Papers by Richard Carlson
Fluent cognitive performance depends on concurrent activation of appropriate representations of g... more Fluent cognitive performance depends on concurrent activation of appropriate representations of goals, procedures, and data. This observation is reflected in a
Psychological science, 2018
We often remember information without its source (e.g., word or picture format). This phenomenon ... more We often remember information without its source (e.g., word or picture format). This phenomenon has been studied extensively in long-term memory but rarely in the context of short-term working memory (WM), which leaves open the question of whether source amnesia can result from a lack of memory encoding rather than forgetting. This study provided a series of striking and novel demonstrations showing participants' inability to report the source of a color representation immediately after that color was used in a task and stored in memory. These counterintuitive findings occurred when participants repeatedly judged the congruency between two color representations from one single object (i.e., color and identity of a color word) or two distinct objects (i.e., color of a square and identity of a color word) and then were unexpectedly asked to report the source of one color representation. These discoveries suggest that source information is often not stored in WM.
Component Fluency in a Problem-Solving Context
Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, 1989
Theories of cognitive skill suggest two hypotheses about component task practice. First, componen... more Theories of cognitive skill suggest two hypotheses about component task practice. First, component practice increases the speed of executing component skills during problem solving. Second, component practice produces component skills that behave as encapsulated subroutines. Eight college students practiced making judgments about digital logic gates for 1360 trials. At two points during practice, they solved circuit problems that did or did not require logic gate knowledge. Time per move declined with problem-solving practice, but the effects of component training were ambiguous. However, teaching circuit functions did increase problem-solving speed. In a second experiment conducted at the end of practice, the same subjects solved problems designed to test whether the logic gate judgments acted as encapsulated subroutines. Component judgments were slower in the problem-solving context than in isolation, disconfirming this hypothesis. Taken together, the results indicate the need for...
Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition, Jul 11, 2016
Many studies have examined how people recall the locations of objects in spatial layouts. However... more Many studies have examined how people recall the locations of objects in spatial layouts. However, little is known about how people monitor the accuracy of judgments based on those memories. The goal of the present experiments was to examine the effect of reference frame characteristics on metacognitive accuracy for spatial judgments. Reference frame characteristics include the alignment of one's viewpoint with the structure of the environment (allocentric alignment), direction of the target with respect to one's current viewpoint (egocentric direction), and the type of perspective used to solve the task (egocentric vs. allocentric). Participants were tested on their knowledge of a well-known location in which they had experience navigating. They were asked to orient themselves toward a particular heading and point to target landmarks from this heading. They then rated their confidence in their pointing judgments. Confidence judgments were sensitive to the effects of allocen...
How to run experiments: A practical guide How to run experiments: A practical guide 3 Chapter 1, ... more How to run experiments: A practical guide How to run experiments: A practical guide 3 Chapter 1, Overview of the Research Process, describes where experiments fit into the research process. If you have taken either an experimental methods course or a research design course, you can skip this chapter. If, on the other hand, you are either a new research assistant or are working on a project in which you are unclear of your role or how to proceed, this chapter may provide some helpful context. This chapter also introduces several running examples. Chapter 2, Preparation for Running Experiments, describes pertinent topics for preparing to run your experiment-such as supplemental reading materials, recruitment of participants, choosing experimental measures, and getting Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval for experiments involving participants. Chapter 3, Potential Ethical Problems, describes ethical considerations necessary for safely running experiments with human participants-i.e., how to ethically recruit participants, how to handle data gathered from participants, how to use that data, and how to report that data. Being vigilant and aware of these topics is an important component to rigorous, as well as ethical, research. Chapter 4, Risks to Validity to Avoid While Running an Experiment, describes risks that can invalidate your experimental data. If you fail to avoid these types of risks, you may obtain either false or uninterruptible results from your experiment. Thus, before starting your study, you should be aware of these risks and how to avoid them. Chapter 5, Running a Research Study, describes practical information about what you have to do when you run experiments. This section will give an example procedure that you can follow. Chapter 6, Concluding a Research Session and Study, describes practical information about what to do at the conclusion of each experimental session and at the end of a study. Chapter 7, Afterward, summarizes the book and describes the appendices. The Appendixes include an example checklist for starting a study, a checklist for setting up a study, an example consent form, an example debriefing form, and an example IRB form. The details and format of these forms will vary by lab and IRB committee, but the materials in the appendixes provide examples of the style and tone. There is also an appendix on how this material could apply to online studies. A web site holding supplementary material is available a http://acs.ist.psu.edu/how-to-run-experiments .
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 2002
We thank Lori Forlizzi, Marc Grosjean, Tim Rickard, Mike Stadler, and an anonymous reviewer for t... more We thank Lori Forlizzi, Marc Grosjean, Tim Rickard, Mike Stadler, and an anonymous reviewer for their constructive comments on earlier drafts. We are grateful to Rickard and Stadler for suggesting the analysis including experiment as a factor. Portions of these data were presented in a poster at the
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 1998
The American Journal of Psychology, 2003
Complex cognitive tasks such as multiple step arithmetic require strategies for coordinating ment... more Complex cognitive tasks such as multiple step arithmetic require strategies for coordinating mental processes such as calculation with processes for managing working memory. To be most effective, such strategies must be sensitive to factors such as the time required for calculation. In two experiments, we tested whether people can learn the timing constraints on WM demands, when those constraints are implicitly imposed. We varied the retention period for intermediate results using the well-known digit size effect: The larger the operands, the longer it takes to perform addition. During learning, participants practiced multiple-step arithmetic routines combined with large or small digits. At transfer, they performed both practiced and novel combinations. Practice performance was affected by digit size and working memory demands. However, the transfer performance was not fully explained by the digit size effect or simply by the practice effect. We argue that participants acquired temporal tuning of the WM strategy to the implicit retention interval imposed by the digit size, and kept using the tuning mode to unpracticed data set.
Proceedings of the 29th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 2007
Organizer/Discussant: Hansjörg Neth (nethh@ rpi. edu) Cognitive Science Department Rensselaer Pol... more Organizer/Discussant: Hansjörg Neth (nethh@ rpi. edu) Cognitive Science Department Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Keywords: immediate interactive behavior; embodiment; embedded, situated, distributed, augmented cognition; adaptation; rational analysis, ecological psychology.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 1989
Several theories assume that practice (a) results in restructuring of component processes and (b)... more Several theories assume that practice (a) results in restructuring of component processes and (b) reduces demand on working memory. Eight subjects practiced judgments about digital logic gates for over 8,000 trials. At two practice levels, subjects made judgments while retaining short-term memory loads irrelevant to the judgments, relevant but not accessed, or accessed to make the judgments. Four phenomena together provide constraints for theory: First, performance declined in moving from blocked practice to randomized practice. Second, gate and judgment type strongly affected latency. Third, these effects declined but did not disappear with practice. Fourth, the cost of accessing information in working memory remained substantial. These results are interpreted as reflecting a serial process with constant structure, while component processes become faster. The results challenge theories assuming that all learning results from restructuring or that restructuring is an automatic consequence of practice, and they support a distributed view of working memory. Several current theories of skill acquisition (e.g., Anderson, 1982, 1983, 1987; Rosenbloom & Newell, 1987) share the assumptions that (a) practice results in the reorganization or r£rtrwc/un/7# of component processes, and (b) practice reduces the load on a working memory that serves as a single workspace for carrying out cognitive processes. In the study reported here, we observed the acquisition of procedural skill for judgments about causal rules over the course of approximately 20 hr (over 8,000 trials) of practice. The results challenge the above assumptions and suggest an alternative view in which the organization of component processes and use of working memory remain constant while the speed of component processes increases (and attentional load decreases) with extended practice (see Schneider, 1985). Restructuring and the Acquisition of Cognitive Skill The production system framework currently provides a popular theoretical approach to understanding learning (e.g., Klahr, Langley, & Neches, 1987). Although the idea of restructuring as a learning mechanism is not necessarily tied to the production system framework, production system theories provide the clearest descriptions of restructuring mechanisms. In Anderson's ACT* theory (1982, 1983, 1987), for example, a composition mechanism combines serially executed productions into single productions. Similarly, the chunking model described by Rosenbloom and Newell (1987) attributes per
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 1985
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 1984
Memory & Cognition, 2003
Studies on spatial frameworks suggest that the way we locate objects in imagined environments is ... more Studies on spatial frameworks suggest that the way we locate objects in imagined environments is influenced by the physical and functional properties of the world and our body. The present study provides evidence that such an influence also characterizes imagined navigation. In Experiment 1, participants followed spatial directions to construct an imagined path, while either keeping constant or updating their orientation at each step. A pattern of step times diagnostic of spatial frameworks was obtained in the updated-orientation but not in the constant-orientation condition. In Experiment 2, participants performed the updated-orientation condition with two levels of external support for the reference frame being used.
Memory & Cognition, 1989
Judgmental asymmetries in using causal knowledge (e.g., for prediction or diagnosis) have been at... more Judgmental asymmetries in using causal knowledge (e.g., for prediction or diagnosis) have been attributed to the inherent directionality of causal knowledge. The present study examines the effect of acquisition context-representations used for initial instruction, and the type of judgment required during acquisition-on judgments using causal rules. In contrast to traditional concept formation research, this paradigm examined the development of procedures for using rules, rather than rule induction. College-student subjects learned to use causal rules describing digital logic gates, receiving instruction with either verbal rules or truth tables, and practicing either predicting or verifying logic-gate outputs. After 200 trials of practice with each rule, subjects were transferred to the untrained judgment task. Transfer was strongly asymmetrical. Subjects trained to make prediction judgments were slowed substantially by transfer to the verification task, while subjects trained to make verification judgments had little difficulty with transfer to the prediction task. Truth-table representations resulted in superior performance, especially for verification judgments. Contrary to prediction, verification judgments always required more time. The results demonstrate that acquisition context may be partly responsible for judgmental asymmetries, and imply that examining conditions of acquisition is important for understanding how causal knowledge is used.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2000
To examine the roles of executive control and automatic activation in task switching, we manipula... more To examine the roles of executive control and automatic activation in task switching, we manipulated foreknowledge as well as task transitions. In Experiments 1 and 2, performance with foreknowledge was faster than performance with no foreknowledge, but the amount of switch cost did not depend on foreknowledge. This result suggests that switch costs primarily reflect persisting activation rather than inadequate preparation. In Experiment 3, switch cost was greater with foreknowledge about task transition alone than with foreknowledge about both task transition and identity, suggesting that foreknowledge about specific task identity did allow preparation for a switched task. We argue that task repetition and foreknowledge effects are independent. Although foreknowledge allows preparation for both repeated and switched tasks, repeating the same task has benefits over task switching regardless of foreknowledge.
Practice effects and composition: A reply to Anderson
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 1989
Anderson (1989) argues that our results (Carlson, Sullivan, & Schneider, 1989) confirm se... more Anderson (1989) argues that our results (Carlson, Sullivan, & Schneider, 1989) confirm several predictions of the ACT* account of skill acquisition, including the occurrence of composition. The ACT* theory does include mechanisms that can account for the major ordinal results of our experiment. However, the quantitative implications of the mechanisms that Anderson invokes to support the occurrence of composition result in unreasonable or inconsistent predictions for this data set. These mechanisms do not account for the observed effects in our control experiment, make the composition hypothesis difficult to falsify, and involve assumptions that negate the processing speed advantage that composition would provide. We also discuss several other points made by Anderson. Our results do provide weak support for some aspects of ACT*, while emphasizing the importance of quantitatively examining interrelations among mechanisms in complex models of skill acquisition.
Practice and working memory effects in building procedural skill
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 1989
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Papers by Richard Carlson