S1 (FriAM 1-65) - The Psychonomic Society

Sunday Morning Papers 297–302
parietal lobule (SPL) subserves goal-directed orienting. Here, we investigated
the independence of these attentional subsystems in patients
with attentional deficits following an acquired lesion to the dorsal
(SPL) or ventral (TPJ) parts of the attentional network. Patients
completed a goal-directed attentional shifting task and a visual contingent
capture task. Patients with lesioned SPL but spared TPJ exhibited
difficulties with goal-directed attentional orienting as well as
exhibited a “hyper-capture” phenomenon. Patients with lesioned TPJ
but spared SPL performed normally on the goal-directed orienting
task, while remaining immune to capture. These findings suggest that
in the normal functioning system, the two types of attentional orienting
are not entirely independent, but, rather, goal-directed attentional
control (SPL) carries information regarding what is important to the
task at hand and thus constrains bottom-up attentional capture (TPJ).
10:40–10:55 (297)
Action Relations Reduce Spatial Extinction Through Configural
Coding. JANE RIDDOCH & GLYN W. HUMPHREYS, University of
Birmingham (sponsored by Glyn W. Humphreys)—Patients with parietal
lesions have shown recovery from extinction when pairs of objects
share an action relation (e.g., a bottle pouring into a glass) relative to
when they do not (e.g., a bottle pouring away from a glass) (Riddoch
et al., 2003, 2006). We investigated the visual constraints on this effect.
We show that the advantage for objects sharing an action relation
is significantly reduced when stimuli are inverted, whereas inversion
does not affect unrelated objects. Similarly changing the size of the objects
relative to one another reduces the effects of action relations on
extinction. We suggest that the effects of action relation are based on
high-level configural grouping of stimuli, which reduces spatial competition
between the stimuli in patients with parietal damage.
11:00–11:15 (298)
Word Fragmentation on the Stroop Task: An Event-Related Potential
Study. SOLEDAD BALLESTEROS, JOSÉ MANUEL REALES,
& FRANCISCO MUÑOZ, UNED—Fifteen adults were presented
with congruent, incongruent, and neutral stimuli at four levels of fragmentation
while performing the Stroop task. Reaction times and
event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. An early negative
component with a peak-amplitude at 85 msec was found that was
larger for the more degraded stimuli at occipital-parietal areas. At
200 msec, a negative potential larger for the most fragmented stimuli
in incongruent condition reflected the Stroop effect. From 250 to
400 msec, congruent stimuli showed a larger positive deviation relative
to both neutral and incongruent conditions. This bilateral positive
potential was larger for the more degraded stimuli. Congruence resolution
signalled by a positive ERP and larger for the more fragmented
stimuli occurred before the incongruent condition. A late larger negativity
for the most fragmented stimuli than for the completed words
peaked at 450 msec and was sensitive to the congruent–incongruent
conflict. This ERP effect displays a centro-parietal topography.
11:20–11:35 (299)
The Shifting Sands of Conflict Processing. ROBERT WEST, Iowa
State University—Studies using functional neuroimaging methodologies
reveal that conflict processing is associated with recruitment of
anterior and lateral prefrontal cortex, parietal cortex, and anterior cingulate.
However, there is striking variation in the pattern of recruitment
that is observed across studies using, PET, fMRI, and ERP methods.
In this study I examined the influence of two factors (level of
practice and trial pacing) on ERPs elicited during the Stroop task.
When there was 500 msec between trials, practice led to a shift from
medial frontal recruitment early in the task to lateral frontal and parietal
recruitment later in the task. When there was 2,000 msec between
trials, the shift in recruitment over time was much less pronounced.
These results are consistent with current theories of cognitive control
and indicate that investigators need to consider both of these factors
when interpreting the results of studies of conflict processing.
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11:40–11:55 (300)
The Cognitive Control and Representation Systems of the Human
Brain. WALTER S. SCHNEIDER, MICHAEL W. COLE, ROBERT
GOLDBERG, & SUDIR PATHAK, University of Pittsburgh—A fundamental
distinction of human cognition and cortical processing is the
interaction of representation specific areas (e.g., visual object, motor
action) and domain general control systems (e.g., attention, decision,
response mapping, affect coding). We detail the function, anatomy,
and interaction of these cortical systems based on behavioral, fMRI,
anatomical (DTI), and functional connectivity methods. We relate the
cortical systems view to automatic and control processing as well as
semantic representation. The representation areas are involved in representation
specific encoding, recognition, similarity judgment,
episodic recall, and automatic coding. The control system components
are tightly coupled, showing differential activity based on comparison
decision (anterior cingulate cortex and presupplementary motor
area), goal processing (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex), stimulus filtering
(inferior frontal junction), arousal (anterior insular cortex), attentional
control (posterior parietal cortex), and affect assessment
(amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex).
The Nature of Thinking
Regency DEFH, Sunday Morning, 10:20–12:00
Chaired by Bradley C. Love, University of Texas, Austin
10:20–10:35 (301)
Putting the Psychology Back Into Psychological Models: Mechanistic
Versus Rational Approaches. BRADLEY C. LOVE & MATT
JONES, University of Texas, Austin, & YASUAKI SAKAMOTO,
Stevens Institute of Technology—Two basic approaches to explaining
the nature of the mind are the rational and mechanistic approaches.
Rational analyses attempt to characterize the environment and the behavioral
outcomes that humans seek to optimize, whereas mechanistic
models attempt to simulate human behavior using processes and
representations analogous to those used by humans. We compared
these approaches on their accounts of how humans learn the variability
of categories. The mechanistic model departs in subtle ways from
rational principles, due to its incremental process of updating category
representations. The model holds that people adjust their estimates of
a category’s mean and variance through error-driven learning, based
on discrepancies between new category members and the current representation
of the category. The model yields a prediction, which we
verify, regarding the effects of order manipulations that the rational
approach does not anticipate. We suggest that psychological advances
are primarily driven by consideration of process and representation,
and that rational accounts trail these breakthroughs.
10:40–10:55 (302)
Smarter Than We Think: Conflict Monitoring in Decision Making.
WIM DE NEYS, University of Leuven, OSHIN VARTANIAN, University
of Toronto, VINOD GOEL, York University, & GÉRY D’YDE-
WALLE, University of Leuven (sponsored by Géry d’Ydewalle)—
Human thinking has been characterized as an interplay between an
intuitive and logical reasoning process. Although monitoring the output
of the two systems for conflict is crucial to avoid decision making
errors there are some widely different views on the efficiency of
the process. Kahneman (2002) claims that the monitoring of the
heuristic system is typically quite lax whereas others such as Sloman
(1996) claim it is flawless and people typically experience a struggle
between what they “know” and “feel” in case of a conflict. We present
a set of behavioral and fMRI studies that contrasted these views. Implicit
behavioral conflict detection measures and the activation pattern
of the lateral and medial (ACC) prefrontal cortex during decision
making both point to the flawless nature of the monitoring: Although
people frequently fail to inhibit illogical intuitive beliefs they do detect
that their responses are not fully warranted.