Book reviews

Freud and his Early Circle: The Struggles of Psycho-Analysis. By Vincent Brome. London: W. Heinemann Ltd. 1967. Pp. xii+275. 63s.

Fundamentals of Measurement (Second Edition). By N. M. Downie. New York: Oxford University Press. 1967. Pp. xiii + 482. 52s.

Psychological Measurement and Prediction. By Paul Horst. Belmont, California: Wadsworth. London: Prentice-Hall, 1967. Pp. vii + 455. 72s.

Attention and Performance. Edited by A. F. Sanders. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Co. 1967. Pp. xii + 452. £6.

Sensory Inhibition. By Georg von Bekesy. London: Oxford University Press; Princeton University Press. 1968. Pp. x + 1265. £4 Is.

Ellements of Psychophysics, Volume I. By Gustav Fechner. Transhlated by Helmut E. Adler. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston Inc. 1966. Pp. xxxi + 286. 56s.

Human Information Processing. By Lawrence J. Fogel. London: Prentice-Hall. 1968. Pp. Ix + 420. 70s.

Vision and the Eye. By M. H. Pirenne. 2nd Edition. London: Chapman & Hall; New York: Barnes & Noble. 1967. Pp. xvi + 224. Hardback 50s. Paperback 25s.

The Human Operator in Complex Systems. Edited by W. T. Singleton, R. S. Easterby and D. Whitfield. London: Taylor & Francis Ltd. Pp. xx + 198. 57s. 6d. Also published as Vol. Io, No. 2, of the Journal Ergonomics.

Behavior. An Introduction to Comparative Psychology. By John B. Watson. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 1967. Pp. xxi + 439. $dollar;7.95.

The Psychology of Communication. By George A. Miller. London: Allen Lane the Penguin Press. 1968. Pp. vii + 197. 35s.     

Shifting attention between the ears

Subjects were asked to recall lists of digits presented either alternately to right and left ears or successively to both. Performance was worse with alternating than with successive lists and the decrement was greater with the faster presentation rate. However, there was no interaction between type of presentation and either digit length or list length. The latter finding suggests that the effect arises in perception rather than in memory and is consistent with the idea that it takes time to shift attention or reset the parameters for perceptual processing of alternating monaural speech items.     

A simple device for detecting departures from visual fixation

A device for detecting departures from visual fixation is described. The principle is to present control targets to one or both eyes at the projected position of the blind spot. When fixation is maintained the control target or targets are not seen. Departures from fixation manifest themselves by the reappearance of the target or targets in the visual field. The system allows approximately 1 deg of movement or less away from the fixation point in either direction.     

THERE ARE TWO WORD-LENGTH EFFECTS IN VERBAL SHORT-TERM MEMORY:

Abstract— In the word-length effect (WLE), lists of shorter words are better recalled than lists of longer words This effect a fundamental to decay-based theories of verbal short-term memory, such as the phonological loop theory (Baddeley, 1986) The WLE has been attributed to the time taken to articulate words, not their structure, a critical point in the debate between decay and interference theories However, this article, we show that the traditional WLE comprises two opposed effects an advantage for words spoken more quickly (short words in terms of duration) and an advantage for words with more elements (long words in terms of complexity) We also report two interactions a disadvantage for a midlist change in duration and an advantage for a midlist change in complexity These results contradict simple decay- based theories and establish the importance of interference in short- term memory We discuss whether decay is also required     

Imitative responses and the rate of gain of information

A series of experiments is described on audio-verbal reaction times. In the first experiment the signals were letters or digits recorded on magnetic tape and presented through earphones. In the second experiment the signals were nonsense syllables drawn from vocabularies of different size. The subjects responded by repeating what they heard as soon as it was presented and reaction times were recorded. It is shown that the size of the group from which the signal is drawn has little effect on the reaction time to that signal. A distinction is drawn between situations in which the rate of gain of information may be expected to apply and situations in which it may not apply. It is suggested that many highly practiced skills fall into the latter category.     

Comments on “selective attention: Perception or response?“ reply

We cannot understand why Treisman and Geffen (1967) think their experiment argues against our theory (Deutsch and Deutsch, 1963). Briefly, Treisman and Geffen ask subjects to repeat and tap to certain words in one message, played to one ear, and only tap to such words when they occur in another message played to the other ear. They find that subjects neglect the words to which they only have to tap. According to our theory, stimuli with a greater weighting of importance inhibit certain outputs (such as storage, motor response) of the structures processing stimuli with a lesser weighting of importance. Now it seems to be clear that Treisman and Geffen have by their instructions (to tap and repeat one set of words and only to tap to another set of words) produced a situation in which one set of stimuli is given a larger weighting of importance than the other. It is therefore not surprising on our theory that the less important set is almost disregarded. It is instructive here to consider Lawson's (1966) very similar experiment. In this experiment the signals to which the subject has to tap do not also have to be repeated if they occur in the message which is being shadowed. (These signals are non-verbal.) Lawson's results are almost the opposite of Treisman and Geffen's, as would be expected from our theory. Treisman and Geffen have some difficulty in explaining the discrepancy. “It seems that analysis of simple physical signals precedes both the selective filter and the analysis of verbal content in the perceptual sequence, that the bottle-neck in attention arises chiefly in speech recognition where of course the information load is usually much higher. To confirm the belief that the verbal content of the secondary message was not being analysed, we find no evidence whatever of interference from secondary target words when these received no tapping response.” (We quote the last sentence as just one example of the fact that Treisman and Geffen have failed to understand our theory. It is one of the major points of this theory to explain why “secondary” messages do not cause interfernce with the “primary” message while they are being analysed.) To return now to the subject of Lawson's experiments, we would suggest that the outcome of such experiments would be the same if instead of signals, words were used in Lawson's paradigm. These words should occur on both channels and should be distinguishable by another speaking voice. The subject should be asked to respond to, but not to repeat such words. To make sure the subject is not simply responding to differences in timbre, pitch, etc., the target words should be interspersed with other words. Treisman and Geffen could not then postulate differences in information load to explain an unfavourable result.     

Implicit Perception and Level of Processing in Object-Substitution Masking

ABSTRACT— Object-substitution masking (OSM) refers to reduced target discrimination when the target is surrounded by a sparse mask that does not overlap with the target in space but trails it in time. In four experiments, we used a novel paradigm to investigate the extent of processing of a masked target in OSM. We measured response-compatibility effects between target and mask, both when the offsets were simultaneous and when the offset of the mask was delayed. Evidence for both OSM and a dissociation between perception and awareness was found when detecting the match between the target and the mask required feature but not categorical analyses. Our results suggest that the locus of disruption in OSM is likely to be beyond feature analysis of the unreported target.     

Location and binding in visual working memory

Visual working memory (VWM) wa sexplored separatelyfor features and for their binding. Features were better recognized when the probes retained the same binding as in the original display, but changing the locations had little effect overall. However, there were strong interactions of location with binding and with matching or new features, suggesting that, when objects are attended, features and locations are spontaneously integrated in VWM. Despite this, when the locations arechanged, features can also be accessed with little decrement, perhaps from separate feature maps. Bindings, on the other hand, are more vulnerable to location changes, suggesting that locations play a central role in the early maintenance and retrieval of bound objects as well as in their initial encoding, at least when verbal coding is prevented. The results qualify past claims about the separation of locations and objects in VWM.