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

Sunday Morning Papers 300–307
11:00–11:15 (300)
Spatiotemporal Occlusion of Biological Motion Reveals Anticipation
Processes of Soccer Players. SHUJI MORI, Kyushu University, &
FUMIAKI YOSHITOMI, Japan Airlines Co.—Sport perception research
has demonstrated that expert sport players anticipate forthcoming plays
better than do their novice counterparts. What remains to be specified
is the perceptual processes underlying their superior anticipation. To address
this question about soccer goalkeepers who attempt to predict the
direction of penalty kicks, we conducted a series of experiments using
biological motion of a penalty kicker in temporal and spatial occlusion
tasks. The results show quite different patterns of anticipatory performance
between experienced players and novices. The players’ anticipation
accuracy increased suddenly from 250 msec to 150 msec before
the kicker kicked the ball, and their anticipation relied on the kinematic
information of the kicker’s waist and support leg at that moment. On the
other hand, the novices’ accuracy increased gradually with increasing
spatiotemporal information in the kicker’s motion. From those results,
we describe two separate time courses of anticipation for experienced
players and novices.
11:20–11:35 (301)
Forms of Underhand Throwing Fit Environmental Conditions and
Personal Situations. JOHN RIESER & GAYATHRI NARASIMHAM,
Vanderbilt University—People vary their forms of action so there is
enough force to get a job done while minimizing unnecessary movement
and satisfying constraints posed by the actor and context. In this study,
adults and young children tried to throw a ball with an underhanded toss
into a wastebasket that was 1–30 m away. They could not see or hear the
ball’s trajectory. Every subject varied the form of throw by increasing the
number of degrees of freedom for longer distances—swinging from the
elbow alone for the 1 m target; from elbow and shoulder for the intermediate
targets; elbow, shoulder, and waist for the far targets; and adding
a run-up for the farthest target. We go on to ask whether the transition
points optimize efficiency, are predictable from individual measures of
strength and limb lengths, and vary with the ball’s shape or weight, as
well as target distance.
11:40–11:55 (302)
The Role of Concepts About Agency in Perceiving Actions. DAN-
IEL T. LEVIN, MEGAN M. SAYLOR, & JULIE A. ADAMS, Vanderbilt
University—In previous research, adults predicted that people would engage
in more goal-directed actions that are guided by objects’ categories
(as opposed to their surface features) than would computers or robots. In
the present experiment, we explored how these concepts affect people’s
memory for the observed actions of a robot that were described either
in basic mechanical terms or in more intentional terms. After hearing
the mechanical or intentional context, participants watched as the robot
traveled among a set of objects, visiting (and “looking at”) four of them.
Participants were better at naming the object categories in the scene for
the intentional robot but were worse at remembering small variations in
the intentional robot’s actions. This demonstrates that concepts about
agency form an interpretive framework that guides attention in predictable
ways during action perception.
Vision
Constitution Ballroom, Sunday Morning, 9:40–11:55
Chaired by Thomas A. Busey, Indiana University, Bloomington
9:40–9:55 (303)
Temporal Processing Across the Senses: Individual Differences in
Elders. THOMAS A. BUSEY, LARRY E. HUMES, JAMES C. CRAIG,
& DIANE KEWLEY-PORT, Indiana University, Bloomington—Temporal
slowing associated with aging affects the auditory, visual, and tactile
senses. Such slowing may lead to deficits in processing rapid speech and
changing scenes, as well as in haptic object identification. Participants
made four different types of temporal order judgments with visual, auditory,
and tactile stimuli. These tasks involved reporting the order of two
or four patterns presented sequentially to the same location or ordering
two items presented to different locations. Elder (n 5 150), middle-aged
46
(n 5 30), and younger (n 5 50) participants were tested. We varied the
stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between the patterns to find a critical
SOA. We found group differences in virtually all of our measures,
suggesting a strong age-related component in each modality. Younger
participants showed strong within- and across-modality correlations.
Elders showed weaker correlations, especially across modalities. Factor
analyses revealed that elders showed more modality independence,
which contradicts common cause accounts of perceptual decline.
10:00–10:15 (304)
The Psychological Four-Color Mapping Problem. GREGORY
FRANCIS, Purdue University—Mathematicians have proven that four
colors are sufficient to color 2-D maps so that no neighboring regions
share the same color. Here, we consider the psychological four-color
problem: identifying which four colors should be used to make a map
easy to use. We build a model of visual search for this design task and
demonstrate how to apply it to the task of identifying the optimal colors
for a map. Application and testing of the model shows that an optimally
colored version of a map of English counties is searched 15% faster than
the corresponding worst colored map.
10:20–10:35 (305)
Human Color Preference: WAVEs of Color, Culture, and Emotion.
STEPHEN E. PALMER & KAREN B. SCHLOSS, University of California,
Berkeley—Color preference is an important aspect of human
behavior, but little is known about why people like certain colors more
than other colors, or even why they like colors at all. We report detailed
measurements of preferences among 37 colors—people like blues and
cool colors most and browns and olives least—and other relevant aspects
of color perception. Models based on cone–opponent contrasts, colorimetric
ratings, and color–emotion associations fit the results less well
than do average ecological valences of color-associated objects, which
account for more than 70% of the group variance: People like colors
strongly associated with objects they like (e.g., blues with clear skies
and clean water) and dislike colors strongly associated with objects they
dislike (e.g., browns with feces and rotten fruit). Further results show
that similar effects arise from social/cultural associations: People like
colors strongly associated with their universities, favorite sports teams,
and religions.
10:40–10:55 (306)
Visual Adaptation: Noise or Gain? ADAM J. REEVES & REBECCA
GRAYHEM, Northeastern University—We offer support for both the
Weber law and the Rose–DeVries square-root law by using visual detection
thresholds for brief large (Weberian) or tiny (square-root) incremental
spots of light presented on steady light-adapting fields in Maxwellian
view. Turning off the field permits thresholds to drop almost instantaneously
to a level predicted by the removal of the photon-driven noise
generated by the field. We conclude that photon noise controls visual
threshold not just at absolute threshold (Hecht, Shlaer, & Pirenne, 1942,
J. Gen. Physiol., 25, 819), but also in the light; the effect of noise accounts
for the entire square-root law and half of the Weber law.
11:00–11:15 (307)
A.H.’s Persisting Visual Mislocalizations: Implications for Visual Updating
and Visual Awareness. MICHAEL McCLOSKEY & EMMA
GREGORY, Johns Hopkins University—A.H., a young woman with a
developmental deficit in perceiving the location of visual stimuli, makes
left–right and up–down reflection errors in a variety of tasks. For example,
when an object is located on her right, A.H. often perceives it at
the corresponding position on her left, or vice versa. Remarkably, A.H.’s
misperceptions of location may persist when she moves her eyes. If she
erroneously perceives an object to be on her left while looking straight
ahead and then makes a leftward saccade in an effort to fixate the object,
she may report that she is looking at the object, even though the eye
movement actually shifted the target to a more peripheral position in her
visual field. We argue that A.H.’s persisting visual mislocalization errors
have implications for understanding how visual representations are
updated over time and what levels of representation give rise to visual
awareness.