Gregory E. Cox’s research while affiliated with State University of New York and other places

We present four experiments that examine perception and memory for a novel set ofauditory stimuli, using multidimensional scaling and cognitive modeling to clarify howindividual people perceive and recognize these items. The stimuli are auditory “textures”constructed by adjusting the distribution of power across upper frequency bands. In Experiment1, people rated similarity between pairs of stimuli; in Experiments 2 and 3, they also engaged ina recognition memory task using the same stimuli. In Experiment 4, they did all the same tasksfrom the first three experiments, and rated stimuli for distinctiveness. Multidimensional scalingsuggested the stimuli were perceived along three dimensions, a result which replicated across allfour experiments. Similarity ratings, recency, and list homogeneity predicted recognitionperformance, but distinctiveness ratings did not. These effects were accommodated by theExemplar-Based Random Walk model (Nosofsky and Palmeri, 1997)—extending prior work(Visscher et al., 2007) to show that memory and attention processes in the auditory domain arefundamentally like those in the visual domain, though particularly strong recency effects in theauditory domain may be due to echoic memory. We conclude by discussing how the stimuliintroduced in this article can be used as “building blocks” to test hypotheses about perceptionand memory for complex, naturalistic sounds such as speech or music while retaining tightexperimental control.

Memory theories distinguish between item and associative information, which are engaged by different tasks: item recognition uses item information to decide whether an event occurred in a particular context; associative recognition uses associative information to decide whether two events occurred together. Associative recognition is slower and less accurate than item recognition, suggesting that item and associative information may be represented in different forms and retrieved using different processes. Instead, I show how a dynamic model (Cox & Criss, 2020; Cox & Shiffrin, 2017) accounts for accuracy and response time distributions in both item and associative recognition with the same set of representations and processes. Item and associative information are both represented as vectors of features. Item and associative recognition both depend on comparing traces in memory with probes of memory in which item and associative features gradually accumulate. Associative features are slower to accumulate, but largely because they emerge from conjunctions of already-accumulated item features. I apply the model to data from 453 participants, each of whom performed an item and performed associative recognition following identical study conditions (Cox et al., 2018). Comparisons among restricted versions of the model show that its account of associative feature formation, coupled with limits on the rate at which features accumulate from multiple items, explains how and why the dynamics of associative recognition differ from those of item recognition even while both tasks rely on the same underlying representations.

Much research in auditory cognition focuses on quantitative outcome variables that cannot fully capture individual differences in auditory perceptual experiences. We address this gap by using topic modeling to investigate the different ways that people perceive and remember a set of artificial timbre stimuli. We analyzed 779 written responses to three questions regarding: 1) how people judged similarity between sounds; 2) how people remembered and recognized previously heard sounds; and 3) how people formed impressions of the sounds they heard. Cross-validation showed that 20 topics characterized the similarity responses, 16 characterized the recognition judgements, and 30 characterized people's impressions. Principal components analysis of the topic distributions identified latent themes within each set of topics. Similarity strategies clustered into three themes: Featural Separation, Impression Formation, and Listening Effort. Recognition strategies clustered into five themes: Featural Irregularity, Contrast, Holistic Processing, Timbral Impressions, and Featural Change. Impressions clustered into two themes: Machinery, and Electricity. Results are analogous to the output of a traditional content analysis-but were produced in a fraction of the time using a replicable methodology that can scale to large datasets. Our work represents a new method for triangulating quantitative, qualitative, and computational methods in auditory research.

Cognitive models, which describe cognition in terms of processes and representations, are ideally suited to help build bridges between “how” cognition works at the level of individual neurons and “why” cognition occurs at the level of goal-directed whole-organism behavior. This chapter presents an illustrative example of such a model, Salience by Competitive and Recurrent Interaction (SCRI; Cox et al. Psychol Rev, 2022), a theory of how neurons in the Frontal Eye Fields (FEF) integrate localization and identification information over time to represent the relative salience of objects in visual search. SCRI is framed in cognitive terms but is able to explain the millisecond-by-millisecond spiking activity of individual FEF neurons. This enables SCRI to help identify differences between neurons in terms of the computational mechanisms they instantiate by means of accounting for their dynamics. Such neural data also provide valuable constraints on SCRI that illuminate the relative importance of different types of competitive and recurrent interactions. Simulated activity from SCRI, coupled with a Gated Accumulator Model (GAM) of FEF movement neurons, reproduces the details of response time distributions in visual search behavior. The chapter includes extensive discussion of the difficult choices and exciting prospects for developing joint neuro-cognitive models like SCRI, developments which are enabled by recent advances in dynamic cognitive models and neural recording technologies.

We address four issues in response to Osth and Hurlstone’s (2022) commentary on the context retrieval and updating (CRU) theory of serial order (Logan, 2021). First, we clarify the relations between CRU, chains, and associations. We show that CRU is not equivalent to a chaining theory and uses similarity rather than association to retrieve contexts. Second, we fix an error Logan (2021) made in accounting for the tendency to recall ACB instead of ACD in recalling ABCDEF (fill-in vs. in-fill errors, respectively). When implemented correctly, the idea that subjects mix the current context with an initial list cue after the first order error correctly predicts that fill-in errors are more frequent than in-fill errors. Third, we address position-specific prior-list intrusions, suggesting modifications to CRU and introducing a position-coding model based on CRU representations to account for them. We suggest that position-specific prior-list intrusions are evidence for position coding on some proportion of the trials but are not evidence against item coding on other trials. Finally, we address position-specific between-group intrusions in structured lists, agreeing with Osth and Hurlstone that reasonable modifications to CRU cannot account for them. We suggest that such intrusions support position coding on some proportion of the trials but do not rule out CRU-like item-based codes. We conclude by suggesting that item-independent and item-dependent coding are alternative strategies for serial recall and we stress the importance of accounting for immediate performance.

Decisions about where to move the eyes depend on neurons in frontal eye field (FEF). Movement neurons in FEF accumulate salience evidence derived from FEF visual neurons to select the location of a saccade target among distractors. How visual neurons achieve this salience representation is unknown. We present a neuro-computational model of target selection called salience by competitive and recurrent interactions (SCRI), based on the competitive interaction model of attentional selection and decision-making (Smith & Sewell, 2013). SCRI selects targets by synthesizing localization and identification information to yield a dynamically evolving representation of salience across the visual field. SCRI accounts for neural spiking of individual FEF visual neurons, explaining idiosyncratic differences in neural dynamics with specific parameters. Many visual neurons resolve the competition between search items through feedforward inhibition between signals representing different search items, some also require lateral inhibition, and many act as recurrent gates to modulate the incoming flow of information about stimulus identity. SCRI was tested further by using simulated spiking representations of visual salience as input to the gated accumulator model of FEF movement neurons (Purcell et al., 2010, 2012). Predicted saccade response times fit those observed for search arrays of different set sizes and different target-distractor similarities, and accumulator trajectories replicated movement neuron discharge rates. These findings offer new insights into visual decision-making through converging neuro-computational constraints and provide a novel computational account of the diversity of FEF visual neurons. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

From the beginning of research on serial memory, chaining theories and position coding theories have been pitted against each other. The central question is whether items are associated with each other or with a set of position codes that are independent of the items. Around the turn of this century, the debate focused on serial recall tasks and patterns of error data that chaining models could not accommodate. Consequently, theories based on other ideas flourished and position coding models became prominent. We present an analysis of a retrieved context model that integrates chains and position codes. Under some parameter values, it produces classic chains. Under most parameter values, it produces context representations that contain information sufficient to specify the position codes in position coding theories. We suggest three ways to extract position codes from context representations and show the codes they produce are mathematically equivalent to the codes in position coding models. The extracted position codes can be substituted for the position codes in position coding models and run through their machinery to mimic their predictions exactly. We suggest that chains, position codes, and retrieved contexts may reflect different strategies for extracting desired information from a common set of memory representations, and we emphasize the value of considering item-dependent context representations that are made from fading traces of past items encoded or retrieved. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

This article tests the conjecture that memory retrieval is attention turned inward by developing an episodic flanker task that is analogous to the well-known perceptual flanker task and by developing models of the spotlight of attention focused on a memory list. Participants were presented with a list to remember (ABCDEF) followed by a probe in which one letter was cued (# # C # # #). The task was to indicate whether the cued letter matched the letter in the cued position in the memory list. The data showed classic results from the perceptual flanker task. Response time and accuracy were affected by the distance between the cued letter in the probe and the memory list (# # D # # # was worse than # # E # # #) and by the compatibility of the uncued letters in the probe and the memory list (ABCDEF was better than STCRVX). There were six experiments. The first four established distance and compatibility effects. The fifth generalized the results to sequential presentation of memory lists, and the sixth tested the boundary conditions of distance and flanker effects with an item recognition task. The data were fitted with three families of models that apply space-based, object-based, and template-based theories of attention to the problem of focusing attention on the cued item in memory. The models accounted for the distance and compatibility effects, providing measures of the sharpness of the focus of attention on memory and the ability to ignore distraction from uncued items. Together, the data and theory support the conjecture that memory retrieval is attention turned inward and motivate further research on the topic. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).