Range effects of an irrelevant dimension on classification

Abstract

In univariate classification tasks, subjects sort stimuli on the basis of the only attribute that varies. In orthogonal classification tasks, often calledfiltering tasks, there additionally are trial-to-trial variations in irrelevant attributes that the subjects are instructed to ignore. Performance is generally slower in filtering tasks than in univariate control tasks. Weinvestigated this slowing in experiments of how the range of irrelevant trial-to-trial variation affects responses in pitch/loudness classification tasks. Using two levels of pitch and of loudness as stimuli, Experiment 1 replicated prior work showing that responses are slowed more when the range of the irrelevant dimension is made larger. Also in Experiment 1,sequential analyses showed that response time depends both on sequence and on the stimulus set independent of sequence. Experiments 2 and 3 used several levels on the irrelevant dimension and showed that responses to categorize loudness are slowed more by larger trial-to-trial pitch differences, but only on trials when the response repeats. When the response changes, performance is essentially unaffected by trial-to-trial irrelevant variation. This interaction supports the conclusion that slowed average performance in orthogonal classification tasks, which is known as Garner interference, is not due to difficulties that subjects have in filtering stimulus attributes. It is due to how subjects process successive stimulus differences. Wecall for more frequent reports of sequential analyses, because these can reveal information that is not available from data averages.Often, people cannot ignore irrelevant information when they classify a stimulus attribute. For example, when people are asked to classify auditory tones according to pitch, their performance is worse (slower and with more errors) when the timbre of the tone varies randomly between trials than if the timbre remains fixed between trials (Crowder, 1989). Irrelevant variation in loudness similarly interferes with performance when tones are classified according to pitch (Lockhead, 1992b;Melara & Mounts, 1994).This result-the fact that irrelevant variation on one dimension interferes with classification on another dimension-is called Garner interference (Gamer, 1974). Whenever there is such interference, the stimulus dimensions interact, which is contrary to what should occur if people could abstract a feature from a stimulus and process it independently ofother features, as Stevens (1975) proposed. There have been many attempts to understand this apparent interference (Garner, 1970; Lockhead, 1966 Lockhead, , 1992bMelara & Marks, 1990;Melara & O'Brien, 1987;Pomerantz & Garner, 1973;Shepard, 1964), none of which was fully successful. Each ofthese attempts addressed characteristics of individual stimuli, and all of these experimental approaches compared average perforThis research was partially supported by a National Science Foundation fellowship to S.A.H. Correspondence should be addressed to S. A. Huettel, Department of Psycho...

An old task in new clothes: A preregistered direct replication attempt of enclothed cognition effects on Stroop performance

“…The sequential effects on response time seen here are as expected based on the work by Huettel and Lockhead (1999) and more recently Little, Wang, and Nosofsky (2016) using a related selective attention task, the Garner paradigm. Their work predicts our finding that trials where both font color and word were repeated are faster than all other trials (by 18 ms), while trials in which the stimulus changes but the response stays the same (font color repeat with word change) are the slowest of all.…”

Selective attention to pitch amid conflicting auditory information: context-coding and filtering strategies

“…This is plausible because, perceptually, the effect of level differences is somewhat similar those in pitch (Zwicker & Fastl, 1990), especially in the untrained participant; in addition, previous studies (Rossing & Houtsma, 1986) show that the pitch of pure tones depends on level. The perceptual equivalence observed in classification tasks suggests that pitch and loudness are integral dimensions (e.g., Garner & Felfoldy, 1970;Graw & Kemler Nelson, 1988;Huettel & Lockhead, 1999;Melara & Marks, 1990a), and that an increase in loudness is congruent with one in pitch (Melara & Marks, 1990b;Melara & Mounts, 1994). The absence of interference with negative polarity-level differences (i.e., decrements) is consistent with the above (Espinoza-Varas & Jang, 2006b).…”

The crucial roles of stimulus matching and stimulus identity in negative priming

“…In processing the probe display, people try to match the target item to other recently experienced items, particularly the most recently experienced item (cf. Huettel & Lockhead, 1999, for a compelling analysis of trial sequence effects in general). A complete match can facilitate processing of the probe target.…”