Expectancy,controlled attention and automatic attention in prospective temporal judgments

Two experiments indicate that prospective judgments of a temporal target are influenced by nontarget temporal features. The basic task was to reproduce a target interval marked by visual events. In addition, visual or auditory interfering events were delivered. Experiment 1 showed that temporal reproduction is shorter when the interfering events occupy a late rather than early position during the target interval, a result explained in terms of expectancy, which causes attention shifts. This study also revealed that similar trends are obtained whether the interfering event involves a specific task or is irrelevant. Experiment 2 confirmed the position effect, and showed that the duration of an irrelevant cue can influence judgment of the target interval, as if it were also timed without appropriate control.     

Expectancy and visual-spatial attention: effects on perceptual quality

When we expect important stimuli at a particular spatial location, how does our perceptual sensitivity change over space? Subjects were cued to expect a target stimulus at one location and then required to perform one of the following tasks at that and three other locations: luminance detection, brightness discrimination, orientation discrimination, or form discrimination. The analysis of subjects' performance according to signal detection theory revealed changes in both sensitivity and bias for each of these tasks. Sensitivity was maximally enhanced at the location where a target stimulus was expected and generally decreased with distance from that location. Factors that influenced the gradient of sensitivity were (a) the type of task performed and (b) the spatial distribution of the stimuli. Sensitivity fell off more steeply over distance for orientation and form discrimination than for luminance detection and brightness discrimination. In addition, it fell off more steeply when stimuli were near each other than when they were farther apart.     

Depression, attention, and time estimation

Depression is known to affect several cognitive functions, but little is known about the effect of this neuropsychological disorder on timing tasks. In the present experiment, 15 depressed and 20 non-depressed participants, classified on the basis of the Beck Depression Inventory, were tested on attentional and on temporal processing tasks. On the Continuous Performance Test, depressed participants made more omissions, but not more erroneous responses, than non-depressed participants. As well, discrimination of relatively long intervals (1120 vs 1280 ms) was poorer for the depressed group, which was not the case for discrimination of brief durations (80 vs 120 ms, and 450 vs 550 ms). Finally, there was a significant difference between groups regarding the variability of 1- or 10-s interval productions made with continuous series of finger taps. The attentional requirements of long-interval processing seems to be a critical factor in depression-induced deficits of temporal processing.     

Reaction time, intelligence, and attention

The roles of attention in reaction time and in the relationships among reaction time, intelligence, and achievement were analyzed. The subjects were 105 seventh-grade children. The results were generally consistent with most studies involving the Hick paradigm: both mean reaction time and the standard deviation of reaction time correlated with the intelligence and achievement measures used. Reaction time measures were correlated with attention and perceptual speed as well as with general intelligence, or g. Implications of these results for current theories linking reaction time and intelligence are discussed.     

Span of attention,backward masking,and reaction time

A test pattern consisting of 0 to 15 dots and a following random dot masking pattern were presented for 5 msec each with SOAs varying between 30 and 200 msec. The subject was asked to report the perceived number of dots in the test pattern as soon as possible and to assign a confidence rating to each report. The span of attention (upper limit for 50% correct numerosity judgments) increased from 2.4 to 9.5 as the SOA increased. Backward masking reduced the reported number of dots from the actual number in the test pattern, especially with small SOAs. Reaction time increased linearly at a low rate (approximately 40 msec/dot) up to 4 dots in the test pattern and then increased linearly at a high rate (approximately 370 msec/dot) as thereported, orperceived, number of dots increased. The two different branches of the reaction time curve were considered to represent two separate processes,subitizing andcounting, as suggested by Klahr (1973), who found similar dual increase rates as a function of the actual number of dots. These findings, as well as causal inference based on partial correlations and path analysis, indicated that the reported (perceived) number of dots and confidence rating were both determined by the number of stimulus dots and the SOA and that the reaction time was determined by the so-determined perceived number of dots and level of confidence. A multistage model is proposed.     

Expectancy,value, and attitudinal semantics

A novel single-attribute test between competing expectancy-value models of attitude was devised using subjects' ratings of clusters of statements located at a range of points within a three-dimensional semantic space with expectancy, value and attitude as the co-ordinates. The data provided strongest support for a model using bipolar scoring for evaluation and unipolar scoring for expectancy.     

Expectancy, redefinition and reported pain

Three groups of subjects were administered a redefinition strategy which asked them to focus on sensations during noxious stimulation. Those in one group were informed that the strategy would reduce pain (positive expectancy), those in a second were informed that it would augment pain (negative expectancy), and those in a third were given no information on expectancy. Subjects in a fourth group received neither redefinition nor instructions on expectancy. The four groups did not differ either in expectancy of pain reduction or in reduction of reported pain. Subjects in all groups expected more pain than they reported, and expectations for pain reduction showed only a small correlation with degree of reported pain reduction. In all groups, men reported less pain than women.     

Personality,Life Situation,and Life Expectancy

ABSTRACT: This study explores demographic, medical, and psychological variables which appear to be related to survival in institutionalized elderly chronically ill patients. Patients who died within 12 months of an assessment procedure were compared with patients who were still alive over 12 months later. Those who died within the year tended to be younger and less religious, to have a somewhat poorer prognosis, greater cognitive impairment, lower life satisfaction, and higher scores on a suicide potential scale and on an observation checklist of indirectly self-destructive behaviors.     

Expectancy and frequency effects on perceptual and motor systems in choice reaction time

Three experiments investigated the effects of expectancy and stimulus frequency in character classification and identification tasks. Both expectancy and frequency were found to have effects on overall response latency, but the two factors had different patterns of interaction with two other experimental variables. The effect of visual quality was larger for low-frequency stimuli than for high-frequency stimuli, whereas the effect of quality was independent of expectancy. The effect of S-R compatibility was more strongly influenced by whether a stimulus was expected than by the frequency of the stimulus. The results suggest that expectancy and frequency have somewhat different effects on human information processing mechanisms. Expectancy allows temporary preparation for a specific S-R pair in response selection processes, but it has no effect on perceptual processes. Stimulus frequency, on the other hand, influences the efficiency of both perceptual and response selection processes. The overall effect of stimulus probability may be interpreted as having as components both expectancy and frequency effects.     

Alerting attention and time perception in children

This experiment investigated the effect of a signal (i.e., a click) warning of the arrival of a stimulus to be timed on temporal discrimination in children aged 3, 5, and 8 years (N=86), using a bisection task with visual stimuli ranging from 0.5 to 2s or 1 to 4s. In all groups, the psychophysical functions were orderly with the proportion of long responses increasing with the stimulus duration, although the steepness of functions increased with age. Stimulus durations were judged to be longer with than without the click in all age groups. With the click, time sensitivity also improved and more particularly in the younger children. The statistical results suggest, within the framework of the scalar timing theory, that the click reduces the closing latency of the switch that connects the pacemaker to the accumulator in the internal clock and also reduces its trial-by-trial variability.     

A biologically plausible robot attention model,based on space and time

After half a century of cognitive revolution we remain far from agreement about what cognition is and what cognition does. It was once thought that these questions could wait until the data were in. Today there is a mountain of data, but no way of making sense of it. The time for tackling the fundamental issues has arrived. The biogenic approach to cognition is introduced not as a solution but as a means of approaching the issues. The traditional, and still predominant, methodological stance in cognitive inquiry is what I call the anthropogenic approach: assume human cognition as the paradigm and work ‘down’ to a more general explanatory concept. The biogenic approach, on the other hand, starts with the facts of biology as the basis for theorizing and works ‘up’ to the human case by asking psychological questions as if they were biological questions. Biogenic explanations of cognition are currently clustered around two main frameworks for understanding biology: self-organizing complex systems and autopoiesis. The paper describes the frameworks and infers from them ten empirical principles—the biogenic ‘family traits’—that constitute constraints on biogenic theorizing. Because the anthropogenic approach to cognition is not constrained empirically to the same degree, I argue that the biogenic approach is superior for approaching a general theory of cognition as a natural phenomenon.

Controlled attention sharing influences time estimation

A seminal attentional model of time estimation predicts that subjective duration will be positively correlated to the amount of attention given to temporal processing. This prediction holds under prospective conditions, in which one is forewarned that judgments of time will be asked, in contrast to retrospective conditions, in which such judgments are required after the relevant period without any prior warning. In three experiments, an attention-sharing method was used. Subjects were asked to control the amount of attention that they devoted to one or the other component of a dual-task paradigm. The first experiment involved word categorization and reproduction of duration. The following experiments, based on signal detection theory, required discrimination of both the duration and the intensity of a single stimulus, in the visual (Experiment 2) or the auditory (Experiment 3) modality. The results indicate that when the attention is directly controlled by the subject, the subjective duration shortens as the amount of attention devoted to the temporal task diminishes. The implications of these results for the possible existence of an internal timer are considered.     

Personality,time of day and visual perception: Preferences and selective attention

The study examined the relationships between Eysenck's personality dimensions and certain aspects of visual perception employing a sample of 83 females. Interaction effects of time of day were emphasized. As to personality, the focus was on the extraversion components Impulsivity (I) and Sociability (S). As to perception, two major aspects were focused on: (1) preferences for (a) colour and (b) form, and (2) selective attention to the salient feature (form complexity) of present stimuli using a person-centered ANOVA approach. The personality by time-of-day interaction hypothesis was only supported for the I (and not S) component, under conditions 1a and 2; in the morning high I scorers preferred more stimulating colours, and paid less attention to form complexity, than low I scorers whereas a reverse pattern emerged in the evening. Neuroticism showed no relationship to perception whereas psychoticism was found to be positively related to colour reactivity and negatively related to reactivity to meaningfulness of stimuli. The findings are discussed in the context of theories about cortical arousal, diurnal rhythm differences, and ‘narrowed attention’.     

Expectancy and intermittency

When a human subject responds to the second of two closely succeeding stimuli, his reaction time to the second stimulus tends to increase sharply as the interstimulus interval decreases. Controversy has centred on the issue of whether this increase is mainly due to the effects of the first stimulus in producing some kind of block in the central analysing systems or whether it is mainly due to the temporal uncertainty of the second signal, as determined by the distribution of interstimulus intervals used.

By substituting for the first stimulus a spontaneous response on the part of the subject and holding the distribution of interstimulus intervals constant, it is shown that the delays in responding to the succeeding signal are eliminated, even at intervals as short as 50 millisec. This is interpreted as evidence in support of the intermittency hypothesis and as a clear indication that the increase in reaction times normally observed is not a result of the distribution of interstimulus intervals.