William P. Banks

Encoding and Processing of Symbolic Information in Comparative Judgments1

Publisher Summary This chapter presents a particular theoretical interpretation of the relationship for one area of experience. The area of experience is elicited by what are usually considered continuous attributes, such as brightness, size, and the theoretical approach that assumes process attributes in terms of discrete semantic codes. The chapter describes the comparative judgment paradigm and the most important effects obtained with it. It also describes and critically reviews the previous models of these results. The semantic coding approach and its application to data from comparative judgment experiments are also discussed. The chapter discusses the relationship between direct experience and the memory of it. The model presented in the chapter is designed to account for the experimental results pertaining to processing of attributes in comparative judgment tasks. It uses hypothetical processes of code manipulation to make the necessary predictions. The codes are called “semantic” because they are assumed to carry information in the same way as do other natural language codes, and they are considered to be discrete.

Configurational effects in visual information processing

These experiments show that the perceptual organization of a multielement display affects both the speed and accuracy with which a target letter in it is detected. The first two experiments show that a target is detected more poorly if it is arranged in good form (a perceptual Gestalt) with noise elements than if it is not. This effect is not confounded with target-noise proximity or display size, and it holds for stimuli terminated by the subject’s response as well as for stimuli of very brief duration. Increasing the number of noise elements can actually improve performance if the added noise elements increase the degree to which the noise elements form perceptual groups separately from the target. A third experiment tries out a new method for scaling the perceptual structure of an array, and it shows that the main features of the first two experiments can be predicted from the scaled perceptual structure of the arrays they used.

Semantic and perceptual processes in symbolic comparisons.

This article studies the processing of pictures and words as symbols. Pictures lead to faster and more accurate responses than words when the task is to decide which member of a pair of pictures or words denotes the larger or smaller object. The present experiments show that the superiority of pictures results from the fact that pictures are interpreted more quickly than words, but that after the interpretation is made, processing is the same. These experiments also give evidence that pictures and words are both processed in terms of linguistic codes rather than mental images. The results are well accounted for by an information-processing model that is based on two general assumptions: (a) The stimuli and the instructions are represented as discrete codes, and (b) processing proceeds until one and only one of the stimulus codes is the same as the code for the instructions.

Recognition and Source Memory as Multivariate Decision Processes

Recognition memory, source memory, and exclusion performance are three important domains of study in memory, each with its own findings, its specific theoretical developments, and its separate research literature. It is proposed here that results from all three domains can be treated with a single analytic model. This article shows how to generate a comprehensive memory representation based on multidimensional signal detection theory and how to make predictions for each of these paradigms using decision axes drawn through the space. The detection model is simpler than the comparable multinomial model, it is more easily generalizable, and it does not make threshold assumptions. An experiment using the same memory set for all three tasks demonstrates the analysis and tests the model. The results show that some seemingly complex relations between the paradigms derive from an underlying simplicity of structure.

Asymmetry of visual interference.

This research studies lateral interference among items in the visual field under conditions in which central cognitive factors such as attention and memory limitations are eliminated or controlled for. Under these conditions lateral masking is still found, and it is still asymmetrical (peripheral items interfere with recognition of central items more than central with peripheral). These experiments therefore add to the evidence that both lateral interference and the asymmetry of interference have a component that does not result from cognitive strategies. The experiments also add to the evidence that the asymmetry effect at the sensory level can be attributed to the falloff in acuity from the center to the periphery of the retina, since the mean eccentricity of the target-mask cluster is more peripheral with a peripheral mask than with a central mask. The hypothesis is advanced that the asymmetry effect, as well as lateral interference itself, at the sensory level results from the grouping of target and mask into a single Gestalt-like configuration. The final experiment in the series supports this hypothesis

Two subjective scales of number.

The way in which the apparent magnitude of numbers grows with their absolute magnitude was measured with a modified version of the direct technique Marks and Slawson (1966) used to determine the psychophysical exponent for loudness. This modified technique required subjects to estimate how evenly and randomly a sequence of integers appeared to sample the numerical continuum. The results indicate that the apparent magnitude of numbers increases with a decelerated power function of their arithmetic magnitude when a series samples from an open-ended range. However, when an upper boundary of the range is specified, the subjective scale seems to be linear. Random productions of numbers parallel the results found with judgments of presented sequences. The two scales of number provide the basis for an interpretation of the difference between magnitude and category scales: that subjects use numbers differently when the response scale is open-ended Imagnitude estimation than when it has a fixed upper limit tcategory scale. Given the assumption that subjects use numbers in this way in the two tasks, the qualitative relation between magnitude and category scales is predicted.

Figural goodness effects in perception and memory

There is an apparent contradiction concerning configurational effects in visual information processing. Some studies have shown that when an array is organized into a “good” or unitary Gestalt, analysis of a single part of it is facilitated, while others have shown “good” arrays to impede search for a part. The three experiments reported here support the proposition that goodness of form can facilitate performance when memory is used, but that goodness impairs strictly perceptual search for a part of an array. These experiments compare detection of a single feature in faces (unitary figures) and nonfaces. They show that when the face or nonface is presented before the target feature (and must be held in memory), performance is better for faces than for nonfaces. When the target is presented before the face or nonface and perceptual search is required, faces give worse performance than nonfaces. Implications for perceptual phenomena, including the object-superiority and word-superiority effects, are discussed.

Lateral interference and perceptual grouping in visual detection

The first two experiments show that recognition of target letters presented briefly in the fovea, exactly at the fixation point, is degraded by masking characters placed beside them and, further, that the amount of degradation is reduced when the masking characters are clustered into a Gestalt group with noise characters that are added to the array. Experiment 3 presents targets in the periphery at well-specified locations for essentially continuous viewing and also shows both lateral masking and the release of masking by grouping of noise characters. These results demonstrate that neither lateral masking nor the release of masking by grouping of noise can be entirely accounted for by uncertainty of location of the target. Gestalt grouping can influence the ways in which an array is searched, but, in addition, it affects the resolving power of the visual system. Implications for theories of lateral masking, feature perturbation, and Gestalt grouping effects are discussed.

Normal iconic memory for stimuli invisible to the rods.

This note is prompted in part by the unsettling report of Mollon and Polden (1978) on the time constants of tachistoscopes. They tested a number of tachistoscopes, including an Iconix fitted with the lamps used by Banks and Barber (1977), and found that they typically required about 18 msec to reach 900/0 of full output when they were turned on or to decline to 10% of output when turned off. Furthermore, the spectral composition of the light changed Over the rise and fall periods. The change in spectral composition is particularly important because the conclusion we drew (Banks & Barber, 1977), that iconic memory was not strictly a rod phenomenon, depended in part on use of stimuli that present zero contrast to the rods, despite being clearly distinguishable to the cones. In that research we created letter arrays by using one color of paper for figure and another for ground such that the cones, but not the rods, could see the contrast between the colors and thus only the cones could be used to detect the letters. The fact that these arrays gave typical iconic decay curves and a partial report superiority seemed to us to be good evidence that iconic memory did not require the rods. We realized, of course, that the matching of the colored papers depends on the spectral composition of the illuminant, and we made our matches using as an illuminant the steady-state light of the stimulus field of the Iconix, filtered through the two mirrors through which the stimulus was seen in Our experiments. If, however, the spectral composition of the light during the rise and fall periods of the tachistoscope lamps was not the same as it was during the steady-state period, then the stimulus arrays would not have zero contrast for the rods during these periods, and the rods might have been able to mediate iconic memory during experimental trials. Another motivation for this note comes from Sakitt and Long (1979), which shows that a small

The asymmetry of lateral interference in visual letter identification

Asymmetry of masking refers to the fact that a masking letter placed on the peripheral side of a target in the visual field will interfere more with recognition of the target than will a masking letter placed on the central side of the target. The experiments in this paper show that lateral masking for a pair consisting of a single target and a single mask cannot be entirely explained by processing interference caused by the mask but that masking ]has a component of purely sensory interference. Furthermore, the asymmetry of masking at the sensory level, when all sources of processing interference are eliminated, can be explained in terms of the falloff in acuity from the center to the periphery of the retina. The sensory component of masking is asymmetrical because, with the target at a constant retinal location, the target-plus-mask configuration is, as a whole, more peripherally located with a peripheral mask than a central one, and it is the location of the target-plus-mask configuration that determines performance.