- Title
- Pushing the limit: a further investigation into the exceptional ability to break Miller's processing capacity
- Creator
- Rae, Babette Patricia
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2018
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- Absolute identification (AI) is a paradigm in which participants identify stimuli varying on one physical dimension, such as line length. Stimuli are presented during a practice phase with a unique label, and during a test phase the participant is required to report labels based on the stimulus alone. Miller’s (1956) processing capacity limit of 7±2 was long thought to be the ceiling for the number of uni-dimensional stimuli participants could learn to identify in an AI task. Recent research, however, has proven this limit to be breakable by some exceptional participants. This thesis contains four experimental chapters that aimed to answer three central questions that relate to the ability to exceed Miller’s processing capacity limit. Firstly, to what extent is this ability learned? Secondly, what quality do people have who can learn beyond this limit? And finally, how far beyond this limit is it possible to go? Following the introduction in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 describes a Structural Forms algorithm (Kemp & Tenenbaum, 2008) to investigate participants’ psychological representation of stimuli across several modalities in various AI learning tasks. The examination of whether the multi-dimensional nature of musical tones contribute to an increased accuracy, and whether the frequencies aligning with the current Western musical scale are better identified, particularly for musicians, is presented in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 describes an experiment conducted in China investigating whether native tonal-language speakers have an AI advantage with pitch compared to Western populations. Chapter 5 reports about a long term learning experiment with tones of varying frequency and lines of varying length. Together, these results confirm findings that breaking Miller’s limit in identifying uni-dimensional stimuli is possible through learning, and that it is correlated with having a complex psychological representation of the stimuli. It is suggested that future research directions focus on disentangling these two factors, as well as collaborating with other psychological research areas such as neuro- and bio-psychology.
- Subject
- absolute identification; absolute pitch; multi-dimensional scaling; tonal language
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1385726
- Identifier
- uon:32283
- Rights
- Copyright 2018 Babette Patricia Rae
- Language
- eng
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT01 | Thesis | 1 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download | ||
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT02 | Abstract | 219 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |