S1 (FriAM 1-65) - The Psychonomic Society

Saturday Afternoon Papers 230–236
Kings College London, & BEATRIZ LUNA, University of Pittsburgh—
Very little is known about how the ventral visual cortex becomes organized
for processing faces or any other visual category. We investigated
developmental changes in brain function that are related to
children’s emerging abilities to represent and recognize faces, places,
and objects. Our results suggest that children demonstrate adult-like
organization in object- and place-related cortex, but no consistent
face-selective activation in the right hemisphere until adolescence,
and in the left hemisphere until adulthood. We will also report results
from an ongoing study investigating developmental changes in the nature
of the specific face-related computations in classical face regions
using an fMRI adaptation paradigm. These results suggest that the
transition from childhood to early adolescence appears to represent an
important transition in the development of face-specificity in the ventral
visual cortex and shed light on models of functional brain development
more broadly.
4:30–4:45 (230)
Extraordinary Face Recognition Ability. RICHARD RUSSELL,
Harvard University, BRAD DUCHAINE, University College London,
& KEN NAKAYAMA, Harvard University—Following media coverage
of developmental prosopagnosia, several individuals contacted us
to self-identify as having significantly better than ordinary face
recognition ability. They describe their face recognition abilities in
strong terms, such as “. . . if I’ve seen your face before I will be able
to recall it. It happens only with faces.” We have tested two of these
individuals, confirming exceptional ability in each case. On two tests
of face recognition they performed significantly better than control
subjects, receiving the highest scores of any subject. On a visual memory
task with abstract art images, they performed near the high end of
the range of the control subject performance. On a face discrimination
task with upright and inverted faces, these two individuals
showed larger inversion effects than did control subjects, who in turn
show larger inversion effects than did people with developmental
prosopagnosia, suggesting a relation between face recognition ability
and inversion effect magnitude.
4:50–5:05 (231)
Featural and Configural Properties in Face Perception: Comparing
Apples and Oranges. JAMES W. TANAKA, University of Victoria,
MARTHA KAISER, Rutgers University, & DANIEL N. BUB, University
of Victoria—All faces are created equal in the sense that every
face shares a common set of basic eyes, nose, mouth features that are
arranged in a similar configuration. Successful individuation of a particular
face must therefore depend on our ability to perceive subtle differences
in featural and configural face properties. In this talk, I will
present a psychophysical test that parametrically measures the perception
of featural and configural information in faces and nonface
objects presented in their upright and inverted orientations. I will
show how this scale can be used to assess the recognition strategies
of normal adults, patients with prosopagnosia, and children with
autism spectrum disorder.
5:10–5:25 (232)
The Ability to Learn New Faces Peaks at Age 30. KEN NAKAYAMA,
Harvard University, & LAURA T. GERMINE & BRAD DUCHAINE,
University College London—Many studies have tracked the development
of face recognition in childhood. No studies have traced the
course of face learning ability from early-adolescence throughout the
life span. Employing a Web-based variant of the Cambridge Face
Memory Test (CFMT), we acquired data from over 22,000 volunteer
subjects. Tracing performance year by year, from age 11 to 67, we
show it rises steeply initially reaching a peak at age 30 and falling
gradually thereafter. An earlier age peak for learning nonface objects
is suggested by our within-category car recognition tests (N = 3,000)
as well as published data on words and digits. While this late peak for
faces is surprising, it is consistent with recent neuro-imaging studies
showing the slower maturation of face specific areas in the brain as
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well as with theoretical accounts requiring prolonged experience with
faces for optimal performance.
Development and Evolution of Cognition
Regency DEFH, Saturday Afternoon, 3:50–5:30
Chaired by Edward A. Wasserman, University of Iowa
3:50–4:05 (233)
How Infant Cognition and Infant Word Learning Interact.
LESLIE B. COHEN, University of Texas, Austin—Based upon research
conduced in our laboratory I will discuss three issues in the infant
word learning literature that can benefit from an understanding
of infant cognition. The first examines how adult social referencing
factors influence the development of infant attention and word learning.
The study shows separate influences of attention directing and
referential cues. The second shows how the inclusion of a verbal label
can influence infants’ organization of new categories. The use of one
or two labels can determine whether one or two categories are formed.
The third indicates how different laboratory procedures (novelty preference
vs. intermodal preferential looking) can lead to very different
results regarding infants’ attachment of labels to categories. Together
these three lines of research highlight the importance of taking into
account the interaction between infant cognition and infant word
learning.
4:10–4:25 (234)
Action and the Discovering Abstract Descriptions of Object Shape.
LINDA B. SMITH, Indiana University—It is commonplace to think
of chairs as being all the same shape, chair shape. But rocking chairs,
desk chairs, and over-stuffed chairs are only the same shape under
some abstract description of object shape. Even more abstract descriptions
relate the shapes of things that can be containers, or that can
fit into narrow holes, or that can be used to reach and drag some distant
object. This talk will present evidence of significant changes in
children’s representation of object shape during the period of 18–24
months, changes that appear tightly tied to action on and with objects.
This is also a developmental period marked by the emergence of tool
use, symbolic play, and the rapid acquisition of common noun
categories.
4:30–4:45 (235)
A Vocabulary Test for Pigeons (Columba livia). EDWARD A.
WASSERMAN, DANIEL I. BROOKS, OLGA F. LAZAREVA, &
MICHELLE A. MINER, University of Iowa—Three pigeons successfully
learned to name 8 distinctively different black-and-white photographs
from each of 16 different basic-level categories by pecking
one of 16 multicolor lexigrams. New categories and new lexigrams
were progressively added to the pigeons’ training regimen in order to
emulate children’s ever expanding verbal vocabularies. Pigeons’ naming
behavior reliably transferred to 4 novel photographs from the different
categories. Additional tests disclosed that the pigeons’ choice by
exclusion and the experimenters’ programming of correction trials following
errors contributed to the birds’ selection of a new lexigram in
response to a new category. Analysis of the pigeons’ mistakes showed
that two factors—lexigram location and basic-level category—affected
the distribution of naming errors; the sequence in which the categories
were learned did not affect confusion errors. These results closely accord
with vocabulary learning by human and nonhuman primates.
4:50–5:05 (236)
Metacognition and Metamemory Across Species. ROBERT R.
HAMPTON, Emory University—Metacognition, or thinking about
thinking, allows one to both monitor and control cognitive processing.
Metamemory is a particularly interesting type of metacognition
because it facilitates the appropriate selection of current behavior
based on accumulated experience, and it supports regulation of learning—for
example, by controlling the allocation of study effort. Fol-