Abstracts of the Psychonomic Society — Volume 14 — November ...

Friday Afternoon Papers 103–109
answer, regardless of whether that answer is correct or incorrect. This
suggests that familiarity serves to focus attention on potential answers
to guide retrieval attempts.
4:50–5:05 (103)
on the Resilience of the Standard interpretation of processing
Fluency. DEANNE L. WESTERMAN, JUSTIN M. OLDS, & BRIAN P.
KURILLA, Binghamton University—Stimuli that are processed fluently
tend to be regarded as familiar and are more likely to be classified as
old on a recognition test. Recently, it has been shown that the relationship
between fluency and positive recognition judgments can be easily
reversed (Unkelbach, 2006, 2007). When participants are given a brief
training phase in which previously studied stimuli are associated with
lower levels of fluency, and feedback is given during training, there is a
reversal of the standard fluency effect, and fluent stimuli are more likely
to be classified as new. The present study investigated the resilience
of the reversed fluency effect by determining whether it persists across
a delay between training and test or a change in context. The results
show that the reversal of the fluency heuristic is short-lived, and that
participants revert to the standard interpretation of enhanced fluency as
familiarity quite readily.
5:10–5:25 (104)
Context Effects in Episodic Recognition of Famous Versus Nonfamous
Faces. LYNNE M. REDER, Carnegie Mellon University—Subjects
viewed celebrities and unfamiliar faces that were superimposed on identifiable
scenic locations (e.g., Mount Rushmore) and judged the likelihood
of the person actually visiting the location. Backgrounds were randomly
assigned to be seen (1) with famous or unfamiliar faces and (2) with many
faces (“Hi Fan”) or only one (“Low Fan”) during encoding. The surprise
posttest asked subjects to recognize whether the face was rated earlier,
regardless of whether or not the background was the same as before. Half
of the backgrounds were reinstated and half were swapped with another
face’s background. Recognition was better when the background was a
reinstatement, but this advantage was modulated by the fan of the background
and by the fame of the face. An explanation for this pattern is
offered on the basis of the thesis that familiarity stimuli are easier to associate
with context. Supporting evidence is also provided.
Selective Attention iii
Constitution Ballroom, Friday Afternoon, 3:10–5:25
Chaired by Stephen R. Mitroff, Duke University
3:10–3:25 (105)
Generalized “Satisfaction of Search”: Adverse influences on Dual-
Target Search Accuracy. MATHIAS S. FLECK, EHSAN SAMEI,
& STEPHEN R. MITROFF, Duke University (read by Stephen R.
Mitroff)—The successful detection of a target in a radiological search
can reduce the detectability of a second target, a phenomenon termed
“satisfaction of search” (SOS). Here, we investigate the generality of
SOS to simultaneously inform radiology, cognitive psychology, and nonmedical,
real-world searches. Our experiments, utilizing nonmedical
searches and untrained searchers, suggest that SOS is affected by several
factors, including (1) relative salience and frequency of different target
types, (2) time pressure, (3) perceptual set, (4) search instructions, and
(5) reward pressure. Collectively, SOS arises when searchers have an
expectation about the likelihood of a target type and when they are under
pressure to perform quickly. This first demonstration of SOS outside of
radiology might implicate a default heuristic that could affect search
broadly. For example, the present data suggest that the detection of easyto-spot
targets in baggage screening (e.g., water bottles) might reduce
detection of hard-to-spot targets (e.g., box cutters).
3:30–3:45 (106)
perceptual Load Theory: much Ado About Nothing. YEHOSHUA
TSAL & HANNA BENONI, Tel Aviv University—In a critical discussion
of the theory, we conclude that perceptual load is not a major factor
in attentional selection. We will focus on the following problems:
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(1) “Perceptual load” has never been defined and its manipulations have
been guided by intuitions. (2) The hypothetical construct “perceptual
load” and its operationalization, “display size,” have often been confused,
leading to puzzling interpretations. (3) The major tenets of the
theory are based on incoherent assumptions rather than testable hypotheses.
(4) The theory makes opposite predictions for perceptual load manipulations
and sensory (or cognitive) load manipulations. Given that
the distinctions between the above concepts are often fuzzy, any possible
result could “support” the theory by assigning a particular load to
a particular pattern of results obtained. (5) In the major manipulation,
display size, perceptual load is completely confounded with dilution.
The latter factor is responsible for the effects traditionally attributed to
perceptual load.
3:50–4:05 (107)
Target–Distractor Competition influences the Compatibility Effect
under Low perceptual Load. YEI-YU YEH, YEN-HO CHEN, &
CHENG-TA YANG, National Taiwan University—Three experiments
were conducted to investigate the context in which a task-irrelevant distractor
is processed to the late stage of response selection under low
perceptual load. The results of Experiment 1 showed that the compatibility
effect was reduced with an increasing number of redundant targets
and was eliminated with five targets. The results of Experiments 2
and 3 showed that four redundant targets eliminated the compatibility
effect caused by three redundant distractors only when the distractors
were not perceptually grouped and the focus of attention could hence be
widened. A hierarchical diffusion modeling approach provided converging
evidence, showing that distractor compatibility influenced how fast
information accumulated toward a correct decision. This compatibility
effect was eliminated when five redundant targets won over a singleton
distractor or when four redundant targets won over three grouped redundant
distractors. The results suggested that target–distractor competition
for recognition and selection in visual short-term memory underlies the
compatibility effect.
4:10–4:25 (108)
Stimulus-Driven Capture by Abrupt onsets: Evidence Against
Nonspatial Filtering. JAN THEEUWES, DANIEL SCHREIJ, &
CHRISTIAN N. L. OLIVERS, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam—Whether
attentional capture is contingent on top-down control settings or is involuntarily
driven by salient stimuli is still widely debated. Schreij, Owens,
and Theeuwes (2008) demonstrated that an onset distractor caused a
response delay even when participants adopted an attentional set for
a color feature. This contradicts the contingent capture hypothesis and
is consistent with stimulus-driven attentional capture. However, Folk,
Remington, and Wu (2009) claimed that this delay does not reflect capture,
but rather nonspatial filtering costs. The present study shows that
the effect of abrupt onsets is in fact spatially modulated, in that the onset
(1) interferes more when presented close to a target, (2) generates inhibition
of return specific for its location, and (3) speeds up performance
when coinciding with the target location. Moreover, adding onsets to
the display has similar effects as does adding attentional-set-contingent
distractors. We conclude that onsets capture attention independently of
attentional set.
4:30–4:45 (109)
Does Feature Detection Require Focal Attention? HOWARD E.
EGETH & JEFFREY MOHER, Johns Hopkins University—Feature integration
theory suggests that a feature can be detected preattentively on
the basis of activity in a hypothetical feature map. Subjects responded
to the presence or absence of a single red letter in a circle of gray letters
surrounding fixation. Subjects were faster to indicate the presence of a
red letter when that letter’s identity was repeated from the previous trial,
even though identity was task irrelevant. This suggests that focal attention
was directed to the letter, even in a simple feature detection task (cf.
Theeuwes, Van der Burg, & Belopolsky, 2008). However, we found no
repetition priming in a similar task with unfamiliar characters instead
of English letters, or with heterogeneous displays in which the target
color was not a singleton. These and related data suggest that a simple