Abstract
Finke and Pinker (1982, 1983) showed subjects an array of dots followed by an arrow in a blank field, and asked them to determine whether the arrow pointed to any of the previously seen dots. Response times were linearly related to the distance between the arrow and the nearest dot, suggesting that subjects spontaneously used an internal scanning or extrapolation process to perform the task. We replicate and extend this finding by varying the retention interval, and by employing a paradigm in which subjects’ eyes are closed and the arrows are described to them using a coordinate scheme. We also show that subjects are unable to predict the form of the data when the task simply is described to them. Results suggest that mental scanning along a straight path can be performed on images reconstructed from memory, and that it does not depend on the ongoing perception of a continuous surface, on physical eye movements, or on demand characteristics.
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This research was supported by NSF Grants BNS81-14916 and BNS82-16546 and an NIH Biomedical Research Support grant awarded to the first author, by a Faculty Research grant from the University of California to the second author, and by the MIT Cognitive Science Center under a grant from the Sloan Foundation.
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Pinker, S., Choate, P.A. & Finke, R.A. Mental extrapolation in patterns constructed from memory. Memory & Cognition 12, 207–218 (1984). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03197668
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03197668