Research - Dr. Leo Standing
Dr. Leo Standing
Department of Psychology
One area of research interest for Dr. Standing is picture memory: the human capacity to effortlessly process large quantities of pictorial information. The central problem explored is why memory for pictures is so much better than that for visually presented words, even when the same item is represented in each kind of stimulus. Much work to date has explored various aspects of picture memory, but few studies have attempted to explain the reasons for pictorial superiority.
Another line of research for Dr. Standing involves judgments of the concentration of alcohol in drinks. Previous studies had indicated a nonlinear relationship between the actual concentration of a drink and its perceived strength for both alcohol and other tastants. Dr. Standing's work to date on this matter has indicated a surprising degree of accuracy in people's judgments of the strength of a drink, higher than is usually found in tasks which require subjects to estimate the strength of solutions by taste. The functions found to date in some cases indicate an exponent of unity (1.0) for alcohol in Stevens' law. This is a very unusual finding which indicates that neither response compression nor response expansion is occurring, unlike what has been found to happen in many hundreds of other psychophysical tasks. Further, this accuracy appears not be impaired by the presence of masking flavours, but actually increased by them. Again, this does not correspond to the large number of studies done on taste masking in other kinds of solutions. So in two ways, the accuracy of alcohol perception appears to be unusual and should repay further study.
