Combining Expectancies

Five experiments examine the combined effects of spatial and non-spatial cues on the latency of an orientation judgement. In Experiment 1 an interaction between position and form expectancies is observed: There is an unusual delay in response time (RT) when expectancies mismatch—that is, when an unexpected (uncued) form appears at an expected (cued) position or an expected (cued) form appears at an unexpected (uncued) position. This interaction is inconsistent with the spatial spotlight model's prediction that position and form expectancy effects will be additive. The position-form interaction is eliminated when target position discriminability is made difficult by adding a distractor item at the location not containing a target (Experiment 2) or by decreasing the validity of the positional cue (Experiment 3). Decreasing the validity of the form cue has no effect on the interaction. The mismatching expectancy interaction is not unique to combinations of position and form—it is also observed when temporal (Experiment 4) and colour (Experiment 5) expectancies are combined with form expectancies. The effects of advance knowledge of position therefore suggest no special status for location compared to other stimulus attributes. Thus, at least for combined expectancies, the notion of a uniquely spatial mental spotlight seems unjustified. It is hypothesized that expectancy interactions may reflect a hierarchical crosstalk relation between dimensions of encoding.     

The return of “visiting relatives”: Pragmatic effects in sentence processing

Two experiments were performed to investigate the role of syntactic and pragmatic cues on the disambiguation of noun phrases of the form VERB+ing NOUN+s, like visiting relatives, that can be interpreted as either singular or plural noun phrases. Both experiments used a self-paced reading task in which reading times were measured for two words, a verb and an adverb, immediately following the potentially ambiguous noun phrase. The interpretation of the noun phrase as singular or plural was biased by pragmatic cues in the first experiment and by syntactic cues in the second experiment. In both experiments, subjects were faster to read the adverb following the verb when the interpretation biased by the cues agreed in number with the verb that immediately followed the target noun phrase than when it did not agree with the verb. These results suggest that pragmatic cues, like syntactic cues, can be utilized rapidly in sentence processing.     

Smaller holistic processing of faces associated with face drawing experience

The type of experience involved with an object category has been regarded as one important factor in shaping of the human object recognition system. Laboratory training studies have shown that different kinds of learning experience with the same set of novel objects resulted in different perceptual and neural changes. Whether this applies to natural real-world objects remains to be seen. We compared two groups of observers who had different learning experiences with faces, using holistic processing as a dependent measure. We found that, while ordinary observers had extensive individuation experience with faces and displayed typical holistic face processing, art students who had acquired additional experience in drawing faces, and thus in attending to parts of a face, showed less holistic processing than did ordinary observers. These results converge with laboratory training studies on the role of type of experience in the development of different perceptual markers for different object categories. It is thus insufficient to categorize expertise simply in terms of object domains (e.g., expertise with faces). Instead, perceptual expertise should be classified in terms of the underlying process or task demand.