Abstracts of the Psychonomic Society — Volume 7 — November 2002 43rd Annual Meeting — November 21–24, 2002 — Kansas City, Missouri Posters 1–7 Thursday Evening Papers and Posters Presented at the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society Hyatt and Westin Hotels, Kansas City, Missouri November 21–24, 2002 POSTER SESSION I tection was improved, but stimulus identification did not show a com- Crown Hall, Thursday Evening, 6:00–7:30 parable improvement. These results suggest that other stimulus infor- mation, such as luminance, is capable of influencing detection per- •VISUAL PERCEPTION • formance but may not improve identification. (1) (4) Priming and Perception of Androgynous Faces: What You See Is Prerecognition Visual Processing of Words, Pseudowords, and Not What You Get. JAY FRIEDENBERG, SARIT KANIEVSKY, & Nonwords. BART A. VANVOORHIS, University of Wisconsin, La MEGAN KWASNIAK, Manhattan College—Fifty-six participants Crosse, & LLOYD L. AVANT, Iowa State University—Viewers made judged the perceived sex and attractiveness of male, female, and morph duration or brightness judgments for pre- and postmasked 15-msec in- faces. The morphs were 50:50 composite blends of single male and puts of words, pseudowords, and nonwords when the words were high- female faces. In the no-prime control, only morphs were presented. image nouns, abstract nouns, and verbs and when the pseudowords Each morph was preceded by its male face in the male-prime condition, and nonwords were derived from letters of the same word or across and by its female face in the female-prime condition. The results showed the three word types. Results showed that for both brightness and du- a reverse priming effect. Participants in the male-prime condition per- ration judgments, the brain’s knowledge of (1) individual words of ceived the morphs as predominantly female; those in the female-prime each word type and (2) orthographic regularity was activated simul- condition saw them instead as predominantly male. We hypothesize taneously with the earliest prerecognition processing of the graphic that primes fatigue an internal face representation, making the opposite- features of upper, lower, or mixed letter case. sex facial counterpart in the morph salient. The data surprisingly show that morphs were not rated as less attractive than primes. Women judged (5) all the faces as significantly more attractive than did men and also spent Effect of Object Displacement on the Planning of Inter- and significantly more time looking at morphs than did men. This perhaps Intraobject Saccades. DORINE VERGILINO-PEREZ & JOHN M. reflects a more liberal response criterion for perceived attractiveness FINDLAY, University of Durham (sponsored by Martin A. Conway)— for women. The planning of saccades to or within objects was investigated by ex- amining the effect of object displacement during the primary saccade. (2) The results provide evidence for two different coordinate systems in Dynamic Object-Based Inhibition Without a Physically Perceived the planning of inter- and intraobject saccade metrics. The artificial Object. LISA N. JEFFERIES & VINCENT DI LOLLO, University error in initial landing position, introduced by the displacement, is of British Columbia—Objects are a critical component of our visual corrected only when the saccadic system selects a new object as a tar- environment; we are continually examining where objects are and get for the second saccade. In this case, the interobject saccade, coded what objects are new in the visual scene. What the brain processes as in a retinocentric coordinate system, is updated with respect to the eye an “object” and the level of representation at which objects exist, how- position to aim for a precise position in the next object. When the sec- ever, are not clearly understood. The present experiments utilized dy- ond saccade is directed within the fixated object, the saccade is coded namic object-based inhibition of return and complete occlusion by il- in an oculocentric coordinate system as a fixed-motor vector, executed lusory occluders to separate cognitive from sensory representations of regardless of the first fixation position on the object. objects and thereby to examine the level at which objects are represented in the brain. Previous research has suggested that a visible object and (6) its concomitant sensory representation are required for object-based Does Need for Cognition Influence the Müller-Lyer Illusion? inhibition to occur. To the contrary, we show that a visible object is CHRISTOPHER KOCH & ELISSA S. HAYWORTH, George Fox not necessary for inhibition to occur and that a cognitive representa- University—Social psychologists often use principles from cognitive tion of the object, rather than a sensory one, may be sufficient. We fur- psychology to explain how people perceive social situations. One ther demonstrate that the formation of cognitive representations de- common term in social cognition is need for cognition. Need for cog- pends on interpretation and expectation nition refers to people who enjoy thinking and problem solving. This study addresses whether or not need for cognition influences how peo- (3) ple process perceptual tasks. Twenty-one graduate and 24 undergrad- Blank Fields on Noise Trials Improve Word Detection But Not uate students completed the Need for Cognition Scale and adjusted Identification. GARY D. FISK, Georgia Southwestern State University, line lengths in a Müller-Lyer task. The amount of time to complete the & STEVEN J. HAASE, University of Wisconsin, Madison—In previ- trials and the amount of line overadjustment were recorded. Although ous work (Haase & Fisk, 2001, Psychonomic Society Annual Meeting), there was a trend toward greater accuracy with higher need for cog- we used a signal detection approach to demonstrate that confidence nition, this trend was not significant. However, those higher in need in detection predicts identification and exclusion performance for for cognition did take significantly longer to complete the task. The briefly presented word stimuli. The noise condition consisted of three results suggest that additional thinking about a perceptual task does flashes of random letter strings (nonwords), and the signal+noise con- not necessarily improve performance on that task. dition consisted of a nonword–word–nonword sequence. In the pre- sent study, the degree of noise on the noise trials was manipulated by (7) (1) replacing the middle nonwords with strings of random digits and Eye-Movement–Based Measures of Memory as a Function of Prior (2) inserting a blank field in place of the middle, nonword field. Exposure Type. FRANK M. MARCHAK, Veridical Research and Stimulus detection closely predicted identification when nonword Design, & TODD DAVIDSON, Montana State University—Marchak noise targets were replaced with numbers, similar to previous find- and Alberts (1999) examined differences in the eye-movement–based ings. In the nonword–blank-field–nonword condition, stimulus de- memory effect (Althoff et al., 1998), which distinguishes between re- 1 Thursday Evening Posters 8–14 peated and novel items (with previously seen items showing fewer fix- (11) ations to fewer regions in a scene and lower levels of constraint in the Velocity Dependence of Optic Flow Strategy for Steering. PHILIP W. patterns of eye movement transitions between regions), for photographs of FINK & WILLIAM H. WARREN, JR., Brown University (sponsored faces of famous media and political figures known to subjects only from by William H. Warren, Jr.)—Recent research has suggested that both magazines, television, and cinema (2-D) and of faces of co-workers the egocentric direction of the goal and optic flow are used to guide with whom they have had direct interactions (3-D). The present work locomotion. Warren et al. (2001) proposed that a linear combination examines the effect of prior exposure to real objects (3-D) and images of the two variables is used to walk to a goal, with the contribution of of objects (2-D) on subsequent eye-movement–based measures of prim- optic flow dependent on the velocity of the flow field. To test this hy- ing and the relationship between faces and objects as stimuli. It further pothesis, we varied the flow velocity during walking in a 12 12 m defines the limits of the effect and its generalizability to alternative virtual environment. To dissociate the two variables, the focus of ex- application areas. pansion was shifted 10º from the actual direction of walking, while flow velocity was manipulated by changing the gain between virtual (8) and physical space. Participants continuously walked to targets located Is the N170 ERP Component Face Specific? ALAN ROBINSON, 8 m apart. The gain was randomly varied, increased, or decreased within University of California, San Diego, & JOANNA MORRIS, Hampshire a block of trials. Preliminary results suggest that optic flow increas- College—Previous ERP studies have suggested that the N170 ERP ingly dominates egocentric direction as the flow velocity increases. component is specific to the visual processing of faces. We measured NIH EY10923, NSF LIS IRI-9720327 ERP responses to the presentation of human heads in increasing lat- eral rotation, from full frontal views of the face through views of the (12) back of the head. Of interest was whether the N170 component would Eye Movement Search: Top-Down Influences on Focal and Periph- still be present when subjects viewed the back of the head and whether eral Vision. HAROLD H. GREENE,