Changes in the visual threshold as a function of subception

In a previous paper (Dixon, 1958b) one of the authors reported an experiment which suggested that apparent changes in the threshold for one eye occur as a function of the emotionality of stimulus material presented below threshold to the other eye. The following experiment describes an attempt to investigate further the validity of this conclusion. The results are consistent with those from the previous research.     

‘Random’ saccadic eye movements during verbal-linguistic and visual-imaginal tasks

Previous research has suggested that questions eliciting visual imagery are associated with lower rates of saccadic eye movements as compared to questions eliciting verbal processes. Two experiments reported here examined the roles of external visual stimulation and speech output in this effect. In both experiments, questions designed to elicit verbal-linguistic or visual-imaginal processing, and which required either syntactically complex or simple responses, were administered while eye movements were recorded by electrooculography. In experiment 1, 42 subjects responded while viewing either the interviewer's face or a gray oval on a video monitor. Imaginal questions elicited a lower rate of eye movements than did verbal questions regardless of the display on the monitor. In experiment 2, 17 subjects responded in conditions of light and darkness. Imaginal questions elicited lower rates of eye movements in both light and dark. Neither cognitive mode nor speech output requirements interacted with stimulus conditions in either experiment. The failure of visual conditions to influence the verbal-imaginal difference in eye movement rate is viewed as inconsistent with a visual interference interpretation of the relationship of eye movements to cognitive activity. Alternate interpretations are discussed.     

信息加工效率与阅读的关系研究

对23名大学生进行知觉广度、记忆广度和阅读理解的多项测验,探求知觉、记忆加工效率与不同语言阅读成绩和阅读眼动特性之间的关系。结果发现：低水平的视觉符号方向信号知觉广度与阅读不存在明显的关系,从眼跳幅度指标上反映出右侧知觉广度大的被试对第二语言加工难度更为敏感。短时记忆和工作记忆能力对阅读的影响主要反映在眼跳幅度方面,与单个注视点获取的信息量有关,但与课文理解水平的关系不明显。短时记忆能力强的被试在眼跳幅度上以及第二语言言语工作记忆弱的被试在注视时间上均出现语言差异效应。     

How young adults with autism spectrum disorder watch and interpret pragmatically complex scenes

The aim of the current study was to investigate subtle characteristics of social perception and interpretation in high-functioning individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs), and to study the relation between watching and interpreting. As a novelty, we used an approach that combined moment-by-moment eye tracking and verbal assessment. Sixteen young adults with ASD and 16 neurotypical control participants watched a video depicting a complex communication situation while their eye movements were tracked. The participants also completed a verbal task with questions related to the pragmatic content of the video. We compared verbal task scores and eye movements between groups, and assessed correlations between task performance and eye movements. Individuals with ASD had more difficulty than the controls in interpreting the video, and during two short moments there were significant group differences in eye movements. Additionally, we found significant correlations between verbal task scores and moment-level eye movement in the ASD group, but not among the controls. We concluded that participants with ASD had slight difficulties in understanding the pragmatic content of the video stimulus and attending to social cues, and that the connection between pragmatic understanding and eye movements was more pronounced for participants with ASD than for neurotypical participants.     

Using computer‐assisted instruction to increase the eye gaze of children with autism

Many children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders have difficulty making appropriate eye contact and engaging in joint attention. The current study evaluated a computer‐assisted instruction package (pairing visual stimuli with vocal stimuli) as a novel treatment to improve the eye gaze accuracy in 3 elementary school children with autism. The researchers measured the latency from a recorded verbal stimulus to the students making eye contact with pictures of familiar individuals displayed on a computer screen, and the duration for which eye gaze on the stimulus was maintained. An automated infrared camera system for measuring eye gaze was utilized that eliminated the need for an instructor to make subjective judgments regarding participants' eye gaze. For all three participants, duration of eye contact increased, and latency to responding decreased following exposure to the computer‐assisted instruction. The implications of these findings for the treatment of individuals with autism are discussed, along with suggestions for future research on the topic.     

Dogmatism, field dependence, and perception of demand characteristics in a verbal operant conditioning experiment

Using a 2 × 2 analysis of variance design, effects of dogmatism and field dependence on subjects' awareness of demand characteristics in a verbal operant conditioning experiment were investigated. From 103 introductory psychology students who participated in a replication of an earlier verbal conditioning experiment, 92 were randomly selected for final study. It was found that only subjects aware of the purpose of the conditioning study appeared to “condition”. Subject awareness was assessed by a series of converging questions which were independently content analyzed by two judges and coded to yield a total awareness score. Based on earlier research it was expected that dogmatism and field dependence would interact to affect levels of awareness. The two-way interaction was statistically significant (p < .05) as predicted. The results were discussed in terms of speculations regarding the modes of perceptual functioning involved in perceiving demand cues.     

The Wandering IQ: A Continuation

The hypothesis addressed in this study was that for every experimental condition, learning with awareness would occur. An experiment was conducted with use of a collating task that incorporated the awareness question into the design investigating the change in performance quality and quantity. Statistical evaluation of Dulany's awareness questionnaire suggested general unawareness of attempted verbal operant conditioning. There is some evidence suggesting that an actual change in performance quality and quantity is accompanied by awareness with use of operant conditioning procedures.     

Recognition of alphabetic characters during voluntary eye movements

In this paper we reconsider the question of vision during eye movements using a novel display procedure which guarantees that the eye was not stopped at any time during the eye movement. The results of our experiment lead us to conclude that true “saccadic suppression,” is a most elusive phenomenon. Furthermore, a brief analysis of the optics of the eye movement suggests that a substantial amount the elevation of visual threshold during eye movements can be attributed to simple retinal smear if one acknowledges the dominating importance of edge effects in visual threshold measurements.     

Change Blindness: Theory or Paradigm?

The present paper examines a number of recent findings from the induced change blindness literature in an attempt to determine what these findings reveal about the role of attention in perception. The conclusion is drawn that change blindness research reveals that attention is necessary to raise a stimulus to a level of awareness (e.g. verbal report), as has been shown in related literatures, e.g. eye movement, masking, and the attentional blink. Some research possibilities employing the change blindness paradigm are suggested, which may prove useful in future research efforts.     

Phonological skills and their role in learning to read: a meta-analytic review

The authors report a systematic meta-analytic review of the relationships among 3 of the most widely studied measures of children's phonological skills (phonemic awareness, rime awareness, and verbal short-term memory) and children's word reading skills. The review included both extreme group studies and correlational studies with unselected samples (235 studies were included, and 995 effect sizes were calculated). Results from extreme group comparisons indicated that children with dyslexia show a large deficit on phonemic awareness in relation to typically developing children of the same age (pooled effect size estimate: -1.37) and children matched on reading level (pooled effect size estimate: -0.57). There were significantly smaller group deficits on both rime awareness and verbal short-term memory (pooled effect size estimates: rime skills in relation to age-matched controls, -0.93, and reading-level controls, -0.37; verbal short-term memory skills in relation to age-matched controls, -0.71, and reading-level controls, -0.09). Analyses of studies of unselected samples showed that phonemic awareness was the strongest correlate of individual differences in word reading ability and that this effect remained reliable after controlling for variations in both verbal short-term memory and rime awareness. These findings support the pivotal role of phonemic awareness as a predictor of individual differences in reading development. We discuss whether such a relationship is a causal one and the implications of research in this area for current approaches to the teaching of reading and interventions for children with reading difficulties.     

Conscious error perception: The impact of response interference from a secondary task

An erroneous response is not always accompanied by the conscious perception of the error being made. We examined whether increased response interference on a manual task improved the conscious perception of erroneous eye movements on a concurrent oculomotor task. In the first experiment, we examined whether a correlate of response interference, increased task difficulty alone, could improve perception of errors. We found no effect of task difficulty on self-monitoring. Results from a second experiment suggested that participants’ ability to monitor their eye movements improved with increased response interference, but post hoc analyses indicated that this was due to a decrease in corrective behaviors. Experiment 3 required participants to report directly on whether they had made an eye movement error, and we found that response interference perturbed, rather than improved, participants’ ability to report on their errors. Together, these findings contribute to models of error monitoring, revealing little support for the view that general increases in response interference or task difficulty are signals that contribute to the conscious detection of errors.     

A threshold theory of the humor response

The humor response has long been considered mysterious, and it is given relatively little attention in modern experimental psychology, in spite of the fact that numerous studies suggest that it has substantial benefits for mood and health. Existing theories of humor fail to account for some of the most basic humor phenomena. On most occasions when a humor response occurs, certain verbal or visual stimuli (the "setup" stimuli, which function as an establishing operation) must precede a critical stimulus (such as a "punch line" or the final panel or critical feature of a cartoon), which then occasions a sudden "revelation" or "understanding"; this revelation is often accompanied by the humor response. We suggest that the setup stimuli increase the strength of the revelatory response to a point just below the threshold of awareness and that the critical stimulus, properly designed and timed, edges the revelatory response to a point just above threshold. We also suggest that it is this threshold phenomenon that produces most instances of the humor response. We discuss these issues in the context of some notable humor of Carl Rogers and B. F. Skinner.     

Threshold variability in subliminal perception experiments: fixed threshold estimates reduce power to detect subliminal effects.

In studies of subliminal perception, a threshold for awareness is usually estimated for each S (e.g., the stimulus duration that yields chance discrimination performance). This article shows that if the S's true threshold varies randomly from trial to trial, estimation of a fixed threshold has important consequences. Specifically, the estimated threshold approaches the minimum of the distribution of true thresholds, and the power of an experiment to detect subliminal perception is reduced. Because there is much evidence that true thresholds vary across trials, threshold variability may have seriously weakened previous experiments that tested for subliminal perception. Fortunately, it is possible to estimate the maximum power loss resulting from threshold variability and therefore to design an experiment with acceptable power even in the presence of variability.     

The role of attention in eye-movement awareness

People are unable to accurately report on their own eye movements most of the time. Can this be explained as a lack of attention to the objects we fixate? Here, we elicited eye-movement errors using the classic oculomotor capture paradigm, in which people tend to look at sudden onsets even when they are irrelevant. In the first experiment, participants were able to report their own errors on about a quarter of the trials on which they occurred. The aim of the second experiment was to assess what differentiates errors that are detected from those that are not. Specifically, we estimated the relative influence of two possible factors: how long the onset distractor was fixated (dwell time), and a measure of how much attention was allocated to the onset distractor. Longer dwell times were associated with awareness of the error, but the measure of attention was not. The effect of the distractor identity on target discrimination reaction time was similar whether or not the participant was aware they had fixated the distractor. The results suggest that both attentional and oculomotor capture can occur in the absence of awareness, and have important implications for our understanding of the relationship between attention, eye movements, and awareness.     

Decisions concerning the rejected channel

It was thought that the physical aspects of auditory stimuli were possibly transmitted via separate pathways from those transmitting the verbal aspects. Three experiments were designed to test this hypothesis. In these experiments subjects had to perform a shadowing task and had to respond simultaneously on response keys to pips superimposed in either ear on verbal messages. The response to these pips was of increasing complexity, in that it was a simple reaction time which was measured in the first experiment, a choice reaction time in the second experiment and a more complex choice reaction time in the third experiment. Subjects were able to perform these tests although the increasing difficulty was reflected in longer reaction times and more errors. The reaction times to the pips presented to the ear which was not being shadowed were slower, and the errors, made to pips in both channels, were “false positives” rather than errors of omission. These results were taken as favouring the hypothesis.     

Visual and verbal working memory loads interfere with scene-viewing

Working memory is thought to be divided into distinct visual and verbal subsystems. Studies of visual working memory frequently use verbal working memory tasks as control conditions and/or use articulatory suppression to ensure that visual load is not transferred to verbal working memory. Using these verbal tasks relies on the assumption that the verbal working memory load will not interfere with the same processes as visual working memory. In the present study, participants maintained a visual or verbal working memory load as they simultaneously viewed scenes while their eye movements were recorded. Because eye movements and visual working memory are closely linked, we anticipated the visual load would interfere with scene-viewing (and vice versa), while the verbal load would not. Surprisingly, both visual and verbal memory loads interfered with scene-viewing behavior, while eye movements during scene-viewing did not significantly interfere with performance on either memory task. These results suggest that a verbal working memory load can interfere with eye movements in a visual task.

     

Enhancing implicit change detection through action

Implicit change detection demonstrates how the visual system can benefit from stored information that is not immediately available to conscious awareness. We investigated the role of motor action in this context. In the first two experiments, using a one-shot implicit change-detection paradigm, participants responded to unperceived changes either with an action (jabbing the screen at the guessed location of a change) or with words (verbal report), and sat either 60 cm or 300 cm (with a laser pointer) away from the display. Our observers guessed the locations of changes at a reachable distance better with an action than with a verbal judgment. At 300 cm, beyond reach, the motor advantage disappeared. In experiment 3, this advantage was also unavailable when participants sat at a reachable distance but responded with hand-held laser pointers near their bodies. We conclude that a motor system specialized for real-time visually guided behavior has access to additional visual information. Importantly, this system is not activated by merely executing an action (experiment 2) or presenting stimuli in one's near space (experiment 3). It is activated only when both conditions are fulfilled, which implies that it is the actual contact that matters to the visual system.     

Memory awareness disruptions in amnestic mild cognitive impairment: comparison of multiple awareness types for verbal and visuospatial material

Successful memory is normally accompanied by explicit awareness of retrieval and confidence in the accuracy of the retrieval product. Prior findings suggest that these features of metamemory can be dissociated from retrieval accuracy in Amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment (aMCI). However, the literature on this question contains variable and conflicting results, likely because of differences in experimental conditions. We sought to systematically evaluate memory awareness disruptions in aMCI using multiple measures and stimulus formats within the same individuals. Memory awareness was tested with global predictions and postdictions, judgments of learning, confidence level ratings, and modified feeling-of-knowing ratings in tasks of visuospatial and verbal memory. These tests were administered to 14 individuals with aMCI and 15 healthy, age-matched controls. Memory awareness accuracy was calculated as the correspondence between subjective judgments and memory performance.Individuals with aMCI demonstrated impaired global and trial-level retrospective task awareness for visuospatial and verbal stimuli. Additionally, modified feeling-of-knowing awareness was impaired selectively for verbal stimuli. Statistical effect sizes for global awareness impairments were comparable to impairments in several objective neuropsychological memory assessments.Memory awareness (metamemory) disruptions in aMCI were most evident for a subset of subjective judgment types and task input modalities. These findings advance understanding of the nature of memory impairments in aMCI and support the utility of incorporating memory awareness testing to better characterize memory integrity in older adults.     

Perception without awareness in a dichoptic viewing situation

One way of investigating perception without awareness is to utilize the phenomenon of binocular rivalry. The dichoptic viewing situation can be so arranged that a stimulus may be above identification level (when presented alone) but masked by contiguous stimulation, i.e. a brighter image to the other eye. This experimental situation was used to replicate an experiment of Smith et al. (1959) which claimed to demonstrate that differences in meaning between words registered below recognition threshold could affect associated conscious thoughts. In the two experiments reported here, a neutral face was paired with affect words presented subliminally and subjects were asked to rate its expression using a forced-choice indicator. Additional controls to those of Smith et al. were used. In Expt. I it was established that words presented outside of awareness had an effect on semantically related judgements, which was at least as great as that with the same words presented supraliminally. In Expt. II this was confirmed and it was found that increasing the similarity of contour between critical and control words of different meaning suggested differences between subliminal and supraliminal sessions. Responses tended to be meaning-related in the former and structure-related in the latter. It was suggested that the experiments have relevance to current theories of selective attention.     

Individual differences in verbal conditioning, extinction, and awareness

The present study examined the relationship of three individual difference variables—need for approval, a belief in internal versus external control of reinforcement, and verbal intelligence— to acquisition, extinction, and awareness in a verbal conditioning task Based on a postexperiment interview and recognition task, subjects were grouped according to their awareness of the response-reinforcement contingencies and the degree to which they admitted influence by the experimenter Approval motivated subjects were more likely to acquire the reinforced response regardless of awareness levels than were low need for approval subjects. Subjects assessed as internal were more likely to deny influence by the experimenter and in some instances were more resistant to extinction than subjects called external Subjects higher in verbal intelligence evidenced more awareness than subjects with lower intelligence scores Results suggest that the inclusion of individual difference variable is of crucial importance to a clear understanding of the experimenter-subject interaction in the verbal conditioning situation Implications for the other dyadic interactions, particularly psychotherapy, were discussed