associated with reduced memory span.     

The twelfth Bartlett memorial lecture: The role of single neurons in the psychology of perception

I feel deeply honoured by your invitation to give the Bartlett lecture, and am especially glad to do so in Holland, the home of so many distinguished psychologists of sensation and perception. And there is a third reason why it has given me much pleasure, for Sir Frederick Bartlett was one of those who had an important influence on the direction of my career some 40 years ago. I had to decide whether to spend my last year at Cambridge reading psychology or physiology, so I attended a short course of introductory lectures he gave in July. About half a dozen of us sat on upright wooden chairs circled around him as he sat in an armchair, smiling benignly. The first thing he did was to tell us to close our notebooks, for he was not going to say anything that would help us to pass any exams. And I believe the very last words of his last lecture were, “So you see it is all very difficult”. I was very glad he said that, for I had in fact found it all very heavy going: my brain seemed always to be lost in clouds of uncertainty when “remembering”, “thinking”, or “perceiving” were mentioned, because there was no conceptual framework for these processes except the words themselves and others spun around them. What I was looking for were the definable quantities of physics, chemistry and even physiology, these I could handle conceptually in their geometric and functional interactions, whereas I always find a purely verbal argument about abstractions difficult to follow and impossible to believe. So this lack of any nonverbal conceptual framework was very painful.

There was one phrase I think I recall him using that particularly aroused my interest-“the effort after meaning”; intuitively this seemed to be very important, but however much effort I made the meaning never quite emerged. I had almost decided that my mistrust of words made me unsuited to a career in psychology, but all the same I put my problem about “physiology or psychology” directly to Bartlett. After finding out that I was mainly interested in problems of sensation and perception, he said he thought that E. D. Adrian's research over the last 20 years had made more difference to that subject than any results obtained from within psychology itself.     

Cue location does not account for all selective associations in food aversion learning

Studies of food aversion learning have been widely interpreted as yielding evidence for selectivity in the associability of cues and consequences. On the one hand, taste cues were easily conditioned to interoceptive consequences (e.g. “illness”), but only with difficulty to exteroceptive consequences (e.g. shock). On the other hand, audiovisual stimuli were easily conditioned to shock, but only with difficulty to illness (Revusky and Garcia, 1970). Sullivan (1984) has emphasized that cue location and temporality have been important uncontrolled variables in many food-aversion studies and has argued that when these factors are taken into account, the supposed selectivity related to sensory modality is lost. Thus, Sullivan (1984) argues that shocks, like “illness”, are readily associated with tastes provided that the tastes are intrinsic attributes of the substances ingested.

Sullivan's important article may have demonstrated significant weaknesses in the evidence for specific associations of exteroceptive cues with shock rather than with “illness”, and this point will not be considered further. However, there are two aspects of Sullivan's case that cannot be substantiated. Firstly, the attempt to demonstrate that taste cues are as readily associated with shock as they are with “illness” is unconvincing. Secondly, unjustified assumptions are made about the nature of the unconditioned stimulus in conditioning with interoceptive consequences, which is presumed to be “illness” despite extensive evidence to the contrary.     

Suppression effects in rhyme judgement tasks

Orthographic and phonological similarity were orthogonally manipulated in a rhyme judgement task. The effects were assessed of paced versus very rapid articulatory suppression on subjects' ability to make rhyme judgements when pairs of words were presented either simultaneously or successively. It was found that there were consistent suppression effects on the accuracy of subjects' judgements to visually similar non-rhyming pairs (e.g. “pint-tint”), visually dissimilar rhyming pairs (e.g. “fare-wear”) and visually similar rhyming pairs (e.g. “fall-tall), regardless of mode of presentation or speed of suppression. The size of the suppression effect was greatest for the visually similar non-rhyming word pairs. It was argued that subjects need to carry out a recheck for phonological similarity when word pairs are visually but not phonologically similar, and that encoding the words in articulatory form is particularly beneficial for making accurate rhyme judgements to such pairs.     

Acoustic similarity and interference in short-term recognition memory: Some results of a decision-theory analysis

The following three studies of single-probe recognition memory set out to show the effect on the signal-detectability measures of d' and β (Tanner and Swets, 1954) of variations in the acoustic similarity of interfering material, which may either precede or follow the item to be remembered (proactive or retroactive interference --PI or RI). The first experiment studies a situation employed by Wickelgren (1966a), who reported that acoustically similar RI substantially reduced d'. It is shown that this effect could have been due to biases in Wickelgren's original designs, and that when a bias-free design is used, the fall in d' is only of borderline significance.

To investigate this problem further, a design was evolved in which two items were presented for memorizing, which varied in acoustic similarity to each other, and (after a distracting task) a probe was presented with one of three questions: Was this the first item of the pair? Was it the second? or, Did it occur in either position? In the first case, recognition-memory with RI of varying acoustic similarity was being studied, and as in the first experiment, it was found that similarity slightly reduced d'. With the second question, PI effects were being studied, and here negligible differences were found. With the third type of question, a “location-free” test, no effects of similarity were found. The last result rules out Posner's (1967) “acid-bath” explanation of similarity effects in interference: an explanation in terms of “differentiation” (or “filtering”) was also invalidated by the results of a third experiment, in which the same effects were found even though similarity varied only between stimulus items and interference, and not between these and the probe. Wickelgren's (1966b) associative model appears to have least difficulty in accommodating these results, though even this needs certain ad hoc assumptions to be able to do so.     

The effect of orthographic structure and lexical meaning on “same-different” judgments

Pairs of high frequency English words, orthographically acceptable pseudo-words, and non-word letter strings were presented in a “same”-“different” task. The mean reaction times for “same” judgments were ordered; real words were faster than pseudo-words, and pseudo-words were faster than non-words. The RTs for the “different”, judgments showed no differences among the three types of words, except in the first two days of practice in a blocked presentation condition when the difference between the real words and non-words was marginally significant. These and other results suggest that “same” judgments are based upon a comparison process which efficiently uses higher order semantic and orthographic information in words, whereas “different” judgments are based upon comparison process which performs a self-terminating search of the graphemic information in words. The results were also discussed with reference to hierarchical models of word perception and reading.     

Newly learned spoken words show long-term lexical competition effects

Newly learned spoken words (e.g., “cathedruke”) become fully engaged in the mental lexicon, as measured via lexical competition with their pre-existing phonological neighbours (e.g., “cathedral”), over the course of several hours or days, and this lexical restructuring is associated with sleep (Dumay & Gaskell, 2007). Here, we investigated the longer-term effects of word learning for three sets of novel words learned at different times using phoneme monitoring and repetition tasks. The effects of these exposure sessions on lexical memory were assessed in a battery of tests. Lexical decision latencies to pre-existing neighbouring words showed that lexical competition effects for the novel words remained observable 8 months after initial exposure. Furthermore, the order-of-acquisition of the novel words affected their production speed (but not recognition speed), with an advantage for earlier acquired words. The results suggest that the consolidation of novel words results in a long-term and stable change in the lexical competition process.     

Familiarity and word recognition

Word recognition was examined for physics and non-physics students after a single visual presentation of a series of sixty words. Physics words likely to be familiar only to physics subjects were used to vary the prior familiarity of the two groups with the inspection material and the ratio of physics to common words (salience) was varied for each of the three inspection series. Common words, which were expected to have greater salience than physics words in one of the inspection series, were not found to be recognized better than the control pairings of physics words by either group of subjects. The absence of differences between physics and non-physics students in the number of inspection list words (positive instances) correctly identified supports the view that prior familiarity is not a critical variable when all inspection items are presented in a recognition test. Physics students made fewer errors than non-physics students in identifying both physics and common words in the the recognition test which were not in an inspection series (negative instances). It is suggested that the correct identification of negative instances involves a scanning of a subject's “internal store” of previously experienced inspection items and that this is more efficient when the meaning of all the items in this “store” is known.     

The learning of surface structure clues to deep structure by a puppet show technique

Fifty-six children were classified in terms of their developmental level on the linguistic structure “John is easy/eager to please”, and an experiment was carried out teaching them “new” (nonsense) words in related transformations by a puppet show technique. These transformations serve as frames for differentiating those new words which indicate a surface structure derived from a transformed deep structure, from those which do not. Results showed that children used different strategies at different developmental levels. Of children who did not use fixed strategies, only children who had correctly performed on all normal adult words (“Passers”) were able to learn which deep structures were called for by some of the new words; all other groups performed at chance levels on all types of new words. However, even these Passers performed correctly only on words given in structures indicating that the tested structure was to be treated as a transformation. The possibility of a language-learning principle related to the marked/unmarked distinction in natural languages is discussed.     

Contextual validity and the effects of low-constraint sentence contexts on lexical decisions

Subjects made lexical decisions after reading either (a) low-constraint sentence contexts that did not predict the identity or meaning of congruous targets (e.g. “Mary went to her room to look at her XXXX”), or (b) control contexts that were randomly ordered lists of words. The crucial variable was the validity of the contextual information. When the sentence contexts were incongrous with the word targets as often as they were congruous (the “less-valid environment”), the congruous contexts had a slight inhibitory effect on decision latency relative to the baseline condition. In contrast, when the contexts were always congruous with the word targets (“valid environment”), they had a large facilitatory effect on decision latency. These results suggest that (a) the effects of congruous contexts can depend on the validity of the contexts across the entire experimental session, and (b) contextual facilitation may be due in part to sentence level processes.     

Is Human Learning Rational?

We can predict and control events in the world via associative learning. Such learning is rational if we come to believe that an associative relationship exists between a pair of events only when it truly does. The statistical metric ΔP, the difference between the probability of an outcome event in the presence of the predictor and its probability in the absence of the predictor tells us when and to what extent events are indeed related. Contrary to what is often claimed, humans' associative judgements compare very favourably with the ΔP metric, even in situations where multiple predictive cues are in competition for association with the outcome. How do humans achieve this judgemental accuracy? I argue that it is not via the application of an explicit mental version of the ΔP rule. Instead, accurate judgements are an emergent property of an associationist learning process of the sort that has become common in adaptive network models of cognition. Such an associationist mechanism is the “means” to a normative or statistical “end”.     

Auditory and visual word-stem completion: Separating data-driven and conceptually driven processes

Two experiments investigated the contributions of data-driven and conceptually driven processing on an implicit word-stem completion task. In Experiment 1, individual words were studied either visually or auditorily and were tested using either visual or auditory word-stems. Keeping modality the same from study to test led to more priming than did changing modality, but there was reliable cross-modal priming. In Experiment 2, subjects read sentences like The boat travelled underwater and inferred the subject noun (i.e. “submarine”) or sentences like The submarine travelled underwater and categorized the subject noun (i.e. “boat”). At test, there was reliable priming for both actually read nouns and inferred nouns. In addition, a modality effect was evident for the actually read nouns but not for the inferred nouns. Taken together, these results imply that there is a basic conceptually driven contribution to priming plus an additional contribution of data-driven processing when surface form is the same at study and test.     

Tracking recognition of spoken words by tracking looks to printed words

Eye movements of Dutch participants were tracked as they looked at arrays of four words on a computer screen and followed spoken instructions (e.g., “Klik op het woord buffel”: Click on the word buffalo). The arrays included the target (e.g., buffel), a phonological competitor (e.g., buffer, buffer), and two unrelated distractors. Targets were monosyllabic or bisyllabic, and competitors mismatched targets only on either their onset or offset phoneme and only by one distinctive feature. Participants looked at competitors more than at distractors, but this effect was much stronger for offset-mismatch than onset-mismatch competitors. Fixations to competitors started to decrease as soon as phonetic evidence disfavouring those competitors could influence behaviour. These results confirm that listeners continuously update their interpretation of words as the evidence in the speech signal unfolds and hence establish the viability of the methodology of using eye movements to arrays of printed words to track spoken-word recognition.     

The effect of an irrelevant dimension on “same-different” judgements of multi-dimensional stimuli

Subjects made “same”-“different” judgements of simultaneously presented pairs of visual stimuli which could vary either in shape and colour independently, or in shape alone. In both conditions only shape was relevant to the “same”-“different” judgement. In the former condition “same” and “different” reaction times (RTs) were shorter when the states (“same” or “different”) of the relevant and the irrelevant dimension, colour, were the same. This result is interpreted as support for either a perceptual or a response interference hypothesis. The presence of an irrelevant dimension did not appear to affect differentially “same” and “different” judgements. The need for a re-evaluation of the results from other studies of multi-dimensional stimulus discrimination is discussed.     

The sad truth about depressive realism

In one form of a contingency judgement task individuals must judge the relationship between an action and an outcome. There are reports that depressed individuals are more accurate than are nondepressed individuals in this task. In particular, nondepressed individuals are influenced by manipulations that affect the salience of the outcome, especially outcome probability. They overestimate a contingency if the probability of an outcome is high—the “outcome-density effect”. In contrast, depressed individuals display little or no outcome-density effect. This apparent knack for depressives not to be misled by outcome density in their contingency judgements has been termed “depressive realism”, and the absence of an outcome-density effect has led to the characterization of depressives as “sadder but wiser”. We present a critical summary of the depressive realism literature and provide a novel interpretation of the phenomenon. We suggest that depressive realism may be understood from a psychophysical analysis of contingency judgements.*     

Mental representation of logical connectives

Logical connectives, such as “AND”, “OR”, “IF . . . THEN”, and “IF AND ONLY IF” are ubiquitous in both language and cognition; however, reasoning with logical connectives is error-prone. We argue that some of these errors may stem from people's tendency to minimize the number of possibilities compatible with logical connectives and to construct a “minimalist” one-possibility representation. As a result, connectives denoting a single possibility (e.g., conjunctions) are likely to be represented correctly, whereas connectives denoting multiple possibilities (e.g., disjunctions or conditionals) are likely to be erroneously represented as conjunctions. These predictions were tested and confirmed in three experiments using different paradigms. In Experiment 1, participants were presented with a multiple-choice task and asked to select all and only those possibilities that would indicate that compound verbal propositions were true versus false. In Experiment 2, a somewhat similar task was used, except that participants were asked later to perform a cued recall of verbal propositions. Finally, Experiment 3 used an old/new recognition paradigm to examine participants' ability to accurately recognize different logical connectives. The results of the three experiments are discussed in relation to theories of representation of possibilities and theories of reasoning.     

like and cross modality recognition in subnormal children

The ability of mentally subnormal children to recognize previously presented visual or verbal stimuli was compared. In “like-modality” procedures they had to recognize words or pictures in the modality in which they had originally been presented. In “cross-modality” procedures the stimulus they had to recognize was in the opposite modality from that which had been used for the first presentation.

In every recognition test the items had to be recognized from among an equal number of novel stimuli. Cross-modality procedures resulted in higher recognition scores. The hypothesis is advanced that this could be accounted for by the necessary translation from one type of sensory image to another in the cross-modality trials, which might minimize over-generalization.     

Shorter articles and notes the interpretation of the passive voice

It was hypothesized that sentences in the passive voice emphasize the importance of the things referred to by their grammatical subjects to a greater extent than sentences in the active voice. Each subject had to produce simple diagrams to represent two sentences, one active and one passive, and it was assumed that the size of areas in these diagrams could be taken as an index of importance. In Group EQ, the sentences specified an equivalent arrangement of colours, e.g. “Red follows Blue,” “Blue is followed by Red”; in Group CO, they specified converse arrangements, e.g. “Red follows Blue,” “Red is followed by Blue.” The predictions, that (i) the subjects of all sentences would tend to be represented as larger than the objects, and that (ii) the subjects of passives would be represented as larger than those of actives, were confirmed.     

Acoustic and associative coding in short-term memory

Short lists of word-digit pairs were presented to 456 college student subjects. One of the words was repeated as a memory probe either immediately after list presentation or after a short rehearsal interval. The stimulus words were either acoustically identical or associatively related (UP, DOWN). Both acoustic identity and associative relatedness produced a memory decrement which decreased with rehearsal. One interpretation of these results is that the primary memory trace is a multiple-dimension one and that, given time, subjects can recover non-acoustic information from it. The data also indicate that the “fate” over time is different for acoustically similar and associatively related items.