Papers and Posters Presented at the 42Nd Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society Coronado Springs Resort, Orlando, Florida November 15–18, 2001
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Abstracts of the Psychonomic Society — Volume 6 — November 2001 42nd Annual Meeting — November 15–18, 2001 — Orlando, Florida Posters 1–6 Thursday Evening Papers and Posters Presented at the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society Coronado Springs Resort, Orlando, Florida November 15–18, 2001 POSTER SESSION I cated our previous experiments, using 500 msec forward and back- Fiesta Ballroom, Thursday Evening, 6:30-8:00 ward masks, with target duration being either 33 or 50 msec (cf. Merikle, Joordens, & Stoltz, 1995). The results show that detection •PSYCHOPHYSICS • confidence is related to identification and exclusion performance, consistent with multidimensional signal detection theory. Also, de- (1) tection, identification, and exclusion success improved substantially Role of Spatial Frequency on Salience in Free Viewing of Complex in the 50-msec condition. In conclusion, stimulus identification and Images. LESTER C. LOSCHKY, Beckman Institute, University of exclusion performance do not appear to be mediated by unconscious Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, GEORGE W. MCCONKIE, University processes under these task and display parameters. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, & JIAN YANG & MICHAEL E. MILLER, Eastman Kodak Company—The drop-off of contrast sensi- •VISION • tivity with retinal eccentricity has been well studied and mathemati- cally modeled. We conducted an experiment investigating whether (4) thresholds established using sinusoidal grating patches scale up to Prerecognition Visual Processing of Words, Pseudowords, and free viewing of complex images. We also tested the hypothesis that Nonwords When Letters Are From One Versus Three Words. BART the contrast sensitivity by retinal eccentricity function affects atten- A. VANVOORHIS, University of Wisconsin, LaCrosse, & LLOYD L. tional selection, as measured by eye movements. Subjects examined AVA N T, Iowa State University—Viewers made duration or brightness photographic images with a gaze-contingent multiresolutional display judgments for pre- and postmasked 15-msec inputs of words, pseu- (GCMRD) in which, on each eye fixation, highest resolution imagery dowords, and nonwords when words were high-image nouns, abstract is present only at the center of vision and resolution falls off gradu- nouns, and verbs and when pseudowords and nonwords were derived ally with distance. We used several resolution drop-off functions de- from letters of the same word or, instead, across the three word types. signed to remove spatial frequencies below, at, or incrementally Results showed that, for both duration and brightness judgments, the above perceptual threshold. Above-threshold filtering results in a de- brain’s knowledge of (1) individual words of each word type and creased likelihood of sending the eyes to more filtered objects, con- (2) orthographic regularity was activated simultaneously with the ear- firming our hypothesis. These results are relevant to the study of stim- liest prerecognition processing of the graphic features of upper, lower, ulus selection mechanisms in neural saliency maps and to research on or mixed letter case. attentional selection in active vision systems. (5) (2) Local Landmarks Are Used to Take Shortcuts During Navigation. Cross-Modally Induced Response Bias in Brightness Judgments. PATRICK FOO, ANDREW DUCHON, WILLIAM H. WARREN, JR., ERIC C. ODGAARD, YOAV ARIEH, & LAWRENCE E. MARKS, & MICHAEL J. TARR, Brown University—Like honeybees (Dyer, John B. Pierce Laboratory and Yale University—Previous research by 1991), humans do not seem to build a metric “cognitive map” from Stein et al. (1996, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience) showed that path integration but rely on visual landmarks to take novel shortcuts participants tend to rate a low-intensity 40 msec light as brighter when in a familiar environment (Foo et al., 2001). Here, we covertly ma- presented concurrently with a 45-dB white noise than when noise is nipulate local landmarks to put them in conflict with metric knowl- absent. Stein et al. argued that the enhancement is not a response bias edge. Participants walked in a 40 ϫ 40 ft virtual environment while but instead the result of enhanced activity in previously unidentified head position and orientation were measured with a sonic/inertial sensory neurons that respond to stimulus intensity regardless of acti- tracker. During training, participants learned two legs of a triangle— vating modality. The present study reexamines this conclusion through the paths from home to A and from home to B. A configuration of col- manipulation of the presentation probability of concurrent noise. The ored posts surrounded the B location. During test, participants walked data indicate that the effects of noise are replicable (although smaller the shortcut from A to B or the reverse. On catch trials, we translated in size than has been previously suggested) and independent of the tra- or rotated the post configuration. This influenced the position and ori- ditional assimilation and contrast effects associated with response entation when arriving at B and the path when leaving B. Thus, spa- bias but are eliminated when the probability of concurrent noise is re- tial knowledge of an environment is dependent on local landmarks, as duced. We conclude that the cross-modally induced increase in rated opposed to metric structure. brightness is therefore the result of response bias rather than of an in- trinsic sensory response. (6) Wavelet Models of Texture Perception of Natural Scenes. FRANK (3) M. MARCHAK, Veridical Research and Design—Fractal functions Word Detection Predicts Identification and Exclusion Performance have been suggested as a model of human texture perception of nat- Under Forward and Backward Masking Conditions. GARY D. ural scenes (Marchak, 1987). Subsequent work has shown that frac- FISK, Georgia Southwestern State University, & STEVEN J. tals provide necessary but not sufficient information to describe tex- HAASE, University of Wisconsin, Madison—In previous work (Haase ture perception (Marchak, 1995). It has recently been shown that & Fisk, in press), we used a signal detection approach to demonstrate wavelet functions seem to provide many of the benefits of fractal ap- that confidence in word detection predicts word identification and ex- proaches while also providing information relating to higher order clusion performance. However, the stimulus masking in those exper- structure relevant to human perception (Kingdom, Hayes, & Field, iments did not exactly replicate the methods of previously published 2001). Furthermore, wavelet-based approaches have been shown to be reports of unconscious perception in exclusion-task paradigms, rais- effective for characterizing natural textures (Goldberg, 1999). The ing the possibility that the failure to measure unconscious perception present work examines the effectiveness of wavelet descriptors in cap- was caused by differences in the masking procedures. Thus, we repli- turing subjects judgments of texture roughness of natural scenes. The 1 Thursday Evening Posters 7–14 results are compared with traditional texture descriptors, such as (e.g., vision and touch). How is this information integrated into a co- second-order statistics, as well as fractal measures, and the strengths herent representation? Pavani, Spence, and Driver (2000) demon- and weaknesses of each approach are discussed. strated that a noninformative visual distractor influences the percep- tion of a tactile stimulus, especially in the presence of a pair of fake •PERCEPTION • rubber hands similar to the observer’s own and aligned with the dis- tractors. Integration may thus depend on the interaction between ap- (7) parent and felt body positions. We examined this virtual body effect Attentional Shifts Between Temporal Processing and Expecting (VBE) to better understand the factors underlying visual–tactile inte- Its Interruption. CLAUDETTE FORTIN & JULIE CHAMPAGNE, gration. Experiment 1 revealed that even when aligned, the posture of Université Laval—When participants are expecting an empty break to the real and fake hands had to match in order for the VBE to occur. be ignored during a time interval production, the produced interval Experiment 2 revealed that the VBE persisted when the fake hands lengthens proportionally to the duration for which the break is ex- were green and alien-like (i.e., visually dissimilar to the real hands). pected (Fortin & Massé, 2000). The proposed interpretation is that at- The implications of these data for multimodal applications (e.g., min- tention is shared between accumulation of temporal information and imally invasive surgery techniques) are discussed. expecting the interruption signal. We assume attentional shifts to take place during the expectancy period and to stop when a break occurs. (11) We present two experiments where the shifting mechanism is analyzed Stimulus Structure Effects on Visual Configural Processing in by presenting a forewarning cue at a fixed time before break occur- Persons With Autism. STEPHANIE JOHNSON & MARC M. SE- rence (Experiment 1) and by varying the relative frequency of trials BRECHTS, Catholic University of America—Performance on a vari- with and without breaks in a relatively extended series of experimen- ety of visual tasks has been used to conclude that persons with autism tal sessions (Experiment 2). The results suggest that these two factors have a local visual focus or precedence, with a relative disregard for affect, respectively, the duration and the frequency