Abstract A central question in perceptual and cognitive psychology is the nature of the processes... more Abstract A central question in perceptual and cognitive psychology is the nature of the processes that combine the multiple sources of environmental information in order to support the subjective, unitary percepts of objects. One of the more promising extant approaches is known as general recognition theory (GRT). GRT provides formal, mathematically-specified definitions of the ways in which perceptual dimensions (eg, the various elements of a face) can interact during perception and identification, and ...
Abstract: Speech perception requires the integration of information from multiple phonetic and ph... more Abstract: Speech perception requires the integration of information from multiple phonetic and phonological dimensions. Numerous studies have investigated the mapping between multiple acoustic-phonetic dimensions and single phonological dimensions (eg, spectral and temporal properties of stop consonants in voicing contrasts). Many fewer studies have addressed relationships between phonological dimensions.
While there is widespread agreement among vision researchers on the importance of some local aspe... more While there is widespread agreement among vision researchers on the importance of some local aspects of visual stimuli, such as hue and intensity, there is no general consensus on a full set of basic sources of information used in perceptual tasks or how they are processed. Gestalt theories place particular value on emergent features, which are based on the higher-order relationships among elements of a stimulus rather than local properties. Thus, arbitrating between different accounts of features is an important step in arbitrating between local and Gestalt theories of perception in general. In this paper, we present the capacity coefficient from Systems Factorial Technology (SFT) as a quantitative approach for formalizing and rigorously testing predictions made by local and Gestalt theories of features. As a simple, easily controlled domain for testing this approach, we focus on the local feature of location and the emergent features of Orientation and Proximity in a pair of dots....
Workload capacity describes processing efficiency across changes in workload, and is an important... more Workload capacity describes processing efficiency across changes in workload, and is an important concept in many areas of psychology. The capacity coefficient is one particularly useful measure of this construct, which is a function across time. Until now most analyses of the capacity coefficient focused on the overall height of this function, often only in terms of a qualitative judgment (greater than or less than one). In this work we detail how a functional extension of principal components analysis can enable us to capture the time extended information of this functional data and yet still describe differences across participants or conditions using a small number of scalar values chosen to maximally distinguish among as set of capture coefficients. The approach opens up many possibilities for a more fine grained study of differences in workload capacity across tasks as well as across individuals.
Abstract Much of scientific psychology and cognitive science can be viewed as a search to underst... more Abstract Much of scientific psychology and cognitive science can be viewed as a search to understand the mechanisms and dynamics of perception, thought and action. Two processing attributes of particular interest to psychologists are the architecture, or temporal relationships between sub-processes of the system, and the stopping rule, which dictates how many of the sub-processes must be completed for the system to finish.
Abstract General Recognition Theory (GRT; Ashby & Townsend, 1986) is a multidimensional theory of... more Abstract General Recognition Theory (GRT; Ashby & Townsend, 1986) is a multidimensional theory of classification. Originally developed to study various types of perceptual independence, it has also been widely employed in diverse cognitive venues, such as categorization. The initial theory and applications have been static, that is, lacking a time variable and focusing on patterns of responses, such as confusion matrices.
Abstract A central question in perceptual and cognitive psychology is the nature of the processes... more Abstract A central question in perceptual and cognitive psychology is the nature of the processes that combine the multiple sources of environmental information in order to support the subjective, unitary percepts of objects. One of the more promising extant approaches is known as general recognition theory (GRT). GRT provides formal, mathematically-specified definitions of the ways in which perceptual dimensions (eg, the various elements of a face) can interact during perception and identification, and ...
Abstract: Speech perception requires the integration of information from multiple phonetic and ph... more Abstract: Speech perception requires the integration of information from multiple phonetic and phonological dimensions. Numerous studies have investigated the mapping between multiple acoustic-phonetic dimensions and single phonological dimensions (eg, spectral and temporal properties of stop consonants in voicing contrasts). Many fewer studies have addressed relationships between phonological dimensions.
While there is widespread agreement among vision researchers on the importance of some local aspe... more While there is widespread agreement among vision researchers on the importance of some local aspects of visual stimuli, such as hue and intensity, there is no general consensus on a full set of basic sources of information used in perceptual tasks or how they are processed. Gestalt theories place particular value on emergent features, which are based on the higher-order relationships among elements of a stimulus rather than local properties. Thus, arbitrating between different accounts of features is an important step in arbitrating between local and Gestalt theories of perception in general. In this paper, we present the capacity coefficient from Systems Factorial Technology (SFT) as a quantitative approach for formalizing and rigorously testing predictions made by local and Gestalt theories of features. As a simple, easily controlled domain for testing this approach, we focus on the local feature of location and the emergent features of Orientation and Proximity in a pair of dots....
Workload capacity describes processing efficiency across changes in workload, and is an important... more Workload capacity describes processing efficiency across changes in workload, and is an important concept in many areas of psychology. The capacity coefficient is one particularly useful measure of this construct, which is a function across time. Until now most analyses of the capacity coefficient focused on the overall height of this function, often only in terms of a qualitative judgment (greater than or less than one). In this work we detail how a functional extension of principal components analysis can enable us to capture the time extended information of this functional data and yet still describe differences across participants or conditions using a small number of scalar values chosen to maximally distinguish among as set of capture coefficients. The approach opens up many possibilities for a more fine grained study of differences in workload capacity across tasks as well as across individuals.
Abstract Much of scientific psychology and cognitive science can be viewed as a search to underst... more Abstract Much of scientific psychology and cognitive science can be viewed as a search to understand the mechanisms and dynamics of perception, thought and action. Two processing attributes of particular interest to psychologists are the architecture, or temporal relationships between sub-processes of the system, and the stopping rule, which dictates how many of the sub-processes must be completed for the system to finish.
Abstract General Recognition Theory (GRT; Ashby & Townsend, 1986) is a multidimensional theory of... more Abstract General Recognition Theory (GRT; Ashby & Townsend, 1986) is a multidimensional theory of classification. Originally developed to study various types of perceptual independence, it has also been widely employed in diverse cognitive venues, such as categorization. The initial theory and applications have been static, that is, lacking a time variable and focusing on patterns of responses, such as confusion matrices.
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Papers by J. Townsend