Showing papers on "Salience (neuroscience) published in 1989"

Understanding collision dynamics.

Abstract: In two experiments we investigated people's ability to judge the relative mass of two objects involved in a collision. It was found that judgments of relative mass were made on the basis of two heuristics. Roughly stated, these heuristics were (a) an object that ricochets backward upon impact is less massive than the object that it hit, and (b) faster moving objects are less massive. A heuristic model of judgment is proposed that postulates that different sources of information in any event may have different levels of salience for observers and that heuristic access is controlled by the rank ordering of salience. It was found that observers ranked dissimilarity in mass on the basis of the relative salience of angle and velocity information and not proportionally to the distal mass ratio. This heuristic model was contrasted with the notion that people can veridically extract dynamic properties of motion events when the kinematic data are sufficient for their specification.

In-Group Salience, Intergroup Comparison, and Individual Performance and Self-Esteem

Abstract: Because of connections between individual self-esteem and in-group status, it was expected that in-group focus of attention would motivate individual performance in circumstances where high performance would help establish the superiority of the group. Lacking circumstances indicating the importance of individual performance to group status, in-group salience was expected to lead to a general decrease in motivation to perform by providing an unthreatened boost to self-esteem. One study having an in-group salience manipulation, with implied group comparison as a constant, and one study in which both in-group salience and perceived intergroup comparison were manipulated yielded evidence supporting these propositions.

Perceptual Salience as a Function of Nonverbal Expressiveness

Abstract: This study investigates the stimulus properties characterizing the behavior of nonverbally expressive people and the cues that underlie these properties. Observers viewed brief video clips of 32 female subjects either high or low in expressiveness. While watching each clip, one set of observers segmented the subjects' behavior into meaningful units. A second set of observers rated the behavior on stimulus dimensions related to perceptual salience and also rated how noticeable each subject was. As predicted, expressives' behavior was seen as significantly more intense, more novel, more complex, and more changing, and the subjects themselves were judged to be more noticeable than the unexpressive subjects. Further expressives elicited a significantly higher segmentation rate than unexpressives. Nonverbal cue coding suggests that gestural animation has the stronigest impact on salience. The results are discussed in relation to salience effects and social influence processes.

Focusing attention for observational learning: the importance of context

Abstract: A significant component of human observational learning is the ability to focus attention toward important or relevant input features. Amechanism with this capability can serve as an inductive bias to facilitate learning in both humans and machines. Past attempts to model attentional focus for human learning have postulated a single salience value for each feature, such that features with greater salience command more attention. These models, however, assume that the feature's salience is not dependent on context, whereas studies of human attention show sensitivity to context. This paper presents a mechanism for contextually focused attention in observational learning.

Distortions in memory for visual displays

Abstract: Systematic errors in perception and memory present a challenge to theories of perception and memory and to applied psychologists interested in overcoming them as well. A number of systematic errors in memory for maps and graphs are reviewed, and they are accounted for by an analysis of the perceptual processing presumed to occur in comprehension of maps and graphs. Visual stimuli, like verbal stimuli, are organized in comprehension and memory. For visual stimuli, the organization is a consequence of perceptual processing, which is bottom-up or data-driven in its earlier stages, but top-down and affected by conceptual knowledge later on. Segregation of figure from ground is an early process, and figure recognition later; for both, symmetry is a rapidly detected and ecologically valid cue. Once isolated, figures are organized relative to one another and relative to a frame of reference. Both perceptual (e.g., salience) and conceptual factors (e.g., significance) seem likely to affect selection of a reference frame. Consistent with the analysis, subjects perceived and remembered curves in graphs and rivers in maps as more symmetric than they actually were. Symmetry, useful for detecting and recognizing figures, distorts map and graph figures alike. Top-down processes also seem to operate in that calling attention to the symmetry vs. asymmetry of a slightly asymmetric curve yielded memory errors in the direction of the description. Conceptual frame of reference effects were demonstrated in memory for lines embedded in graphs. In earlier work, the orientation of map figures was distorted in memory toward horizontal or vertical. In recent work, graph lines, but not map lines, were remembered as closer to an imaginary 45 deg line than they had been. Reference frames are determined by both perceptual and conceptual factors, leading to selection of the canonical axes as a reference frame in maps, but selection of the imaginary 45 deg as a reference frame in graphs.