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Biomedical subjects

R W Frick

Publications and source records attributed to R W Frick.

11 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1992

Interestingness.

What makes a statement interesting? In Expts 1 and 2, merely increasing the amount of background knowledge on a topic did not always increase the interest for statements on that topic. However, background knowledge that combined with a statement to create an interesting implicit proposition did increase interest. In Expt 3, the likelihood of an event's occurrence was not a good predictor of its interestingness, whereas there was a good correspondence between interest and changes in the subjects' beliefs. These findings suggest that interest is not a simple function of either unexpectedness or amount of background knowledge. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that statements changing a person's beliefs or confidence in beliefs are interesting.

Attention↗
PubMed1989

Recency and the modality effect in immediate ordered recall.

In immediate ordered recall, recency is the improved recall of the last item of a presentation, and the modality effect is the advantage for an acoustic presentation over a subvocalized visual presentation, primarily occurring at the last serial position. Experiment 1 tested grouped presentations. There was a modality effect for the first item of the last group, even though that item was at the third-to-last or fourth-to-last serial position. In Experiment 2, for vocalized presentations of syllables ending in a, recency was larger for staccato speech than legato speech; for subvocalized presentations, there was a substantial recency for the legato style. In Experiment 3, recency was larger for a set of syllables ending in ATE than for a set of syllables ending in AME. These results suggest that recency cannot be explained by the existence of a fixed-capacity store, auxiliary to the auditory short-term store, that retains only some types of presentations. It is suggested instead that recency might reflect an auxiliary method of using the information in the auditory short-term store.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed1989

Explanations of grouping in immediate ordered recall.

This article is about grouping in immediate ordered recall. The following findings are reported: (1) grouping a presentation improves recall, even when steps are taken to prevent rehearsal; (2) grouping primarily improves recall of the items adjoining the grouping, creating primacy and recency within groups; and (3) this primacy and recency are found even when single, isolated errors in recall are considered. These results suggest that the effects of grouping cannot be fully explained by rehearsal, chunking, or the number of directions in which an item can be transposed. It is suggested instead that (1) the auditory short-term store contains an unparsed and uncategorized representation that must be parsed and categorized just prior to recall, in a process of recovery; (2) items adjoining the boundary of a presentation are more easily recovered; and (3) grouping creates a boundary within the presentation. To support this explanation, a final experiment demonstrates an interaction between type of stimuli and serial position, with grouping most improving recall of adjoining phonemes.

Adult↗
PubMed1988

Issues of representation and limited capacity in the auditory short-term store.

This article makes several related claims about the auditory short-term store (ASTS) tested by immediate ordered recall. The first claim is that the representation in ASTS is uncategorical and unparsed. The second claim is that there is a stage of recovery just prior to recall, in which the information in ASTS is parsed and categorized. Finally, it is proposed that the amount of representational medium in ASTS is fixed and allocated proportionally to each item in the presentation. When too many items are presented, the items are not represented with sufficient fidelity to be recovered, leading to the phenomenon of limited capacity. These claims are contrasted to the predictions of a slot model, in which ASTS is hypothesized to store a fixed number of categorical and parsed items. Novel explanations are given for several phenomena in immediate ordered recall, including the Hebb effect, the correlation between perceptibility and capacity, and serial position curves.

Attention↗
PubMed1988

Issues of representation and limited capacity in the visuospatial sketchpad.

This article is about a visual short-term store called the visuospatial sketchpad (VSSP), which is tested by immediate ordered recall. Several claims are made: first, even for categorizable stimuli such as digits and letters, the representation in VSSP is uncategorized and unparsed. Second, the representation in VSSP is parsed and categorized just prior to recall in a process called recovery. The probability of recovering an item depends upon the fidelity of that item's representation. Third, VSSP has a fixed amount of representational medium which is allocated proportionally to the items in the presentation. When too many items are presented for recall, not all of the items are represented with sufficient fidelity to be recovered, producing the phenomenon of limited capacity.

Consciousness↗
PubMed1987

A dissociation of conscious visual imagery and visual short-term memory.

Two people who reported an impaired ability to form conscious visual images were tested. Compared to a control group of college students, these impaired visualizers were not impaired on two tests of visual short-term memory. Furthermore, they retained more digits in visual short-term memory than they could visualize. These results suggests that deficits in the ability to form conscious visual images can arise without visual short-term memory being impaired, and conscious visual imagery should not be equated with visual short-term memory.

Adult↗