Attention and Effort

Levels of processing: A framework for memory research

Recent studies of eye movements in reading and other information processing tasks, such as music reading, typing, visual search, and scene perception, are reviewed. The major emphasis of the review is on reading as a specific example of cognitive processing. Basic topics discussed with respect to reading are (a) the characteristics of eye movements, (b) the perceptual span, (c) integration of information across saccades, (d) eye movement control, and (e) individual differences (including dyslexia). Similar topics are discussed with respect to the other tasks examined. The basic theme of the review is that eye movement data reflect moment-to-moment cognitive processes in the various tasks examined. Theoretical and practical considerations concerning the use of eye movement data are also discussed.

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Eye movements in reading and information processing: 20 years of research.

Miller (1956) summarized evidence that people can remember about seven chunks in short-term memory (STM) tasks. How- ever, that number was meant more as a rough estimate and a rhetorical device than as a real capacity limit. Others have since suggested that there is a more precise capacity limit, but that it is only three to five chunks. The present target article brings together a wide vari- ety of data on capacity limits suggesting that the smaller capacity limit is real. Capacity limits will be useful in analyses of information processing only if the boundary conditions for observing them can be carefully described. Four basic conditions in which chunks can be identified and capacity limits can accordingly be observed are: (1) when information overload limits chunks to individual stimulus items, (2) when other steps are taken specifically to block the recoding of stimulus items into larger chunks, (3) in performance discontinuities caused by the capacity limit, and (4) in various indirect effects of the capacity limit. Under these conditions, rehearsal and long-term memory cannot be used to combine stimulus items into chunks of an unknown size; nor can storage mechanisms that are not capacity- limited, such as sensory memory, allow the capacity-limited storage mechanism to be refilled during recall. A single, central capacity limit averaging about four chunks is implicated along with other, noncapacity-limited sources. The pure STM capacity limit expressed in chunks is distinguished from compound STM limits obtained when the number of separately held chunks is unclear. Reasons why pure capacity estimates fall within a narrow range are discussed and a capacity limit for the focus of attention is proposed.

/pdf/the-magical-number-4-in-short-term-memory-a-reconsideration-3704b9phuz.pdf

The magical number 4 in short-term memory: a reconsideration of mental storage capacity.

Strategies of Discourse Comprehension

We can all agree that the capacity to symbolize and communicate in language has powerful effects on how we think and behave, but how does the way we think affect the structure of our language? This article explores the ways in which specific properties of language structure and speech behavior reflect certain general cognitive laws. Recent investigations of language have made an important simplifying assumption: the primary subject for linguistic description is linguistic knowledge, as opposed to linguistic behavior. This heuristic strategy has facilitated progress in the formal description of the “abstract” structures of language, but has left open the question of how such structures are learned by children and utilized by adults. Previous attempts to integrate linguistic structure and speech behavior have been efforts to find direct mappings of abstract linguistic structures onto language learning, speech perception, and speech production. Although the details of these mappings differ, the basic postulate is the same: actual speech behavior is some regular function of the abstract linguistic structure originally isolated in linguistic investigations. That is, grammar rests at the epicenter of all language behavior, with different functions of

The cognitive basis for linguistic structures

Musically experienced listeners recognize simple melodies better in the right ear than the left, while the reverse is true for naive listeners. Hence, contrary to previous reports, music perception supports the hypothesis that the left hemisphere is dominant for analytic processing and the right hemisphere for holistic processing.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/185/4150/537.full.pdf

Cerebral Dominance in Musicians and Nonmusicians

More than 19,000 multisign utterances of an infant chimpanzee (Nim) were analyzed for syntactic and semantic regularities. Lexical regularities were observed in the case of two-sign combinations: particular signs (for example, more) tended to occur in a particular position. These regularities could not be attributed to memorization or to position habits, suggesting that they were structurally constrained. That conclusion, however, was invalidated by videotape analyses, which showed that most of Nim's utterances were prompted by his teacher's prior utterance, and that Nim interrupted his teachers to a much larger extent than a child interrupts an adult's speech. Signed utterances of other apes (as shown on films) revealed similar non-human patterns of discourse.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/206/4421/891.full.pdf

Thomas G. Bever

Papers

The cognitive basis for linguistic structures

Cerebral Dominance in Musicians and Nonmusicians

Can an ape create a sentence

The Psychology of Language: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics and Generative Grammar

Children use canonical sentence schemas: a crosslinguistic study of word order and inflections.