Abstracts 2005 - The Psychonomic Society

Papers 307–313 Sunday Morning
may have a promotion focus (a sensitivity to potential gains in the environment)
or a prevention focus (a sensitivity to potential losses).
Regulatory fit suggests that people perform best when their regulatory
focus matches the payoffs in the environment. We generated a
category structure in which a unidimensional rule led to good but subcriterial
performance. The learning criterion could be achieved, however,
using a complex conjunctive rule. People were best able to find
the conjunctive rule when there was a regulatory fit. If there were rewards
on every trial, people with a promotion focus learned better
than people with a prevention focus. If there were punishments on
every trial, people with a prevention focus learned better than people
with a promotion focus. These findings suggest that regulatory fit
leads to flexible cognitive processing.
11:00–11:15 (307)
Varying Abstraction in Categorization. GERT STORMS & WOLF
VANPAEMEL, University of Leuven—A model is proposed that elegantly
unifies the traditional exemplar and prototype models. These
two models are extreme cases of the proposed varying abstraction
model. This unifying model further makes room for many new intermediate
pseudoexemplar models. Analysis of empirical data, using
both artificial stimuli and natural concepts, showed evidence in favor
of intermediate pseudoexemplar models as compared with the classical
prototype and exemplar models. A further advantage of the varying
abstraction model is that because of its pseudoexemplar models,
it allows for sensitive modeling. For example, the model is highly useful
for investigating in full detail recent findings that category representation
may change during the learning process. The model can also
capture possible varying categorization strategies depending on the
complexity of the categories under study.
11:20–11:35 (308)
Does Response Scaling Cause the Generalized Context Model to
Mimic a Prototype Model? DANIEL J. NAVARRO, University of Adelaide,
& JAY I. MYUNG & MARK A. PITT, Ohio State University (read
by Jay I. Myung)—Exemplar and prototype accounts of categorization
phenomena differ primarily in terms of the manner in which category
information is represented. However, the models also make auxiliary
assumptions that are instantiated as model parameters. Smith and Minda
(1998) argue that the response scaling parameter in the exemplarbased
generalized context model (GCM) makes the model unnecessarily
complex and allows it to mimic prototype representations. We
estimate the complexity of GCM with and without the parameter, as
well as that of a prototype model. We then go on to assess the extent
to which the models mimic each other’s behavior. The parameter does
increase the complexity of the model, but this complexity only allows
partial mimicry. Furthermore, if we adopt minimum description
length as the measure of model performance, the models become
highly discriminable.
11:40–11:55 (309)
Effects of Noun Modification on Plausibility of Attribute Information.
JAMES A. HAMPTON, City University, London, & MARTIN
JONSSON, Lund University—Inspired by a recent paper by Connolly
et al., we investigated whether attributes judged to be generally true
of a noun class will also be considered true of an orthogonal subset
of that class. For example, given that ravens are black, how likely is
it that young jungle ravens are black? Experiment 1 replicated their
result. Modification, particularly with atypical modifiers, reduced the
judged truth of typical attributes. Experiment 2 required forced choice
decisions of likelihood between modified and unmodified subject
nouns and asked for additional justifications. Experiment 3 showed
that the reduction in judged likelihood was correlated with the mutability
of the predicate for the subject noun. Finally, we demonstrate a
new version of the conjunction fallacy. People judged a universally
quantified statement (All ravens are black) to be more likely to be true
than the same statement with a modified subject noun (All jungle
ravens are black).
48
Visual Word Recognition
Grand Ballroom West, Sunday Morning, 10:00–12:00
Chaired by Wayne S. Murray, University of Dundee
10:00–10:15 (310)
The Form of the Word Frequency Effect. WAYNE S. MURRAY, University
of Dundee, & KENNETH I. FORSTER, University of Arizona—
Murray and Forster (2004) made strong claims about the precise form
of the effect of word frequency on recognition time. It was argued that
the underlying function directly reflects the relationship between access
time and the rank order of words in a frequency-ordered search
or verification set. Across three experiments, a rank function produced
an account that was numerically superior to the more “traditional”
description of this function as logarithmic, but no clear statistical
superiority was demonstrated. In this paper, we consider word
recognition data derived from a number of sources and show that although
a log function provides a reasonable approximation across the
mid-frequency range, it is clearly inadequate at the frequency extremes,
whereas rank produces a good fit throughout the entire frequency
range. We discuss both the practical and theoretical consequences
of this finding.
10:20–10:35 (311)
1984: Reconsidering the Absence of Frequency Attenuation Effect
With Masked Repetition. SACHIKO KINOSHITA, Macquarie Centre
for Cognitive Science—The frequency attenuation effect refers to the
finding that the magnitude of frequency effect in the lexical decision
task is reduced for repeated words. Forster and Davis (1984) reported
that the frequency attenuation effect is not found with masked repetition
but that instead effects of frequency and masked repetition are additive.
This pattern has been replicated many times (although see Masson
& Bodner, 2003, for contradictory data), and has been taken as a
benchmark finding for accounts of masked repetition priming. I report
contrary data showing that a frequency attenuation effect is found
with some low-frequency words and that this is not due to methodological
artifacts, such as greater power or stronger manipulation of
frequency. Implications of the results for the nature of lexical representation
and the lexical decision task will be discussed.
10:40–10:55 (312)
Visual Word Recognition: Is a Hybrid Connectionist Framework
Needed? JENNIFER A. STOLZ, NASEEM AL-AIDROOS, & DEREK
BESNER, University of Waterloo—Interactive activation is currently
the dominant conceptual framework for language processing. That
said, such a framework encounters difficulty in explaining the combination
of several empirical observations in the context of the lexical
decision task (an interaction between the effects of stimulus quality
and semantic priming when the relatedness proportion is .5,
additive effects of these same two factors when the relatedness proportion
is .25, and additive effects of stimulus quality and word frequency).
We report a series of simulations from a hybrid model that
combines interactive activation across later stages with an earlier
stage that is thresholded. This model produces all of the phenomena
noted above, as well as many others.
11:00–11:15 (313)
Early Semantic Effects in Visual Word Recognition. KENNETH I.
FORSTER, University of Arizona—Several phenomena have now
emerged suggesting that in semantic categorization experiments, the
semantic properties of the category fundamentally alter very early
processes in visual word recognition. For example, masked semantic
priming with a short-duration prime occurs reliably in semantic categorization
but not in lexical decision. Similarly, masked cross-language
translation priming from the second language to the first is obtained
only in semantic categorization. One possibility is that these effects
might be explained as congruence effects. However, there is at least
one effect that cannot involve congruence—namely, the greater sen-