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Cognitive processes in object counting
Başlık:
Cognitive processes in object counting
Yazar:
Towse, John N., author.
ISBN:
9780438084209
Yazar Ek Girişi:
Fiziksel Tanımlama:
1 electronic resource (392 pages)
Genel Not:
Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 76-08C.
Özet:
This thesis is concerned with children's counting. It explores the question of whether the coordination of operations, when engaged in the task of counting objects, is carried out by a central processing system. Chapter 1 reviewed the psychological literature on cognitive performance and identified the 'central executive' of working memory (eg. Baddeley, 1986) and the 'executive processing space' within cognitive-developmental theory (Case, 1985) as theoretical structures with responsibility for coordination and control. By studying counting, a task which requires such functions, the thesis examines the status and utility of these theoretical concepts. Chapter 2 focused on previous studies of object counting (particularly those using children) and outlined the importance of different component operations which form the counting process. In doing so, the review described potential manipulations of count difficulty. A study by Miller and Stigler (1987) attempted to model the process of coordinating these components, but several methodological and interpretative problems make their conclusions unsound. Additive factor methodology was evaluated and justified as an initial investigative procedure with which to probe for a common processing structure. Visual manipulations of the count task were constructed and their effects were assessed (Experiment 1). On the basis of these experimental data, spacing of objects in a row (low or high proximity) was combined with a verbal number production manipulation (counting forwards or backwards) to produce different loads on any coordinating system (Experiment 2). The effects of these manipulations were reliable, but independent, a result which argues against the idea of a central executive as controller of task performance. Subsequent chapters detail several experiments which have followed up this independent- component finding. An interaction was demonstrated between proximity and a separate visual similarity factor, object colour (Experiment 3). Both manipulations were more powerful when the display configuration served to group objects together. This result showed that the previous additive effect using between component difficulty manipulations occurred in the context of nonadditive effects using within-dimension manipulations. Object similarity produced additive effects when combined with verbal sequence order, and so showed the earlier proximity result to be generalisable (Experiment 4). A separate study. Experiment 5, investigated the masking effect of irrelevant objects in arrays which lacked any spatial organisational principle, together with a manipulation of number words (incrementing by either one or two for each item). Once again, component manipulations were reliable in changing processing load, but there was no interaction between them. In a further investigation (Experiment 6), number increment was again used, combined with two manipulations of visual attention. Visual presentations allowed either pre-attentive object identification or forced serial, attention-demanding search mechanisms (following, for example, Treisman and Gelade, 1980; Treisman and Gormican, 1988). The number of background items accompanying target objects was also manipulated. There was no satisfactory evidence that changing the coordination difficulty tapped a unitary processing system. It was considered that these results were in conflict with the apparently positive evidence for an executive obtained by Case, Kurland and Goldberg (1982). These authors claimed to have found a trade-off between processing demand and storage capacity on a counting based task. Their analysis was re-considered and evidence was presented which showed that their processing interference explanation for memory performance was unnecessary, since memory decay provided a more adequate account of the experimental effects obtained in Experiments 7 to 10. Taken as a whole, the experimental data generate problems for the notion of a unitary executive system. Although the task of counting should have provided a good opportunity to observe a control mechanism, the results have favoured a more distributed, modular process account (cp. Daneman and Tardif, 1987). The results call into question the utility of the idea of a central performance limitation, and suggest that component synchronisation, at least for counting if not more generally, is carried out by multiple and independent processing modules.
Notlar:
School code: 1543
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Yer Numarası | Demirbaş Numarası | Shelf Location | Lokasyon / Statüsü / İade Tarihi |
---|---|---|---|
XX(686898.1) | 686898-1001 | Proquest E-Tez Koleksiyonu | Arıyor... |
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