A critical review of the concept of set in contemporary experimental psychology.

Gibson, James J.

doi:10.1037/h0055307

Cited by 203 publications

(95 citation statements)

References 112 publications

(107 reference statements)

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“…The concept of expectancy, or the related term "preparatory set," has a checkered history in psychology. For example, although expectancy has been a topic of interest in learning theories of animal and human behaviour (e.g., Gibson, 1941;Haber, 1966;MacQuorquodale & Meehl, 1953;Meehl & MacQuorquodale, 1951;Mowrer, 1938Mowrer, , 1941Mowrer, Raymond, & Bliss, 1940;Tolman, 1932), it has also come under attack from both behaviourist and information processing approaches. Correspondingly, expectancy has not explicitly played much of a role in more current theories of human memory.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Expectancy effects in memory for melodies.

Schmuckler

1997

Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology / Revue canadienne

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Two experiments explored the relation between melodic expectancy and melodic memory. In Experiment 1, listeners rated the degree to which different endings confirmed their expectations for a set of melodies. After providing these expectancy ratings, listeners received a recognition memory test in which they discriminated previously heard melodies from new melodies. Recognition memory in this task positively correlated with perceived expectancy, and was related to the estimated tonal coherence of these melodies. Experiment 2 extended these results, demonstrating better recognition memory for high expectancy melodies, relative to medium and low expectancy melodies. This experiment also observed asymmetrical memory confusions as a function of perceived expectancy. These findings fit with a model of musical memory in which schematically central events are better remembered than schematically peripheral events.The generation of expectations has been recognized as a central factor in listeners' perceptions of music. Simply defined, "expectation 11 refers to the anticipation of upcoming information based on past and current information. The concept of expectancy has traditionally received, and continues to receive, a great deal of attention from both a music-theoretic (e.g., Meyer, 1956Meyer, ,1965Narmour, 1989Narmour, , 1990Narmour, ,1992 and psychological viewpoint (e.g., Bharucha, 1987Bharucha, , 1994Carlsen, 1981Carlsen, , 1982Carlsen, Divenyi, & Taylor, 1970;Cuddy & Lunney, 1995;Dowling, 1994;Jones, 1976Jones, , 1981Jones, , 1982Jones, , 1990Krumhansl, 1995;Schellenberg, 1996Schellenberg, ,1997Schmuckler, 1989Schmuckler, ,1990Schmuckler & Boltz, 1994;Unyk & Carlsen, 1987).Given this interest, it is not surprising that expectation has been found to play a critical role in many aspects of musical processing. One such area involves listeners' judgments of, and responses to, musical passages. For example, Schmuckler (1989) had listeners provide goodness-of-fit ratings for a set of continuations of melodic, harmonic, and combined melodic-harmonic passages. These studies uncovered systematic variation in listeners' judgments of these continuations, with some endings receiving high expectancy ratings, whereas other endings received relatively low expectancy ratings. Additionally, these studies demonstrated that expectancies were predictable from various music-theoretic and perceptual/cognitive principles of pattern organization. Similar results have been observed by Cuddy and Lunney (1995), Krumhansl (1995), andSchellenberg (1996), in their tests of Narmour's (1990Narmour's ( ,1992) implication-realization model. Together, these findings suggest that judgments of a musical event vary with the perceived expectancy of that passage, with expectations quantifiable on the basis of a range of factors.A second area in which expectancies play a role in musical perception is the processing and encoding of musical information. For example, Bharucha and colleagues (Bharucha & Stoeckig, 1986, 1987Tekman & Bharucha, 1992) de...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Expectancy effects in memory for melodies.

Schmuckler

1997

Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology / Revue canadienne

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“…M. Mandler & Mandler, 1964). A major contribution of Watt (1906) was to experimentally test this view and to demonstrate that it could not easily explain his findings on constrained association (Boring, 1950;Gibson, 1941;Humphrey, 1951;G. Mandler, 2007;J.…”

Section: Historical Background To the Problemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dynamics of the attentional control of word retrieval: Analyses of response time distributions.

Roelofs¹

2008

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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Since W. Wundt (1904) and H. J. Watt (1906), researchers have found no agreement on how goals direct word retrieval. A prevailing associative account (E. K. Miller & J. D. Cohen, 2001) holds that goals bias association strength, which determines retrieval latency and whether irrelevant words interfere. A symbolic account (A. Roelofs, 2003) holds that goals enable retrieval rules and predicts no strict dependence of interference on latency. Here, 3 chronometric experiments in which the role of relative retrieval latency was investigated through distributional analyses, following Watt, are reported. Participants verbally categorized picture-word pairs that were semantically related or unrelated, or they categorized single pictures or words. The pairs yielded semantic latency effects in both word and picture categorizing, although single words were categorized slower than single pictures. Semantic effects occurred in word categorizing even when postexposure of the pictures compensated for the difference in categorizing latency. Vincentile and ex-Gaussian analyses revealed that the semantic effects occurred throughout the latency distributions, excluding goal neglect as the cause of the effects. The results were interpreted as most consistent with the symbolic account, which was corroborated by computer simulations.Keywords: attention, computational modeling, distributional analysis, memory retrieval, word productionIn the early days of experimental psychology, Wundt (1904) criticized the now classic, associative Wernicke-Lichtheim model of word production by arguing that the retrieval of words from memory is an active goal-driven process rather than a passive associative process, as held by the model. According to Wundt, an attentional process centered in the frontal lobes of the human brain controls a word perception and production network located in perisylvian brain areas, described by the Wernicke-Lichtheim model. Whereas Wundt examined goal-driven processes in perception, Watt (1906) experimentally investigated goal-directed word retrieval. Successful realization of task-relevant associations, he demonstrated, cannot simply be the result of passive associations between stimuli and word responses. Instead, task goals play a vital role in determining the direction of the retrieval process. A century later, however, it is still a hotly debated issue how exactly goals direct word retrieval processes.The work reported in the present article is intended to shed light on the role of one factor in the word retrieval process, namely, relative retrieval latency. I begin by briefly describing the classic study of Watt (1906) and the seminal theoretical accounts of Selz (1913) and Müller (1913). Next, I discuss current theories of the control of word retrieval, which are descendents of these early theoretical ideas. I then present three chronometric experiments on categorizing pictures and words that examined the relative merits of two theories, namely, the associative account of Cohen, Dunbar, and McClelland (1990) and ...

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“…It is clear that such a top-down interpretation of behavior is in contrast to a Stimulus±Response Psychology which attributes to the stimulus the role of an exclusive determinant of a following response. In a critical review of``set'' and related notions, Gibson (1941) concluded that behavior was determined by something else besides the immediately preceding stimulus. Hebb (1949, loc.cit., p. 5) added that this``does not deny the importance of the immediate stimulus, it does deny that sensory stimulation is everything in behavior.''…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neural aspects of anticipatory behavior

1999

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Anticipatory behavior reveals itself in the perceptual domain and in the motor domain. Expectant attention and motor preparation are characterized by selection, aimed at an amelioration of the signal-to-noise ratio in the information to be processed. The functional similarity of anticipatory attention and motor preparation is re¯ected in the underlying anatomical substrate. The prefrontal cortex, involved in a number of dierent networks, organizes anticipatory behavior in a top-down way by activating cortico-cortical loops and thalamo-cortical loops to sensory and motor areas. The sensory areas are set to receive the impinging stimulus presentation, the motor areas are set to implement and execute the different motor programs. Thalamic nuclei are also activated from the prefrontal cortex, especially the large association nuclei, the dorsomedial nucleus and the pulvinar. In dierent models of selective attention the reticular nucleus of the thalamus has a special role in the distribution of the inhibitory control upon the information processing in the``relay'' nuclei. It is hypothesized that it has the same pivotal position in motor preparation. Although the anatomical relations do not allow a direct test of the proposed hypothesis, the available psychophysiological evidence does not contradict it. Ó

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A critical review of the concept of set in contemporary experimental psychology.

Cited by 203 publications

References 112 publications

Expectancy effects in memory for melodies.

Expectancy effects in memory for melodies.

Dynamics of the attentional control of word retrieval: Analyses of response time distributions.

Neural aspects of anticipatory behavior

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