Effects Of Task Requirements Research Articles

Effects of task requirements on rapid natural scene processing: From common sensory encoding to distinct decisional mechanisms.

Using manual responses, human participants are remarkably fast and accurate at deciding if a natural scene contains an animal, but recent data show that they are even faster to indicate with saccadic eye movements which of 2 scenes contains an animal. How could it be that 2 images can apparently be processed faster than a single image? To better understand the origin of this speed advantage in forced-choice categorization, the present study used a masking procedure to compare 4 tasks in which sensory, decisional, and motor aspects were systematically varied. With stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) above 40 ms, there were substantial differences in sensitivity between tasks, as determined by d' measurements, with an advantage for tasks using a single image. However, with SOAs below 30-40 ms, sensitivity was similar for all experiments, despite very large differences in reaction time. This suggests that the initial part of the sensory encoding relies on common and parallel processing across a large range of tasks, whether participants have to categorize the image or locate a target in 1 of 2 scenes.

Effects of task requirements on the brain activity in the coincident timing task

Effects of task requirements on the brain activity in the coincident timing task

The Effects of Task Requirements on Children's Life Judgments

RICHARDS, D. DEAN, and SIEGLER, ROBERT S. The Effects of Task Requirements on Children's Life Judgments. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1984, 55, 1687-1696. Although children's understanding of the concept of life has been studied extensively in the past 50 years, findings have been contradictory. Some results have supported Piaget's contention that children identify life with function, motion, or autonomous motion; other results have not. The 4 experiments of our study were designed to establish the conditions under which children exhibit different understandings of life by varying task requirements within a common procedural framework. When children were asked either to name living things or to judge the life status of particular entities, they almost never indicated that inanimate objects were alive. When asked to justify their judgments, however, young children frequently cited the object's capacity for movement. In addition, emphasizing the motion states of objects caused 4and 5-year-olds, but not older children, to judge whether objects were alive on the basis of whether the objects were moving. Overall, the results suggested that even 4and 5-year-olds know that people and other animals are alive and that almost all inanimate objects are not. However, they also indicated that young children relate motion to life in a greater number of contexts than do older children. Variations in the type of data emphasized, the choice of stimuli, and the stage classification criteria appear to account for the diversity of previous conclusions.

The Effects of Task Requirements on Children's Life Judgments

The Effects of Task Requirements on Children's Life Judgments

Effects of Task Requirements on Ear Superiority for Sung Speech

A series of dichotic trials, each involving two different sequences of letters sung to two different melodies by two different singers, was presented three times to each of 12 subjects. The required tasks, performed on different days, were letter sequence, melody, and singer recognition. Results indicated no significant difference between ears in recognition of sung voices, but significant right-ear superiority for letter sequence recognition, significant left-ear superiority for melody recognition and a significant task-by-ear interaction. Since the same acoustical stimuli were presented to the same subjects on all tasks, these findings provide an unequivocal demonstration that laterality effects in audition are not solely determined by stimulus characteristics but are also dependent on task requirements.

Ear asymmetry and delayed auditory feedback: effects of task requirements and competitive stimulation.

Ear asymmetry and delayed auditory feedback: effects of task requirements and competitive stimulation.