比较视觉搜索任务中工作记忆最小化的眼动研究

采用比较视觉搜索任务和眼动追踪技术,通过增加组成图片的图形数量和改变不同图形的特征属性,考察比较视觉搜索任务是否遵循工作记忆最小化原则以及图形特征加工的优先性问题。结果表明图形数量的增加不影响平均每次注视的图形数量,被试平均每次注视1.65个图形,即比较视觉搜索任务仍遵循工作记忆最小化原则。不同图形中颜色和形状都不同的注视时间最短,颜色不同和形状不同在注视时间上差异不显著,表明比较视觉搜索任务中特征维度数量比特征性质在引导注意上具有优先性。事先不规定搜索路径的情况下,被试主要采用系统搜索策略完成比较搜索任务。     

前提项目间差异对儿童归纳推理多样性效应的影响

通过两个实验深入探讨了前提项目间差异对儿童归纳推理多样性效应的表现水平的影响。结果发现:(1)多样性效应受多样组和非多样组之间差异(前提项目间差异)大小的影响,在减小两组差异的前提下,5～6岁儿童尚未表现出多样性效应;除个别任务外,8～9岁儿童表现出多样性效应(实验1)。(2)对前提图片的形状差异进行数量化处理后发现,儿童在归纳推理多样性效应任务上的归纳判断力度随前提项目间差异的增大而增强;在前提项目间差异很小的情况下,10～12岁儿童也没有运用多样性信息进行推理;当前提项目间差异很大时,被试表现出多样性效应(实验2)。     

视知觉无意识加工中的形状优势效应

研究了视知觉无意识加工中是否存在形状优势效应。被试为天津师范大学本科生60名。仪器为pentium lll高分辨率计算机．程序用E-prime心理实验软件系统编制而成。在实验1中,用信号检测论技术发现．当启动图形呈现时间为20ms时．被试是不能觉知到该图形的。在实验2和3中．被试的任务分别是判断图形的形状和颜色,用MANOVA分析启动图形对靶图形的启动效应时发现．启动图形的颜色线索不会影响靶图形的形状判断,但启动图形的形状线索却能抑制或促进靶图形的颜色判断。实验证据提示．在判断物体整体特征时,无意识知觉具有形状优势效应。     

比较视觉搜索任务的认知老化研究

本研究通过增加组成图片的图形数量和改变目标图形的特征,考察老年人和大学生在比较视觉搜索任务中的眼动特点和图形特征加工的优先性。结果表明与青年人相比,老年人在比较视觉搜索过程中总注视时间和注视次数增加,平均眼跳幅度减少,对目标刺激的注视时间增加。老年人和青年人在目标刺激的注视过程中都表现出图形维度数量的优先性,即表现为颜色和形状都不同的目标刺激注视时间最短,颜色不同和形状不同的目标刺激在注视时间上差异不显著。说明老年人在比较视觉搜索过程中存在认知老化,在图形特征加工的优先性上结果和青年人一致,以上结果与年龄和研究任务有关。     

视知觉无意识对局部形状和颜色特征加工的注意调节

研究了视知觉无意识对局部几何特征加工中的整体优势效应.被试为天津师范大学本科生60名.仪器为pentium III高分辨率计算机,程序用E-prime心理实验软件系统编制而成.被试的任务是判断靶图形中央线条的方向或颜色.用MANOVA分析了启动图形对靶图形局部特征加工的启动效应,发现了视知觉对无意识呈现的图形加工具有形状优势效应,启动图形与靶图形的整体形状相同可以抑制对靶图形局部形状特征的判断.当被试的任务变成判断靶线条的颜色或启动图形的边由连通状态变成不连通时,视知觉无意识对启动图形加工的整体优势效应消失.该结果提示整体优势效应很可能与任务涉及的信息通道密切相关,对局部形状特征的注意很可能涉及对周围整体形状信息加工自动抑制的过程.     

图形颜色、形状及质地表征特性的研究

记忆中的图形特征既可以按一定方式被直接储存,也可以按抽象形式存储。虽然目前尚无法确定图形特征（形状、颜色等）分别以何种方式存储,但可以肯定,图形的颜色和形状可以分开表征。那么,图形的其它特征之间是否也是可以分开表征呢？该研究中的两个实验对图形的质地与形状、质地与颜色之间表征关系进行了探讨。实验结果表明,图形的质地可以分别与形状、颜色分开表征,这一结果提示,人们在记忆图形时,可以将图形的不同特征按分离方式进行加工。同时,通过对两实验结果比较发现,图形的形状、颜色和质地的记忆难度之间存在差异,形状最易,颜色最难,质地居中。     

工作记忆表征捕获眼动中的颜色优先性

刺激属性所具有的引导效力在工作记忆表征自上而下地引导注意捕获过程中起重要作用, 已有研究表明工作记忆表征的颜色属性在引导注意时具有一定的优势。研究采用工作记忆任务与视觉搜索任务相结合的双任务范式, 结合眼动追踪技术, 通过设置具有较强引导效力的颜色属性与朝向属性进行直接竞争的实验条件, 进一步考察工作记忆表征的颜色属性是否依然具有优先性。实验1发现工作记忆表征的颜色属性与朝向属性同时竞争眼动捕获时, 颜色属性表现出较强的优势, 而朝向属性单独呈现时并未表现出任何捕获效应。实验2与3进一步证实了颜色属性捕获眼动的优先性, 即当颜色属性在面临作为靶子属性的朝向属性的竞争时, 依然能捕获更多的注视点。这些结果直接证实了工作记忆表征的颜色属性在工作记忆表征的捕获眼动的过程中具有较强的引导效力, 相对于其他刺激属性(如朝向、形状)更具有优先性。     

刺激–反应联结学习在项目特异性比例一致效应中的作用

比例一致效应通常被用来研究认知控制的动态变化,其中项目特异性比例一致效应是其重要分支。当前研究分别以任务的无关属性(空间位置)与相关属性(颜色)进行比例偏置操纵,考察联结学习与注意调节在比例一致效应中的作用。结果发现,在刺激–反应编码具有显著性优势的条件下,当位置作为信号时,被试可以利用刺激–反应联结学习反转比例一致效应;当颜色作为信号时,联结学习不起作用,比例一致效应消失。这些结果表明刺激–反应联结学习在比例一致效应中起到主要作用,符合显著性编码假说的预期。     

不同推理水平儿童在图形推理任务中的眼动研究

以矩阵填充任务为材料,以眼动仪为研究工具,以3~6年级学生为被试,探讨图形推理中儿童推理过程的特征和策略使用的差异,以及推理能力高低组儿童完成图形推理任务的眼动模式差异.在本实验条件下,得出以下结论:(1)8岁以上儿童已经具备解决矩阵填充任务的逻辑思维能力,但高低水平组儿童在解决任务的能力水平上存在差异,高水平儿童的反应时较快、正确率较高;(2)在儿童推理的过程中,不同维度对推理过程的影响存在一定的层次:对形状、颜色维度的识别最容易,对大小维度的识别次之,对方向维度的识别最难;(3)高低水平组儿童获得策略的时间进程不同,差异主要产生在推理开始后的5~11秒这个阶段,在这一阶段中,高水平组儿童对方向这一较难维度的识别和正确答案的识别都快于低水平组儿童,体现了高水平组儿童更强的信息加工能力.     

“类比推理”和“假说”的学习要点

一、类比推理的学习要点类比推理是根据两个或两类对象在许多属性上相同,推出它们在另外某些属性上也相同的一种逻辑推理。由于在这种推理中,其结论所断定的内容超过了前提知识的范围,前提并不蕴涵结论,因此其前提和结论之间的联系并非必然的,结论只具有一定程度的可靠性。而这种可靠性程度的大小取决于前提中两个或两类对象的相同属性与结论中的推出属性之间的相关     

Food rejection and the development of food category-based induction in 2–6 years old children

We studied children’s inductive inferences within the domain of food categories. There has so far been little research on inductive reasoning about food among children, despite the theoretical and practical importance of knowing what knowledge children bring to the table and how they use it. We tested the hypotheses that children’s food category-based induction performances and their food rejection are negatively correlated, and that these performances are influenced by the colour typicality of the food items. We recruited 126 children aged 2–6 years, and administered a category-based induction task. Participants were successively shown 8 sets of three pictures containing one target picture (a vegetable) and two test pictures (a vegetable dissimilar in colour to the target picture and a fruit similar in colour to the target picture). For each set, participants were told a novel property about the target picture and asked to generalise this property to one of the two test pictures. Additionally, the parents of each child filled out a questionnaire about his or her food rejection tendencies. Results on accuracy (i.e. if participants generalised the properties according to category membership, not perceptual similarity) provided the first empirical evidence in favour of a negative relationship between children’s food rejection and food category-based induction.     

Effectiveness of color in picture recognition memory

Investigations were conducted into the effectiveness of color in picture recognition memory. In the study phase, half of the pictures were presented in color and the other half in black and white. In the test phase, half were presented in the same color mode as the study pictures and the other half in the other mode. In immediate and 1-week-delayed tests, the recognition performance was highest when color pictures were used in both the study and test phases. The recall for the color mode of the study pictures, however, was not as good, even with the color pictures. This suggests that the effectiveness of color in picture recognition is not necessarily due to the memory for colors in the pictures themselves, but is probably due to the distinctiveness of features highlighted by the colors. We also found that in the recall performance for the color mode it was more difficult to detect the deletion of colors than to detect their addition.     

Drawing deficits in brain-damaged patients' freehand pictures

This study examines errors in brain-damaged patients' attempts to produce freehand drawings of common objects in response to a linguistic target (e.g., "fruit"). The pictures were carefully analyzed according to the features which dictionaries claim should vary necessarily from item to item, including color, shape, relative size, and special features which help distinguish between similar items. A "recognizability score" was created to quantify patients' overall drawing capacity. The findings revealed that subjects with right hemispheric insult are significantly more impaired overall than left hemisphere-damaged patients in producing freehand pictures. However, freehand drawing skills do not break down in an undifferentiated fashion after right hemispheric insult: Group and individual data reveal that patients with right central (primarily parietal) insult are most impaired at expressing shape attributes in their pictures, right posterior patients with primarily temporoparietal insult experience the greatest difficulty attributing color to their pictures, but patients with right anterior insult are impaired at expressing color, shape, and relative size in their pictures. All patients with right hemisphere insult often attribute specific features indiscriminantly to any member of the same category, resulting in anomalous pictures like a "potato bush." One patient with left posterior insult seemed to encounter difficulty generating the mental images necessary to serve as the basis for his pictures. These findings are discussed with reference to an image-based model for freehand drawing.     

When spiders appear suddenly: spider-phobic patients are distracted by task-irrelevant spiders

Fear is thought to facilitate the detection of threatening stimuli. Few studies have examined the effects of task-irrelevant phobic cues in search tasks that do not involve semantic categorization. In a combined reaction time and eye-tracking experiment we investigated whether peripheral visual cues capture initial attention and distract from the execution of goal-directed eye movements. Twenty-one spider-phobic patients and 21 control participants were instructed to search for a color singleton while ignoring task-irrelevant abrupt-onset distractors which contained either a small picture of a spider (phobic), a flower (non-phobic, but similar to spiders in shape), a mushroom (non-phobic, and not similar to spiders in shape), or no picture. As expected, patients' reaction times were longer on trials with spider distractors. However, eye movements revealed that this was not due to attentional capture by spider distractors; patients more often fixated on all distractors with pictures, but their reaction times were delayed by longer fixation durations on spider distractors. These data do not support automatic capture of attention by phobic cues but suggest that phobic patients fail to disengage attention from spiders.     

Imagery, encoding specificity, and prose recall in 6-year-old children

Partial pictures depict only selected portions of prose passages. Partial pictures hypothetically aid retention by inducing young children to generate imagery for nonpictured prose. Results from two hundred eighty-eight 6-year-old children indicated that (a) partial pictures at study facilitate recall, (b) identical study and retrieval prompts facilitate recall, and (c) imagery instructions and training do not affect retention. Partial pictures apparently help children to encode information more efficiently at study, but there is no evidence that young children generate images with the aid of the partial picture cues, nor that they have a retrieval deficit for these images as suggested by M. Ruch and J. Levin.     

Selective attention by children and adults to pictures specified by color

Four conditions were used to investigate developmental trends in the ability to establish and use a color set to direct the selective processing of pictures. In three conditions, 6-year-old, 9-year-old, and adult subjects viewed a series of pairs of pictures, with one red and one black line drawing in each pair. Subjects were asked to look either at the red pictures only, the black pictures only, or both pictures. In a fourth condition, subjects viewed a series of singly presented red and black pictures. Pictures of both colors were included in a subsequent recognition memory test. At all ages recognition memory was comparable for pictures of each color in the both and single conditions but was higher for pictures of the specified color in the selective red and selective black conditions. There was no evidence at any age that memory for pictures of the specified color was decreased by the presence of the second picture. These results, showing roughly comparable selectivity at all ages, were discussed in relation to findings of developmental trends in selective attention on more “traditional” central-incidental learning tasks.     

Perceptual simulation in developing language comprehension

We tested an embodied account of language proposing that comprehenders create perceptual simulations of the events they hear and read about. In Experiment 1, children (ages 7–13 years) performed a picture verification task. Each picture was preceded by a prerecorded spoken sentence describing an entity whose shape or orientation matched or mismatched the depicted object. Responses were faster for matching pictures, suggesting that participants had formed perceptual-like situation models of the sentences. The advantage for matching pictures did not increase with age. Experiment 2 extended these findings to the domain of written language. Participants (ages 7–10 years) of high and low word reading ability verified pictures after reading sentences aloud. The results suggest that even when reading is effortful, children construct a perceptual simulation of the described events. We propose that perceptual simulation plays a more central role in developing language comprehension than was previously thought.     

The acquisition of automatic response biases through categorization

Participants categorized left- and right-pointing line drawings presented together with pictures, whose pointing direction (to the left or right) was ambiguous (spatially ambiguous pictures; Experiments 1 and 2) or that pointed neither to the left nor to the right (spatially neutral pictures; Experiment 3). Subsequently, the spatially ambiguous and neutral pictures were used in a Simon task, wherein participants made left and right keypresses on the basis of the color of the pictures, while ignoring the object that they depicted. In all three experiments, performance was facilitated when the response required by the color matched the pointing direction of the line drawings with which the picture had been previously paired. Performance was impeded when the response required by the color did not match the pointing direction of the line drawings with which the picture had been previously paired. Thus, responses indirectly associated with pictures by category membership were automatically triggered even when the responses were inappropriate.     

Recognition latency for pictures and words as a function of encoded-feature similarity.

In separate trials of a same-different recognition task, a single target item presented as either a picture or a word was followed after a 30-sec delay by a single test item, either a picture or a word. Test items were either nominal matches for the target (same) or one of five related distractor items. Distractors were selected to resemble the target item on one of five dimensions: orthographic, acoustic, conceptual (functional or categorical), schematic (similar in shape), or neutral. Same-different reaction times were found to vary systematically as a function of depiction mode of target and/or test items and by distractor type. Verbally related distractors (orthographic and acoustic) produced longer reaction times when target or test items or both were presented as printed words. When target or test items were presented as pictures, schematic and conceptual distractors produced the longest rejection latencies.     

Theoretical analysis of the cognitive processing of lexical and pictorial stimuli: reading, naming, and visual and conceptual comparisons

This article reviews the research literature on the differences between word reading and picture naming. A theory for the visual and cognitive processing of pictures and words is then introduced. The theory accounts for slower naming of pictures than reading of words. Reading aloud involves a fast, grapheme-to-phoneme transformation process, whereas picture naming involves two additional processes: (a) determining the meaning of the pictorial stimulus and (b) finding a name for the pictorial stimulus. We conducted a reading-naming experiment, and the time to achieve (a) and (b) was determined to be approximately 160 ms. On the basis of data from a second experiment, we demonstrated that there is no significant difference in time to visually compare two pictures or two words when size of the stimuli is equated. There is no difference in time to make the two types of cross-modality conceptual comparisons (picture first, then word, or word first, then picture). The symmetry of the visual and conceptual comparison results supports the hypothesis that the coding of the mind is neither intrinsically linguistic nor imagistic, but rather it is abstract. There is a potent stimulus size effect, equal for both pictorial and lexical stimuli. Small stimuli take longer to be visually processed than do larger stimuli. For optimal processing, stimuli should not only be equated for size, but should subtend a visual angle of at least 3 degrees. The article ends with the presentation of a mathematical theory that jointly accounts for the data from word-reading, picture-naming visual comparison, and conceptual-comparison experiments.