Cue Delay Research Articles

Cognitive Scanning Processes in Children

Third- and fifth-grade children and adults were presented with 8-item letter sequences of varied approximations to English in a tachistoscopic single report, cue delay task. Age differences in report accuracy suggested that younger children, as compared with adults, may be at a double disadvantage in tasks requiring perceptual-memory processing: Their initial intake capacity and/or selective processing abilities may be more limited than those of adults; and the subsequent strategy employed by children to transfer iconic information into a more permanent memory store appears to be qualitatively, as well as quantitatively, different (less systematic, less orderly, and less efficient) than that used by adults. The suggestion that children's reading experience and ability (as assessed by a word recognition task) may be related to their systematic use of an orderly left-to-right iconic transfer strategy was also examined. In addition, the results suggested that the differential letter-pattern familiarity effect between children and adults may not be attributable to visual intake components but, rather, may be related to the relative rates with which familiar letter patterns are transferred out of iconic memory.

Selective perception without confounding contributions of decision and memory

Previous research has demonstrated that decision processes and short-term memory limitations contribute to the observed limitation in the span of apprehension in tachistoscopic experiments. The present study addresses the question of whether perceptual factors also contribute to this limitation. Observers were asked to indicate which of four target letters occurred in a four-item test display. The irrelevant background items were either highly confusable or completely nonconfusable with the target letters. The target detection task is designed to bypass short-term memory limitations. In order to eliminate differences in decision processing, the location of the target letter was indicated either slightly before or shortly after the display presentation. The indicator was either an arrow cue or a pattern mask. Performance decreased with increases in the delay of the arrow cue only when the background items were confusable. The pattern mask yielded standard masking functions, but performance with the nonconfusable background items improved more rapidly with increases in processing time than did performance with the confusable background items. These results conform to the hypothesis that attention operates at the perceptual stage of processing. The results were accurately described by a quantification of attentional effects in a general information processing model.

The effects of memory load and the contrast of the rod signal on partial report superiority in a Sperling task

Subjects participated in a Sperling task. The independent variables included delay of report cue, dark background field vs. a light background field intense enough to nearly saturate the rod system (duration of rod icon), and whether or not subjects were required to retain a list of letters or words (memory load) while performing in the Sperling task. Partial report superiority is normally taken as an indication of iconic memory. However, the main result was that memory load, which presumably does not affect the duration of the icon, increased partial report superiority. The effect of luminance of the background field was to reduce the partial report superiority. The results show that the existence of a partial report superiority and/or a decaying partial report curve does not necessarily imply the existence of an icon or visual storage.

Stimulus position functions in tachistoscopic identification tasks: Scanning, rehearsal, and order of report

Three experiments were conducted to investigate the locus of attentional control under the information-overload conditions stemming from tachistoscopic presentation of a horizontally arranged row of letters. In Experiment 1, left-right visual field accuracy differences were greater in a whole- than in a single-report task, reflecting a pronounced influence of report order bias effects. However, accuracy in the single-report task, which is relatively unaffected by report order biases, also declined from left to right across stimulus positions. In Experiment 2, single-report task requirements which provided an opportunity for rehearsal had negligible effects on the shape of the stimulus-position function. In Experiment 3, the leftright accuracy differences were observed to vary as a function of cue delay interval in a single-report visuospatial probe task. The degree of left-field superiority was negligible with a short delay interval, and much greater with longer delay intervals. The results are discussed in terms of a cognitive scanning operation.

Cue delay and the role of rehearsal in directed forgetting.

Cue delay and the role of rehearsal in directed forgetting.

Cue delay and the role of rehearsal in directed forgetting.

Cue delay and the role of rehearsal in directed forgetting.

Delay of gratification in children: A function of magnitude of reward and the delay cue

In research on delay of gratification in children, the delay cue and magnitude of reward cue have traditionally been confounded. The delay and magnitude of reward cues were independently varied in the present study to investigate whether children's delay of gratification preferences were attributable to (a) the magnitude of reward cue, and/or (b) discriminative stimulus properties of the delay cue. To assess delay of gratification preferences, 39 preschool subjects chose between various amounts of pennies on a two-choice task. The data indicated that children's choice to delay gratification was a function of both the magnitude of reward and the delay of reward cues.

Iconic memory: A reply to Professor Holding

Professor Holding has argued that the partial report superiority normally taken as evidence for the existence of iconic memory might instead be due to cue anticipation or output interference. I have suggested that both of these alternative explanations are inconsistent with the finding that the partial report superiority diminishes rapidly with increasing cue delay. In addition, Sperling's original partial report experiment was designed in such a way that cue anticipation could not have occurred; and both his results with selection by letter vs number and Averbach and Coriell's bar-marker results indicate that output interference effects are absent or negligible in tachistoscopic experiments. Consequently, I have concluded that the partial report superiority, and especially its decline with increasing delay, remains as strong evidence in favor of the conventional view of iconic memory. Furthermore, if this view were wrong, there would remain no way of giving a satisfactory account of (a) Averbach and Coriell's results, (b) "direct" investigations of visual persistence, or (c) integration and interruption effects in backward visual masking.

Monaural detection with contralateral cue (MDCC). II. Interaural delay of cue and signal.

In a monaural detection with contralateral cue (MDCC) task, subjects detect a masked signal presented monaurally. A cue containing information relevant to the signal is presented to the other ear. We used a burst of noise as the signal and the same noise burst delayed or advanced by up to 2400 μsec as the cue. For most subjects, performance was best when the cue and signal were approximately simultaneous. When the cue led by about 800 μsec, performance dropped sharply to levels below those obtained without the cue, recovering to the uncued level for yet longer disparities. When the signal led the cue, performance dropped smoothly as a function of timing disparity, and for signal lead greater than about 1000 μsec, the cue had little effect on performance. Although the task subjectively is one of judging the apparent lateralization of the cue, we argue that the lateralization mechanism is not by itself the detecting mechanism.

The amount seen in brief exposures.

The experiments reported are a series of attempts to test the consequences of assuming that a subject exposed to briefly presented tachistoscopic information does not have access to a visual image. The partial report procedure is examined under several conditions with the letter row cues immediately following stimulus exposure, and at different levels of cue delay. The results of eye movement monitoring, and of instructing subjects where to look, agree with the guessing data of a previous experiment in showing a sharp decline in the number of letters correctly reported when the subject is looking at the wrong row, in conformity with the anticipative selection hypothesis. The result of varying the subject's uncertainty about what is to be reported is to vary the slope of the delay curve; with the implication that inefficient strategies of rehearsal, rather than visual image decay, are responsible for the reported delay effects.

Delay of incentive cues in paired-associate learning and its effect on organizing responses

Studies of probability learning, incidental learning, short-term memory, and PA learning have shown that incentive to learn influences recall. In general, the effect is one of negative contrast: The recall of unrewarded materials suffers with no contrasting facilitation in the recall of rewarded materials. It was hypothesized that this incentive effect was due to S 's differential use of organizing responses while learning. The validity of the hypothesis was tested by determining the influence of incentive on recall with various degrees of delay in incentive cuing. Delay in cuing was expected to reduce differential use of organizing responses which, according to the hypothesis, would in turn reduce the incentive effect on recall. Measures of organizing responses conformed to the expectation that cuing delay would reduce differential responding. As predicted, the influence of incentive on recall decreased with degree of cue delay.

Information available from brief visual presentations using two types of report

The effects of the acoustic and structurai similarity of letters on the accuracy of report were studied using two partial report measures. Ss in Group 1 were required to compare two cued letter pairs on an eight-letter array, and to report whether they were the same or different (CJ), while Group 2, in addition to CJ, had also to report the names of the letters comprising the pairs (CR). The data showed that while CR resulted in a decline in accuracy with increasing cue delay, as reported by Sperling, the CJ measure showed an increase in accuracy. Structural similarity of the target pairs increased the difficulty of both CJ and CR reports over the first 100 msec. An interpretation is offered in terms of a structural trace which does not decay, and in which structural features are “sharpened” and exaggerated to enhance the discriminability of the components.

Cue timing in a multi-dimensional detection task.

The effects of pre- and post-stimulus cues on detection were studied using 2-alternative forced-choice tasks. The stimuli used were tones presented to Ss through earphones and dots presented on TV monitors. The tones varied in pitch and intensity and the dots varied in displacement both horizontally and vertically. Thus Ss could be required to make discrimination in 4 dimensions. Performance on 1-dimensional input—1-dimensional output was superior to that for 4-dimensional input—1-dimensional output even when the stimulus for which a response was required was cued 4.0 sec. before its presentation. The duration of the post-stimulus cue delay, 0.10 sec. to 4.0 sec., had no differential effect on performance levels. These results are quite different from those reported for absolute judgment tasks.