Sangam: A Confluence of Knowledge Streams

The Many Faces of Garner Interference

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dc.contributor Townsend, James T
dc.creator Burns, Devin Michael
dc.date 2014-09-16T17:15:40Z
dc.date 2014-09-16T17:15:40Z
dc.date 2014-07
dc.date 2014
dc.date.accessioned 2023-02-21T11:19:04Z
dc.date.available 2023-02-21T11:19:04Z
dc.identifier http://hdl.handle.net/2022/18756
dc.identifier.uri http://localhost:8080/xmlui/handle/CUHPOERS/252965
dc.description Thesis (Ph.D.) - Indiana University, Psychological & Brain Sciences, 2014
dc.description A series of speeded classification tasks proposed by Garner (1974) has become a well-entrenched method for identifying interactions between perceptual dimensions. The theory proposes that <italic>integral</italic> dimensions should produce a redundancy gain when a second dimension covaries perfectly with the attended dimension, and interference if the second dimension varies irrelevantly. This work questions the interpretation of such results as indicating interactive dimensions, reviewing independent models which naturally exhibit such effects. Furthermore, there are several methodological confounds which make the cause of Garner interference non-identifiable in the standard experimental context, the most serious of which is the conflation of changes in the number of stimuli with changes in the number of irrelevant dimensions. Here is proposed a novel three-dimensional extension of the Garner paradigm capable of disambiguating these experimental factors, which includes several conditions designed to help distinguish between various competing models of the related phenomena. This new paradigm was implemented with two stimulus sets, both composed of known integral dimensions, but from opposite sides of the complexity spectrum: color patches differing in their saturation, brightness, and hue; and faces differing in weight, age, and gender. Results show typical Garner interference effects for both stimulus sets, although the redundancy gains were rather modest. When a three-dimensional analog of the Garner filtering test is created by allowing a second irrelevant dimension to vary, however, the expected interference effects do not appear. Counter-intuitively, this additional variation often leads to an <italic>improvement</italic> in performance, an effect which cannot be predicted by the extant models. This effect is shown to be driven primarily by the extra dimension of variation rather than the additional stimuli. The implications for these (and other) findings are considered with regards to the utility of the Garner paradigm and the models that have attempted to describe it.
dc.language en
dc.publisher [Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University
dc.rights Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
dc.rights http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
dc.subject EBRW
dc.subject Garner
dc.subject Integral
dc.subject Interactions
dc.subject Perceptual
dc.subject Separable
dc.subject Cognitive psychology
dc.subject Experimental psychology
dc.subject Quantitative psychology and psychometrics
dc.title The Many Faces of Garner Interference
dc.type Doctoral Dissertation


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