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W T Maddox

Publications and source records attributed to W T Maddox.

11 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1997

Direct and indirect stimulus-frequency effects in recognition.

Subsequent recognition of stimuli perceived in a given situation was studied in relation to stimulus familiarity as determined by frequency in observers' prior experience. To distinguish direct and indirect frequency effects, on the basis of selective memory retrieval and selective attention during learning, respectively, rigorous controls were imposed on stimulus rehearsability and learning conditions. As predicted by a global memory model, both hits and false alarms on recognition tests increased as a function of prior frequency in a concordant pattern that indicates a direct effect, in contrast with the usual indirect effect of varying normative word frequency. Understanding the role of experiential stimulus frequency in recognition may further the interpretation of research in such paradigms as eyewitness testimony.

Adult↗
PubMed1996

Perceptual separability, decisional separability, and the identification-speeded classification relationship.

Three observers participated in several sessions of identification and speeded classification. Predictions from F. G. Ashby and W. T. Maddox's (1994a) response time (RT) theory of speeded classification were tested. A key theoretical concept is decisional separability (DS), that is, that the decision about the level of 1 component does not depend on the perceived value of the other component. The theory predicted that DS would hold in the filtering task but would be violated in the redundancy task, resulting in the redundancy gains. To summarize the results, (a) DS held in the filtering conditions, but not in the redundancy conditions; (b) redundancy gains occurred; (c) despite the redundancy gains, strong evidence was obtained that the stimulus components are perceptually separable; (d) 2 new models that each assumed RT decreases with the distance between the percept and the decision bound provided good accounts of the RT distributions and accuracy rates; and (e) the shift from identification to speeded classification influenced both perceptual and decisional processes.

Adult↗
PubMed1996

A formal theory of feature binding in object perception.

Visual objects are perceived correctly only if their features are identified and then bound together. Illusory conjunctions result when feature identification is correct but an error occurs during feature binding. A new model is proposed that assumes feature binding errors occur because of uncertainty about the location of visual features. This model accounted for data from 2 new experiments better than a model derived from A. M. Treisman and H. Schmidt's (1982) feature integration theory. The traditional method for detecting the occurrence of true illusory conjunctions is shown to be fundamentally flawed. A reexamination of 2 previous studies provided new insights into the role of attention and location information in object perception and a reinterpretation of the deficits in patients who exhibit attentional disorders.

Adult↗
PubMed1995

Base-rate effects in multidimensional perceptual categorization.

The optimality of human performance when category base rates differ was investigated in 2 multidimensional perceptual categorization tasks. All participants were sensitive to differences in base rate, even during their 1st experimental session. Nearly half of the participants learned the optimal decision bound by their final experimental session. Little evidence for conservative cutoff placement was found (i.e., an underestimation of category base-rate differences). In fact, participants who did not learn the optimal decision bound tended to use a decision bound that overestimated the base-rate difference. Across all conditions participants showed a clear shift toward the optimal decision bound with experience. These data suggest that experienced participants are highly sensitive to differences in category base rate. The model-based analyses suggest that the decision-bound model of categorization (Ashby, 1992a; Ashby & Maddox, 1993; Maddox & Ashby, 1993) provides a powerful tool for investigating the limits of human categorization performance.

Adult↗
PubMed1995

Interactions of stimulus attributes, base rates, and feedback in recognition.

Continuous old-new recognition was studied in relation to 3 factors that have been relatively neglected in previous research-stimulus attributes, old-new base rates, and informative feedback following responses. Under all conditions, both hits and false alarms increased over trials and all measures of recognition depended strongly on stimulus properties, notably interitem similarity. In contrast to expectations based on earlier results, both hit and false-alarm levels proved independent of old-new base rate when tests were given without feedback; with feedback added, false-alarm rates tended to approach true old-stimulus base rates with some types of stimuli, though not with words. The findings are compatible, in general, with current composite-memory models and were predicted in detail by an array-similarity model deriving from categorization theory.

Adult↗
PubMed1994

A probabilistic multidimensional model of location information.

A probabilistic multidimensional model of location discrimination is developed and applied to data from an experiment in which subjects are required to determine whether a briefly presented horizontal and vertical bar are touching. The proposed gap-detection model assumes that errors in perception are due to variability in the perceived location and/or in the perceived length of the bars. A series of gap-detection models that allow variability only in perceived location were rejected on the basis of likelihood-ratio tests of overall goodness of fit. However, when the models were modified to account for: (a) a compression of the distance perceived between the bars (Wolford, 1975), or (b) the bisection illusion (Künnapas, 1955), excellent absolute fits to the data were obtained. A pair of models that suggests that the horizontal/vertical illusion or a response bias was operative failed. Applications of the model to more conventional object-perception experiments (e.g., the illusory-conjunction experiment) are discussed.

Adult↗
PubMed1993

Comparing decision bound and exemplar models of categorization.

The performance of a decision bound model of categorization (Ashby, 1992a; Ashby & Maddox, in press) is compared with the performance of two exemplar models. The first is the generalized context model (e.g., Nosofsky, 1986, 1992) and the second is a recently proposed deterministic exemplar model (Ashby & Maddox, in press), which contains the generalized context model as a special case. When the exemplars from each category were normally distributed and the optimal decision bound was linear, the deterministic exemplar model and the decision bound model provided roughly equivalent accounts of the data. When the optimal decision bound was non-linear, the decision bound model provided a more accurate account of the data than did either exemplar model. When applied to categorization data collected by Nosofsky (1986, 1989), in which the category exemplars are not normally distributed, the decision bound model provided excellent accounts of the data, in many cases significantly outperforming the exemplar models. The decision bound model was found to be especially successful when (1) single subject analyses were performed, (2) each subject was given relatively extensive training, and (3) the subject's performance was characterized by complex suboptimalities. These results support the hypothesis that the decision bound is of fundamental importance in predicting asymptotic categorization performance and that the decision bound models provide a viable alternative to the currently popular exemplar models of categorization.

Adult↗
PubMed1992

Evaluation of a prolonged infusion of recombinant tissue-type plasminogen activator (Duteplase) in preventing reocclusion following successful thrombolysis in acute myocardial infarction.

The hypothesis that an infusion of recombinant tissue-type plasminogen activator (rt-PA) maintained for up to 24 hours could prevent reocclusion after early coronary patency had been established was evaluated in patients with acute myocardial infarction. The rt-PA studied was an investigational double chain rt-PA (Duteplase, Burroughs Wellcome Co.), administered according to body weight. Coronary patency was documented in 139 of 213 patients who had 90-minute angiograms recorded after an initial lytic dose of rt-PA. In these responders a further 90-minute infusion at one third the initial lytic dose was given before assignment to 1 of 4 maintenance dose rates (0.012, 0.024, 0.036, 0.048 MIU/kg/hour) which were continued for the subsequent 9 to 21 hours. The principal end point was the status of the infarct-related coronary artery 12 to 24 hours after the start of therapy, and before termination of rt-PA, in patients with initially patent vessels at 90 minutes. Of the 103 responders with repeat angiograms after a 9 to 21 hour maintenance infusion of rt-PA, a total of 17 (16.5%) patients reoccluded across all doses administered. There was no significant relationship between the maintenance dose rate and the incidence of reocclusion. However, there was strong association between total dose of rt-PA administered and the incidence (16%) of serious or life-threatening bleeding exclusive of surgery. Other factors associated with serious bleeding included low body weight, female gender, and total duration of rt-PA infusion. Reocclusion was independent of the 90-minute Thrombolysis in Myocardial Infarction trial perfusion grade and diameter of infarct vessel. Rethrombosis after establishment of early patency after rt-PA remains a significant problem that is unaffected by sustained rt-PA infusion in doses that can be tolerated.

Female↗
PubMed1990

Integrating information from separable psychological dimensions.

This article examines decision processes in the perception and categorization of stimuli composed of the separable psychological dimensions, orientation and size. The randomization technique (Ashby & Gott, 1988) of general recognition theory, which allows accurate estimation of a subject's decision boundary in a categorization task, is used in 4 experiments. Even though the stimulus components are clearly separable, it was found that Ss were not constrained to use separable response strategies, nor were they constrained to attend to distance to the prototypes. Instead, they used decision rules that were nearly optimal, even if this required information integration or for the Ss to attend to higher level category properties such as component correlation.

Adult↗
PubMed1983

Platelet function abnormalities in response to arachidonic acid in the acute phase of myocardial infarction.

The aggregation of platelets to arachidonic acid was studied serially in patients admitted to the hospital with suspected acute myocardial infarction (MI) and no history of platelet-altering drug ingestion. Of 17 patients studied within the first 48 hours after MI, 16 had a marked decrease in aggregation, to 0.5 mM arachidonic acid (15 +/- 12% compared with 64 +/- 15% for control subjects, p less than 0.01). The exception was a patient with documented coronary artery spasm who was receiving nifedipine at the time of MI. He had a delayed but normal final percent aggregation. The aggregation response returned to normal at 2 to 4 days and was slightly above normal at 6 to 10 days (change not statistically significant). Thromboxane B2 formation correlated with the response of patients' platelets to arachidonic acid (38 +/- 15 ng in the low responders versus 161 +/- 30 ng/3 X 10(8) platelets/4 min in the normal responders, p less than 0.05). Low responding platelets after washing had normal adenosine diphosphate and adenosine triphosphate contents and aggregated and formed thromboxane B2 normally with arachidonic acid. The plasma of patients with MI was found to inhibit platelet aggregation and thromboxane B2 formation to arachidonic acid.

Adenosine Diphosphate↗