Abstracts 2005 - The Psychonomic Society

Papers 48–53 Friday Morning
view that older adults’ reduced source memory causes their false
memories. That is, we observed that even when older and younger
adults showed equivalent source accuracy for all item types, older
adults were still more than twice as likely as their younger counterparts
to claim that they had witnessed events in a video that were only
suggested in a questionnaire. Moreover, older adults were most likely
to commit suggestibility errors when they were most confident about
the correctness of their response, whereas their younger counterparts
committed these errors only when they were uncertain about the accuracy
of their response. These results exactly fit the predictions of a
vivid false recollection hypothesis about the effects of cognitive aging
on episodic memory.
Psycholinguistics
Grand Ballroom West, Friday Morning, 10:20–12:00
Chaired by Sam Glucksberg, Princeton University
10:20–10:35 (48)
Understanding Novel Metaphors: When Comparison Fails. SAM
GLUCKSBERG & CATRINEL HAUGHT, Princeton University—
Bowdle and Gentner recently argued that novel metaphors are invariably
understood as comparisons, whereas conventional ones can be
understood either as comparisons or as categorizations. We show that
whether a metaphor is understood as a comparison or as a categorization
depends on the relative aptness of the two forms. Using a
novel adjectival modification paradigm, we show that novel metaphors,
such as “billboards are advertising warts,” can be understood as categorizations
but are anomalous as comparisons. We also show that
some metaphors and their corresponding similes have distinctly different
interpretations. These findings lead to the conclusion that comparison
theories of metaphor are fundamentally flawed.
10:40–10:55 (49)
The Processing of Novel Metaphors by the Two Cerebral Hemispheres.
MIRIAM FAUST & NIRA MASHAL, Bar-Ilan University,
TALMA HENDLER, Wohl Institute for Advanced Imaging, Sourasky
Medical Center, Tel-Aviv, ABRAHAM GOLDSTEIN & YOSSI AR-
ZOUAN, Bar-Ilan University, & MARK JUNG-BEEMAN, Northwestern
University—Some research indicates that the right cerebral
hemisphere (RH) plays a unique role in comprehending the figurative
meaning of metaphors, whereas the results of other studies do not support
the notion of a selective role for the RH in accessing metaphorical
meanings. In the present research, participants were presented
with four types of word pairs—literal, conventional metaphoric, novel
metaphoric, and unrelated—and were asked to decide whether each
expression was meaningful or not. The findings of behavioral and
ERPs experiments suggest that the RH contributes significantly to the
processing of novel metaphoric expressions. Furthermore, the results
of an fMRI experiment show that a unique network, consisting of the
right homologue of Wernicke’s area, the left and right premotor areas,
the right and left insula, and Broca’s area, is recruited for the processing
of novel metaphors, but not for the processing of conventional
metaphors.
11:00–11:15 (50)
Determinants of Speed of Processing Effects on Spoken Idiom
Comprehension. CRISTINA CACCIARI & ROBERTO PADOVANI,
University of Modena—Using a cross-modal lexical decision paradigm,
we investigated the extent to which individual speed of processing
(SOP) affected spoken language comprehension in languageunimpaired
participants when the sentence contained a semantically
ambiguous Italian idiom (e.g., “break the ice”) embedded in an idiomrelated
context. To differentiate among sensorimotor speed components,
cognitive speed components, and personality-based components,
we investigated the main factors that might account for the
differences in idiom activation latencies between fast versus slow participants.
The participants enrolled in the cross-modal study were pre-
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sented with a battery of tests assessing (1) the SOP in nonlinguistic
tasks, (2) the ability to inhibit irrelevant information, (3) the role of
verbal working memory components, (4) word recognition, lexical access,
and reading abilities, (5) nonverbal intelligence, and (6) personality
structure and anxiety level. The speed with which idiomatic
meanings were activated was modulated by phonological, semantic,
memory-based, and personality components.
11:20–11:35 (51)
Laughter in Bill Clinton’s My Life (2004) Interviews. DANIEL C.
O’CONNELL, Georgetown University, & SABINE KOWAL, Technical
University of Berlin—Two types of laughter of Bill Clinton and his
interviewers—as an overlay of words spoken laughingly and as laughter
of the ha-ha sort—were investigated in 13 media interviews given
after the publication of his memoirs. His laughter was found to be predominantly
an overlay of words spoken laughingly, whereas Hillary
Clinton’s had been found to be largely of the ha-ha type (O’Connell
& Kowal, 2004). The presence of interviewers’ laughter disallowed
neutralism on their part. Ha-ha laughter occurred as interruption or
back channeling 30% of the time and, hence, did not necessarily punctuate
speech during pauses at the end of phrases and sentences (Provine,
1993). Laughter did not follow upon “banal comments” (Provine, 2004,
p. 215) nor reflect either “nonseriousness” (Chafe, 2003a, 2003b) or
uncensored spontaneity (Provine, 2004, p. 216). Instead, laughter reflected
the perspective of interviewer and/or interviewee and was used
as a deliberate, sophisticated, and rhetorical device.
11:40–11:55 (52)
Comprehending Stuttered Speech in Different Referential Contexts.
MICHELLE F. LEVINE & MICHAEL F. SCHOBER, New School for
Social Research (read by Michael F. Schober)—How do listeners comprehend
stuttered speech? In an experiment, listeners selected one of
two squares on a computer screen on the basis of recorded instructions
produced by a person who stuttered. The instructions consisted of naturally
occurring stutters with repeated initial phonemes (“Pick the
g-g-g-green square”), the same stimuli with stutters excised (“Pick the
green square”) or replaced by pauses of equal length (“Pick the . . .
green square”), and matched fluent instructions by the same speaker.
In general, stutters did not hurt and sometimes speeded comprehension
of the target word, measured from the word’s onset. When the
squares’ colors started with different phonemes (green vs. black), listeners
selected the target more quickly when they heard the stuttered
instruction, as compared with any other version. When colors started
with the same phonemes (green vs. gray), the benefit decreased. As
with some other disfluencies, stutters can actually be informative
about speakers’ intentions, speeding comprehension without loss of
accuracy.
Models of Reasoning
Dominion Ballroom, Friday Morning, 10:20–12:00
Chaired by David J. Bryant, Defence R&D Canada
10:20–10:35 (53)
Heuristic and Bayesian Models for Classification With Uncertain
Cues. DAVID J. BRYANT, Defence R&D Canada—Fast and frugal
heuristics provide potential models for human judgment in a range of
tasks. The present research explored whether a fast and frugal heuristic
could successfully model participants’ decision behavior in a simulated
air threat classification task. Participants learned to classify
simulated aircraft, using four probabilistic cues, and then classified
test sets designed to contrast predictions of several heuristics, including
the take-the-best-for-classification (TTB-C) and pros rule, developed
specifically for threat classification. When cues were presented
textually, most participants appeared to use TTB-C or pros rule, but
no participant was observed to respond as predicted by a Bayesian
strategy. In contrast, items presented pictorially resulted in a large proportion
of participants conforming to predictions of the Bayesian