Abstracts 2005 - The Psychonomic Society

Papers 200–206 Saturday Afternoon
SYMPOSIUM: Event Representation
Grand Ballroom Centre, Saturday Afternoon, 1:30–3:40
Chaired by Thomas F. Shipley, Temple University
1:30–1:40 (200)
Event Representation Symposium Introduction. THOMAS F. SHIP-
LEY, Temple University—Humans effortlessly recognize all sorts of
events, from simple events like objects colliding and humans walking,
to complex events like a double play or getting mad. Humans can also
remember and describe these events and generally react appropriately,
be it catching an approaching object or comforting a friend. The phenomenal
ease of our interactions with events belies the complexity of
the underlying processes. Although psychology has historically concentrated
on the study of static aspects of the world, that is changing.
Events, things that happen over time, are the basis of all experience,
and thus understanding how we process events is an important area of
research in every psychological domain. This symposium offers an
overview of research on event processing. The talks will illustrate the
breadth of issues and give a sense of the interconnections across the
traditionally separate domains of perception, categorization, memory,
and emotion.
1:40–2:00 (201)
Inducing Causal Events From Physical and Social Forces. PHILLIP
WOLFF, Emory University—Simple collision events give rise to the
impression of causation. Most of the research on this effect has focused
on the kinematics of these events—that is, on the motions of the objects
without regard to the forces that produced those motions. In contrast,
the vector model (Wolff & Zettergren, 2002)—based on Talmy’s
(1988) theory of force dynamics—proposes that the perception of causation
in collision events is based upon the underlying dynamics—that
is, upon the forces that produce the motions. Whereas a kinematic representation
of causal events is largely limited to physical interactions,
a force vector representation extends easily to other kinds of causation,
including social causation. In support of this, I describe a series
of experiments in which intentions and desires are treated like physical
forces in the perception of causation involving people. Potential
implications for the semantics of causal verbs will be discussed.
2:00–2:20 (202)
Levels of Biological Motion Perception. NIKOLAUS TROJE, Queen’s
University—Biological motion has long been treated as one single
phenomenon. Here, we want to suggest a dissociation between a
mechanism responsible for a nonspecific, shape-independent detection
of biological events, on the one hand, and a mechanism that retrieves
shape from motion and recovers the articulation and general
structure of a specific body, on the other hand. Evidence for this dissociation
is presented in terms of experiments designed to explore the
nature of the inversion effect in biological motion. As long as it is presented
upright, scrambled biological motion still contains information
about the facing direction of a walker. We isolate the invariants responsible
for this inversion effect as being representative of the ballistic
movement of limbs under conditions of gravity. The consequences
of using scrambled motion to mask biological motion in
detection experiments and the usage of scrambled motion as a control
stimulus in imaging studies are discussed.
2:20–2:40 (203)
Recognizing Gender From Affective Arm Movements: How to Throw
Like a Man. FRANK E. POLLICK, University of Glasgow, KERRI L.
JOHNSON, New York University, & LAWRIE S. MCKAY, University
of Glasgow—Arm kinematics systematically vary when an actor depicts
the same action with different affective states (Pollick et al.,
2001). Using a motion library of 29 actors (14 male), we examined
the recognition of gender from point-light throwing actions when the
actors were asked to perform throws in sad, neutral, happy, and angry
emotional styles. In accord with the notion of kinematic specification
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of dynamics, actions with the greatest velocity, in this case angry
throws, produced the highest accuracy in gender recognition. However,
interpretation of this result is complicated by a strong bias for
angry throws to be reported as male. Two distinct models could explain
this bias: (1) there is a social stereotype to categorize angry
movements as male and (2) the kinematic elements that signal maleness
are more pronounced in angry actions. We investigate these two
possibilities and present the outcome.
2:40–3:00 (204)
Event Boundaries in Autobiographical Memory. MARTIN A. CON-
WAY & HELEN L. WILLIAMS, University of Leeds, & ALAN D.
BADDELEY, University of York—Two experiments explored the
boundaries of episodic memories. In the first experiment, participants
provided a detailed account of all that occurred from leaving home to
arriving at the University. One week later, they repeated this recall. A
second group performed a similar free recall for a vacation. Participants
then studied their recall narratives, divided them up into memories,
and placed the recalled details in forward temporal order. The
majority of memories were found to start with an action. Thoughts,
feelings, and facts were less frequent as first details, although they
were present for some memories. Last details were highly variable,
and no single type of detail predominated. Very few memories were
retrieved 1 week later, but participants showed relatively good memory
for their earlier recall. The findings of these preliminary studies
provide some initial insights into the goal-oriented nature and boundaries
of everyday autobiographical memories.
3:00–3:20 (205)
When Action Meets Word: Event Parsing, Representation, and Verb
Learning. THOMAS F. SHIPLEY & SHANNON PRUDEN, Temple
University, RACHEL PULVERMAN & ROBERTA M. GOLINKOFF,
University of Delaware, & KATHY HIRSH-PASEK, Temple University—Events
are a fundamental unit of human experience. We perceive,
remember, and communicate about events. Events are composed
of dynamic spatial relations. Among them, path, an object’s
motion through space, might prove foundational for perception of
complex aspects of events, including cause and intention. Segmentation
of paths may be accomplished using geometric properties of the
path; spatiotemporal path curvature extrema predict perceptual event
boundaries. Recognition of local path fragments may then be based
on spatiotemporal shape. Whereas our research focuses on how we
perceive path, path appears in the world’s languages in verbs and
prepositions. Language-learning infants appear to attend to path before
other elements of events. Here we explore the hypotheses that infants
use a default strategy of attending to and using path information
to link novel verbs to events. Only later will they show sensitivity to
statistical properties of their native language (e.g., that English verbs
generally encode manner).
[3:20–3:40 Event Representation Roundtable Discussion]
Mechanisms of Attention
Grand Ballroom East, Saturday Afternoon, 1:30–3:10
Chaired by Steven Yantis, Johns Hopkins University
1:30–1:45 (206)
Distributed Representation of Attentional Priority in Human Cortex.
JOHN T. SERENCES & STEVEN YANTIS, Johns Hopkins University
(read by Steven Yantis)—Selective attention biases competition for
cortical representation in favor of behaviorally relevant stimuli (voluntary
attentional control) or salient stimuli (stimulus-driven control).
We used fMRI to investigate the cortical representation of attentional
priority by having observers view two multicolored RSVP letter
streams containing occasional digit cues that instructed them to shift
attention between the streams during search for a red target letter.
Topographically organized regions of extrastriate (V1–V4), parietal