S1 (FriAM 1-65) - The Psychonomic Society

Posters 3112–3118 Friday Evening
(3112)
Capacity Limits of Spatial Updating: Online and Offline Updating.
ERIC HODGSON & DAVID WALLER, Miami University (sponsored
by Leonard S. Mark)—Keeping track of changing self-to-object spatial
relations is generally considered to be capacity limited. However,
the limits of updating seem to depend on whether objects are updated
online (i.e., in real time) or offline (i.e., reconstructed after movement).
Previous results (Hodgson & Waller, 2006) indicate that spatial
updating through a 135º rotation involves offline processing and
is unaffected by the number of targets. In contrast, participants in the
present experiment were required to keep track of the locations of between
1 and 10 objects through a smaller, 45º rotation (putatively requiring
only online processing). Set size effects were found in both
error and latency, indicating a capacity limit of online updating around
6 items. An additional experiment showed that updating capacity depends
both on the number of updated objects and on the magnitude of
the movement, such that the further one rotates, the fewer objects one
can update online.
(3113)
Can People Determine Parallel and Perpendicular Paths in Active
Navigation? ELIZABETH R. CHRASTIL & WILLIAM H. WARREN,
JR., Brown University—Theories of path integration and cognitive map
construction often assume that metric information about distances and
angles is acquired during walking. Moreover, a map with Euclidean
or affine structure must preserve parallelism. In the present study, we
test whether traversed angles can be used to determine parallel and
perpendicular paths in an ambulatory virtual environment. Participants
performed a shortcut task in which they walked down a main
path, took a 90º turn onto a side path, then a variable angle turn, and
finally were asked to walk perpendicular or parallel to the main path.
Participants were expected to exhibit large variable errors and a 90º
bias, over-turning acute angles and under-turning obtuse angles. This
task dissociates angle from distance, which are confounded in triangle
completion tasks. The results can be used to predict path integration
performance and have implications for the accuracy and geometric
structure of cognitive maps.
(3114)
Route Angularity Effects on Distance Estimation in a Virtual Environment.
ADAM T. HUTCHESON, DOUGLAS H. WEDELL, &
DAVID E. CLEMENT, University of South Carolina—Research has
shown that increasing the number of turns a route takes through the
environment increases estimates of distance, known as the route angularity
effect. Two studies examined mental processes responsible
for the occurrence of the route angularity effect in virtual settings.
Study 1 tested the plausibility of a scaling explanation of the route angularity
effect using a paradigm that has produced the effect in the
past. The route angularity effect was found, but the data did not support
the scaling hypothesis. Study 2 examined the role of memory in
the route angularity effect, with memory load manipulated at encoding
or interference manipulated prior to retrieval. The results demonstrated
that the route angularity effect was significantly increased by
a memory load at encoding but that it was unaffected by the inference
task prior to retrieval. Both studies show a greater magnitude of underestimation
as the actual path length increases.
• WORKING MEMORY •
(3115)
The Impact of Perception–Action Incompatibility on Auditory Serial
Recall. ROBERT W. HUGHES, JOHN E. MARSH, & DYLAN M.
JONES, Cardiff University (sponsored by Fabrice Parmentier)—The
talker-variability effect in serial recall—the impairment of auditory–
verbal serial recall when successive to-be-remembered items are spoken
in different voices—is typically explained by recourse to item loss
through decay within a bespoke short-term store. We provide evidence
that the effect can be reattributed to the incompatibility between the
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automatic auditory perception of order and the action requirement to
reproduce the veridical order of the to-be-remembered items: Factors
that promote the automatic perceptual encoding of order by voice
rather than according to the true temporal order of the items exacerbates
the effect. Moreover, whereas tasks that require memory for
order (serial recall and probe tasks) are susceptible, tasks that call only
for item memory (missing-item task) are not. We suggest that the
talker variability effect can be added to a growing list of short-term
“memory” phenomena that may be reconstrued as reflecting the constraints
on perceptual and gestural-planning processes.
(3116)
Phonological Similarity Effects in Verbal Working Memory and Language
Production Tasks. DANIEL J. ACHESON & MARYELLEN C.
MACDONALD, University of Wisconsin, Madison—Similar patterns
of errors have been observed in language production and verbal working
memory (WM) tasks under conditions of phonological similarity
(Ellis, 1980). Such errors have been attributed to item-ordering
processes in the WM literature but to phoneme ordering processes in
language production. The nature of serial ordering mechanisms was
investigated with a tongue-twister (TT) paradigm. Lists were composed
of four nonwords, with ±TT status varying only through nonword
ordering (e.g., TT list: tiff deeve diff teeve; non-TT list: tiff teeve
diff deeve). Memory demands varied across four levels: simple reading
(Experiment 1), immediate serial recall, immediate serial typing,
and serial recognition (Experiments 2, 3 and 4, respectively). Robust
effects of TT ordering were observed despite constant phonological
overlap across items. Relative to item serial-position analyses,
phoneme error analyses provided insight into the serial ordering
process shared by language production and verbal WM. Implications
for theories of WM are discussed.
(3117)
Improving Strategy Choice in Individuals With Low Working Memory
Capacity. MELANIE CARY, University of Wisconsin, La Crosse,
& MARSHA C. LOVETT, Carnegie Mellon University—How do individuals
with low versus high working memory capacity differ in
their strategy choices? Prior research (Cary & Lovett, 2004) examined
this question for an income-calculation task where the two primary solution
strategies were both viable but differed in working memory demands.
The results showed that high-capacity individuals were more
likely to adapt their choices toward the less-demanding strategy,
whereas low-capacity individuals were more likely to stick with their
initial strategy, even when it was the more demanding one. In the present
study, two experiments explored alternative approaches to improving
the strategy choices made by low-capacity individuals. One experiment
examined the impact of providing low-capacity participants
with a subtle instructional bias toward the less-demanding strategy.
The other experiment examined the impact of providing low-capacity
and high-capacity participants with example problems to illustrate the
use of both strategies. Our analyses focus on participants’ strategy
choice and adaptation in each case.
(3118)
Individual Differences in Interference From Auditory Distractors:
The Role of Working Memory Capacity. EMILY M. ELLIOTT,
JILL A. SHELTON, & SHARON D. LYNN, Louisiana State University,
& CANDICE C. MOREY, University of Missouri, Columbia—Irrelevant
sounds are pervasive, and can disrupt cognitive performance. The
goals of the present study were to investigate individual differences
in performance in the presence of auditory distractors and to assess
the relationship of these differences with multiple indices of working
memory capacity. Our findings suggest that goal maintenance and the
ability to avoid distraction from irrelevant sounds were both important
in determining the relationship between working memory and
performance in a cross-modal version of the Stroop task. We found
that out of three working memory measures, only operation span, a
storage-plus-processing task emphasizing attentional control, showed