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Jazz musicians make numerous rhythmic alterations in the melodies of standard ballad for expressive purposes. Without altering a single pitch, these performers take melodies which are so well-known as to be cliched and make them sound fresh. The primary technique is that of extensive rubato, where the melody is played at a varying tempo against the steady rhythmic background of a rhythm section (typically drums, bass, and piano). This results in a 'displacement' of the melodic note relative to its 'nominal' position against the background. Types and degrees of rhythmic variation are shown to depend on motivic structure (parallel motives are performed in similar ways, preserving the original's proportional rhythmic structures), metric emphasis (downbeats are treated differently than other locations), and harmonic structure (melodic tones belonging to the underlying harmonies are rhythmically displaced in a more extreme manner than tones outside the harmonies). Consideration is given to the way in which very familiar tunes are treated compared with less-familiar melodies (for example, 'My Funny Valentine' compared with 'Niama.'), leading to a discussion of the role of long-term memory in expressive performance. Analyses are given of several melodies, taken from commercial recordings by master improvisers.
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Many people believe that natural categories have perfectly predictive defining features. They do not easily accept the family resemblance view that the features characteristic of a category are not individually sufficient to predict the category. But common laboratory tasks do produce this simpler than it is belief. If there is no simple classification principle in a task, the participants know that fact and can report it. We argue that most laboratory tasks using family resemblance categories do produce this everyday simpler than it is belief because they encourage analysis of identification criteria. To simulate the learning occurring in many natural circumstances, we developed a procedure, diverted analysis, in which a participant's analytic abilities are diverted from the way the stimuli are identified to the use to which those stimuli will be put. We discuss the prevalence of diverted analysis in everyday categorization, and the contribution this paradigm might make to explaining how peoples simplified intuitions survive the necessity of acting in a complex world.
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Peggy Christidis, Department of Psychology, Claremont Graduate University and Deborah Burke, Psychology Department, Pomona College
It is widely believed that Stroop interference increases in old age. Such increases are theoretically important, for example, as support for the view that older adults suffer deficits in inhibitory processes used to suppress irrelevant information such as the baseword in the Stroop paradigm. In a series of studies, we investigated the conditions that produce age-related changes in the Stroop effect. Older adults produced proportionately greater interference in the standard paper and pencil Stroop task, but not in a computerized single trial Stroop task. Moreover, there was no correlation between proportional interference effects in the two tasks. Varying the relatedness of the baseword to the color response in the computerized task affected the amount of interference, with comparable effects across age. These results are inconsistent with the view that Stroop interference is an index of an inhibitory process that deteriorates with age. We argue that proportional comparisons are misleading and that age differences in interference are attributable to general slowing with age.
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MaryLou Cheal, Department of Psychology, Arizona State University, and Garvin Chastain, Department of Psychology, Boise State University
Over the past two or three years, we have conducted at least 18 experiments in which we have made comparisons between the effects of directing attention with multiple element precues and the effects of directing attention with the typical precue with a single element. These data have demonstrated various differences related not only to single versus multiple elements, but also to static versus moving precues, expectations as to which precue will appear, and which precues capture attention. Conclusions include: (1) voluntary allocation of attention can modulate processes that have been thought to be involuntary, (2) the attentional system is not merely tuned to static or dynamic discontinuities, (3) the curve of accuracy as a function of SOA differs when the background elements move from when they are static, and (4) moving multi-element precues capture attention, even though static multi-element precues do not.
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One of the most pervasive beliefs about human navigation is that some people have a natural ability that distinguishes them from others. In this research, we asked children and adults to rate their own sense of direction, a promising index of orientation skills despite its simplicity and reliance on self-assessment. However, when tested in the context of route acquisition and reversal in the outdoors, we found no reliable relations between ratings of sense of direction and measures of route and survey knowledge. In addition, route reversal performance was easily improved by instructing children and adults during route acquisition to look back in anticipation of the return. The pattern of results suggests that way finder's beliefs about their sense of direction are less important for route navigation than the attentive strategies they use.
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Many studies vary the distribution of attention given to different spatial locations, showing effects on performance. In a series of studies we tried to focus all attention on one location, and used a variety of direct and indirect measures to assess processing of information presented at other locations. Of the measures we used, perhaps the most useful and sensitive was implicit memory for words presented in unattended locations. We demonstrate a range of implicit effects, from no effect whatever when attention is never drawn to the unattended location, to substantial effects in other cases (although these seem to occur regardless of conscious awareness).
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Attentional deficits are a significant part of the cognitive decline in Alzheimer's Disease (AD). Two experiments investigated the ability of AD patients to covertly engage and shift their attention as well as their ability to use available attentional resources to guide or focus higher-order semantic processing. The first experiment was a basic attention orienting detection task in which an endogenous arrow cued the probable location of a target. Results indicated that AD patients could use the central cue as effectively as aged-matched normal control participants. The second experiment utilized a semantic priming paradigm in which lateralized picture prime stimuli were preceded by either a valid or an invalid endogenous cue. Preliminary data indicate that aged-matched control participants show semantic priming in only the valid condition, whereas AD patients show semantic priming from both valid and invalid conditions. These data indicate that even though AD patients can successfully use a cue to direct their attention in a simple target detection task, they cannot use this information to filter out or inhibit semantic information as effectively as the control participants. The latter finding has important implications for the language deficits in AD and suggests that part of their deficit may lie in the activation of too much semantic information.
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Michael Esterman, Regina McGlinchey, & William Milberg, GRECC, Veterans Affairs Medical Center Processing of featural and spatial information in a patient with hemispatial neglect
Several studies have now documented the processing of neglected visual information without awareness using implicit measures of perception. These studies leave unanswered the question of whether neglect patients suffer from some deficit in consciously mediated attention, or a fundamental deficit in higher visual processes that might undermine attention itself. In the current study, we sought to further understand the underlying basis of visual processing in the neglected field using tasks designed to assess the integrity of neglect patients' representations of features and space, two important streams of visual information that are likely processed through separate pathways. A patient with hemispatial neglect was tested in four experiments using a repetition priming paradigm. In one experiment, the processing of simple featural information was examined, whereas another experiment examined the processing of spatial information. Priming data from the patient suggested that featural and spatial information were successfully processed in the neglected field without conscious awareness. Using a related paradigm, two additional experiments examined the processing of featural and spatial information when both were varied simultaneously within the same task. In these follow-up experiments, performance in the LVF was markedly impaired. While the RVF exhibited large spatial and feature priming effects, there was no spatial priming in the LVF, and feature priming was impaired compared to the RVF. Thus, independent representations of featural and spatial information appeared intact in the patient when processed independently. However, when both types of information were varied simultaneously, spatial priming was eliminated and feature priming was impaired. These data suggest that an inability to form coherent representations based on the simultaneous processing, or possibly binding of featural and spatial information may be an important factor underlying neglect. Independent representations of features and space alone may be insufficient for conscious awareness to emerge.
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According to the locus of slack logic, a variable that has additive effects with SOA in Task2 of a PRP (psychological refractory period) experiment must have its effect at a stage of processing that is either in or after the bottleneck that caused the PRP effect. We found two manipulations that 1) have additive effects with SOA in Task2 of a PRP experiment, and 2) have large modulating effects on the magnitude of the attentional blink effect when manipulated in Task1 of an AB experiment. We conclude that a stage of processing that is in or after the PRP bottleneck must be either in or before the AB bottleneck.
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One of the oldest questions in experimental psychology concerns the perception of simultaneous events, particularly when input arrives through two different sensory modalities (such as sight and sound). How far apart do two events have to be before they are perceived as sequential? It was this problem in the Greenwich Observatory in 1795 that led to the first experiments in perceptual thresholds in the 1830s, and the development of psychophysics. Modern psychological experiments have yielded contractory results. I will report preliminary results from an experiment in which subjects judged the simultaneity of asynchronous cross-modal stimuli (sound/sight or sound/touch), and review related findings. Principal findings are that the threshold for simultaneity perception is lower than has been previously thought.
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To test the widely accepted claim that H.M. exhibits a "pure memory deficit" that has left his language abilities intact, we compared H.M. and controls in three the language comprehension and three language production experiments. In Comprehension Study 1 (CS1), H.M. and memory-normal controls of comparable intelligence, education, and age indicated whether sentences were ambiguous or unambiguous, and H.M. detected ambiguities significantly less often than controls. In CS 2, participants identified the two meanings of visually presented sentences that they knew were ambiguous, and relative to controls, H.M. rarely discovered the ambiguities without help, and had difficulty understanding the first meanings, experimenter requests, and his own output. CS 3 replicated these results and showed that they were not due to brain damage per se or to cohort effects. In Production Studies (PS) 1 and 2, participants described the meaning of visually presented sentences, and H.M.'s descriptions suggested a semantic-level production deficit: Relative to controls of comparable age, intelligence, and education, H.M.'s descriptions were significantly less grammatical, less comprehensible, less coherent, less effective, less clear, less concise, and more repetitious at lexical, phrase, and sentence levels of language production. PS 3 replicated these results for conversational speech. Present findings contradict "stages of processing theories" that localize H.M.'s deficit to a storage stage that is independent of processes for comprehending, retrieving and producing verbal materials, and instead support a distributed-memory theory in which memory binding and retrieval are inherent aspects of normal language comprehension and production.
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The priming method has been used extensively by experimental psychologists to examine human information processing. This method involves measuring performance to a target stimulus that is either related or unrelated to a prior prime stimulus. Although response to a target often benefits from its relation to a prime, there are a host of conditions in which the opposite result occurs. These priming effects are often explained by reference to inhibitory attentional processes that act on representations of the prime during or after encoding, but before presentation of the target. By contrast, some researchers have pointed out that priming effects may depend on processing that occurs only upon onset of the target (Kahneman, Treisman, & Gibbs, 1992; Neill & Valdes, 1992; Ratcliff & McKoon, 1988; Whittlesea & Jacoby, 1990). We describe the results of several experiments that examine the role of attention during retrieval for two priming phenomena: object specific preview benefits and negative priming. The results suggest that modulation of a strategic attentional setting eliminates one effect and produces the other.
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In simple response-time tasks, subjects respond more rapidly to an intense stimulus (such as a 65-dB tone) than to a weak stimulus (a 55-dB tone). They also press harder on the response key when the stimulus is more intense. Models of both of these findings exist, but no single model can explain both sets of results (as well as the puzzling finding of a zero correlation between RT and force on a trial-by-trial basis). We started our search for a unified model with Hildreth's model of simple RT and Ulrich and Wing's model of force production. We were successful in creating a unified model, but only when we added two new elements. The first new element is a "gate" between the perceptual and motoric modules; the second is a set of "capacitors" that holds perceptual activation until the gate opens. The new model is capable of simulating the results from a wide variety of simple-RT tasks and can be used to generate some novel predictions.
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Visual search is more than a tool for studying visual attention in the lab. It is also an analogue of real-life visual tasks in which an organism searches its environment for interesting objects, such as mates, predators, and food. This functional interpretation suggests the hypothesis that search should be based on post-constancy representations - i.e., ones in which accidental characteristics of the scene, such as shadows, point-of-view, and distance, have been resolved. We began a test of this general hypothesis by addressing lightness constancy, the fact that surface lightness is perceived as unchanged despite changes in illumination conditions. We present a series of experiments from which it is concluded, despite expectations, that search is "not" always based on post-constancy representations. Instead, the system seems to be flexible. In particular, when task performance could -- in principle -- be improved given access to pre-constancy representations, the system seems to access those representations.
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Relatively little is known about the nature of auditory imagery - despite the fact that this imagery is implicated in a wide range of tasks, including memory rehearsal, reading, and music perception. I will report several studies indicating that auditory imagery often relies on covert speech, so that one imagines an event by literally talking (or singing) to oneself, and then "listening" to this internal production, using many of the mechanisms of ordinary audition. It is also clear, however, that we are able to imagine many sounds that we cannot reproduce; in these cases, imagery cannot rely on covert production. To illustrate this point, I will report studies evaluating the accuracy of subjects' imagery for timbres of various orchestral instruments. I will then turn to the broader theoretical question of why imagery sometimes does require subvocalized support, and why it sometimes does not.
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We have previously reported that spatial attention can be directed within an environmental, "scene-based" reference frame. Our conclusion was based on the rotation of an attentional bias with the reference frame in an endogenous cuing task requiring a letter reflection judgment. We wanted to find out whether spatial attention in visual search would also operate in a scene-based frame. Two different discrimination tasks were run under conditions in which "whole world" upright, viewer upright, and scene-based upright were dissociated. One task required participants to find a normally oriented or reflected "E" among digital "2s" and "5"s, and to report the letter orientation. The other was modeled on a conjunction search task previously used by Previc & Blume, in which subjects reported the presence or absence of a large or small square or diamond among 15 distractors. Reaction times revealed an upward bias in viewer-oriented coordinates in both tasks, confirming Previc & Blume's findings, and supporting their suggestion of an upper hemifield specialization for extrapersonal vision.
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One debate in the spatial attention literature concerns the role of depth and distance. We demonstrate that depth cues which alter the perceived length of a line affect the magnitude of the validity effect in a Posner cueing task. Two lines of equal length appeared on the screen at the same time. Depth cues were added to make one line look nearly twice as long as the other. We compared the validity effects (valid versus invalid targets) for perceived long and perceived short lines and found larger effects for perceived long lines. The validity effects were predicted by the perceived length of the line, not the actual length. The results will be discussed of as they relate to interactions between attention, perceptual organization, spatial maps and objects.
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An important feature of Alzheimer's Disease (AD) that differentiates it from normal aging is the deterioration of semantic memory. The purpose of the present study was to determine if the poor performance of AD patients on tasks that require them to use semantic memory is related to their inability to identify specific semantic relations. This hypothesis was tested by comparing the reaction times (RT) and error rates of AD patients to those of the normal elderly and normal young in a sentence verification task. We found that AD patients were significantly slower and less accurate on aspects of the task that required the knowledge of specific semantic relationships than the normal elderly and the young. In a second experiment, young normal participants performed the same task with a concurrent memory load. The results from this experiment indicate that the performance of AD patients in this task cannot be attributed to a diminished working memory capacity.
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Despite the diversity of forms that music takes across cultures and even within a culture, the set of possible listener-friendly musical structures is constrained by basic processing predispositions. Specification of such predispositions could provide a basis for describing a "universal grammar" for music. Studies with adults, children, and infants reveal that tones related by small-integer frequency ratios are better processed and remembered compared to larger-integer ratios, and that scales with unequal steps are perceptually advantageous compared to equal-step scales. Cross-cultural and developmental research indicates that the structure of melodies (tone sequences) is further constrained by basic grouping principles such as proximity.
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Anatomical, physiological, and behavioral studies provide support for separate object- and location-based components of visual attention. Although studies of object-based components have usually involved voluntary attention, recent evidence reported by Tipper et al. (1994) suggests that objects also play a role in reflexive "exogenous" orienting. The present studies investigated the role of location-markers (objects) in reflexive attentional orienting and developed a task in which the facilitatory and inhibitory components of both location and object cueing could be separately examined. The results suggest that the presence of objects is critical for facilitatory, but not inhibitory, aspects of reflexive visual orienting. No evidence for pure object-based facilitation or inhibition was found. Inhibition of return was observed whether objects were present or absent, and when present, whether objects were uniformly changed or unchanged. However, when final displays contained two different objects, one cued and one uncued, location-based inhibition was eliminated. The possibility of a tradeoff between spatial attention and object attention/recognition processes at long delays will be discussed along with results from a follow-up study.
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This study examines participantsU ability to detect conceptual errors during language comprehension. The prototypical conceptual error is known as the Moses Illusion, which is observed when people answer general knowledge questions such as "How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the Ark?": They often incorrectly respond "Two" even though their long term memory contains the information that Noah, not Moses, took animals on the Ark. Node Structure Theory (NST) predicts a related effect reported for the first time in the present study and called the Armstrong error. Armstrong errors are observed when people answer questions such as "Jazz musician Neil Armstrong is well known for his song "What a _________?": They often incorrectly respond "What a Wonderful World" even though their long term memory contains the information that Neil Armstrong was astronaut who did not write songs. Unlike Moses errors, where the valid name (Noah) and the distorted name (Moses) are related semantically, Armstrong errors involve a valid surname (Louis Armstrong) and a phonologically distorted surname (Neil Armstrong) that are phonologically identical. To test the predictions of NST, participants listened to a large number of filler and experimental general knowledge questions. The experimental questions fell into 4 categories: valid, semantically distorted, phonologically distorted, and unrelated distorted. As predicted by NST, results indicated that participants made an equal number of comprehension errors of the Moses and Armstrong types. Participants also made more errors with the Armstrong and Moses distortions than with an unrelated distortion for which the distorted name was semantically and phonologically unrelated to the correct name (e.g., replacing Louis Armstrong with Alan Shepard). Implications of these results for language comprehension are discussed.
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Q. Wang, P. Cavanagh and M. Green (1994) demonstrated a pop-out effect in searching for an unfamiliar target among familiar distractors and argued for the importance of familiarity difference between the target and the distractors in determining the search efficiency. In the current study, we re-examined the effects of target and distractor familiarity on search efficiency, using target-distractor pairs with low-level features and emergent features thoroughly controlled across all conditions. We found that the familiarity of the distractors, rather than the familiarity difference between the target and distractors, determines search efficiency.
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Age differences in the ability to switch attention between tasks was investigated in a group of young (18-30) and healthy old (55-79) adults. Participants switched predictably between two choice reaction time tasks in an AABB sequence. The tasks were to classify a digit as odd/even or a letter as vowel/consonant. In addition, the response stimulus interval (RSI) was varied across blocks of trials (250 ms, 750 ms). The results yielded a reliable switch cost (switch minus nonswitch) that was of a similar magnitude for the young and old adults at the 250 RSI. However, at the 750 RSI, the young adults showed a reduction in the magnitude of the switch cost, whereas the older adults did not An inspection of the data revealed that the absence of a reduction in the switch cost for the older adults at the 750 RSI was due to an age-related decrease in response times on the nonswitch trials. In contrast to previous studies, these results suggest that age does not impair the ability to switch attention between tasks, and that older adults are more likely to engage in task-set preconfiguration than young adults, at least when the switch is predictable.
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Memory for music strongly shapes our subsequent perceptions, expectations, and aesthetic experiences of music. In this talk, I describe recent research on short-term memory for pitch and duration in music. In each experiment, listeners were presented a seven-note melody followed by a probe tone; the task was to judge if the probe tone matched one of the preceding sequence notes in both pitch and duration. The seven notes of the initial sequence varied in pitch and duration. The probe tone either matched one of the sequence notes, or it differed from all sequence notes in one of four ways: 1. in pitch; 2. in duration; 3. in both pitch and duration; or 4. in the way pitch and duration were combined: that is, it matched the pitch of one sequence note, but the duration of a different sequence note. The latter "switch" condition yielded high error rates in comparison with other conditions, suggesting that listeners were not highly sensitive to the manner in which pitch and duration were combined. The results, supported by mathematical modeling, illustrate that pitch and temporal information are processed somewhat independently, and, for unfamiliar musical materials, may be improperly re-integrated in memory. Implications for musical memory and aesthetics are discussed.
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We used a search task to explore the cumulation of visual information over time. Instead of using a single unchanging display, we varied the amount and type of information that persisted and the amount and type that changed across successive intervals. If information specifying the objects and layout of a scene normally builds up over time, changing the elements and moving the target around should severely disrupt search performance. By varying what is changed, we can throw light on the nature of the information that cumulates over time. This set of search paradigms may also throw light on whether scanning is serial or parallel for any given target-distractor combination.
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Two experiments, one based upon Van Orden's (1987) experimental paradigm and the other upon Lesch and Pollatsek's (1993) experimental paradigm, were carried out to examine the nature of the visual lexical access from character to meaning in the Chinese written language. Significant homophonic effects were observed in both experiments, suggesting that character-to-phonology conversion occurred within a very short time after character detection. In addition, significant priming for the target word, which was semantically related to a homophone of the probe word, was obtained only under the condition of single character presentation. However, the effect could not be observed for two-character words under various SOA manipulations. This interactive effect suggests that the visual lexical access in reading a multiple-character Chinese word entails not only a complex morphological construction process but also an early graphic verification check to prevent the homophonic interference.
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Dual-task studies using the Psychological Refractory Period (PRP) paradigm have demonstrated the existence of performance limiting constraints on human performance. These constraints include both central cognitive limitations (e.g., a processing bottleneck at response selection and/or categorization) as well as peripheral limitations (e.g., response modality effects). The current work examines the stability of the effects of response modality on dual-task interference across practice. It is demonstrated that response modality effects attenuate less with practice than central cognitive limitations.
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Roediger and McDermott (1995) reintroduced a paradigm originally developed by Deese (1959). The paradigm provides a technique for the creation of false memories. The paradigm is reliable and easy to implement. Because of these characteristics and because of the current interest in false memories, the paradigm has been used in many recent studies. We argue that if important conditions are added allowing a signal detection analysis, criterion shift is shown to play a large role, perhaps the entire role, in false memories. We describe three experiments showing the importance of criterion shift in understanding false memory and discuss implications for the meaning of a false memory.
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Amnesics exhibit severe deficits on tests of free recall, however, they perform relatively normally on some tests of recognition memory. These findings have been interpreted as showing that these patients suffer from a selective disruption of the processes supporting conscious recollection, and that familiarity processes are preserved in these patients. Although these studies do show that amnesics can use familiarity as a basis for accurate recognition judgments the results do not show whether familiarity is normal in amnesics. To address this issue the results from several amnesia studies that have used the process dissociation and the remember/know procedures were reanalyzed in order to directly examine the fate of familiarity and recollection in these patients. The results of the analyses showed that amnesic patients exhibited deficits in both recollection and familiarity. An examination of recognition ROCs (receiver operating characteristics) in a group of stroke patients supports the claim that amnesia is associated with deficits in both recollection and familiarity.
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