Cognitive Framing in Action: The Upper Effect in Bimanual Object Manipulation
Open Access
- Author:
- McCormick-Huhn, John
- Graduate Program:
- Psychology
- Degree:
- Master of Science
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- March 25, 2015
- Committee Members:
- David A. Rosenbaum, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
- Keywords:
- Action planning
cognition
cognitive framing
object manipulation
bimanual - Abstract:
- Cognitive framing effects have been widely reported in high-level decision-making. Here I report how the framing of instructions impacted a physical task. In the experiments to be described here, participants demonstrated a new perceptual-motor phenomenon during a bimanual rotation task. Participants moved a long PVC pipe from one height to another, always turning the pipe 180 degrees. The participants were given instructions verbally in some experiments and non-verbally (only visually) in others. In Experiment 1, I discovered the upper effect. The term refers to the fact that in the bimanual rotation task that I used, participants rotated the pipe to target positions in such a way that the end of the pipe end to which attention was drawn—what I call the “business” end—was moved through the upper workspace. A priori, it was possible for all the tasks I studied for participants to rely on a default strategy of always turning the pipe clockwise or always turning the pipe counter-clockwise. That is not what they did, however. In Experiment 2, I tested the hypothesis that the upper effect arose because participants sought to exploit gravity. I replicated the upper effect in a new apparatus. In Experiment 3, I tested to see the importance of explicit specifications found in the instructions on the upper effect. I was able to knock out the upper effect when no business end was mentioned. In Experiment 4, I addressed the question of whether the upper effect still held in the absence of verbal instructions. Participants showed the upper effect even more strongly. In Experiment 5, I checked whether the upper effect resulted from participants’ wanting to avoid visual occlusion of the business end by their own arms. Again, participants performed the upper effect. I discuss how the findings from this series of studies shed light on the similarities between perceptual-motor planning and the high-level cognitive framing effects made famous by Kahneman and Tversky.