Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology-Revue Canadienne De Psychologie Experimentale最新文献

Individual differences exist in the ability to create an accurate mental survey representation (i.e., a cognitive map) of a novel environment, yet the mechanisms underlying differences in cognitive map accuracy are still under investigation. To determine whether differences in overt attention allocation contribute to these individual differences, the current study examined whether looking times to landmarks and other objects while navigating in a dynamic virtual environment were related to cognitive map accuracy. Participants completed a battery of spatial tests; some tests assessed spatial skills prior to the navigation task (the Santa Barbara Sense of Direction Scale and the Spatial Orientation Test), and others tested memory of the virtual environment Silcton after an exploration period (a landmark recognition task, a direction estimation task, a map-building task, and a route construction task). Individuals with inaccurate cognitive maps of Silcton, as measured by the direction estimation and map-building tasks, showed equivalent eye fixations to buildings and objects when exploring Silcton as those with accurate maps. Despite similar looking times, the inaccurate mappers were significantly worse at judgments of relative direction between landmarks in Silcton and showed poorer memory for landmarks in Silcton than accurate mappers. These findings suggest that cognitive mechanisms, such as mental perspective-taking, occurring after attention allocation underlie differences in cognitive map accuracy. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

In the missing item task, two short lists are presented. The test list contains all but one of the items from the study list in a new random order and the task is to report which item from the study list is missing. Murdock and Smith (2005) found that the time to correctly respond with the missing item was independent of the position of the missing item and was also independent of the list length. They argued that these data are difficult to accommodate by models that include a search process but are consistent with models that posit "direct access" such as the power set version of Theory of Distributed Associative Memory (TODAM). If direct access is occurring, redintegration cannot be occurring. Two experiments test the direct access account by determining whether two effects commonly ascribed to redintegration occur in the missing item task. Experiment 1 found a semantic relatedness effect and Experiment 2 found a word frequency effect. The presence of these effects is consistent with a redintegration account. Implications for TODAM and for an explanation based on the Feature Model are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Pantomime-grasping is a "simulated" motor response wherein an individual grasps to an area dissociated from a physical target. The task has been used in the apraxia literature as a proxy for natural grasping (i.e., physically grasping a target); however, it is important to recognize that the task's decoupled spatial relations between stimulus and response renders the top-down processing of target features (e.g., size) that accumulating evidence has shown to be mediated by visual information functionally distinct from natural grasping. Here, we examined whether the visual information supporting pantomime-grasps exhibits a visual resolution power commensurate with natural grasps. Participants were presented with a target and nontarget that differed in size below the perceptual threshold (i.e., 0.5 mm or ∼1.3%) and were asked to make a perceptual judgment about the target (i.e., "smaller" or "larger" than the nontarget) before and after completing natural and pantomime-grasps. Results showed that perceptual judgments "before" and "after" natural and pantomime-grasps did not reliably distinguish between target and nontarget. Natural grasp peak grip apertures (PGAs) scaled to target size and were comparable for "before" and "after" perceptual judgment trials-a result indicating that haptic feedback from physically grasping the target did not "boost" perceptual accuracy. Most notably, pantomime-grasp PGAs were insensitive to target size; that is, responses elicited a visual resolution power less than natural grasps. These results provide convergent evidence that pantomime-grasps are mediated by the same visual information as obligatory perceptions and do not provide a proxy for natural grasps. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Across two experiments, the numerical magnitude and the physical size of single digits presented in either two (Experiment 1) or four (Experiment 2) different font sizes were judged using either horizontally and vertically (Experiment 1) or just horizontally (Experiment 2) aligned manual responses. Such a design allowed for the simultaneous examination of the size congruity effect (SiCE), the spatial-numerical association of response codes (SNARC) effect, and the more novel spatial-size association of response codes (SSARC) effect. In Experiment 1, SiCEs and SNARC effects were found that operated independently of one another but no SSARC effect occurred. In Experiment 2, separate SiCEs and SNARC effects were found when judging numerical magnitude whereas separate SiCEs and SSARC effects were found when judging physical size. As will be discussed, such findings provide important constraints on the manner in which the full set of congruency and compatibility effects between stimulus and response dimensions in such tasks may be modeled. To illustrate this point, four different versions of a general computational processing model of these effects are considered. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).