ISSN : 1226-9654
Inhibition of return(IOR) refers to a bias against attending to and/or detecting visual stimuli at recently attended locations. Previous studies tried to find the underlying mechanisms in relation to the attention shift or eye movement. This study aimed to examine the relationship between IOR and the eye movement system. In experiment 1, the cue was manipulated so that subjects made a saccade to periphery and moved their eyes slowly to the center along the cue, moving from periphery toward the center. The task was to detect a target. There were no IOR-effect in the pursuit condition. In experiment 2, subjects made a pursuit eye movement along the cue, moving slowly from the center toward periphery and then made a saccade to the center. There were also no IOR-effects, if the saccade systems were not activated. These results suggest that the activation of saccade systems is a neccessary condition for IOR.
Visual marking refers to indicating the items that have already been processed in a display. So far, most researchers have assumed that marking is performed accurately in both enumeration and search tasks. On the basis of this assumption, it has been claimed that linearity and a 2:1 target-absent/target-present ratio exist for a conjunction search. In Experiments la and 1b, subjects were asked to judge whether the number of items in a display is odd or even. Positively accelerating RT functions were found as the number of items increased, which suggested that marking is not accurate. In Experiments 2 & 3, marking accuracy far the distractors were examined. Contrary to Experiment 1, marking for the distractors seemed to be accurate. The implications of these results were considered.
It was reported that texture segregation in the space of the IID texture varying in mean luminance and contrast is mediated by two mechanisms: (1) texture luminance-sensing mechanism, and (2) one which senses the combined property of texture luminance and contrast (Nam, 1995, 1999). This paper studies the characteristics of these mechanisms in texture segregation in adopting three different sizes of texture elements. Specifically, it focuses on how texture luminance and contrast are combined by the second mechanism. We measured the probability of discrimination for various pairs of textures in the IID space with three different texture element sizes. The size of texture elements was manipulated so that the sampling capacity of the mechanisms was systematically influenced. We observed that each threshold produced by two mechanisms was changed systematically in the opposite direction. It was suggested that the second mechanism consists of a single process with a combined property of texture luminance and contrast rather than a dual process which senses texture luminance and contrast separately, then combines these outputs on the next step. A negative half-wave rectification is proposed as a single process in texture segregation for the second mechanism.
Two experiments tested whether the extra-retinal eye position information (EEPI) used in computing monocular egocentric visual direction originated from eye muscle proprioception("inflow") or efference copy("outflow"). Immediately after inducing potentiation in the extraocular muscle, one of the eyes was cxcluded to induce phoria. Both phoria and open-loop pointing errors were measured before and after potentiation. The results showed that even when potentiation did not modulate the size of phoria (the position of the occluded eye), it changed the size of pointing error, indicating that EEPI used in determining monocular visual direction is efference copy rather than phoria (real position of the occluded eye).
This study was planned to investigate whether structural alignments have an influence on categorization processes through comparing the effect of structural alignment on similarity-based transfer and rule-based learning in categorization. In Experiment 1, I manipulated common attributes and dimensional correspondence between learned exemplars and new exemplars. I found that categorization performances in general declined as the number of common attributes decreased, but this tendency was statistically significant only in the match in place condition. These results implicated that similarities between learned exemplars and new exemplars had an influence on categorization and the influence of similarities grew larger as stimulus's attributes had been well aligned. In Experiment 2, I instructed participants to learn categories by rules and examined whether structural alignment had an effect on the rule-based categorization by comparing the match in place condition with the match out of place condition. I found that participants learned categories more quickly in the match in place condition than in the match out of places condition. In conclusion, structural alignment between stimuli play an important role in categorization processes.
Three experiments were conducted to explore the characteristics of knowledge representation for categories and scripts. Using the primed naming task with superordinate concepts as the prime, Experiment 1 explored the interaction effect between knowledge type and concept typicality: The naming response was faster for typical concept, and this result was manifest in the category representation only. In Experiment 2, upward primed naming task was employed, using basic level concepts as primers. The results showed a significant upward priming effect only in category representation. Experiment 3 examined the priming effect among basic level concepts. It was observed that primed naming responses was faster for typical-atypical pairs than for atypical-typical pairs, only in category representation. The results were discussed in relation to the possible differences in the knowledge representation characteristics of categories and scripts.
A series of three experiments examined whether working memory capacity influences participants' analogical learning of new scientific concepts. Experiment 1 demonstrated that analogical learning depends on working memory capacity. High-span participants showed better performance in inference problem solving than did low-span participants. Experiment 2 again showed that whereas participants with a high span produced a large analogical learning effect, those with a low span did not. Experiment 3 demonstrated that the latter group produced a large analogical learning effect, given the pictures relevant to the analogical learning condition. These results were discussed in terms of a close relationship between working memory capacity and the analogical mapping process.
Perceiving colors of a surface plays an important role on the percept of an object. I investigated the characteristic of human color information processing by examining the effect of the surrounding distractor colors on the perception of target color in several color search tasks. Experiment 1, in which the search performance for a primary color among single-color distractors or vice versa was investigated, revealed an early parallel processing property of color information with objects' orientation and shape. However, when two primary colors or two-color distractor mixtures were included in experiment 2, the results showed a parallel search pattern in searching primary colors among color distracter mixtures but a serial search pattern in searching color mixtures among primary colors. These results indicate that processing for primary colors is more efficient than that for color mixtures under a certain circumstance. I further investigated effects of adjacent surrounding colors on the detection of target color in Experiment 3. Again, We found that serarching for a primary color among color mixtures was more efficient than searching for a mixture color among primary colors.