Arnold L. Glass

The facilitation of lexical decisions by a prime occurring after the target

Three experiments are reported that investigate priming effects in a lexical decision task. when the prime was presented after the target. In Experiment 1, the lexical decision target was presented for 50 msec, followed 80 msec later by the prime. No significant facilitation of responses was observed in the related prime condition. In Experiment 2, the target was presented for 30 msec, followed 35 msec later by the prime. Targets followed by related primes were responded to significantly faster than targets with unrelated primes. Experiment 3 replicated the result of Experiment 2. The data are interpreted as supporting parallel processing of the prime and target in semantic priming experiments. The theoretical implications of the “backward” priming effect are discussed.

Reading and listening to high and low imagery sentences

Five reaction time experiments were performed to clarify the role that imagery plays in sentence understanding. In the first experiment, subjects had to decide whether visually presented sentences were true or false. Reading and verifying high-imagery sentences took longer than reading and verifying low-imagery sentences. This was true even though both types of sentences were equal in difficulty when auditorily presented. In Experiment 2, the words of each sentence were serially presented in order to make the reading presentation more like the listening presentation. Again, reading interfered more with the processing of high-imagery sentences than low-imagery sentences. Experiments 3 and 4 were identical to Experiments 1 and 2 except that a comprehension task was used instead of a verification task. Again, reading interfered more with the high- than the low-imagery sentences. However, in Experiment 5, when a grammatical judgment task was used, reading no longer interfered more with the high-imagery sentences. These results suggest that imagery plays a significant role in the comprehension of high-imagery sentences.

Context and distance-to-disambiguation effects in ambiguity resolution: Evidence from grammaticality judgments of garden path sentences

Abstract This study investigated whether single or multiple structures are constructed at the level of syntactic analysis for ambiguous strings. To this end, three experiments were conducted to determine the effects of various types of snytactic and nonsyntactic information on grammaticality judgments for garden path sentences. The results of Experiment 1, using a speeded grammaticality judgment task, were that context and length of the ambiguous region influenced the probability of calling a garden path sentence grammatical. In Experiment 2, even when given unlimited time to make grammaticality judgments, 40% of all long garden path sentences that required a less preferred analysis were called ungrammatical. Experiment 3 extended the length effects found in Experiments 1 and 2 to some additional types of garden path sentences. The results support a parsing model that is influenced by context and that constructs only a single interpretation of an ambiguous string at a time.

Positional discriminability in linear orderings

Subjects were taught two eight-term linear orders of the form “A taller than B taller than C ….,” They were then asked to choose the “taller” term in all possible pairwise combinations within each series, and reaction time was measured for each pair. In addition, subjects performed a further task in which they judged whether or not two terms were adjacent in the ordering. In subsequent sessions, subjects were told that the “shortest” term on one list was taller than the “tallest” term on the other, so that the two lists were merged into a single 16-term series. They were then required to choose the “taller” term for both within-groups and between-groups pairs. Subjects did not appear to use the initial groupings in performing this task, even when given training on differential categorical codes (“tall” vs. “short”) for the two sublists. Rather, subjects in all tasks appeared to represent the items as ordered positions along an internal array, so that comparison times depended largely on the differential discriminability of the item positions. In each task decisions were made more quickly if the terms being compared were near the ends of the ordering, rather than near the middle.

Structural units and the redintegrative power of picture fragments.

We suppose that line drawings are perceived and represented in memory as a hierarchy of related parts and subparts, as dictated by Gestalt laws like common direction and spatial proximity. Therefore, a figure fragment comprising a natural part of an orginally studied pattern should serve as a strong retrieval cue for redintegrating memory for the pattern, whereas an equally large fragment suggesting either no units of misleading units should lead to poorer recall. This was confirmed in an experiment in which subjects studied 33 nonsense line drawings; recall of each was tested with good, mediocre, or bad (misleading) fragments of the original patterns. Good cues had about five time more redintegrative power than bad cues. A second experiment testing multiple-choice recognition memory showed that subjects confused an originally studied pattern about four times as often with a structurally similar distractor as with a structurally dissimilar distractor (which had an equal-sized change). Thus, memory cuing by fragments and memory confusions with slightly altered distractors indicate the significant constitutents of a figure.

The comprehension of idioms

Four experiments will performed to examine how familiar idioms are interpreted. Subjects had to respond as rapidly as possible whether an idiom had the same or different meaning as a phrase which, on half of the trials, was a paraphrase of either the figurative or literal meaning of the idiom. When subjects were instructed to respond on the basis of either figurative or literal meaning, idioms were matched to their literal and figurative paraphrases equally rapidly. When subjects were instructed to respond only on the basis of literal meaning, idiom-phrase pairs that shared a figurative interpretation took longer to reject as different than idiom pairs that shared no interpretation. These results domonstrated that whenever a familiar idiom is comprehended, both its literal and figurative interpretations are made.

Evidence for two kinds of low-typical instances in a categorization task

Three experiments examined the relationship between instance typicality and reaction time (RT) in a semantic categorization task. In all three experiments, first the instance was presented, and then the category. High-typicality high-imagery instances (e.g., robin) and lowtypicality low-imagery instances (e.g., grackle) were categorized faster than low-typicality highimagery instances (e.g., penguin). Instructing subjects to generate images of the instances had no influence on the pattern of results. The difference in categorization RT for lowimagery low-typicality instances vs. high-imagery high-typicality instances suggests that these instances may be represented differently in memory.

Representation of images in sentence verification

Abstract Five reaction time sentence verification experiments were conducted in order to (1) investigate the source of interference between reading and visual imagery, (2) identify the sensory properties of the representation that are common to both reading and visual imagination, and (3) determine whether reading interferes with visual imagery during initial sentence comprehension or during subsequent sentence verification. Experiment 1 demonstrated that a visual representation, common to both reading and visual images, was the source of the interference observed. Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated that reading interferes with the spatial-like characteristics of a visual image. And finally, Experiments 4 and 5 offered evidence that imagery is not used in the initial determination of sentence meaning (comprehension). Together, the research presented offers evidence that the fundamental structure of many images is visuospatial, and that a visuospatial representation plays an overt role in the verification of many sentences.

Toward a Consumer-Centric Grid: A Behavioral Perspective

Active consumer participation is seen as an integral part of the emerging smart grid. Examples include demand-side management programs, incorporation of consumer-owned energy storage or renewable energy units, and active energy trading. However, despite the foreseen technological benefits of such consumer-centric grid features, to date, their widespread adoption in practice remains modest. To shed light on this challenge, this paper explores the potential of prospect theory, a Nobel-prize winning theory, as a decision-making framework that can help understand how risk and uncertainty can impact the decisions of smart grid consumers. After introducing the basic notions of prospect theory, several examples drawn from a number of smart grid applications are developed. These results show that a better understanding of the role of human decision making within the smart grid is paramount for optimizing its operation and expediting the deployment of its various technologies.

Recognition Confusions among Quantifiers.

Subjects listened to a story containing sentences with five different quantifiers (all, many, some, a few, and none). They were then given a recognition test in which for each sentence they were asked to rate all the quantifiers as to how certain they were that each had appeared in the sentence. The degree of confusion between any two quantifiers (measured by both mean certainty ratings and first choice frequencies) declined monotonically with the separation of the two terms in a linear order. The confusion pattern was identical regardless of whether subjects were given intentional or incidental learning instructions. Successive interval scaling and the Luce biased choice model were both used to derive unidimensional scales of quantifier values that accurately described the obtained confusion matrix. A semantic feature model was also able to provide a fairly good overall account of the data, except that it had difficulty explaining the high frequency of confusions between all and many. The results raise the possibility that a major component of the memory trace for quantifiers is an essentially analog representation of magnitude.