Pattern uncertainty and the discrimination of visual patterns

Clement, David E.; Varnadoe, Kenneth W.

doi:10.3758/bf03208782

Cited by 58 publications

(44 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…A series of recent studies has argued for encoding effects of figural goodness. Clement and Varnadoe (1967) conducted a twochoice speeded classification task in which subjects sorted decks of cards with two alternative dot patterns per deck. The alternatives were both good, both poor, and one good and one poor.…”

Section: Processing Consequences Of Goodnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Stimulus-specific processing consequences of pattern goodness

Sebrechts

Garner

1981

Memory & Cognition

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Two issues concerning the effects of visual pattern goodness on information processing time were investigated: the role of memory vs. encoding and the role of individual stimulus goodness vs. stimulus similarity. A sequential "same-different" task was used to provide differentiation of target item or memory effects from display item or encoding effects. Experiment 1 used four alternative stimuli in each block of trials. The results showed that good patterns were processed faster than poor patterns for both "same" and "different" responses. Furthermore, the goodness of the target item had a greater effect on reaction time than did the goodness of the display item, indicating that memory is more important than encoding in producing faster processing of good stimuli. Effects of interstimulus similarity on processing time were minimal, although isolation of good stimuli in a similarity space could explain many of the results. Experiment 2 replicated the results of Experiment 1, despite the fact that differences in similarity space had been minimized by using only two alternative stimuli in each block. In addition, the speed of processing a "same" pair was essentially independent of the particular alternative stimulus in a block. These results suggest that in this task, there is a processing advantage for good stimuli that is stimulus specific, with the effect operating primarily in memory.It is widely recognized that the structure of visual objects affects phenomenal experience, although the precise nature of that effect is not fully known. The Gestalt psychologists made substantial progress in understanding these experiences by enumerating characteristics of patterns that made them perceptually "good." More recently, Garner (1962) indicated how such goodness might be related to stimulus information and redundancy. He suggested that for a given pattern, the number of equivalent patterns provided a useful index of what constitutes a good figure: The fewer the number of equivalent patterns, the better the given pattern will be.For experimental purposes, rotations and reflections serve as one useful specification of equivalent patterns. If rotating and/or reflecting a pattern yields the same pattern, the number of equivalent patterns is one and the pattern is good; if rotating or reflecting a pattern yields several different patterns, the number of equivalent patterns is larger and the pattern is poorer. Garner and Clement (1963) showed that this definition was highly correlated with the way people rate goodness, thus providing a well-defined means of specifying a good or a poor pattern independent of subjective ratings. Processing Consequences of GoodnessUsing a variety of information processing tasks, it has been found that good patterns are processed more efficiently than poor patterns, as measured by time or by errors. Since it has been shown that there exists a reliable processing advantage for good patterns, recent research has been primarily concerned with establishing the nature of that effect. In particular, t...

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Section: Processing Consequences Of Goodnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Stimulus-specific processing consequences of pattern goodness

Sebrechts

Garner

1981

Memory & Cognition

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“…Several previous studies using the Garner dot pattens (Garner & Clement, 1963) have attempted to distinguish between the influences of stimulus encoding and memory search (Bell & Handel, 1976;Checkosky & Whitlock, 1973;Clement & Varnadoe, 1967;Garner & Sutliff, 1974;Pomerantz, 1977;Sebrechts & Garner, 1981). One approach taken was to use the Sternberg (1969) methodology (the 'additive factor method') in which separate processes are assumed when two factors are shown to influence response times independently as demonstrated by a non-significant interaction in an analysis of variance.…”

Section: Stimulus Encoding Versus Memory Searchmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, Clement and Varnadoe (1967) found that sorting times are longer for stimuli with a larger ESS. Furthermore, response times to individual patterns or pairs of patterns have been shown to increase with ESS (Checkosky & Whitlock, 1973;Garner & Sutliff, 1974;Lachmann & Geissler, 2002;Lachmann & van Leeuwen, 2005a, b, 2007, 2010Pomerantz, 1977).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is it really search or just matching? The influence of Goodness, number of stimuli and presentation sequence in same–different tasks

Hermens

Lachmann

Leeuwen

2013

Psychological Research

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The Goodness of Garner dot patterns has been shown to influence same-different response times in a specific way, which has led to the formulation of a memory search model of pattern comparison. In this model, the space of possible variations of each pattern is searched separately for each pattern in the comparison, resulting in faster response times for patterns that have fewer alternatives. Compared to an alternative explanation based on stimulus encoding plus mental rotation, however, the existing data strongly favor this explanation. To obtain a more constraining set of data to distinguish between the two possible accounts, we extended the original paradigm to a situation in which participants needed to compare three, rather than two patterns and varied the way the stimuli were presented (simultaneously or sequentially). Our findings suggest that neither the memory search nor the encoding plus mental rotation model provides a complete description of the data, and that the effects of Goodness must be understood in a combination of both mechanisms, or in terms of cascades processing.

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“…Several reports in the literature have concluded that good patterns can be processed more rapidly than poor patterns (Bell & Handel, 1976;Checkosky & Whitlock, 1973;Clement & Varnadoe, 1967;Garner & Sutliff, 1974;Pomerantz, 1977). The underlying basis for the goodness effect has been a matter of theoretical interest.…”

Section: Study 4 Focusing Performancementioning

confidence: 99%

Context and goodness in a focusing task

King

Crist

Lockhead

1979

Perception & Psychophysics

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In a focusing task, people respond positively to one stimulus and negatively to all other stimuli that occur. The task has been called focusing in recognition of the possibility that only the target stimulus is relevant to performance, and that what people do is to focus on some aspect of the target, such as its configuration. The present study used eight patterns, and people focused on each pattern in eight different experimental conditions. The stimulus set was selected to have good patterns (according to symmetry, subjective goodness, and free classification measures) that were similar to each other (according to similarity judgments) and poor patterns that were dissimilar from one another and from the good patterns. The results were that the good patterns were difficult (speed and accuracy) to classify, and the poor patterns were easy. The similarity between the target pattern and the other patterns in the total set, i.e., the context of each focused stimulus, predicted performance. These results support the idea that similarity judgments measure relevant aspects of context and that the effects of context on performance should not be overlooked.

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Pattern uncertainty and the discrimination of visual patterns

Cited by 58 publications

References 5 publications

Stimulus-specific processing consequences of pattern goodness

Stimulus-specific processing consequences of pattern goodness

Is it really search or just matching? The influence of Goodness, number of stimuli and presentation sequence in same–different tasks

Context and goodness in a focusing task

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