
John Hawkins FlowersUniversity of Nebraska–Lincoln | NU
John Hawkins Flowers
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Publications (48)
Oral naming latencies were measured for visually displayed digits that were flanked by either compatible (identical) or incompatible (different) noise digits. When target-noise spatial separation was "narrow" (1.1-deg visual angle), substantially longer latencies were observed for incompatible target-noise combinations than for compatible combinati...
Subjects participated in visual character- and word-classification-tasks-for-which-spatially contiguous context stimuli were exposed 100 or 1,000 msec prior to target onset. These context stimuli were physically identical to the target on 75% of the trials. Substantial facilitation of RT occurred for “valid” trials at both SOA levels. When the targ...
The speed of classification of six alternative ink colors into two categories of three colors each was measured in tasks for which the colors were displayed as either XXXX patterns or incongruent words (Stroop stimuli). Substantial interference from the words occurred when the classification required grouping nonadjacent hues (red, yellow, and blue...
The 59th Annual Nebraska Symposium on Motivation (The Influence of Attention, Learning, and Motivation on Visual Search) took place April 7-8, 2011, on the University of Nebraska-Lincoln campus. The symposium brought together leading scholars who conduct research related to visual search at a variety levels for a series of talks, poster presentatio...
Visual search is one of our most ubiquitous activities, as anyone who has had a “Where’s my car?” moment can attest. Attending to relevant stimuli while screening out distractions requires a complex set of interactions between visual, neurological, and behavioral processes. While recent years have seen digital technologies both enhance our visual s...
Researchers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln are currently designing a wearable/portable neutron detector. As an alerting mechanism, the device will transmit vibration to the wearer's skin in the presence of hazardous levels of neutron radiation. The present study was designed to help in the ergonomically correct body placement of the neutron...
Researchers at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln are currently designing a vibrotactile alerting mechanism for a neutron sensor. The instrument will vibrate on users' skin in the presence of high levels of neutron radiation. The head, neck, upper arm, wrist, waist, and ankle are potential body placements for the device. However, there is minimal...
Sonification tools have not yet become typical components of data analysis software, despite dramatic advances in sound-production capabilities of personal computers over the past decade. However, we continue to believe that auditory displays have the potential to be highly useful for “small scale” exploration of data for normally sighted users as...
The design of auditory formats for data display is presently focused on applications for blind or visually impaired users, specialized displays for use when visual attention must be devoted to other tasks, and some innovative work in revealing properties of complex data that may not be effectively rendered by traditional visual means. With the avai...
The design of auditory formats for data display is presently focused on applications for blind or visually impaired users, specialized displays for use when visual attention must be devoted to other tasks, and some innovative work in revealing properties of complex data that may not be effectively rendered by traditional visual means. With the avai...
While developments in sound production hardware now make the creation of auditory graphs possible for casual users of personal computers, some of the same pitfalls to effective auditory display development that arose in the early 1990's continue to impede effective applications of this promising technology. Most of these pitfalls stem from lack of...
This experiment compared the performance with explicit (rule-application and rule-discovery) and implicit (nonrule-instructed) learning approaches on the performance of a probabilistic video game task requiring fine motor control. The task required visual tracking of a small ball of light and "catching" it by means of joystick manipulation. A gener...
Human participants performed a perceptual task in which they sorted auditory (musical) displays of one-month long daily weather summaries (temperature, rainfall, and snowfall) based on perceived similarity of weather patterns. Displays for fifteen winter months and fifteen summer months were sorted by separate groups of participants. Each group sor...
Daily climate records that include temperature and precipitation observations, along with other optional "event" records (such as a severe storm occurrence or the highlighting of record high or low temperatures) are a form of multivariate time series data that is well suited to sonification. Our project describes and demonstrates sonification of hi...
L, a 47-year-old female of Choctaw descent, was first identified as a potential synaesthetic++ on the basis of self-report data regarding digit-colour associations. Upon completion of the identification procedures typified in the literature, it was concluded that L met the classic memory-performance criteria used to identify synaesthetic ability. A...
The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of sonification research, including the current status of the field and a proposed research agenda. This paper was prepared by an interdisciplinary group of researchers gathered at the request of the National Science Foundation in the fall of 1997 in association with the International Conference o...
Human sensitivity to correlational structure between nontargets and likelihood of target presence in a visual letter-search task were studied in two experiments. In each of these experiments, the performance of subjects for whom the nontarget information was altered in the final trial block was compared with the performance of subjects for whom the...
The equivalence of visual and auditory scatterplots was examined in two experiments. Experiment 1 examined the relationship between actual Pearson's r and visual and auditory judgments of direction and magnitude of correlation for 24 bivariate data samples. Experiment 2 directly evaluated visual and auditory perceptual sensitivity to outliers by ex...
Sonification is the use of nonspeech audio to convey information. The goal of this report is to provide the reader with (1) an understanding of the field of sonification, (2) an appreciation for the potential of sonification to answer a variety of scientific questions, (3) a grasp of the potential for sonification applications to facilitate communi...
The equivalence of visual and auditory graphical displays was examined in two experiments. In Experiment 1, multidimensional
scaling techniques were applied to paired comparison similarity judgments of both auditory and visual displays of simple periodic
wave forms. In Experiment 2, a subset of perceptually similar pairs of wave forms was selected...
In three experiments we studied human ability to use statistical contingencies between visual stimuli (flankers and targets) to improve performance in a letter-digit classification task. We compared the performance of explicitly informed subjects with that of subjects who were told nothing of the contingencies. Simultaneous presentation of flankers...
In three experiments we studied human ability to use statistical contingencies between visual stimuli (flankers and targets)
to improve performance in a letter-digit classification task. We compared the performance of explicitly informed subjects
with that of subjects who were told nothing of the contingencies. Simultaneous presentation of flankers...
By applying multidimensional scaling procedures and other quantitative analyses to perceptual dissimilarity judgments, we compared the perceptual structure of visual line graphs depicting simulated time series data with that of auditory displays (musical graphs) presenting the same data. Highly similar and meaningful perceptual structures were demo...
Efficient exploratory data analysis (EDA) may be aided by succinct, but informative, graphical representations (e.g., Tukey
plots) that convey information about central tendency, variability, and shape of distributions, and that permit detection
of outliers. Using research strategies adapted from studies of cross-modal perceptual equivalence, we sh...
A single experiment studied how effectively information about the central tendency, variability, and shape of numeric data
distributions could be conveyed to statistically knowledgeable subjects. The data were summarized by visual histograms, auditory
histograms that coded numeric value as pitch on the musical scale, and five-note auditory analogue...
We compared the influences of explicit instruction and uninstructed implicit learning of correlations among visual events, in a fine-motor task. The task required visual tracking of a small "ball" of light and "catching" it by means of joystick manipulation. A general pattern of improvement with practice for instructed and "noninstructed" condition...
Priming stimuli that spatially flank a fixated target stimulus may cause either facilitation or interference with target classification, depending on experimental context. Two experiments demonstrated distinct effects of response compatibility and semantic congruity between flankers and target. Response competition occurred when targets were flanke...
Priming stimuli that spatially flank a fixated target stimulus may cause either facilitation or interference with target classification,
depending on experimental context. Two experiments demonstrated distinct effects of response compatibility and semantic congruity
between flankers and target. Response competition occurred when targets were flanke...
Subjects visually searched for letter string targets consisting of either familiar English three-letter words (e.g., SEX)
or featurally similar nonword trigrams (e.g., SFX). Distractor items were either words or nonwords and had varying degrees
offeature overlap with the target among different blocks of trials. Search was facilitated by a word-nonw...
This study examined direct effects of postnatally administered ethanol upon growth and adult open field behaviors in male rats. Charles Rivers CD albino rats (13 litters) were used in 5 groups; ethanol, Sustagen, pair-fed, handled, or unhandled. Experimental animals were intragastrically fed ethanol (Sustagen [Mead Johnson] vehicle) twice daily, co...
In a voice reaction time task, subjects named target digits that were horizontally flanked by noise digits or by a neutral symbol (#). For the control subjects, the noise digits were uncorrelated with the target digit, whereas for three experimental groups, the value of the noise digit predicted the target digit by an arithmetic rule (target = nois...
Flanking characters that surround a target character may cause either facilitation of or interference with target classification,
depending on experimental context. In three different experiments, the patterns of facilitative priming and interference were
shown to change systematically as a function of onset asynchrony between flankers and target,...
Some fundamental aspects of observational data are outlined, and some basic issues in implementation of small computers in
observational research are discussed.
Two general-purpose software packages for collecting and analyzing observational data from a variety of settings are discussed.
One package is designed for coding mutually exclusive behavioral states using the Apple’s keyboard as an input device. The
other is designed to monitor temporally overlapping behaviors, and it makes use of the Apple II’s b...
Four experiments (90 undergraduates) demonstrated that highly familiar letter sequences (English words) in noncued portions of a tachistoscopic display substantially reduced accuracy of partial report. Findings suggest that in addition to facilitating character scanning, familiarity may operate in automatically directing attentional resources to a...
Subjects classified either the numerosity or numeric value of elements in successive stimulus displays. In separate experiments,
responses were indicated by oral naming, card sorting, manual tapping, and oral “tapping.” Incongruent levels of numeric value
slowed naming and sorting, but not tapping, when numerosity was the cue for responding. Incong...
Recent developments in microprocessor-based technology should be of particular interest to psychologists concerned with perceptual
and cognitive processes. This paper describes the advantages of a Z-80-based system that uses the Technical Design Labs video
display board (VDB) for the generation and control of visual stimuli.
In two experiments, subjects were required to match printed names with subsequently displayed achromatic shades or geoinetric
shapes. The presence of incongruent shades or shapes at the time of word display substantially slowed the RT for performing
the match. This pictorial interference (interference due to a visual, nonlingalistic attributel was...
The presence of irrelevant words (incongruent color and shape names) substantially slowed the sorting of shapes and colors. This interference was maintained over four sessions of practice for color sorting, but essentially vanished for shape classification and color classification using stimuli in which the word and color were physically separated....
The effect of incongruent color words on speed of classifying ink colors was measured in visual scanning tasks and in card sorting tasks. In both cases, little or no interference effects were noted when the classification allowed focusing on a single ink color or a set of highly similar colors (adjacent hues). Substantial interference occurred when...
Two experiments measured RTs for matching sequentially displayed color names to color patches. Experiment I demonstrated that
printing the name in an incongruent color produced longer RTs than when the name was printed in black ink or a congruent colored
ink, provided the time interval between the name display and the color patch display was brief...
The effects of spatial stimulus repetition, sequential stimulus repetition, spatially separated dimensional redundancy, and
sequentially presented dimensional redundancy on absolute judgment accuracy of hue and brightness were compared. Two exposure
durations, 0.1 and 2.0 sec, were used. While spatial repetition did not improve accuracy for either...
The influence of two types of linguistic dimensions, word-nonword and consonant pronunciation, on classification speed of trigrams in card-sorting tasks of two levels of complexity was examined. In complex grouping tasks, which required the evaluation of more than one letter to classify each stimulus, sorting times were faster when the linguistic d...
The effect of spatially repeated stimulus elements on the speed of discrimination, measured in a sorting task, was determined
under conditions of low stimulus visibility (state limitation) and high stimulus similarity (process limitation). A significant
increase in speed of sorting stimuli was found when the stimuli were state limited but not when...
Garner and Lee (1962) showed no gain in visual discrimination accuracy with addition of redundant stimulus elements. Eriksen
and Lappin (1965) showed a substantial gain. One experiment reported here indicates that the discrepancy is not due to the
fact that the earlier experiment used heterogeneous stimulus elements. A second experiment indicated t...
This study compared the effectiveness of two auditory display designs for conveying the relationship between discrete and continuous data. Participants judged the relationship between simulated data representing "sea temperature," (a continuous variable) and "storm occurrence" (a categorical variable) by rating the strength of covariation between t...