Context effects (Psychology)

Forster and Lavie (2008) and Lavie, Lin, Zokaei and Thoma (2009) have demonstrated that meaningful stimuli, such as objects, are ignored under conditions of high perceptual load but not low. However, objects are seldom presented without context in the real world. Given that context can reduce the threshold for object recognition (Barenholtz, 2013), is it possible for context to reduce the processing load of objects such that they can be processed under high load? In the first experiment, I attempted to obtain similar findings of the aforementioned studies by replicating their paradigm with photographs of real-world objects. The findings of the experiment suggested that objects can cause distractor interference under high load conditions, but not low load conditions. These findings are opposite of what the perceptual literature suggests (e.g., Lavie, 1995). However, these findings are aligned with a two-stage dilution model of attention in which information is first processed in parallel and then selectively (Wilson, Muroi, and MacLeod, 2011). Experiment 2 assessed if this effect was specific to semantic objects by introducing meaningless, abstract objects. The results suggest that the dilution effect was not due to the semantic features of objects. The third experiment assessed the influence of context on objects under load. The results of the experiment found an elimination of all interference effects in both the high and low load conditions. Comparisons between scene-object congruency revealed no influence of semantic information from scenes. It appears that the presentation of a visual stimuli prior to the flanker task diluted attention such that the distractor effects previously observed in the high load condition were minimized. Thus, it does not appear that context reduced the threshold for object recognition under load. All three experiments have demonstrated strong evidence for the dilution approach of attention over perceptual load models.

The current study sought to examine further the concept of
eyewitness memory for events. Specifically, using filmed events that were
performed with objects and events performed without objects, we explored
the potential interaction of the object cue and binding or conjunction
errors. This specific memory error involves improperly pairing two or more
feature memories together in the long-term store. In our study, these
features were the action and the actress performing the action. Our study
involved 51 participants. Participants were shown target events in Week 1
and asked to retrieve the target events from a larger group of events in
Week 2. While findings did not show the expected interaction of
conjunction events to object presence or absence, objects without an
object showed a significantly higher acceptance rate. A secondary analysis revealed an interaction effect between head-focus and
recognition item type, meaning participants did view events without an
object differently from objects with an object.

Kersten, Earles, and Berger (2015) reported a distinction between two kinds of motion representations. Extrinsic motions involve the path of a person or object, with respect to an external frame of reference. Intrinsic motions involve the manner in which the various parts of a person or object move. They found that intrinsic motions are encoded and remembered with the corresponding actor performing the motions in a unitized memory representation. Extrinsic motions are encoded as separate memory representations, making them more difficult to accurately associate with the correct actor. In the proposed experiment, I will examine the generality of this distinction in motion representation, and investigate whether the unitization of intrinsic motion with its corresponding actor occurs during reading comprehension tasks.

Most of the human visual field falls in the periphery, and peripheral processing is
important for normal visual functioning. Yet, little is known about peripheral object
recognition in naturalistic scenes and factors that modulate this ability. We propose that
a critical function of scene and object memory is in order to facilitate visual object
recognition in the periphery. In the first experiment, participants identified objects in
scenes across different levels of familiarity and contextual information within the scene.
We found that familiarity with a scene resulted in a significant increase in the distance
that objects were recognized. Furthermore, we found that a semantically consistent scene
improved the distance that object recognition is possible, supporting the notion that
contextual facilitation is possible in the periphery. In the second experiment, the preview
duration of a scene was varied in order to examine how a scene representation is built and
how memory of that scene and the objects within it contributes to object recognition in
the periphery. We found that the closer participants fixated to the object in the preview,
the farther on average they recognized that target object in the periphery. However, only a preview duration of the scenes for 5000 ms produced significantly farther peripheral
object recognition compared to not previewing the scene. Overall, these experiments
introduce a novel research paradigm for object recognition in naturalistic scenes, and
demonstrates multiple factors that have systematic effects on peripheral object
recognition.

Satellite-framed languages and verb-framed languages differ in how they encode motion events. English encodes or lexicalizes Path in verb particles, prepositional phrases, or satellites associated with the main verb. In contrast, Turkish tends to encode Path in the main verb of a clause. When describing motion events, English speakers typically use verbs that convey information about manner rather than path, whereas Turkish speakers do the opposite. In this study, we investigated whether this crosslinguistic difference between English and Turkish influences how the speakers of these languages perform in a non-linguistic recognition memory task. In a video description task, English speakers used more manner verbs in the main verb of sentences than Turkish speakers did. In the recognition memory task, English speakers attended more strongly than Turkish speakers did to path of motion. English and Turkish speakers attended equally to manner of motion, however, providing no support for the linguistic relativity hypothesis.

Two skills necessary for the execution of proficient calculation, retrieving arithmetic facts from memory and accessing number magnitude information, were studied in a group of patients diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease (AD), mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and healthy controls to try to elucidate the locus of impairment in AD-related calculation deficits. This was achieved through the use of an arithmetic production task and a number-matching task as measures of explicit and implicit retrieval of arithmetic facts, and a numerical Stroop task that assesses automatic access to number magnitude representation. AD patients, but not MCI patients, showed high response latencies and a high number of errors when performing multiplications in the production task, and reduced automatic retrieval of arithmetic task in the number-matching task. All participants showed the classic problem-size effect often reported in the mathematical cognition literature. Performance on the numerical Stroop task suggests that access to number magnitude information is relatively resistant to cognitive impairment. ... Results for the AD group are consistent with a pattern of preserved and impaired cognitive processes that might mediate the reported calculation deficits in AD.

Across three experiments, we assessed how location and color information contributes to the identification of an object whose image has been degraded, making its identity ambiguous. In Experiment 1, some of the target objects had fixed locations within the scene. We found that subjects used this location information during search and later to identify the blurred target objects. In Experiment 2, we tested whether location and color information can be combined to identify degraded objects, and results were inconclusive. In Experiment 3, both the location and color of each object was variable but statistically predictive of the object's identity. We found that subjects used both sources of information-color and location - equally when identifying the blurred image of the object. Overall, these findings suggest that location information may be as determining as intrinsic feature information to identify objects when the objects' intrinsic features are degraded.

I am living in a world of strangers. Growing up, I was told to never talk to them. As an adult, I have grown self-centered, spending my days filtering the external into my own internal truths. In doing so, a boundary has been set between my brain and everything beyond it. For different reasons I have stayed quiet over the years, and formed opinions of strangers by means of observation; but now, finally, I am reaching out. I am going to places I would not normally go to, slowing down enough to notice, and trying something different. I am trying to talk to strangers, trying to get them to open up to me in a world where a lot of us have curled the focus inward. I am trying to explore, trying to overcome, approach, dig deeper, and above all, learn something that makes each one of us familiar.

Recent research in visual object recognition has shown that context can facilitate object recognition. This study assessed the effect of self-relevant familiarity of context in object recognition. Participants performed a task in which they had to recognize degraded objects shown under varying levels of contextual information. The level of degradation at which they could successfully recognize the target object was used as a measure of performance. There were five contextual conditions: (1) no context, (2) context, (3) context and size, (4) context and location, (5) context, size and location. Within each contextual condition, we compared the performance of "Expert" participants who viewed objects in the context of their own house and "Novice" participants who viewed those particular settings for the first time. Ratings were performed to assess each object's consistency, frequency, position consistency, typicality and shape distinctiveness. Object's size was the only contextual info rmation that did not affect performance. Contextual information significantly reduced the amount of bottom-up visual information needed for object identification for both experts and novices. An interaction (Contextual Information x Level of Familiarity) was observed. Expert participants' performance improved significantly more than novice participants' performance by the presence of contextual information. Location information affected the performance of expert participants, only when objects that occupied stable positions were considered. Both expert and novice participants performed better with objects that rated high in typicality and shape distinctiveness. Object's consistency, frequency and position consistency did not seem to affect expert participants' performance but did affect novice participants' performance.

Healthy aging has been associated with declines in executive functioning (EF) but it remains unclear how different subprocesses of EF are affected by age and by other possibly mediating variables. The principal aim of the present study was to investigate the effects of age and processing speed on three executive functions: set-shifting, planning, and attentional control. Four age groups (20-29 years, 60-69 years, 70-79 years, and 80-89 years) were compared on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST), the DKEFS Tower Test, the Conner's Continuous Performance Test, and a Letter comparison test of processing speed. Results suggested that increased age was associated with decreased performance on most of the studied executive measures, but not all EF are equally affected by age. A slowdown in processing speed mediates some, but not all, decrements in executive performance. The results are interpreted in light of recent neuroimaging data on age-related changes in brain functioning.