Biomedical subjects

Lana M Trick

Publications and source records attributed to Lana M Trick.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2005

Age-related differences in multiple-object tracking.

Multiple-object tracking is the ability to attend (keep track of) the positions of multiple target items as they move among other items. The performance of young and older adults (M = 19 and 73 years old, respectively) was compared in two versions of a tracking task in which participants were required to monitor the positions of 1-4 moving targets in a field of 10 moving items. All participants were capable of tracking more than 1 item at once, but on average older participants tracked around 3 items at once whereas young adults tracked 4. Results suggest that there are age differences in the ability to either track or report positions of moving items. All participants reported positions of 1-4 targets in a field of 10 items with 100% accuracy when items were static.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2005

The role of working memory in spatial enumeration: patterns of selective interference in subitizing and counting.

Articulatory suppression (repeatedly pronouncing a syllable or word while carrying out another task) is thought to interfere selectively with the phonological store in working memory. Although suppression interferes with temporal enumeration (enumerating successive light flashes), to date there has been little evidence of such interference in spatial enumeration (enumerating units laid out in space at one time)--a finding with serious ramifications for theories of enumeration. Participants carried out a spatial enumeration task, enumerating 1-8 dots while listening to a metronome (baseline condition) or while carrying out a secondary task to the rhythm of the metronome (dual-task condition). There were four secondary tasks: simple articulation (saying a letter), complex articulation (alternating between two letters), simple tapping (tapping a finger), and complex tapping (alternating between two fingers). Interference varied with number of items, but the pattern differed from that observed with temporal enumeration.

Association Learning↗

PubMed2003

Grouping and gambling: a Gestalt approach to understanding the gambler's fallacy.

The gambler's fallacy was examined in terms of grouping processes. The gambler's fallacy is the tendency to erroneously believe that for independent events, recent or repeated instances of an outcome (e.g., a series of "heads" when flipping a coin) will make that outcome less likely on an upcoming trial. Grouping was manipulated such that a critical trial following a run of heads or tails was grouped together with previous trials (i.e., the last trial of "Block 1") or was the first trial of another group (the first trial of "Block 2"). As predicted, the gambler's fallacy was evident when the critical trial was grouped with the previous trials, but not when it was arbitrarily grouped with the next block of trials. Discussion centres on the processes underlying the gambler's fallacy and practical implications of these findings.

Attitude↗

PubMed2003

Age differences in enumerating things that move: implications for the development of multiple-object tracking.

The attentional theory of spatial enumeration (Trick & Pylyshyn, 1994) predicts that subitizing, the rapid process (40-120 msec/item) used to enumerate 1-4 items, employs the same mechanism that permits individuals to track 4-5 moving items simultaneously, whereas enumerating more items requires moving attentional focus from area to area in the display. To test this theory, enumeration of static and moving items was investigated in 8-, 10-, 12-, and 20-year-old participants using a number discrimination task. As was predicted, random independent item motion did not substantially impede enumeration of 1-4 items regardless of age. However, even movement within a 1.14 degree square area slowed enumeration of 6-9 items, although on average the interference decreased with age from 788 msec for the 8-year-olds to 136 msec for the 20-year-olds. The relevance of this finding for theories of enumeration, multiple-object tracking, visual working memory, and object-based attention is discussed.

Age Factors↗