Intentional Control of Event Counting.

Abstract

Event counting depends on simple, well-learned knowledge but is effortful and error-prone. In 6 experiments, the authors examined event-counting performance, testing a model that suggests that counting is controlled by minimal goal representations coordinated with perceptual events by temporal synchrony. In Experiment 1, they examined self-paced counting with or without delays that disrupted participants' preferred pacing. In subsequent experiments, participants counted computer-paced events occurring at rhythmic or varied intervals, reporting or verifying totals. Several results support the model: Participants counted rhythmic events more accurately, made undetected undercount errors when counting rhythmic events, and made false alarms to undercount or overcount probes presented at different times. These results suggest that intentions that guide fluent counting specify parameters deictically rather than semantically and that error monitoring is implicit.

The role of placekeeping ability in fluid intelligence

“…Thus, for research or diagnostic purposes, UNRAVEL could be administered repeatedly to the same participants in order to assess aptitudetreatment interactions, effects of environmental stressors, or effects of cognitive aging. In future work, we plan to investigate other reusable tasks, such as event counting (Carlson & Cassenti, 2004), as candidate indicators of placekeeping, with the goal of further investigating the relationship between placekeeping ability and Gf at the latentvariable level.…”

“…Thus, to study placekeeping errors in coffee making, Botvinick and Bylsma found that they had to have each participant make 50 cups of actual coffee in order to produce enough data to analyze. In event counting (e.g., Carlson & Cassenti, 2004), errors are again infrequent enough that the data are generally total counts reported after a series of events, which are compared to actual counts in order to compute a deviation. However, total counts mask errors that offset one another, as when someone fails to count one event but double-counts another.…”

The Impact of a Mnemonic Acronym on Learning and Performing a Procedural Task and Its Resilience Toward Interruptions

“…This provides a number of cognitive challenges similar to order memory and serial recall (e.g., Henson, 1998; Hurlstone et al, 2014), including initial learning of the sequence, retaining the sequence across time, and, most important, retrieving the correct order of steps once the procedure has to be executed. According to some authors, the latter is assumed to involve a so-called placekeeping process, i.e., monitoring the progress within a procedural task by keeping track of completed and to-be-executed steps (Carlson and Cassenti, 2004; Trafton et al, 2011; Hambrick and Altmann, 2015).…”

Multisensory Integration With a Head-Mounted Display: Role of Mental and Manual Load

“…A concern was that the memory load associated with keeping a mental count could somehow have caused the pattern of results. Carlson and Cassenti (2004) have shown that keeping a mental count imposes high mental workload and is prone to various errors. In the mismatch task, errors could be judgment errors (false alarms, misses, and perceptual misses of the mismatch event itself) or increment errors (false increments of the current total in working memory or false nonincrements).…”

“…The first hypothesis (Hypothesis 1) is that compared with keeping a mental count, registering mismatches with a clicker should improve mismatch task accuracy across all conditions. A clicker should reduce participants' reliance on working memory and remove errors associated with demands on, or failures of, working memory (Carlson & Cassenti, 2004).…”