Abstracts 2005 - The Psychonomic Society

Papers 188–194 Saturday Morning
11:40–11:55 (188)
Metacomprehension for Multiple-Choice, Essay, and Recall Tests.
RUTH H. MAKI, CYNTHIA J. DEMPSEY, AMY J. PIETAN,
MICHAEL T. MIESNER, & JOSHUA ARDUENGO, Texas Tech University—Students’
abilities to predict multiple-choice test performance
after reading text is often poor. In order to predict performance
on multiple-choice tests, students must predict what specific topics
will be tested and the difficulty of incorrect alternatives. This uncertainty
is removed for posttest judgments. We manipulated the uncertainty
of the test by using three types of tests: multiple choice, essay,
and recall. We scored essay and recall answers with latent semantic
analysis. Overall, correlations between judgments and performance
were higher for multiple-choice than for essay tests, with recall falling
in the middle. This was true for prediction and posttest confidence
judgments and for students of high, medium, and low verbal abilities.
Metacomprehension for essay tests was particularly poor, even after
students had written the answers. Because predictions for multiplechoice
tests tended to be the best, uncertainty about questions and expected
answers cannot explain poor performance predictions.
Comparative Cognition
Civic Ballroom, Saturday Morning, 10:40–12:00
Chaired by David A. Washburn, Georgia State University
10:40–10:55 (189)
Constraint Competition in the Control of Attention. DAVID A.
WASHBURN, Georgia State University—In a series of experiments
modeled after the Kane and Engle (2003) studies on the control of attention
in Stroop task performance by humans, rhesus monkeys were
tested to examine how experiential constraints (habits) and executive
constraints (intentions) vie for the control of behavior. The monkeys
performed a numerical Stroop task under varying proportions of congruous
or incongruous trials. Overall, the monkeys performed similarly
to the low-memory-span humans of the Kane and Engle (2003)
study: Errors increased on infrequent incongruous trials, response
times were longer for incongruous than for baseline or congruous trials,
and the monkeys switched between processing sets with difficulty.
Even in these conditions, however, it appeared that the monkeys had
not forgotten the rules of the task; rather, it seems that these manipulations
of task cues were effective in biasing the competition that exists
between automatic and controlled determinants of attention.
11:00–11:15 (190)
Familiarity Processing in Primates and Avians: Proactive Interference.
ANTHONY A. WRIGHT, University of Texas Health Science
Center, Houston, JEFFREY S. KATZ, Auburn University, TAMO
NAKAMURA & JACQUELYNE J. RIVERA, University of Texas Health
Science Center, Houston, & BRADLEY R. STURZ & KENT D. BOD-
ILY, Auburn University—Rhesus monkeys and pigeons learned a same/
different concept with a large set of pictures. After the same/different
concept had been learned, proactive interference was measured and
manipulated to test the degree to which performance and transfer depended
on familiarity and feature processing.
11:20–11:35 (191)
Operant Conditioning and Hoarding in Dwarf Hamsters (Phodopus
campbelli). KRISTA A. WERTZ & JEROME FRIEMAN, Kansas State
University (read by Jerome Frieman)—Hamsters are prolific hoarders.
They store large amounts of food in their cheek pouches and also create
large caches of food in or around their nests. Because they hoard
food, they rarely experience severe deprivation and do not respond
well to it. They can be trained to leverpress without being deprived of
food. We trained dwarf hamsters (Phodopus campbelli) to leverpress
for food in a closed economy under various fixed ratio schedules of
reinforcement and manipulated whether they could accumulate a
hoard in their nest. We observed them leverpressing for food in fairly
regular bursts spaced hours apart, primarily during the night. The
30
lengths of bursts in leverpressing increased when they were unable to
amass a hoard. These observations reflect the adaptive strategies in a
species that hoards food.
11:40–11:55 (192)
Learning in Antlions, Sit-and-Wait Predators: Hurry Up and Wait.
KAREN L. HOLLIS, AMBER M. HAYDEN, & MARGARET L.
MCDERMOTT, Mount Holyoke College—Antlions (Neuroptera:
Myrmeleontidae), the larvae of an adult winged insect, capture food
by digging funnel-shaped pits in sand and then lying in wait, buried
at the vertex, for prey to fall inside. A captured prey is injected with
digestive enzymes, and the fluids are extracted via the mandibles. The
sedentary nature of antlions’ sit-and-wait predatory behavior and, especially,
their innate ability to detect prey arrival, do not fit the profile
of invertebrates that possess learning capabilities. However, we
show that learning can play an important, and heretofore unrecognized,
role in this insect’s predatory behavior. Once each day for
16 days, individual antlions received either a brief vibrational cue presented
immediately before the arrival of food or that same cue presented
independently of food arrival. Signaling of food enabled
antlions not only to extract food faster, but also to dig more efficient
pits and molt sooner than antlions for which food was not signaled.
Speech Perception
Conference Rooms B&C, Saturday Morning, 9:40–12:00
Chaired by Delphine Dahan, University of Pennsylvania
9:40–9:55 (193)
Speaker Specificity in Speech Perception: The Importance of What
Is and Is Not in the Signal. DELPHINE DAHAN, University of Pennsylvania,
& REBECCA A. SCARBOROUGH, Stanford University—
In some American English dialects, /�/ before /ɡ/ (but not /k/) raises
to [ε], reducing phonetic overlap between, for example, “bag” and
“back.” Here, participants saw four written words on a screen (e.g.,
“bag,” “back,” “dog,” “dock”) and heard a spoken word. They indicated
which word they had heard. Participants’ eye movements to the
written words were recorded. Participants in the “æ-raising” group
heard “bag”-like words containing [ε]; participants in the “control”
group heard cross-spliced “bag”-like words containing [�]. The æraising
group participants identified “back”-like words (identical between
groups) more quickly and more accurately and made fewer fixations
to the competitor “bag,” than did control group participants.
Thus, exposure to raised realizations of “bag” facilitated identification
of “back” because of the reduced fit between the input and the
altered representation of the competing hypothesis “bag.” So listeners
evaluate speech with respect to what is and what is not in the signal,
and this evaluation involves speaker-specific representations.
10:00–10:15 (194)
Lexical Knowledge and Speaker Familiarity Modulate Perception
of Assimilated Segments. REBECCA PIORKOWSKI & WILLIAM
BADECKER, Johns Hopkins University (read by William Badecker)—
We present experiments that examine how the perception of assimilated
segments is influenced by lexical knowledge: for example, when
lexical access to an underlying form (“bean”) is influenced by competition
with its assimilated surface form (“beam”) in contexts such as
“the dye turned the bean blue.” Using cross-modal priming, we compared
the priming effect of words that assimilate to nonwords in
phonological licensing contexts (“brown pea”) with the priming effect
of words that assimilate to other words in a licensing context (“bean
blue”). We also compared the priming effect of mid-frequency words
whose assimilated form is more frequent with the priming effect of
mid-frequency words whose assimilated form is less frequent. We
found that lexical access to the underlying form is influenced by the
frequency and lexicality of the surface form, the listener’s knowledge
of the speaker, and the relative timing of the spoken prime and visual
probe.