| Visual processing provides one of the most crucial interfaces with the world around us. Typically, we think of visual processing as a way to take in information about the world around us. But how is visual processing itself influenced by the external world? Four studies explore some of the ways in which the external world influences perception of identical visual information. In the first study, participants viewed hills and reported the slope of the hill using a verbal measure and a motor measure over both short and long distances. The results from this study are interpreted as an example of visual processing being guided by the goal of two different cognitive systems, which results in an overestimate of slope in the verbal measure and a more veridical estimate of slope in the motor measure. In the second study, participants were asked to remember the location of a dot in a circle and make either a reproduction or a discrimination response. Changes in response modality yielded dramatically different patterns in response bias that is thought to arise from the simplification in task demands during discrimination versus reproduction trials. In the third study visual memory is integrated with semantic memory. Participants use object-based tracking mechanisms to follow the location of objects previously associated with spoken facts and attempt to refixate these objects when asked about the semantic information. In the last study, participants viewed four images (one positive, one negative and two neutral) while being eye-tracked. They either believed that an unseen partner viewed the same images (the joint condition) or a symbol array (the alone condition). In the alone condition, participants predominantly fixated the negative images, while in the joint condition, participants initially fixated the negative image but then switched to the positive image. This behavior is interpreted in terms of the effects of social context on visual processing. Taken as a whole, these experiments show that identical visual information yields different responses from the individual based on the cognitive use of the information, the social context or the response modality. |
