CATLAB

Jennifer Richler co-winner of the Bob Fox Award of Excellence in Post-Doctoral Research

Posted on Apr 21, 2015

The Bob Fox Award of Excellence in Post-Doctoral Research is granted to post-doctoral fellows in the Department of Psychology at Vanderbilt who have demonstrated outstanding achievement in research; it is named in honor of Robert “Bob” Fox for his essential role in guiding the evolution of Vanderbilt’s Psychology Department over a five-decade period starting in the mid-60s.

Jenn earned her PhD at Vanderbilt with Isabel Gauthier and Thomas Palmeri and has continued on at Vanderbilt as a post-doctoral fellow. She previously won the Nunnally Dissertation Award and the Pat Burns Graduate Student Research Award from the department. She has 30 peer-reviewed publications and is an Associate Editor at JEP:General. She also spearheaded the PeePs (Particularly Exciting Experiments in Psychology) newsletter that highlights research published in the six experimental psychology journals from APA.

Congratulations, Jenn!

May Shen co-winner of The William F. Hodges Teaching Assistant Award

Posted on Apr 21, 2015

The William F. Hodges Teaching Assistant Award recognizes outstanding achievement as a teaching assistant by a graduate student in the Department of Psychology at Vanderbilt. William Hodges was an undergraduate and a graduate student at Vanderbilt in the 1960s. After his untimely death in 1992, family and friends established the William F. Hodges Teaching Assistant Award at Vanderbilt to honor outstanding teaching assistants in the department.

May is a third year graduate student in the CatLab. She has completed a Certificate in College Teaching from the Center for Teaching and has TAed for a wide array of courses in the department, including PSY208 (Principles of Experimental Design), PSY209 (Quantitative Methods), and PSY225 (Cognitive Psychology); this semester, she is TAing for a statistics course in Psychology and Human Development. Adriane Seiffert, for whom May TAed in PSY208 and PSY209, noted that her work was “exemplary in both courses”, and that students commented that “she was responsive and helpful – gave exact answers to questions”, “conveyed the material in a way she knew would be effective, logical and memorable”. Geoff Woodman, for whom May TAed in PSY225, noted that she “jumped on a week’s worth of lectures when given the opportunity.”

Congratulations, May!

New paper in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

Posted on Mar 24, 2015

We have a new paper in press:

Mack, M.L., & Palmeri, T.J. (in press). The dynamics of categorization: Unraveling rapid categorization. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. [PDF]

We explore a puzzle of visual object categorization: Under normal viewing conditions, you spot something as a dog fastest, but at a glance, you spot it faster as an animal. During speeded category verification, a classic basic-level advantage is commonly observed (Rosch, Mervis, Gray, Johnson, & Boyes-Braem, 1976), with categorization as a dog faster than as an animal (superordinate) or Golden Retriever (subordinate). A different story emerges during ultra-rapid categorization with limited exposure duration (<30ms), with superordinate categorization faster than basic or subordinate categorization (Thorpe, Fize, & Marlot, 1996). These two widely cited findings paint contrary theoretical pictures about the time course of object categorization, yet no study has previously investigated them together. Over five experiments, we systematically examined two experimental factors that could explain the qualitative difference in categorization across the two paradigms: exposure duration and category trial context. Mapping out the time course of object categorization by manipulating exposure duration and the timing of a post-stimulus mask revealed that brief exposure durations favor superordinate-level categorization, but with more time a basic-level advantage emerges. But this superordinate advantage was modulated significantly by target category trial context. With randomized target categories, the superordinate advantage was eliminated; and with “blocks” of only four repetitions of superordinate categorization within an otherwise randomized context, the advantage for the basic-level was eliminated. Contrary to some theoretical accounts that dictate a fixed priority for certain levels of abstraction in visual processing and access to semantic knowledge, the dynamics of object categorization are flexible, depending jointly on the level of abstraction, time for perceptual encoding, and category context.

New Papers

Posted on Jan 28, 2015

New papers in press:

Palmeri, T.J., & Mack, M.L. (in press). How experimental trial context affects perceptual categorization. Frontiers in Psychology.

Logan, G.D., Yamaguchi, M., & Schall, G.D., & Palmeri, T.J. (in press). Inhibitory control in mind and brain 2.0: A blocked-input model of saccadic countermanding. Psychological Review.

Richler, J.J., Palmeri, T.J., & Gauthier, I. (in press). Holistic processing does not require configural variability. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.