S1 (FriAM 1-65) - The Psychonomic Society

Saturday Morning Papers 179–186
11:20–11:35 (179)
Dynamic Processes in Visual Word Recognition: A New Theoretical
Challenge. SHANNON O’MALLEY & DEREK BESNER, University
of Waterloo (read by Derek Besner)—New findings illustrate how
the effect of word frequency in reading aloud is context sensitive in a
way unanticipated to date. These findings are taken to suggest that the
underlying processing is dynamic in a way largely unanticipated to
date. Several theoretical accounts are considered.
11:40–11:55 (180)
On the Biological and Computational Plausibility of Grandmother
Cells. JEFFREY S. BOWERS, University of Bristol—Advocates of
the PDP approach often highlight the similarity between the distributed
representations learned in connectionist models and the neural networks
implemented in the brain. Models with localist coding, including
localist network models that learn, are often rejected on the basis of
their biological implausibility. In this talk I review a variety of singlecell
recording studies that undermine the common assumption that
neuroscience data are more consistent with the PDP approach. Indeed,
the field of neurophysiology is predicated on the (well-demonstrated)
fact that the activity of single neurons correlates with perception and
action. This observation is problematic for the PDP assumption that
knowledge is coded in a distributed manner. I also challenge some of
the common functional (computational) criticisms that are raised
against models that include localist representations.
Visual Attention
Beacon B, Saturday Morning, 10:00–12:00
Chaired by Raymond M. Klein, Dalhousie University
10:00–10:15 (181)
Two Flavors of Inhibition of Return. ANA CHICA & JUAN
LUPIÁÑEZ, University of Granada, & TRACY L. TAYLOR & RAY-
MOND M. KLEIN, Dalhousie University (read by Raymond M. Klein)—
Inhibition of return (IOR) refers to slower reaction times to targets presented
at previously stimulated or inspected locations. Taylor and
Klein (2000) showed that IOR can affect both input and output processing,
depending on whether the oculomotor system is in a quiescent
or in a prepared state, respectively. If the motoric flavor of IOR
is truly nonperceptual and nonattentional, no IOR should be observed
when the responses to targets are not explicitly spatial. When the eyes
moved to the peripheral cue and back to center before the target appeared
(to emphasize the motoric component), IOR was generated in
a detection task (for which motor preparation is important) but not in
a color discrimination task. This same discrimination task showed
IOR when the motoric component was not activated, by preventing
eye movements to the cue. Thus, the motoric flavor of IOR, elicited
by oculomotor programming is restricted to output processing.
10:20–10:35 (182)
Inducing Inhibition of Return in One Person Based on the Actions of
Another. GEOFF G. COLE & PAUL A. SKARRATT, University of
Durham, & ALAN KINGSTONE, University of British Columbia—
Welsh et al. (2005) reported a highly novel inhibition of return (IOR)
effect in which the phenomenon is induced in one person through the
observation of another person’s actions. They showed that participants
were slower to make reaching responses to a location that had previously
been responded to by another person (compared to a location
where no previous response had been made). The present study examined
whether this socially modulated IOR effect occurs when the
observer only knows where the other person has responded, rather
than actually seeing the response being made. The results showed the
presence of IOR both when the reaching response was visible and
when the response location was only inferred. This suggests that IOR
can be induced on the basis of a higher order inference of the biological
behavior of another individual.
28
10:40–10:55 (183)
Effects of Exogenous and Endogenous Orienting of Attention on
Change Detection. GARY C.-W. SHYI & KIT-MAN YUEN, National
Chung Cheng University—A large number of studies now show that
people are surprisingly poor at detecting significant changes in visually
presented scenes. In the present study, we conducted three experiments
to investigate the relationship between orienting attention
and change detection. In Experiments 1 and 2 we demonstrated, respectively,
that exogenous and endogenous orienting can influence allocation
of attention, which in turn can affect participants’ performances
on change detection. In Experiments 3, we compared and
contrasted the relative dominance of exogenous versus endogenous
orienting as a function of time course. The results showed that when
both exogenously and endogenously attended items were provided,
the timing of onset appearance was critical to determine whether exogenous
or endogenous control would be activated, which in turn may
enhance the performance of detecting changes. The implications of
our findings for the role of attention in change blindness and change
detection are discussed.
11:00–11:15 (184)
Masking and Decay in the Attentional Blink for Detection and
Orientation Discrimination. BRADLEY J. WOLFGANG & PHILIP L.
SMITH, University of Melbourne—The attentional blink (AB) is a
transient perceptual deficit that is characterized by a reduction in second
target performance following the correct identification of a first
target presented between 100 and 500 msec earlier. The AB is thought
to occur when inattention combines with a limitation in the availability
of second target information. Theoretically, such a limitation could
be (1) induced by visual masking, or (2) occur through passive stimulus
decay in unmasked displays. We investigated the masking requirements
for the detection and discrimination of two near-threshold
Gabor patch stimuli. For detection, the AB was only found when stimuli
were backward masked; for discrimination, an AB was obtained in
both masked and unmasked displays. The decay-based AB for discrimination
was additionally shown to depend on spatial frequency.
We suggest that the attentional demands of perceptual processing interact
with masking and stimulus decay to determine the strength of
stimulus representations in visual short-term memory.
11:20–11:35 (185)
Whole Versus Partial Report: The Attentional Blink in RSVP Sentences.
MARY C. POTTER, MIT, MARK NIEUWENSTEIN, Vrije
Universiteit Amsterdam, & NINA STROHMINGER, University of
Michigan—An attentional blink in RSVP target search (errors in reporting
T2 at an SOA of about 200 msec) disappears when all items
must be reported; instead, performance drops over serial position
(Nieuwenstein & Potter, 2006). In contrast to unrelated items such as
letters, words that form a sentence are easily remembered in RSVP
(Potter, 1984). Would target words in sentences escape an attentional
blink? Subjects either reported two red words (T1 and T2) or the
whole sentence. There was a blink for T2 at an SOA of 187 msec in
partial report, but in whole report T1 and T2 were easily remembered.
When the sentence was scrambled, whole report dropped but partial
report was unaffected: T1 was now better in partial than in whole report,
but T2 (at an SOA of 187 msec) was again worse. The attentional
blink is not due to memory processing of T1, but to selection.
11:40–11:55 (186)
Hold Everything! Hand Position Alters Vision. RICHARD A.
ABRAMS, FENG DU, CHRISTOPHER C. DAVOLI, & WILLIAM H.
KNAPP, Washington University—The present study explored the
manner in which hand position may affect visual perception. We studied
three classic visual attention tasks (visual search, inhibition of return,
and attentional blink) during which the participants held their
hands either near the stimulus display, or far from the display. Remarkably,
the hands altered visual processing: People shifted their at-