Biomedical subjects

Matthew A Paul

Publications and source records attributed to Matthew A Paul.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Vision-for-action: the effects of object property discrimination and action state on affordance compatibility effects.

When a person views an object, the action the object evokes appears to be activated independently of the person's intention to act. We demonstrate two further properties of this vision-to-action process. First, it is not completely automatic, but is determined by the stimulus properties of the object that are attended. Thus, when a person discriminates the shape of an object, action affordance effects are observed; but when a person discriminates an object's color, no affordance effects are observed. The former, shape property is associated with action, such as how an object might be grasped; the latter, color property is irrelevant to action. Second, we also show that the action state of an object influences evoked action. Thus, active objects, with which current action is implied, produce larger affordance effects than passive objects, with which no action is implied. We suggest that the active object activates action simulation processes similar to those proposed in mirror systems.

Adult↗

PubMed2005

Inhibition of object identity in inhibition of return: implications for encoding and retrieving inhibitory processes.

Inhibition of return (IOR) effects, in which participants detect a target in a cued box more slowly than one in an uncued box, suggest that behavior is aided by inhibition of recently attended irrelevant locations. To investigate the controversial question of whether inhibition can be applied to object identity in these tasks, in the present research we presented faces upright or inverted during cue and/or target sequences. IOR was greater when both cue and target faces were upright than when cue and/or target faces were inverted. Because the only difference between the conditions was the ease of facial recognition, this result indicates that inhibition was applied to object identity. Interestingly, inhibition of object identity affected IOR both when encoding a cue face and retrieving information about a target face. Accordingly, we propose that episodic retrieval of inhibition associated with object identity may mediate behavior in cuing tasks.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2002

Object-based representations facilitate memory for inhibitory processes.

Previous work has shown that in a sequential cueing task, inhibition of the return of attention (IOR) can be observed for up to four or five loci. We have argued that the inhibition processes mediating IOR are associated with object-based representations, and it is object-based representations that are maintained in memory. Experiments presented here show that, compared with standard conditions in which a number of identical grey squares are cued, cueing empty locations tends to reduce the memory for prior inhibitory processes; while cueing objects which are distinctive in colour and shape tends to increase memory for inhibition. Converging with other recent findings, we conclude that memory for the inhibitory processes of attention facilitates visual search and that this memory is dependent on object-based representations.

Attention↗