Cronbach (1957) famously noted the divergence between the experimental and psychometric traditions in psychology and called for a unification, but many domains of cognitive experimental psychology continue to pay minimal heed to basic psychometric principles. The present article considers the lack of attention devoted to the reliability of measures extracted in a popular visual search task for studying putatively unconscious mental processes, , and the inferential fallacies that this neglect can cause. Two experiments (total = 200) demonstrated that the reliability of contextual cuing and awareness measures can be increased by three manipulations designed to increase between-participant variability in search performance. At the same time, the data were subjected to a multiverse analysis, which found that specific data preprocessing pipelines result in more reliable estimates. Nevertheless, the reliability estimates remained too low for drawing firm conclusions from standard statistical techniques. Interpreting results from analyses based on individual differences, such as the typical low correlations between implicit and explicit measures, will be challenging so long as the underlying measures have poor reliability. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
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J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn
October 2024
Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London.
Cronbach (1957) famously noted the divergence between the experimental and psychometric traditions in psychology and called for a unification, but many domains of cognitive experimental psychology continue to pay minimal heed to basic psychometric principles. The present article considers the lack of attention devoted to the reliability of measures extracted in a popular visual search task for studying putatively unconscious mental processes, , and the inferential fallacies that this neglect can cause. Two experiments (total = 200) demonstrated that the reliability of contextual cuing and awareness measures can be increased by three manipulations designed to increase between-participant variability in search performance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAtten Percept Psychophys
November 2024
Universidad de Málaga, Málaga, Spain.
Three experiments explored how the repetition of a visual search display guides search during contextual cuing under conditions in which the search process is interrupted by an instructional (endogenous) cue for attention. In Experiment 1, participants readily learned about repeated configurations of visual search, before being presented with an endogenous cue for attention towards the target on every trial. Participants used this cue to improve search times, but the repeated contexts continued to guide attention.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform
June 2023
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, The University of Iowa.
In six experiments, we examined how object categories structure the learning of environmental regularities to guide visual search. Participants searched for pictures of exemplars from a set of real-world categories in a repeated search task modeled on the contextual cuing literature. Each trial began with a category label cue, followed by a search array of natural object photographs, with one target object matching the category label.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCell Rep
April 2023
Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, USA.
New memories are not quarantined from each other when first encoded; rather, they are interlinked with memories that were encoded in temporal proximity or that share semantic features. By selectively biasing memory processing during sleep, here we test whether context influences sleep consolidation. Participants first formed 18 idiosyncratic narratives, each linking four objects together.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform
December 2022
Two experiments examined the role that depth plays in the formation of associations during contextual cuing of visual search. Current associative models make predictions about the spatial constraints placed on learning within two-dimensional procedures, but there exists very little evidence of how these predictions translate to three-dimensional space. A virtual reality procedure was used to project the stimuli in three dimensions.
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