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Introduction
Current institution
Current position
- Distinguished Professor Rudy Chair in Psychological and Brain Sciences
Additional affiliations
September 1989 - present
Position
- Distinguished Professor and Rudy Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences
Education
September 1962 - August 1966
Publications
Publications (251)
Perceptual and cognitive work require the expenditure of brain energy, and the efficiency of that energy expenditure can vary as a function of a range of exogenous and endogenous factors. The same is true for physical work, and tools have been developed to quantify energetic efficiency in the performance of physical work. The same is not true for t...
Two intriguing papers of the late 1990’s and early 2000s by J. Tanaka and colleagues put forth the hypothesis that a repository of face memories can be viewed as a vector space where points in the space represent faces and each of these is surrounded by an attractor field. This hypothesis broadens the thesis of T. Valentine that face space is const...
Withdrawal statement
The authors have withdrawn this manuscript because it has been substantially revised, expanded, and re-titled. The updated, revised, expanded and retitled version will be submitted as a new preprint. Therefore, the authors do not wish this work to be cited as reference for the project. If you have any questions, please contact...
We employed the Riemannian Face Manifold (RFM) as an alternative approach to the conventional linear Euclidean space for explaining the atypicality bias in face likeliness judgments. The RFM posits that the mental representation of faces is better captured as a manifold of stable states, accounting for the nonlinearity in the physical properties of...
The purpose of this study is to take preliminary steps to unify psychoacoustic techniques with reaction-time methodologies to address the perceptual mechanisms responsible for the detection of one vs. multiple sounds. We measured auditory redundancy gains for auditory detection of pure tones widely spaced in frequency using the tools of Systems Fac...
Systems factorial technology (SFT) is a theoretically derived methodology that allows for strong inferences to be made about underlying processing architectures (e.g., whether processing occurs in a pooled, coactive fashion or in serial or in parallel). Measures of mental architecture using SFT have been restricted to the use of error-free response...
What are the geometric and information processing characteristics of elementary figures composed of simple physical dimensions? There have been a number of investigations of perception of rectangles,including debate about configurality (e.g., integrality and gestalt properties) as well as the prime perceptual dimensions. Yet, because of ambiguity e...
All science, including psychological science, is subject to what Townsend and Ashby have called the principle of correspondent change which ensures that experimental manipulations act as informed agents with respect to predictions and testing critical theoretical features. Mostly, this type of program goes unspoken. Within the general field known a...
The multidimensional generalization of signal detection theory known as General Recognition Theory (GRT, Ashby & Townsend, Psychological Review, 93, 154–179 1986) has been used to model and characterize the ways in which changes in encoded perceptual information and the application of decisional operators can produce patterns in behavior that are c...
Much progress has been made in the investigation of perceptual, cognitive, and action mechanisms under the assumption that when one subprocess precedes another, the first one starts and finishes before the other begins. We call such processes “Dondersian” after the Dutch physiologist who first formulated this concept. Serial systems obey this prece...
Systems Factorial Technology (SFT) is a popular framework for that has been used to investigate processing capacity across many psychological domains over the past 25+ years. To date, it had been assumed that no processing resources are used for sources in which no signal has been presented (i.e., in a location that can contain a signal but does no...
The detection response task (DRT) is a measure of workload that can assess the cognitive demands of real-world multitasking. It can be configured to present simple stimuli of several modalities, including auditory and visual signals. However, the concurrent presentation of the DRT stimuli alongside another task could cause dual-task interference, a...
This report continues our probe of the fundamental properties of elementary psychological processes. In the present instance, we first distinguish between descriptive and state–space based parallel race models. Then we show, engaging previous results on stochastic dominance in Theorem 1, that descriptive race models can be designed that predict eit...
Mathematical psychology is that branch of psychology focusing on the use of mathematical and computational models to explain and predict human behavior. Typical areas of interest are memory, attention, problem solving, perception, decision making, and motor control. The field developed from the measurement problems encountered in psychophysics with...
Systems Factorial Technology (SFT) is a theoretically-derived methodology that allows for strong inferences to be made about the underlying processing architecture (e.g., whether processing occurs in a pooled, coactive fashion or independently, in serial or in parallel). Measures of mental architecture using SFT have been restricted to the use of e...
One vein of our research on psychological systems has focused on parallel processing models in disjunctive (OR) and conjunctive (AND) stopping-rule designs. One branch of that research has emphasized that a common strategy of inference in the OR situations is logically flawed. That strategy equates a violation of the popular Miller race bound with...
Systems Factorial Technology (SFT) is a popular framework for that has been used to investigate processing capacity across many psychological domains over the past 25+ years. To date, it had been assumed that no processing resources are used for sources in which no signal has been presented (i.e., in a location that can contain a signal but does no...
Long before the mathematical developments that led inexorably to the development of systems factorial technology, the somewhat arduous, but arguably requisite labors which precisely defined parallel and serial architectures had begun (e.g., Townsend, 1969, 1972). Both then and now, what are now referred to as standard serial models and standard par...
Critical parts of the definitions of standard serial and standard parallel modes refer to stochastic independence. Standard serial models are defined by stochastic independence and identical distributions of their processing times. Processing times in the serial models are identical to the intercompletion time statistics. Similarly, standard parall...
This chapter is a tutorial on and review of a theory‐driven, quantitative approach to studying human information processing systems. Key properties in such systems comprise mental architecture, workload capacity, decisional stopping rules, and several varieties of independence, among others. We outline the early history of such interests, which beg...
The ways in which theory manifests change vs. invariance takes on highly recondite and powerful forms in 20th century physics. The prime example must be Emmy Noether's stupendous theorem which, with simplified language, demonstrated that for every symmetry in nature such as invariance under rotation, some type of physical quantities will be preserv...
In this article we differentiate and characterize the standard two-process serial models and the standard two process parallel models by investigating the behavior of (conditional) distributions of the total completion times and survivals of intercompletion times without assuming any particular forms for the distributions of processing times. We ad...
The slope of the set size function as a critical statistic first gained favor in the 1960s due in large part to the seminal papers on short-term memory search by Saul Sternberg and soon, many others. In the 1980s, the slope statistic reemerged in much the same role in visual search as Anne Treisman and again, soon many others brought that research...
Researchers have been interested in how human beings accumulate and process information for decision-making since the development of experimental psychology in the late nineteenth century and then its renaissance in cognitive science in the 1960s. Whereas psychometrics and test theory, which also got their start in the nineteenth century have made...
General Recognition Theory (GRT, Ashby&Townsend, 1986) is a powerful, static, nonparametric theory used to characterize the relationship between theoretical characteristics such as perceptual independence (PI), perceptual separability (PS) and decisional separability (DS), and response-frequency-based measures such as marginal response invariance (...
There is now a substantial literature documenting the ability to use strong-inference theory-based experimental methodologies to determine the fundamental characteristics of human information processing. The meta-theory known as systems factorial technology (SFT, Townsend & Nozawa, 1995), applied by way of an experimental task known as the double-f...
This paper proposes a novel approach to assess audiovisual integration for both congruent and incongruent speech stimuli using reaction times (RT). The experiments are based on the McGurk effect, in which a listener is presented with incongruent audiovisual speech signals. A typical example involves the auditory consonant/b/combined with a visually...
Systems factorial technology (e.g., Townsend and Nozawa, 1995) is a toolbox of methods to test characteristics of multichannel processing systems. In this paper, we present a semiparametric Bayesian model of response times based on a piecewise-exponential model. This model allows us to compute the posterior estimates of the response time distributi...
This article starts with a brief history of information-processing architectures, emphasizing a traditional experimental paradigm, the additive factors method, and the classic problem of model mimicry. Several solid approaches to identifying mental architecture are introduced with a discussion of the necessary assumptions for these tests. Other fun...
Developmental dyslexia is a complex and heterogeneous disorder characterized by unexpected difficulty in learning to read. Although it is considered to be biologically based, the degree of variation has made the nature and locus of dyslexia difficult to ascertain. Hypotheses regarding the cause have ranged from low-level perceptual deficits to high...
Clinical mathematical psychology uses analytical (formula) derivations to describe behavioral, cognitive behavioral, or psychophysiological abnormalities associated with clinical disorders. The quality of being "analytical" differentiates mathematical modeling from statistical modeling, and computational modeling, or computer simulation. An analyti...
Bayesian data analysis involves describing data by meaningful mathematical models, and allocating credibility to parameter values that are consistent with the data and with prior knowledge. The Bayesian approach is ideally suited for constructing hierarchical models, which are useful for data structures with multiple levels, such as data from indiv...
This investigation brings together a response-time system identification methodology (e.g., Townsend & Wenger Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 11, 391-418, 2004a) and an accuracy methodology, intended to assess models of integration across stimulus dimensions (features, modalities, etc.) that were proposed by Shaw and colleagues (e.g., Mulligan & Shaw...
This study applied reaction-time based methods to assess the workload capacity of binaural integration by comparing reaction time (RT) distributions for monaural and binaural tone-in-noise detection tasks. In the diotic contexts, an identical tone + noise stimulus was presented to each ear. In the dichotic contexts, an identical noise was presented...
The following study applied reaction time analyses of workload capacity to tone-in-noise detection for monaural (NmSm), diotic (tone and noise identical at each ears; NoSo), and dichotic (tone is anti-phase but noise is not; NoSTT) conditions. Reaction times allow comparisons between these conditions at the same signal-to-noise ratios (something wh...
The Survivor Interaction Contrast (SIC) is a distribution-free measure for assessing the fundamental properties of human information processing such as architecture (i.e., serial or parallel) and stopping rule (i.e., minimum time or maximum time). Despite its demonstrated utility, there are some vital gaps in our knowledge: first, the shape of the...
Simultaneously presented signals may be processed in serial or in parallel. One potentially valuable indicator of a system's characteristics may be the appearance of multimodality in the response time (RT) distributions. It is known that standard serial models can predict multimodal RT distributions, but it is unknown whether multimodality is diagn...
Perceptual organization bridges the gap between the low-level building blocks of incoming sensations and the high-level interpretation of these inputs as meaningful objects, scenes and events in the world. In the visual modality, for instance, the features signaled by the neurons in low-level cortical areas must be combined in order for the high-le...
As a fundamental part of our daily lives, visual word processing has received much attention in the psychological literature. Despite the well established advantage of perceiving letters in a word or in a pseudoword over letters alone or in random sequences using accuracy, a comparable effect using response times has been elusive. Some researchers...
Systems factorial technology (SFT) comprises a set of powerful nonparametric models and measures, together with a theory-driven experiment methodology termed the double factorial paradigm (DFP), for assessing the cognitive information-processing mechanisms supporting the processing of multiple sources of information in a given task (Townsend and No...
We propose a measure of audiovisual speech integration that takes into account accuracy and response times. This measure should prove beneficial for researchers investigating multisensory speech recognition, since it relates to normal-hearing and aging populations. As an example, age-related sensory decline influences both the rate at which one pro...
Configural superiority effects are an important component of our understanding of visual perception of many types of stimuli. We propose the capacity coefficient as common framework for measuring configural superiority across a wide range of stimulus types. This measure has a number of advantages. The coefficient is based on a comparison of respons...
Research today demands the application of sophisticated and powerful research tools. Fulfilling this need, this two-volume text provides the tool box to deliver the valid and generalizable answers to today's complex research questions. The Oxford Handbook of Quantitative Methods in Psychology aims to be a source for learning and reviewing current b...
Workload capacity, an important concept in many areas of psychology, describes processing efficiency across changes in workload. The capacity coefficient is a function across time that provides a useful measure of this construct. Until now, most analyses of the capacity coefficient have focused on the magnitude of this function, and often only in t...
General Recognition Theory (GRT; Ashby & Townsend, 1986) is a multidimensional theory of classification. Originally developed to study various types of perceptual independence, it has also been widely employed in diverse cognitive venues, such as categorization. The initial theory and applications have been static, that is, lacking a time variable...
"Features" of a stimulus object are often specified by certain salient parts of that object (e.g., "eyes" constitute a facial feature). Existing work has provided evidence that "emergent features" such as orientation or proximity may be more salient than "elementary" features like location when two dots are configured in an appropriate fashion usin...
Measures of human efficiency under increases in mental workload or attentional limitations are vital in studying human perception, cognition, and action. Assays of efficiency as workload changes have typically been confined to either reaction times (RTs) or accuracy alone. Within the realm of RTs, a nonparametric measure called the workload capacit...
Much of scientific psychology and cognitive science can be viewed as a search to understand the mechanisms and dynamics of perception, thought and action. Two processing attributes of particular interest to psychologists are the architecture, or temporal relationships between sub-processes of the system, and the stopping rule, which dictates how ma...
The efficiency of an information processing system across changes in workload (i.e. number of items to be processed) is particularly important in cognitive science. The capacity coefficient (Townsend & Nozawa, 1996; Townsend & Wenger 2004) is an empirical measure of workload efficiency based on estimated reaction time distributions. The capacity co...
Mathematical psychology is not, per se, a distinct branch of psychology. Indeed, mathematical psychologists can be found in any area of psychology. Rather, mathematical psychology characterizes the approach that mathematical psychologists take in their substantive domains. Mathematical psychologists are concerned primarily with developing theories...
This chapter starts with a brief history of information processing architectures, emphasizing a traditional experimental paradigm, the additive factors method, and the classic problem of model mimicry. Several solid approaches to identifying mental architecture are introduced with a discussion of the necessary assumptions for these tests. Other fun...
Summerfield (1987) proposed several accounts of audiovisual speech perception, a field of research that has burgeoned in recent years. The proposed accounts included the integration of discrete phonetic features, vectors describing the values of independent acoustical and optical parameters, the filter function of the vocal tract, and articulatory...
Research has shown that visual speech perception can assist accuracy in identification of spoken words. However, little is known about the dynamics of the processing mechanisms involved in audiovisual integration. In particular, architecture and capacity, measured using response time methodologies, have not been investigated. An issue related to ar...
Studies of race aftereffects show that adaptation biases responses away from an adapting stimulus. However, it remains unclear if shifts in response frequencies result from changes in perceptual representations or in decisional mechanisms supporting race classification. General recognition theory (GRT) provides a single modeling framework within wh...
In general cognitive systems are comprised of more than a single subprocess. The arrangement and linkages of these subprocesses are known as “mental architecture”. The simplest non-trivial systems or manner of carrying out multi-tasking on discrete items is found in two diametrically opposite models that have been classically used to describe the a...
The ability to obtain reliable phonetic information from a talker's face during speech perception is an important skill. However, lip-reading abilities vary considerably across individuals. There is currently a lack of normative data on lip-reading abilities in young normal-hearing listeners. This letter describes results obtained from a visual-onl...
The survivor interaction contrasts (SIC) is a powerful measure for distinguishing among candidate models of human information processing. One class of models to which SIC analysis can apply are the coactive, or channel summation, models of human information processing. In general, parametric forms of coactive models assume that responses are made b...
Increasing the number of available sources of information may impair or facilitate performance, depending on the capacity of the processing system. Tests performed on response time distributions are proving to be useful tools in determining the workload capacity (as well as other properties) of cognitive systems. In this article, we develop a frame...
Systems Factorial Technology is a powerful framework for investigating the fundamental properties of human information processing such as architecture (i.e., serial or parallel processing) and capacity (how processing efficiency is affected by increased workload). The Survivor Interaction Contrast (SIC) and the Capacity Coefficient are effective me...
The word superiority effect has lost some luster in the literature but has never been satisfactorily explained. Proposed models vary from facilitatory interactive parallel processing to positive feedback from higher centers, to even independent parallel channels. Issues such as this call for data and analyses that are able to assess central dynamic...
Most research on expression recognition uses still photographs of high emotional intensity expressions, whereas in real life expressions tend to be dynamic and of low emotional intensity. The present study uses photorealistic 3-D animated images of ecologically valid expressions (Spencer-Smith, et. al., 2000) in a seven-alternative forced choice ta...
The Survivor Interaction Contrast (SIC) is a powerful tool for assessing the architecture and stopping rule of a model of mental processes (Townsend & Nozawa, 1995). Despite its demonstrated utility, the methodology has lacked a method for statistical testing until now. In this paper we briefly describe the SIC then develop some basic statistical p...
People are faster and more accurate at detecting a certain feature, say, a left parenthesis, when presented within a context, “( )”, than when presented alone, “(” (Pomerantz et al, 1977; 2003). Similarly, people seem be better at identifying a given facial feature, say a nose, within the context of a face, than when the nose is presented alone. Ac...
Failure to selectively attend to a facial feature, in the part-to-whole paradigm, has been taken as evidence of holistic perception in a large body of face perception literature. In this article, we demonstrate that although failure of selective attention is a necessary property of holistic perception, its presence alone is not sufficient to conclu...
Configural or gestalt processing are general terms given to phenomena where the whole is different from the sum of its parts. Here we explore these phenomena through face perception, a known configural process. Split faces have often been employed as a manipulation that disrupts the configurality typically found in face processing. By applying syst...
A central question in perceptual and cognitive psychology is the nature of the processes that combine the multiple sources of environmental information in order to support the subjective, unitary percepts of objects. One of the more promising extant approaches is known as general recognition theory (GRT). GRT provides formal, mathematically-specifi...
Models of configural processing often neglect an explanation of how configural mechanisms and representations develop in visual perception. Employing standard information processing models (see Townsend & Ashby, 1983), we investigate how configural learning via perceptual unitization affects and is affected by the underlying information processing...
In visual-search tasks, adding context can dramatically hamper or facilitate the latencies for detecting a target-item. An appealing demonstration of the latter was provided by Pomerantz, Sager, and Stoever (1977). Participants were presented with a display containing four diagonal lines and were then asked to indicate the location of the odd line...
Configural learning is the process by which configural perceptual representations and processing mechanisms develop. Blaha and colleagues (Blaha & Busey, VSS 2007; Blaha & Townsend, Under Revision) characterized this process by a qualitative shift in processing capacity, reflecting a fundamental change in the efficiency of the visual information pr...
Given the holistic nature of faces, Wenger and Townsend (2001) proposed that face information processing would be supported by a facilitatory parallel system, meaning that all features are processed simultaneously. However, there is an apparent contradiction between this working definition and Bradshaw and Wallace's (1971) claim that face recogniti...
Previous studies of global–local processing in autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) have indicated mixed findings, with some evidence of a local processing bias, or preference for detail-level information, and other results suggesting typical global advantage, or preference for the whole or gestalt. Findings resulting from this paradigm have been used...
Evolution of clinical mathematical psychology, exemplifying integrative, translational psychological science, is considered in light of target, idealized scientific systems. It is observed that mutual benefits to psychological clinical science, and quantitative theory, potentiated through their interlacing as exemplified in this special issue, stan...
The capacity coefficient is a well established measure of the efficiency of processing combined sources of information. It has been applied to measure cognitive processes ranging from audio-visual integration to face perception. Recently, the capacity coefficient has also been applied in various clinical situations. Typical clinical analysis, such...
All sounds are multidimensional, yet the relationships among auditory dimensions have been studied only infrequently. General recognition theory (GRT; Ashby & Townsend, 1986) is a multidimensional generalization of signal detection theory and, as such, provides powerful tools well suited to the study of the relationships among perceptual dimensions...
A huge set of focused attention experiments show that when presented with color words printed in color, observers report the ink color faster if the carrier word is the name of the color rather than the name of an alternative color, the Stroop effect. There is also a large number (although not so numerous as the Stroop task) of so-called "redundant...
Speech perception requires the integration of information from multiple phonetic and phonological dimensions. Numerous studies have investigated the mapping between multiple acoustic‐phonetic dimensions and single phonological dimensions (e.g., spectral and temporal properties of stop consonants in voicing contrasts). Many fewer studies have addres...
Kingston, Diehl, Kirk, and Castleman [Kingston, J., Diehl, R. L., Kirk, C. J., Castleman, W.A., 2008. On the perceptual structure of distinctive features: The [voice] contrast. Journal of Phonetics, 36, 28–54] present a sophisticated experimental design and detection theoretic analysis of the internal auditory structure of phonological contrasts. H...
