Department of
Psychology Graduate Program Information
Department
of Psychology Graduate Program 'Bible' (Rice access only)
In January, 2000 I returned to Rice University after five years at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. I have now set up a new laboratory at Rice and have funds available for supporting a full-time graduate student. In addition to extending my previous line of research (described below), and I also helping Rice set up a new program in Neuroscience, joint with Baylor College of Medicine (just a few hundred yards from Rice). This program includes a full graduate curriculum in neuroscience as well as an anticipated neuroimaging center with complete fMRI facilities. As a result, I anticipate a significant component of my future research will involve neuroimaging work.
Historically, my research has focused on 4 different areas:
·
Perceptual Organization
and Gestalt Psychology
·
Selective Attention and
Information Processing
·
Visual Illusions
·
Mental Imagery
My work on the first two of these areas, Perceptual Organization and Selective Attention, represents my primary research focus, even through today, and these two areas are linked. Most centrally, I have studied the age-old problem of visual grouping: the binding in the visual system of sets of features, attributes, contours and the like into unitary perceptual groups. I have worked to develop objective, theoretically-grounded performance measures for grouping, the absence of which proved a major stumbling block for Gestalt psychology. As a result, previously ambiguous terms such as pattern, configuration, and whole can now be operationally defined. My contribution has been to link grouping with selective attention: two entities belong to the same perceptual group if one cannot attended selectively to one while ignoring the other, and if one can successfully attend to both simultaneously. Based on this insight, I was able to demonstrate how perceptual groups are processed, particularly in the human visual system. My work has also led to a better understanding of emergent features, such as symmetry or closure, which can arise from configurations of perceptual elements such as line segments. Here again my work has focused on constructing theoretical conceptions of what constitutes an emergent feature and from the results devising operational definitions and performance measures, mostly RT (reaction time) for detecting them. My demonstrations have found their way into the major textbooks in the field. The RT effects I uncovered are robust, on the order of 10 times the magnitude of the most commonly researched effects in human perception (and may be the largest RT effects in cognitive psychology, so large, as they say, that no statistics are needed to document them). My most recent work is focused on comparing the two most common measures of selective attention, Stroop Interference and Garner Interference. This work shows that despite the nominal similarity of these two measures, the correlation between them is effectively zero. This in turn has led me to scrutinize the theory behind each effect and to the development of a model showing how the two arise independently.
Pomerantz, J. R., & Garner, W. R. (1973b). Stimulus configuration in selective attention tasks. Perception & Psychophysics, 14, 565-569.
Pomerantz, J. R., & Schwaitzberg, S. D. (1975). Grouping by proximity: Selective attention measures. Perception & Psychophysics, 18, 355-361.
Pomerantz, J. R., Sager, L. C., & Stoever, R. J. (1977). Perception of wholes and of their component parts: Some configural superiority effects. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 3, 422-435.
Pomerantz, J. R. (1983b). Global and local precedence: Selective attention in form and motion perception. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 112, 516-540.
Pomerantz, J. R., & Pristach, E. A. (1989). Emergent features, attention and perceptual glue. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, 15, 635-649.
Lew, H., Chmiel, R., Jerger, J., Pomerantz, J. R., & Jerger, S. (1997). Electrophysiologic indices of Stroop and Garner interference reveal linguistic influences on auditory and visual processing. Journal of the American Academy of Audiology, 8, 104-118.
My work on illusions includes the first published paper on the Illusory Pausing effect (whereby discs moving on collision courses in the visual field appear to pause when they glide over one another); a complete explanation of the Rubber Pencil Illusion (a robust effect whereby straight line contours appear to bend or go rubbery when the lines are put into motion, as when a pencil is wobbled between finger and thumb); and an explanation of the Grass Is Greener Illusion (which demonstrates rather than being a metaphor, the effect is literally true and is an unavoidable consequence of ecological optics). It also includes work on the Aperture problem in vision (why barber pole stripes appear to move vertically when in fact the pole is rotating horizontally); Motion Aftereffects (when stationary objects appear to move after a viewer has watched a moving display for a prolonged period of time); Apparent Motion (of the type seen in moving pictures, where sequential presentation of static images yields the perception of smooth, continuous motion); and Subjective Contours (the perception of edges where none exist).
Kolers, P. A., & Pomerantz, J. R. (1971). Figural change in apparent motion. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 87, 99-108.
Pomerantz, J. R., Goldberg, D. M., Golder, P. S., & Tetewsky, S. (1981). Subjective contours can facilitate performance in a reaction-time task. Perception & Psychophysics, 29, 605-611.
Goldberg, D. M., & Pomerantz, J. R. (1982). Models of illusory pausing and sticking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 8, 547-561.
Pomerantz, J. R. (1983a). The rubber pencil illusion. Perception & Psychophysics, 33, 365-368.
Pomerantz, J. R. (1983c). The grass is always greener: An ecological analysis of an old aphorism. Perception, 12, 501-502.
Finally, my work in Mental Imagery consists of a paper that has gone on to become a Citation Classic and has been reprinted in various places. It deals with one of the core problems in cognitive science, the issue of the form of mental representation, or in particular how the mind and brain encode visual objects. Although I have not continued research in this area, I retain an active interest in it..
Kosslyn, S. M., & Pomerantz, J. R. (1977). Imagery, propositions, and the form of internal representation. Cognitive Psychology, 9, 52-76. Also reprinted in N. Block (Ed.), Readings in Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. 2. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981.