Abstract
Critical distinctions in human information processing, such as parallel versus serial processing, or integral versus separable dimensions of encoded information, are at the very core of understanding the foundations of psychological experience. As such, two lines of general and powerful mathematical characterizations of these problems have been developed, resulting in two meta-theories: general recognition theory (GRT, Ashby & Townsend, 1986), which addresses the relations among multiple sources of encoded information using response frequencies, and systems factorial theory (SFT, Townsend & Nozawa, 1995), which addresses fundamental characteristics of processing using reaction times (RTs). To date, GRT and SFT have evolved separately, with open questions existing for each; the present effort is one of a set of ongoing efforts intended to address the questions of each meta-theory individually by using the two approaches together. In the present effort, we sought to investigate the extent to which a response bias could be reliably identified in both response frequencies and RTs, by using static GRT, a newer RT version of GRT (RTGRT, Townsend, Houpt, & Silbert, 2012) and SFT. The stimuli for this particular investigation were designed to induce the Hering illusion, where physically vertical lines to the left and right of a center point are superimposed on a set of radiating lines, resulting in the illusion that the vertical lines are bowed outward. Observers participated in two tasks, a double factorial task using a conjunctive (AND) response rule and a complete identification task. Payoff schemes were manipulated in a way that the optimal responding was first unbiased and then was biased toward specific responses. Results indicate that capacity increased with liberal bias and decreased with conservative bias. Individual differences across observers suggest the potential for using these regularities to advance a theoretical synthesis of the two approaches.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2017