Developmental Eye-Tracking Publications
All EyeLink eye tracker developmental research publications (infants / children / aging) up until 2025 (with some early 2026s) are listed below by year. You can search the eye-tracking research publications using keywords such as Infant, Reading, Word Recognition, etc. You can also search for individual author names. If we missed any EyeLink developmental articles, please email us!
2025 |
Aino Luotola; Riikka Korja; Jukka Leppänen; Akie Yada; Eeva Eskola; Tuomo Häikiö; Hetti Lahtela; Eeva Holmberg; Elisabeth Nordenswan; Saara Nolvi; Hasse Karlsson; Linnea Karlsson; Eeva-Leena Kataja Reciprocal relationships between a child's engagement with faces and mother–child interaction at 8, 30, and 60 months Journal Article In: Developmental Psychology, vol. 61, no. 5, pp. 964–976, 2025. @article{Luotola2025,Prioritized attention to faces can be viewed as an early-developing marker of social engagement. This behavior is closely linked with early interactions, but there has been little research examining the longitudinal associations between social engagement and parent–child interaction. We examined the reciprocal relations between mother–child interaction and child engagement with faces from infancy to preschool age. Participants of this study were 738 mother–child dyads from the FinnBrain Birth Cohort. We used Emotional Availability Scales to examine mothers' emotional availability in interaction and eye tracking to examine attention dwell time for pictured faces and nonface patterns under distraction at 8, 30, and 60 months. Using a random intercept cross-lagged panel model, which differentiates between-dyad variance from within-dyad variance (deviations from the individual's latent average), we found that higher maternal emotional availability was associated with shorter dwell time for faces at the between-dyad level. At the within-dyad level, stability (smaller deviations from the individual's latent average) in a mother's emotional availability at 30 months was associated with stability in the child's face engagement in the subsequent assessment at 60 months. Similar associations were not found in analyses of dwell times for nonfaces. Together, our findings show an interconnection between mother–child interaction and the child's engagement with faces and raise the possibility that shifts in the quality of these interactions within specific developmental stage may lead to changes in how children engage with social cues. |
K. Maquate; Angela Patarroyo; Angelina Ioannidou-Tsiomou; Pia Knoeferle Age differences in spoken language comprehension: Verb-argument and formality-register congruence influence real-time sentence processing Journal Article In: Discourse Processes, vol. 62, no. 8-9, pp. 650–672, 2025. @article{Maquate2025,Using the Visual World Paradigm, we investigated participants' processing of formality register and verb-argument (in)congruent sentences. Crucially, we tested whether individual differences influence sentence processing by taking participants' age (18–45 years) and their social status (high vs. low) into account. Participants listened to German context sentences that set up formal (e.g. Elegantly dressed says Peter:) or informal (e.g. Sloppily dressed rambles Peter:) situations while they looked at images that were associated either with a formal (e.g. a pair of fancy shoes and chic clothes) or informal (e.g. a pair of old shoes and casual clothes) context. Following the context sentence, they listened to a German target sentence (e.g. I'm soon tying my shoescolloquial). The verb in the target sentence imposed semantic constraints on its arguments (e.g. tie has a good semantic fit with shoes but fits less well with clothes). The on-screen images represented candidate post-verbal referents (e.g. shoes or clothes), creating semantic congruence between the verb constraints and two out of four candidate referents. This verb-argument congruence factor was crossed with congruence between the formality of the context sentence and the (informal vs. more formal) register of the post-verbal argument (e.g. shoesstandard vs. shoescolloquial). Our results show that participants take the formality of the context into account to inform anticipation of matching images on the screen. Moreover, the older the participants were, the more they took the formality of the context into account. All participants made use of the verb's restrictions: They anticipated and integrated the named object noun argument. Crucially, only younger but not middle-aged participants made use of the context sentence formality to further inform expectations of verb-argument congruence. Participants' social status did not influence register and verb-argument sentence processing. |
Kate Matsunaga; Kleanthis Avramidis; Mark S. Borchert; Shrikanth Narayanan; Melinda Y. Chang Method for assessing visual saliency in children with cerebral/cortical visual impairment using generative artificial intelligence Journal Article In: Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, vol. 18, pp. 1–9, 2025. @article{Matsunaga2025,Cerebral/cortical visual impairment (CVI) is a leading cause of pediatric visual impairment in the United States and other developed countries, and is increasingly diagnosed in developing nations due to improved care and survival of children who are born premature or have other risk factors for CVI. Despite this, there is currently no objective, standardized method to quantify the diverse visual impairments seen in children with CVI who are young and developmentally delayed. We propose a method that combines eye tracking and an image-based generative artificial intelligence (AI) model (SegCLIP) to assess higher- and lower-level visual characteristics in children with CVI. We will recruit 40 CVI participants (aged 12 months to 12 years) and 40 age-matched controls, who will watch a series of images on a monitor while eye gaze position is recorded using eye tracking. SegCLIP will be prompted to generate saliency maps for each of the images in the experimental protocol. The saliency maps (12 total) will highlight areas of interest that pertain to specific visual features, allowing for analysis of a range of individual visual characteristics. Eye tracking fixation maps will then be compared to the saliency maps to calculate fixation saliency values, which will be assigned based on the intensity of the pixel corresponding to the location of the fixation in the saliency map. Fixation saliency values will be compared between CVI and control participants. Fixation saliency values will also be correlated to corresponding scores on a functional vision assessment, the CVI Range-CR. We expect that fixation saliency values on visual characteristics that require higher-level processing will be significantly lower in CVI participants compared to controls, whereas fixation saliency values on lower-level visual characteristics will be similar or higher in CVI participants. Furthermore, we anticipate that fixation saliency values will be significantly correlated to scores on corresponding items on the CVI Range-CR. Together, these findings would suggest that AI-enabled saliency analysis using eye tracking can objectively quantify abnormalities of lower- and higher-order visual processing in children with CVI. This novel technique has the potential to guide individualized interventions and serve as an outcome measure in future clinical trials. |
Stephan C. Meylan; Roger P. Levy; Elika Bergelson Children's expressive and receptive knowledge of the English regular plural Journal Article In: Developmental Psychology, pp. 1–16, 2025. @article{Meylan2025,We investigate how children form early grammatical generalizations using the test case of the English regular plural. While some previous studies demonstrate that children apply abstract grammatical rules to produce novel plurals before 24 months, other studies have revealed that children use plural forms inconsistently with familiar and novel nouns and demonstrate limited or variable receptive plural knowledge through 36 months. This is at odds with typical trajectories in language development, where receptive knowledge precedes expressive knowledge. However, previous studies tested receptive and expressive knowledge in different samples and differences in experimental materials across studies limit interpret-ability. In a cross-sectional design, across three studies, we tested one hundred twenty-eight 24- to 36-month-olds on two complementary experimental tasks: a receptive (eyetracking) task to evaluate children's understanding of plurals and an expressive (storybook) task to test their plural production. In the former, children heard sentences directing their gaze to an onscreen plural or singular target. In the latter, they heard a singular object labeled and a prompt eliciting their plural production. We manipulated both novelty (novel vs. familiar object words; e.g., “cats” vs. “wugs”) and phonological form (/s/vs./z/plurals; e.g., “cats” vs. “dogs”). We found strong, age-related evidence of expressive knowledge of the plural, but much more limited evidence of receptive knowledge. Performance on the expressive task only predicted performance on the receptive task that included additional grammatical cues (e.g., “there are two wugs” vs. “can you find the wugs?”). This work highlights the complexity of emerging grammatical generalizations in language acquisition and emphasizes the role of redundant grammatical cues in processing. |
Mira L. Nencheva; Richard Peng; Diana I. Tamir; Casey Lew-Williams Infants track patterns of emotion transitions in the home Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, pp. 1–12, 2025. @article{Nencheva2025,Predicting others' feelings enables efficient social interactions. How do infants learn which emotions precede and follow each other? We propose that infants develop this ability by tuning into the dynamics of their socioemotional environment, in which they observe reliable patterns in how adults shift from one emotion (e.g., anger) to another (e.g., sadness). If infants learn about emotion transitions by observing the adults around them, we expect that the way infants process emotion transitions will reflect both average patterns seen in adults as well as specific patterns of their primary caregiver. We measured 4- to 10-month- old American infants' (N= 70) pupillary responses to emotion transitions and surveyed primary caregivers on the frequency of their own emotion transitions. As expected, infants were attuned to average adult patterns of emotion transitions, showing greater pupillary synchrony for more common transitions. Infants also showed sensitivity to their own primary caregiver's specific pattern of emotion transitions, showing similar pupillary responses to other infants in the sample whose caregivers show similar patterns. These findings suggest that infants learn about emotion dynamics by attending to both average and specific statistical patterns in the people around them. |
Ewa Niechwiej-Szwedo; Jordan Hobson; Andrew Chaston; Lisa Christian Vision, visuomotor, and executive function in older adults with a history of brain injury Journal Article In: Canadian Journal of Neurological Sciences, pp. 1–11, 2025. @article{NiechwiejSzwedo2025,Background Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is associated with negative sequelae affecting sensorimotor and executive functions. Conversely, age-related decline in these functions is also well documented. The current study examined the accelerating aging hypothesis by assessing vision, fine motor skills, and executive function in older individuals with a history of TBI. It was hypothesized that the age-related reduction in function will be exacerbated in individuals with TBI. Methods Participants (n=27) were community dwelling older adults (mean age 74.6 years SD 6.8; 14 females). History of TBI was determined using the Ohio State University TBI Identification Method (n=13). The visual examination included visual acuity, contrast sensitivity, and binocular vision. Visuomotor control was assessed using a precision grasping and placement task. The antisaccade task was used to evaluate executive functions. Participants with a history of TBI also completed questionnaires assessing quality of life. Results There were no significant differences between the groups for the vision tests or fine motor skill assessment. In contrast, the oculomotor test revealed significantly longer saccade latency in the group with history of TBI (10-12% difference, p<0.05). Exploratory analysis showed a significant negative association between the antisaccade latency and lower participation score on the Sydney Psychosocial Reintegration Scale. Conclusions Results indicate that oculomotor testing is a sensitive behavioural assay into executive functions in older adults, and differentiates between healthy adults and those with a history of TBI. The significant saccade latency slowing supports the accelerating aging hypothesis, while the association with community participation suggests impact on lifestyle. |
Ryan M. O'Leary; Nicole M. Amichetti; Zoe Brown; Alexander J. Kinney; Arthur Wingfield Congruent prosody reduces cognitive effort in memory for spoken sentences: A pupillometric study with young and older adults Journal Article In: Experimental Aging Research, vol. 51, no. 1, pp. 35–58, 2025. @article{OLeary2025a,Background: In spite of declines in working memory and other processes, older adults generally maintain good ability to understand and remember spoken sentences. In part this is due to preserved knowledge of linguistic rules and their implementation. Largely overlooked, however, is the support older adults may gain from the presence of sentence prosody (pitch contour, lexical stress, intra-and inter-word timing) as an aid to detecting the structure of a heard sentence. Methods: Twenty-four young and 24 older adults recalled recorded sentences in which the sentence prosody corresponded to the clausal structure of the sentence, when the prosody was in conflict with this structure, or when there was reduced prosody uninformative with regard to the clausal structure. Pupil size was concurrently recorded as a measure of processing effort. Results: Both young and older adults' recall accuracy was superior for sentences heard with supportive prosody than for sentences with uninformative prosody or for sentences in which the prosodic marking and causal structure were in conflict. The measurement of pupil dilation suggested that the task was generally more effortful for the older adults, but with both groups showing a similar pattern of effort-reducing effects of supportive prosody. Conclusions: Results demonstrate the influence of prosody on young and older adults' ability to recall accurately multi-clause sentences, and the significant role effective prosody may play in preserving processing effort. |
Erika Oliveira; Marisa Cruz; Jovana Pejovic; Sónia Frota; Marina Vigário Early perception of intonation in Portuguese Sign Language: A preliminary study using eye tracking Technical Report 2025. @techreport{Oliveira2025,We developed an adaptation of Frota et al.'s (2014) design to investigate, for the first time, early perception of intonation contrasts in a sign language. Using a modified version of the visual habituation paradigm, implemented with eye-tracking, we ran a pilot study with one deaf infant with limited exposure to Portuguese Sign Language (LGP), and one monolingual hearing infant, both coming from European Portuguese (EP) speaking homes. The results indicate that the new procedure can be successfully implemented to investigate deaf (and hearing) infants' sensitivity to the LGP statement/yes-no question prosodic contrast, shortly after 6 months. Interestingly, the looking pattern differed between the infants: the deaf infant looked more to the face than to the body region, while the hearing infant exhibited the reverse pattern. However, both infants demonstrated no evidence of discrimination of the visual prosodic contrast, unlike hearing EP-learning infants, who discriminated the auditory intonation contrast at 5 months (Frota et al., 2014). The results are conjectured to follow from infants' insufficient/lack of exposure to sign language input, as well as from the kind of phonological contrast under study. Further investigation is warranted, applying the new experimental procedure to deaf infants acquiring LGP in LGP homes. |
Henri Olkoniemi; Tuomo Häikiö; Milla Merinen; Jasmiina Manninen; Matti Laine; Penny M. Pexman Learning irony in school: Effects of metapragmatic training Journal Article In: Journal of Child Language, pp. 1–22, 2025. @article{Olkoniemi2025,Irony comprehension requires going beyond literal meaning of words and is challenging for children. In this pre-registered study, we investigated how teaching metapragmatic knowledge in classrooms impacts written irony comprehension in 10-year-old Finnish-speaking children (n = 41, 21 girls) compared to a control group (n = 34, 13 girls). At pre-test, children read ironic and literal sentences embedded in stories while their eye movements were recorded. Next, the training group was taught about irony, and the control group was taught about reading comprehension. At post-test, the reading task and eye-tracking were repeated. Irony comprehension improved after metapragmatic training on irony, suggesting that metapragmatic knowledge serves an important role in irony development. However, the eye movement data suggested that training did not change the strategy children used to resolve the ironic meaning. The results highlight the potential of metapragmatic training and have implications for theories of irony comprehension. |
Ascensión Pagán; Federica Degno; Sara V. Milledge; Richard D. Kirkden; Sarah J. White; Simon P. Liversedge; Kevin B. Paterson Aging and word predictability during reading: Evidence from eye movements and fixation-related potentials Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, vol. 87, no. 1, pp. 50–75, 2025. @article{Pagan2025,The use of context to facilitate the processing of words is recognized as a hallmark of skilled reading. This capability is also hypothesized to change with older age because of cognitive changes across the lifespan. However, research investigating this issue using eye movements or event-related potentials (ERPs) has produced conflicting findings. Specifically, whereas eye-movement studies report larger context effects for older than younger adults, ERP findings suggest that context effects are diminished or delayed for older readers. Crucially, these contrary findings may reflect methodological differences, including use of unnatural sentence displays in ERP research. To address these limitations, we used a coregistration technique to record eye movements (EMs) and fixation-related potentials (FRPs) simultaneously while 44 young adults (18–30 years) and 30 older adults (65+ years) read sentences containing a target word that was strongly or weakly predicted by prior context. Eye-movement analyses were conducted over all data (full EM dataset) and only data matching FRPs. FRPs were analysed to capture early and later components 70–900 ms following fixation-onset on target words. Both eye-movement datasets and early FRPs showed main effects of age group and context, while the full EM dataset and later FRPs revealed larger context effects for older adults. We argue that, by using coregistration methods to address limitations of earlier ERP research, our experiment provides compelling complementary evidence from eye movements and FRPs that older adults rely more on context to integrate words during reading. |
Elena Peterson In: Journal of Embodied Intelligence, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 41–52, 2025. @article{Peterson2025,Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), a critical transition between normal aging and dementia, demands early non-pharmacological intervention. Embodied robots show potential in elderly care, but existing MCI interventions rely on single-modal interaction and lack real-time cognitive state-based personalization. This study developed a multimodal perception-based intelligent robot (MPIR) and explored its effect on MCI elderly via a 10-week experiment (42 participants, MPIR vs. traditional training groups). Behavioral results: MPIR group's MoCA score improved by 10.3% (T0:22.3±1.8 to T2:24.6±1.5, p<0.001), higher than control's 4.2% (p<0.05), with greater ADAS-Cog reduction. Neurocognitively, MPIR group had sustained PFC/hippocampus activation and increased P300 amplitude (p<0.001). Real-time cognitive load matching and positive emotions played parallel mediating roles. Findings confirm MPIR's effectiveness, providing new means for MCI early intervention. |
Boyang Qin; Marieke Heugten Verbs drive real-time object state representation during language processing in children under 3 years of age Journal Article In: Language Learning and Development, pp. 1–20, 2025. @article{Qin2025,Adults' language-mediated event representations are greatly constrained by verbs. However, it is unclear whether children use verb information in a similar fashion. Using the Looking While Listening paradigm, we conducted two experiments to test whether children between 32 and 36 months incorporate verb type and tense when representing object state during language processing. Children were shown images of an object in different states (e.g. an open vs. a closed box), while listening to sentences labeling this object. In Experiment 1, sentences included either a stative or a non-stative verb (e.g. “David opened/owned the box!”). In Experiment 2, sentences included non-stative verbs in either past or future tense (e.g. “David's gonna open/opened the box”). Children's looking behavior differed as a function of verb type and tense, with more attention to images implying a modified object state (e.g. an open box) for non-stative verbs and past tense verbs compared to stative and future tense verbs. These effects occurred after noun onset, indicating that this use of verb knowledge is not anticipatory in nature. Taken together, these findings suggest that by age three, children's object state representations are sufficiently detailed in nature to be updated as a function of verb information. |
Kathryn L. Roberts; Poonam Arya Using eye-tracking and verbal protocol methodologies to explore third-grade students' patterns of attention to print and images Journal Article In: Reading Psychology, vol. 46, no. 8, pp. 771–799, 2025. @article{Roberts2025,Both eye tracking and verbal protocol methodologies have been used in research on reading, particularly in relation to readers' attention and strategy use. In this study, both methodologies are used to explore third-grade readers' patterns of attention to verbal and visual elements of two illustrated story books, as well as how those patterns relate to accuracy, prosody, and strategy use. Results indicate that, while students were fairly consistent in spending more time focused on verbal elements of text, readers who appeared to read in similar ways based on one variable (i.e., attention patterns, accuracy, prosody, strategy use) generally did not demonstrate similar performances on the other variables. This was also the case for some readers when comparing the reading of one book to the reading of the other. Directions for future research are discussed. |
Irina A. Sekerina; Olga Parshina; Vladislava Staroverova; Natalia Gagarina Attention–language interface in Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, vol. 249, pp. 1–19, 2025. @article{Sekerina2025,The current study employed the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) to test comprehension of narrative macrostructure in Russian in a visual world eye-tracking paradigm. The four MAIN visual narratives are structurally similar and question referents' goals and internal states (IS). Previous research revealed that children's MAIN comprehension differed among the four narratives in German, Swedish, Russian, and Turkish, but it is not clear why. We tested whether the difference in comprehension was (a) present, (b) caused by complicated inferences in understanding IS compared with goals, and (c) ameliorated by orienting visual attention to the referents whose IS was critical for accurate comprehension. Our findings confirmed (a) and (b) but found no effect of attentional cues on accuracy for (c). The multidimensional theory of narrative organization of children's knowledge of macrostructure needs to consider the type of inferences necessary for IS that are influenced by subjective interpretation and reasoning. |
Kaiyuan Sheng; Lian Liu; Feng Wang; Songnian Li; Xu Zhou An eye-tracking study on exploring children's visual attention to streetscape elements Journal Article In: Buildings, vol. 15, pp. 1–25, 2025. @article{Sheng2025,Urban street spaces play a crucial role in children's daily commuting and social activities. Therefore, the design of these spaces must give more consideration to children's perceptual preferences. Traditional street landscape perception studies often rely on sub- jective analysis, which lacks objective, data-driven insights. This study overcomes this limitation by using eye-tracking technology to evaluate children's preferences more scientif- ically. We collected eye-tracking data from 57 children aged 6–12 as they naturally viewed 30 images depicting school commuting environments. Data analysis revealed that the proportions of landscape elements in different street types influenced the visual perception characteristics of children in this age group. On well-maintained main and secondary roads, elements such as minibikes, people, plants, and grass attracted significant visual attention from children. In contrast, commercial streets and residential streets, character- ized by greater diversity in landscape elements, elicited more frequent gazes. Children's eye-tracking behaviors were particularly influenced by vibrant elements like walls, plants, cars, signboards, minibikes, and trade. Furthermore, due to the developmental immaturity of children's visual systems, no significant gender differences were observed in visual per- ception. Understanding children's visual landscape preferences provides a new perspective for researching the sustainable development of child-friendly cities at the community level. These findings offer valuable insights for optimizing the design of child-friendly streets. |
Lauren N. Slivka; Kenna R. H. H. Clayton; Greg D. Reynolds Mask-wearing affects infants' selective attention to familiar and unfamiliar audiovisual speech Journal Article In: Frontiers in Developmental Psychology, vol. 3, pp. 1–8, 2025. @article{Slivka2025,This study examined the immediate effects of mask-wearing on infant selective visual attention to audiovisual speech in familiar and unfamiliar languages. Infants distribute their selective attention to regions of a speaker's face differentially based on their age and language experience. However, the potential impact wearing a face mask may have on infants' selective attention to audiovisual speech has not been systematically studied. We utilized eye tracking to examine the proportion of infant looking time to the eyes and mouth of a masked or unmasked actress speaking in a familiar or unfamiliar language. Six-month-old and 12-month-old infants (n = 42, 55% female, 91%White Non-Hispanic/Latino) were shown videos of an actress speaking in a familiar language (English) with and without a mask on, as well as videos of the same actress speaking in an unfamiliar language (German) with and without a mask. Overall, infants spent more time looking at the unmasked presentations compared to the masked presentations. Regardless of language familiarity or age, infants spent more time looking at the mouth area of an unmasked speaker and they spent more time looking at the eyes of a masked speaker. These findings indicate mask-wearing has immediate effects on the distribution of infant selective attention to different areas of the face of a speaker during audiovisual speech. |
Stephanie Ducrot; Jonathan Grainger The development of letter representations in preschool children is affected by visuomotor integration skills and visual field asymmetries Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, vol. 257, pp. 1–12, 2025. @article{StephanieDucrot2025,One essential skill believed to consolidate during the preschool years is children's ability to recognize the different letters of the alphabet. The aim of the present study was to track how visual representations of letters change and are consolidated with exposure to print and the graphomotor experience a child has. A secondary goal of this study was to investigate the emergence of the right visual field advantage for letter identification, reflecting children's sensitivity to the directionality of print. Eighty-one preschool children (aged 4 to 5 years) participated in a longitudinal study where they were shown isolated uppercase letters in both normal upright format and rotated 180◦. The letter stimuli were mixed randomly with symbol stimuli in a letter/non-letter lateralized classification task. The results indicated that accuracy in classifying rotated letters as letters—rather than symbols—significantly improved among 4-year- old preschoolers between testing in December (mid-year) and in June (end of the school year). In contrast, little further development was observed in 5-year-old preschoolers, although they still exhibited a slight disadvantage in accuracy when classifying rotated letters. Additionally, behavioral and eye-movement data highlighted a left-to-right deployment of attention by the end of the second year of formal preschool education, evidenced by the emergence of a right visual field advantage. Our results suggest that letter representations undergo significant consolidation during the second year of formal preschool education, which typically corresponds to 4-year-old children in France, with a close relationship between letter identification skills, sensitivity to the directionality of print, and visuo-motor integration skills. |
Naomi Vingron; Lea Alexandra Müller Karoza; Nancy Azevedo; Aaron Johnson; Evdokimos Konstantinidis; Panagiotis Bamidis; Melissa Võ; Eva Kehayia How words can guide our eyes: Increasing engagement with art through audio-guided visual search in young and older adults Journal Article In: The Mental Lexicon, pp. 1–12, 2025. @article{Vingron2025,Pursuing cognitively stimulating activities, such as engaging with art, is crucial to a healthy lifestyle. The current work simulates visits to an art museum in a laboratory setting. Using eye tracking, we explored how linguistically guided visual search may increase attention, enjoyment and retention of information when viewing art. Two groups of adults, young (under 35 years) and older (over 65 years) viewed ten paintings on a computer screen presented either with or without an accompanying audio-guide, while having their eye movements recorded. Audio-guides referred to specific areas of the painting, marked as Interest Areas (IA). Across age groups, as attested by gaze fixations, the audio-guides increased attention to these areas compared to free-viewing. Audio-guided viewing did not lead to a significantly increase over free-viewing in information recall accuracy or feelings of enjoyment and engagement. Overall, older adults did report feeling more positively about both audio-guided and free viewing than young adults. Thus, the use of audio-guides, specifically the gamification through linguistically guided visual search, may be a useful tool to promote meaningful attentional interactions with art. |
Carla A. Wall; Caitlin Hudac; Kelsey Dommer; Beibin Li; Adham Atyabi; Claire Foster; Quan Wang; Erin Barney; Yeojin Amy Ahn; Minah Kim; Monique Mahony; Raphael Bernier; Pamela Ventola; Frederick Shic Preserved but un-sustained responses to bids for dyadic engagement in school-age children with Autism Journal Article In: Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, pp. 1–9, 2025. @article{Wall2025,Purpose: Dynamic eye-tracking paradigms are an engaging and increasingly used method to study social attention in autism. While prior research has focused primarily on younger populations, there is a need for developmentally appropriate tasks for older children. Methods: This study introduces a novel eye-tracking task designed to assess school-aged children's attention to speakers involved in conversation. We focused on a primary outcome of attention to speakers' faces during conversation between three actors and during emulated bids for dyadic engagement (dyadic bids). Results: In a sample of 161 children (78 autistic, 83 neurotypical), children displayed significantly lower overall attention to faces compared to their neurotypical peers (p <.0001). Contrary to expectations, both groups demonstrated preserved attentional responses to dyadic bids, with no significant group differences. However, a divergence was observed following the dyadic bid: neurotypical children showed more attention to other conversational agents' faces than autistic children (p =.017). Exploratory analyses in the autism group showed that reduced attention to faces was associated with greater autism features during most experimental conditions. Conclusion: These findings highlight key differences in how autistic and neurotypical children engage with social cues, particularly in dynamic and interactive contexts. The preserved response to dyadic bids in autism, alongside the absence of post-bid attentional shifts, suggests nuanced and context-dependent social attention mechanisms that should be considered in future research and intervention strategies. |
Changying Yan Enhancing English language teaching quality evaluation via dynamic multimodal cognitive transfer models Journal Article In: International Journal of Information and Communication Technology, vol. 26, no. 32, pp. 121–141, 2025. @article{Yan2025c,This paper proposes a dynamic assessment method based on multimodal cognitive transfer modelling to address the limitations of static and unidimensional analysis in English teaching quality assessment. A two-channel LSTM-cognitive state space model is constructed by synchronously collecting four-dimensional data of speech, vision, text and physiological signals in the teaching scene, quantifying students' cognitive state transfer trajectories based on the ACT-R cognitive architecture in the knowledge transfer channel, and adopting a dynamic causal map to model the feedback mechanism of teachers' strategy adjustment in the teaching intervention channel. A time-varying weighted assessment function was designed to dynamically fuse cognitive state vectors with intervention intensity. In a 136-lesson experiment in 12 schools, the causal attribution rate of this method was improved by 41.2%, and the adoption rate of intervention suggestions reached 83.7%, which verified the effectiveness and universality for dynamic quality assessment of English teaching. |
2024 |
Jordan C. Abramowitz; Matthew J. Goupell; Kristina DeRoy Milvae Cochlear–implant simulated signal degradation exacerbates listening effort in older listeners Journal Article In: Ear & Hearing, vol. 45, no. 2, pp. 441–450, 2024. @article{Abramowitz2024,Objectives: Individuals with cochlear implants (CIs) often report that listening requires high levels of effort. Listening effort can increase with decreasing spectral resolution, which occurs when listening with a CI, and can also increase with age. What is not clear is whether these factors interact; older CI listeners potentially experience even higher listening effort with greater signal degradation than younger CI listeners. This study used pupillometry as a physiological index of listening effort to examine whether age, spectral resolution, and their interaction affect listening effort in a simulation of CI listening. Design: Fifteen younger normal-hearing listeners (ages 18 to 31 years) and 15 older normal-hearing listeners (ages 65 to 75 years) participated in this experiment; they had normal hearing thresholds from 0.25 to 4 kHz. Participants repeated sentences presented in quiet that were either unprocessed or vocoded, simulating CI listening. Stimuli frequency spectra were limited to below 4 kHz (to control for effects of age-related high-frequency hearing loss), and spectral resolution was decreased by decreasing the number of vocoder channels, with 32-, 16-, and 8-channel conditions. Behavioral speech recognition scores and pupil dilation were recorded during this task. In addition, cognitive measures of working memory and processing speed were obtained to examine if individual differences in these measures predicted changes in pupil dilation. Results: For trials where the sentence was recalled correctly, there was a significant interaction between age and spectral resolution, with significantly greater pupil dilation in the older normal-hearing listeners for the 8- and 32-channel vocoded conditions. Cognitive measures did not predict pupil dilation. Conclusions: There was a significant interaction between age and spectral resolution, such that older listeners appear to exert relatively higher listening effort than younger listeners when the signal is highly degraded, with the largest effects observed in the eight-channel condition. The clinical implication is that older listeners may be at higher risk for increased listening effort with a CI. |
Victoria I. Adedeji; Julie A. Kirkby; Martin R. Vasilev; Timothy J. Slattery Children's reading of sublexical units in years three to five: A combined analysis of eye-movements and voice recording Journal Article In: Scientific Studies of Reading, vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 214–233, 2024. @article{Adedeji2024,Purpose: Children progress from making grapheme–phoneme connections to making grapho-syllabic connections before whole-word connections during reading development (Ehri, 2005a). More is known about the development of grapheme–phoneme connections than is known about grapho-syllabic connections. Therefore, we explored the trajectory of syllable use in English developing readers during oral reading. Method: Fifty-one English-speaking children (mean age: 8.9 years, 55% females, 88% monolinguals) in year groups three, four, and five read aloud sentences with an embedded target word, while their eye movements and voices were recorded. The targets contained six letters and were either one or two syllables. Result: Children in grade five had shorter gaze duration, shorter articulation duration, and larger spatial eye-voice span (EVS) than children in grade four. Children in grades three and four did not significantly differ on these measures. A syllable number effect was found for gaze duration but not for articulation duration and spatial EVS. Interestingly, one-syllable words took longer to process compared to two-syllable words, suggesting that more syllables may not always signify greater processing difficulty. Conclusion: Overall, children are sensitive to sublexical reading units; however, due to sample and stimuli limitations, these findings should be interpreted with caution and further research conducted. |
Noor Z. Al Dahhan; Julie Tseng; Cynthia Medeiros; Sridar Narayanan; Douglas L. Arnold; Brian C. Coe; Douglas P. Munoz; E. Ann Yeh; Donald J. Mabbott Compensatory mechanisms amidst demyelinating disorders: Insights into cognitive preservation Journal Article In: Brain Communications, vol. 6, no. 6, pp. 1–17, 2024. @article{AlDahhan2024,Demyelination disrupts the transmission of electrical signals in the brain and affects neurodevelopment in children with disorders such as multiple sclerosis and myelin oligodendrocyte glycoprotein-associated disorders. Although cognitive impairments are prevalent in these conditions, some children maintain cognitive function despite substantial structural injury. These findings raise an important question: in addition to the degenerative process, do compensatory neural mechanisms exist to mitigate the effects of myelin loss? We propose that a multi-dimensional approach integrating multiple neuroimaging modalities, including diffusion tensor imaging, magnetoencephalography and eye-tracking, is key to investigating this question. We examine the structural and functional connectivity of the default mode and executive control networks due to their significant roles in supporting higher-order cognitive processes. As cognitive proxies, we examine saccade reaction times and direction errors during an interleaved pro- (eye movement towards a target) and anti-saccade (eye movement away from a target) task. 28 typically developing children, 18 children with multiple sclerosis and 14 children with myelin oligodendrocyte glycoprotein-associated disorders between 5 and 18.9 years old were scanned at the Hospital for Sick Children. Tractography of diffusion MRI data examined structural connectivity. Intracellular and extracellular microstructural parameters were extracted using a white matter tract integrity model to provide specific inferences on myelin and axon structure. Magnetoencephalography scanning was conducted to examine functional connectivity. Within groups, participants had longer saccade reaction times and greater direction errors on the anti- versus pro-saccade task; there were no group differences on either task. Despite similar behavioural performance, children with demyelinating disorders had significant structural compromise and lower bilateral high gamma, higher left-hemisphere theta and higher right-hemisphere alpha synchrony relative to typically developing children. Children diagnosed with multiple sclerosis had greater structural compromise relative to children with myelin oligodendrocyte glycoprotein-associated disorders; there were no group differences in neural synchrony. For both patient groups, increased disease disability predicted greater structural compromise, which predicted longer saccade reaction times and greater direction errors on both tasks. Structural compromise also predicted increased functional connectivity, highlighting potential adaptive functional reorganisation in response to structural compromise. In turn, increased functional connectivity predicted faster saccade reaction times and fewer direction errors. These findings suggest that increased functional connectivity, indicated by increased alpha and theta synchrony, may be necessary to compensate for structural compromise and preserve cognitive abilities. Further understanding these compensatory neural mechanisms could pave the way for the development of targeted therapeutic interventions aimed at enhancing these mechanisms, ultimately improving cognitive outcomes for affected individuals. |
Sameer N. B. Alladin; Dani Berry; Evgeniya Anisimova; Ruth Judson; Poppy Whittaker; Edwin S. Dalmaijer Children aged 5–13 years show adult-like disgust avoidance, but not proto-nausea Journal Article In: Brain and Neuroscience Advances, vol. 8, pp. 1–8, 2024. @article{Alladin2024,Disgust is a vital emotion in the avoidance of illness. Human adults across cultures show disgust towards sources of potential contamination or pathogens, and elect to avoid their ingestion or even to look at them. Stomach rhythms appear to play an important role: disgust reduces normogastric power, and the pharmacological normalisation of gastric state reduces disgust avoidance. Human children are remarkably slow to develop disgust as measured by self-report and facial expressions. Here, we investigate whether disgust-induced avoidance (measured using eye tracking) and changes in gastric rhythm (measured using electrogastrography) exist in children aged 5 to 13 years ( N = 45). We found that children in this bracket showed oculomotor avoidance of disgusting stimuli in a preferential-looking task, similar to adult samples in previous research. However, in contrast to adult samples in previous research, children did not show an attenuation in normogastric power. These findings could suggest that avoidance behaviour precedes gastric involvement during disgust. This would support the idea that children initially respond to parental modelling: parents set (and enforce) the social norm of disgust avoidance, and children initially conform and only later do they internalise disgust as an interoceptive signal. Alternatively, the employed stimuli could have been potent enough to induce oculomotor avoidance, but not a gastric response. Research is slim in this area, and future work should focus on elucidating the role of the stomach in disgust, and on longitudinal studies of disgust development from childhood to adolescence. |
Alisa Baron; Katrina Connell; Daniel Kleinman; Lisa M. Bedore; Zenzi M. Griffin Grammatical gender in spoken word recognition in school-age Spanish monolingual and Spanish–English bilingual children Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 15, pp. 1–13, 2024. @article{Baron2024,This study examined grammatical gender processing in school-aged children with varying levels of cumulative English exposure. Children participated in a visual world paradigm with a four-picture display where they heard a gendered article followed by a target noun and were in the context where all images were the same gender (same gender), where all of the distractor images were the opposite gender than the target noun (different gender), and where all of the distractor images were the opposite gender, but there was a mismatch in the gendered article and target noun pair. We investigated 51 children (aged 5;0–10;0) who were exposed to Spanish since infancy but varied in their amount of cumulative English exposure. In addition to the visual word paradigm, all children completed an article–noun naming task, a grammaticality judgment task, and standardized vocabulary tests. Parents reported on their child's cumulative English language exposure and current English language use. To investigate the time course of lexical facilitation effects, looks to the target were analyzed with a cluster-based permutation test. The results revealed that all children used gender in a facilitatory way (during the noun region), and comprehension was significantly inhibited when the article–noun pairing was ungrammatical rather than grammatical. Compared to children with less cumulative English exposure, children with more cumulative English exposure looked at the target noun significantly less often overall, and compared to younger children, older children looked at the target noun significantly more often overall. Additionally, children with lower cumulative English exposure looked at target nouns more in the different-gender condition than the same-gender condition for masculine items more than feminine items. |
Doug J. K. Barrett; Claire V. Hutchinson; Fengjun Zhang; Hongyu Xie; Jingxin Wang Age-related differences in saccadic indices of top–down guidance via short-term memory during visual search Journal Article In: Psychology and Aging, vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 421–435, 2024. @article{Barrett2024,Aging has been associated with significant declines in the speed and accuracy of visual search. These effects have been attributed partly to low-level (bottom–up) factors including reductions in sensory acuity and general processing speed. Aging is also associated with changes in top–down attentional control, but the impact of these on search is less well-understood. The present study investigated age-related differences in top–down attentional control by comparing the speed and accuracy of saccadic sampling in the presence and absence of top–down information about target color in young (YA) and older (OA) observers. Displays contained an equal number of red and blue Landholt stimuli. Targets were distinguished from distractors by a unique orientation, and observers reported the direction of the target's gap on each trial. Single-target cues signaled the color of the target with 100% validity. Dual-target cues indicated the target could be present in either colored subgroup. The results revealed reliable group differences in the benefits associated with top– down information on single-target cues compared to dual-target cues. On single-target searches, OA made significantly more saccades than YA to stimuli in the uncued color subset. Single-target cues also produced a smaller advantage in the time taken to fixate the target in OA compared to YA. These results support an agerelated decline in observers' use of top–down information to restrict sequences of saccades to a task-relevant subset of objects during visual search. |
Katarina Begus; Elizabeth Bonawitz Infants evaluate informativeness of evidence and predict causal events as revealed in theta oscillations and predictive looking Journal Article In: Communications Psychology, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 1–9, 2024. @article{Begus2024,This study investigates 16-month-old infants' sensitivity to the informativeness of evidence and its potential link to infants' ability to draw accurate causal inferences and predict unfolding events. Employing concurrent EEG and eye tracking, data from 66 infants revealed significantly increased theta oscillatory activity when infants expected to see causally unconfounded evidence compared to confounded evidence, suggesting heightened cognitive engagement in anticipation of informative evidence. Crucially, this difference was more pronounced in the subset of infants who later made correct predictions, suggesting that they had correctly inferred the causal structure based on the evidence presented. This research sheds light on infants' motivation to seek explanatory causal information, suggesting that even at 16 months, infants can strategically direct attention to situations conducive to acquiring informative evidence, potentially laying the groundwork for the impressive abilities of humans to rapidly acquire knowledge and develop causal theories of the world. Living |
Hatice Eraslan Boz; Işil Yaǧmur Tüfekçi; Müge Akkoyun; Koray Koçoǧlu; Gülden Akdal Age-related saccadic reaction time associated with attention and working memory Journal Article In: Neurological Sciences and Neurophysiology, vol. 41, no. 4, pp. 231–236, 2024. @article{Boz2024,Objective: This study examined saccadic reaction time (SRT) in visually guided saccades according to age and its relationship with attention and working memory. Materials and Methods: The study participants were divided into three groups: young adulthood (18-39 years), middle adulthood (40-59 years old), and older age groups (over 60 years). A total of 85 participants, including 20 young aged, 26 middle aged, and 39 older aged, participated in the study. SRT was recorded using the EyeLink 1000 Plus eye tracker, and 32 trials were conducted. In addition, neuropsychological tests assessing attention and working memory including the Trail Making Test (TM), Digit Span (DS), and Stroop test were applied to the participants. Results: SRTs were prolonged in the middle adulthood (P = 0.026) and older age group compared with young adulthood (P = 0.002). However, SRT did not differ between the middle adulthood and older age groups (P > 0.05). In addition, SRT was moderately positively and negatively correlated with TM-A (r = 0.355 |
Shannon M. Brady; Marissa Ogren; Scott P. Johnson Effects of conflicting emotional cues on toddlers' emotion perception Journal Article In: British Journal of Developmental Psychology, vol. 42, no. 3, pp. 376–391, 2024. @article{Brady2024,The communication of emotion is dynamic and occurs across multiple channels, such as facial expression and tone of voice. When cues are in conflict, interpreting emotion can become challenging. Here, we examined the effects of incongruent emotional cues on toddlers' interpretation of emotions. We presented 33 children (22–26 months |
Meghan E. Byrne; Sara Kirschner; Anita Harrewijn; Rany Abend; Amit Lazarov; Lucrezia Liuzzi; Katharina Kircanski; Simone P. Haller; Yair Bar-Haim; Daniel S. Pine Eye-tracking measurement of attention bias to social threat among youth: A replication and extension study Journal Article In: Journal of Mood & Anxiety Disorders, vol. 8, pp. 1–9, 2024. @article{Byrne2024,Attentional bias to social threat cues has been linked to heightened anxiety and irritability in youth. Yet, inconsistent methodology has limited replication and led to mixed findings. The current study aims to 1) replicate and extend two previous pediatric studies demonstrating a relationship between negative affectivity and attentional bias to social threat and 2) examine the test-retest reliability of an eye-tracking paradigm among a subsample of youth. Attention allocation to negative versus non-negative emotional faces was measured using a free-viewing eye-tracking task among youth (N = 185 total, 60 % female |
Melinda Y. Chang; Mark S. Borchert Comparison of eye tracking and Teller acuity cards for visual acuity assessment in pediatric cortical/cerebral visual impairment (CVI) Journal Article In: American Journal of Ophthalmology, vol. 260, pp. 115–121, 2024. @article{Chang2024a,PURPOSE: To compare eye tracking and Teller acuity cards (TAC) for assessment of visual acuity in children with cortical, or cerebral, visual impairment (CVI). DESIGN: Reliability and validity study. METHODS: We recruited 41 children with CVI from a single academic pediatric neuro-ophthalmology clinic. All children performed eye tracking to measure visual acuity, and 26 children completed TAC assessment by a masked examiner. Additionally, 2 pediatric neuro-ophthalmologists graded visual behavior using the 6-level Visual Behavior Scale (VBS). Eye tracking and TAC were performed at baseline and at 1 month. Test–retest reliability of eye tracking and TAC were assessed using the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC). Eye tracking and TAC visual acuities were correlated with one another and VBS scores using the Spearman correlation coefficient. RESULTS: Test–retest reliability was excellent for eye tracking measurement of visual acuity (ICC = 0.81, P <.0001). For pediatric CVI, TAC test–retest reliability was fair (ICC = 0.42 |
Xianglan Chen; Weiqian Liu; Yuming Ma; Zhongyang Sun How pupils of different ages perceive menus denoting metaphorical and metonymic expressions: Insights from eye-tracking Journal Article In: Acta Psychologica, vol. 249, pp. 1–7, 2024. @article{Chen2024i,The “embodied” position on language comprehension proposes that metaphor or metonymy understanding can be presented in a distributed network based on previous sensorimotor experience. The current study attempted to investigate how children understood metaphor and metonymy.in the context of daily diet that provides rich sensory experience for children. We implemented an eye-tracking experiment where a 2 × 2 × 2 mixed design was employed. Thirty Chinese pupils aging from 6 to 12 were instructed to appreciate Chinese menus denoting metaphoric or metonymic expressions. Results of eye-tracking indicated that the dish image captioned with metaphorical names held the greatest attention of pupils, which held especially true for junior pupils. Moreover, the inclusion of Chinese pinyin in the menu served as a distractor that reduced pupils' attention to other menu elements. This study adds to the state of the art on embodied account of language by inspecting how the under-explored children perceived metaphorical and metonymic expressions. The context of everyday diet abundant in sensory experience managed to provide a more vivid scenario on this topic. It also provides practical insight into how to design menus to invoke particular sensory experience of infants who are undergoing both physical and mental development. |
Laura K. Cirelli; Labeeb S. Talukder; Haley E. Kragness Infant attention to rhythmic audiovisual synchrony is modulated by stimulus properties Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 15, pp. 1–8, 2024. @article{Cirelli2024,Musical interactions are a common and multimodal part of an infant's daily experiences. Infants hear their parents sing while watching their lips move and see their older siblings dance along to music playing over the radio. Here, we explore whether 8- to 12-month-old infants associate musical rhythms they hear with synchronous visual displays by tracking their dynamic visual attention to matched and mismatched displays. Visual attention was measured using eye-tracking while they attended to a screen displaying two videos of a finger tapping at different speeds. These videos were presented side by side while infants listened to an auditory rhythm (high or low pitch) synchronized with one of the two videos. Infants attended more to the low-pitch trials than to the high-pitch trials but did not display a preference for attending to the synchronous hand over the asynchronous hand within trials. Exploratory evidence, however, suggests that tempo, pitch, and rhythmic complexity interactively engage infants' visual attention to a tapping hand, especially when that hand is aligned with the auditory stimulus. For example, when the rhythm was complex and the auditory stimulus was low in pitch, infants attended to the fast hand more when it aligned with the auditory stream than to misaligned trials. These results suggest that the audiovisual integration in rhythmic non-speech contexts is influenced by stimulus properties. |
Brian C. Coe; Jeff Huang; Donald C. Brien; Brian J. White; Rachel Yep; Douglas P. Munoz Automated analysis pipeline for extracting saccade, pupil, and blink parameters using video-based eye tracking Journal Article In: Vision, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 1–20, 2024. @article{Coe2024,The tremendous increase in the use of video-based eye tracking has made it possible to collect eye tracking data from thousands of participants. The traditional procedures for the manual detection and classification of saccades and for trial categorization (e.g., correct vs. incorrect) are not viable for the large datasets being collected. Additionally, video-based eye trackers allow for the analysis of pupil responses and blink behaviors. Here, we present a detailed description of our pipeline for collecting, storing, and cleaning data, as well as for organizing participant codes, which are fairly lab-specific but nonetheless, are important precursory steps in establishing standardized pipelines. More importantly, we also include descriptions of the automated detection and classification of saccades, blinks, “blincades” (blinks occurring during saccades), and boomerang saccades (two nearly simultaneous saccades in opposite directions where speed-based algorithms fail to split them), This is almost entirely task-agnostic and can be used on a wide variety of data. We additionally describe novel findings regarding post-saccadic oscillations and provide a method to achieve more accurate estimates for saccade end points. Lastly, we describe the automated behavior classification for the interleaved pro/anti-saccade task (IPAST), a task that probes voluntary and inhibitory control. This pipeline was evaluated using data collected from 592 human participants between 5 and 93 years of age, making it robust enough to handle large clinical patient datasets. In summary, this pipeline has been optimized to consistently handle large datasets obtained from diverse study cohorts (i.e., developmental, aging, clinical) and collected across multiple laboratory sites. |
Carmen Julia Coloma; Ernesto Guerra; Zulema De Barbieri; Andrea Helo; Zulema De Barbieri; Andrea Helo; Carmen Julia; Ernesto Guerra; Zulema De Barbieri; Andrea Helo Article comprehension in monolingual Spanish-speaking children with developmental language disorder: A longitudinal eye tracking study Journal Article In: International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 105–117, 2024. @article{Coloma2024,Purpose: Article-noun disagreement in spoken language is a marker of children with developmental language disorder (DLD). However, the evidence is less clear regarding article comprehension. This study investigates article comprehension in monolingual Spanish-speaking children with and without DLD. Method: Eye tracking methodology used in a longitudinal experimental design enabled the examination of real time article comprehension. The children at the time 1 were 40 monolingual Spanish-speaking preschoolers (20 with DLD and 20 with typical language development [TLD]). A year later (time 2), 27 of these children (15 with DLD and 12 with TLD) were evaluated. Children listened to simple phrases while inspecting a four object visual context. The article in the phrase agreed in number and gender with only one of the objects. Result: At the time 1, children with DLD did not use articles to identify the correct image, while children with TLD anticipated the correct picture. At the time 2, both groups used the articles' morphological markers, but children with DLD showed a slower and weaker preference for the correct referent compared to their age-matched peers. Conclusion: These findings suggest a later emergence, but a similar developmental trajectory, of article comprehension in children with DLD compared to their peers with TLD. |
Federica Conti; Sarah Carnemolla; Olivier Piguet; Muireann Irish Scene construction in healthy aging – Exploring the interplay between task complexity and oculomotor behaviour Journal Article In: Brain and Cognition, vol. 177, pp. 1–10, 2024. @article{Conti2024,Mounting evidence indicates a close correspondence between episodic memory, mental imagery, and oculomotor behaviour. It remains unclear, however, how oculomotor variables support endogenously driven forms of mental imagery and how this relationship changes across the adult lifespan. In this study we investigated age-related changes in oculomotor signatures during scene construction and explored how task complexity impacts these processes. Younger and cognitively healthy older participants completed a guided scene construction paradigm where scene complexity was manipulated according to the number of elements to be sequentially integrated. We recorded participants' eye movements and collected subjective ratings regarding their phenomenological experience. Overall, older adults rated their constructions as more vivid and more spatially integrated, while also generating more fixations and saccades relative to the younger group, specifically on control trials. Analyses of participants' total scan paths revealed that, in the early stages of scene construction, oculomotor behaviour changed as a function of task complexity within each group. Following the introduction of a second stimulus, older but not younger adults showed a significant decrease in the production of eye movements. Whether this shift in oculomotor behaviour serves a compensatory function to bolster task performance represents an important question for future research. |
Ilse E. J. I. Coolen; Jordy Langen; Sophie Hofman; Fréderique E. Aagten; Jessica V. Schaaf; Lea Michel; Michael Aristodemou; Nicholas Judd; Aran T. B. Hout; Emma Meeussen; Rogier A. Kievit In: BMC Psychology, vol. 12, no. 407, pp. 1–26, 2024. @article{Coolen2024,Background: Children's cognitive performance fluctuates across multiple timescales. However, fluctuations have often been neglected in favour of research into average cognitive performance, limiting the unique insights into cognitive abilities and development that cognitive variability may afford. Preliminary evidence suggests that greater variability is associated with increased symptoms of neurodevelopmental disorders, and differences in behavioural and neural functioning. The relative dearth of empirical work on variability, historically limited due to a lack of suitable data and quantitative methodology, has left crucial questions unanswered, which the CODEC (COgnitive Dynamics in Early Childhood) study aims to address. Method: The CODEC cohort is an accelerated 3-year longitudinal study which encompasses 600 7-to-10-year-old children. Each year includes a ‘burst' week (3 times per day, 5 days per week) of cognitive measurements on five cognitive domains (reasoning, working memory, processing speed, vocabulary, exploration), conducted both in classrooms and at home through experience sampling assessments. We also measure academic outcomes and external factors hypothesised to predict cognitive variability, including sleep, mood, motivation and background noise. A subset of 200 children (CODEC-MRI) are invited for two deep phenotyping sessions (in year 1 and year 3 of the study), including structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging, eye-tracking, parental measurements and questionnaire-based demographic and psychosocial measures. We will quantify developmental differences and changes in variability using Dynamic Structural Equation Modelling, allowing us to simultaneously capture variability and the multilevel structure of trials nested in sessions, days, children and classrooms. Discussion: CODEC's unique design allows us to measure variability across a range of different cognitive domains, ages, and temporal resolutions. The deep-phenotyping arm allows us to test hypotheses concerning variability, including the role of mind wandering, strategy exploration, mood, sleep, and brain structure. Due to CODEC's longitudinal nature, we are able to quantify which measures of variability at baseline predict long-term outcomes. In summary, the CODEC study is a unique longitudinal study combining experience sampling, an accelerated longitudinal ‘burst' design, deep phenotyping, and cutting-edge statistical methodologies to better understand the nature, causes, and consequences of cognitive variability in children. |
Nicholas Cragoe; Jenna Sprowles; Megan L. Woodbury; Salma Musaad; Elizabeth Enright; Andréa Aguiar; Susan L. Schantz Associations of prenatal maternal urinary concentrations of triclosan and benzophenone-3 with cognition in 7.5-month-old infants Journal Article In: Environmental Research, vol. 263, pp. 1–9, 2024. @article{Cragoe2024,Background: Endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) have been linked to adverse health outcomes and prenatal exposure is known to impact infant and child development. However, few studies have assessed early devel- opmental consequences of prenatal exposure to two common phenolic compounds, benzophenone-3 (BP-3) and triclosan (TCS). Objective: We evaluated the relationship of prenatal exposure to BP-3 and TCS with infant cognition at 7.5 months via performance on a visual recognition memory (VRM) task. Methods: Drawing from the Illinois Kids Development Study (IKIDS) cohort, prenatal exposure to BP-3 and TCS was assessed in pools of five urine samples collected from each woman across pregnancy. Cognition was measured in 310 infants using a VRM task assessing information processing speed, attention, and recognition memory through infrared eye-tracking. Generalized linear regression estimated exposure-outcome associations, followed by stratification to investigate modification of associations by infant sex and stimulus set. Results: Sampled mothers were more likely to be white, college educated, and middle or high income relative to the US population. Mean chemical exposures were significantly higher than those of adult women in the NHANES cohort. In models adjusted for income, gestational age at birth, and testing age, prenatal BP-3 exposure was associated with an increase in run duration (average time spent looking at the stimuli before looking away) (β = 0.0011, CI -0.0001:0.0022), indicating slower information processing speed, while TCS was associated with significantly longer time to familiarization (time to accrue a total of 20 s of looking time to the stimuli) (β = 0.0686, CI 0.0203:0.1168, p < 0.01), indicating poorer attention. Stratum-specific analyses isolated both effects to male infants who viewed the second of two stimulus sets. Conclusion: Higher prenatal exposure to triclosan was associated with poorer attention in infancy, while benzophenone-3 may be associated with slower information processing speed, particularly among males. |
Sarah C. Creel; Conor I. Frye Minimal gains for minimal pairs: Difficulty in learning similar-sounding words continues into preschool Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, vol. 240, pp. 1–27, 2024. @article{Creel2024,A critical indicator of spoken language knowledge is the ability to discern the finest possible distinctions that exist between words in a language—minimal pairs, for example, the distinction between the novel words beesh and peesh. Infants differentiate similar-sounding novel labels like “bih” and “dih” by 17 months of age or earlier in the context of word learning. Adult word learners readily distinguish similar-sounding words. What is unclear is the shape of learning between infancy and adulthood: Is there a nonlinear increase early in development, or is there protracted improvement as experience with spoken language amasses? Three experiments tested monolingual English-speaking children aged 3 to 6 years and young adults. Children underperformed when learning minimal-pair words compared with adults (Experiment 1), compared with learning dissimilar words even when speech materials were optimized for young children (Experiment 2), and when the number of word instances during learning was quadrupled (Experiment 3). Nonetheless, the youngest group readily recognized familiar minimal pairs (Experiment 3). Results are consistent with a lengthy trajectory for detailed sound pattern learning in one's native language(s), although other interpretations are possible. Suggestions for research on developmental trajectories across various age ranges are made. |
Nannan Cui; Yang Wang; Jiefei Luo; Yan Wu The role of executive functions in 9- to 12-year-old children's sentence processing: An eye-movement study Journal Article In: Journal of Research in Reading, vol. 47, no. 2, pp. 201–219, 2024. @article{Cui2024,Background: Executive function (EF) plays a crucial role in children's reading. However, previous studies were based on offline products of reading comprehension. Online research is needed to reveal the core mechanisms underlying children's reading processing. By measuring children's working memory (WM) and cognitive flexibility (CF), we investigated whether individual differences in EF could modulate sentence processing and, if so, how they exert their roles. Methods: The present study manipulated semantic congruency and the association between crucial words in a sentence. We recruited 89 Chinese children aged 9–12 years and monitored their eye movement. Results: The study revealed distinct associations between reader- and text-related characteristics, as evidenced by eye-movement patterns during reading. A significant incongruency effect was observed in reading, underscoring the children's capacity to discern incongruent information. Children's WM and CF were found to modulate this process. Specifically, high-WM children showed more effective integration of incongruent information when the textual context was closely related during the later-stage processing. In contrast, low-WM children faced more challenges with incongruent words. Additionally, CF was influential during the early processing period. High-CF children exhibited longer early-stage reading times for incongruent words in associated contexts. Conclusions: Individual differences in EF can modulate children's online sentence processing. However, different EF components may play different roles. |
Stephanie M. Eick; Kaegan Ortlund; Andréa Aguiar; Francheska M. Merced-Nieves; Megan L. Woodbury; Ginger L. Milne; Susan L. Schantz Associations between oxidative stress biomarkers during pregnancy and infant cognition at 7.5 months Journal Article In: Developmental Psychobiology, vol. 66, no. 2, pp. 1–9, 2024. @article{Eick2024,Oxidative stress has been identified as an important biological pathway leading to neurodevelopmental delay. However, studies assessing the effects of oxidative stress on cognitive outcomes during infancy, a critical period of neurodevelopment, are limited. Our analysis included a subset of those enrolled in the Illinois Kids Development Study (N = 144). Four oxidative stress biomarkers (8-isoprostane-PGF2α, 2,3-dinor-5,6-dihydro-8-iso-PGF2α, 2,3-dinor-8-iso-PGF2α, and prostaglandin-F2α) were measured in second and third trimesters urine and were averaged. Infant cognition was measured using a visual recognition memory task consisting of five blocks, each with one familiarization trial (two identical stimuli) and two test trials (one familiar and one novel stimulus). Outcomes measured included average run duration (a measure of information processing speed), novelty preference (a measure of recognition memory), time to reach familiarization, and shift rate (measures of attention). Linear regression was used to estimate associations between individual oxidative stress biomarkers and each outcome. Increasing 8-isoprostane-PGF2α, 2,3-dinor-8-iso-PGF2α, and prostaglandin-F2α were associated with a decrease in novelty preference (β = −0.02, 95% confidence interval [CI] = −0.03, 0.00; β = −0.02, 95% CI = −0.04, 0.00; β = −0.01, 95% CI = −0.02, 0.00, respectively), as well as a modest increase in shift rate. These findings suggest that oxidative stress may be associated with poorer recognition memory in early infancy. |
Eeva Eskola; Eeva-Leena Kataja; Jukka Hyönä; Hetti Hakanen; Saara Nolvi; Tuomo Häikiö; Juho Pelto; Hasse Karlsson; Linnea Karlsson; Riikka Korja Lower maternal emotional availability is related to increased attention toward fearful faces during infancy Journal Article In: Infant Behavior and Development, vol. 74, pp. 1–12, 2024. @article{Eskola2024,It has been suggested that infants' age-typical attention biases for faces and facial expressions have an inherent connection with the parent–infant interaction. However, only a few previous studies have addressed this topic. To investigate the association between maternal caregiving behaviors and an infant's attention for emotional faces, 149 mother–infant dyads were assessed when the infants were 8 months. Caregiving behaviors were observed during free-play interactions and coded using the Emotional Availability Scales. The composite score of four parental dimensions, that are sensitivity, structuring, non-intrusiveness, and non-hostility, was used in the analyses. Attention disengagement from faces was measured using eye tracking and face-distractor paradigm with neutral, happy, and fearful faces and scrambled-face control pictures as stimuli. The main finding was that lower maternal emotional availability was related to an infant's higher attention to fearful faces (p = .042), when infant sex and maternal age, education, and concurrent depressive and anxiety symptoms were controlled. This finding indicates that low maternal emotional availability may sensitize infants' emotion processing system for the signals of fear at least during this specific age around 8 months. The significance of the increased attention toward fearful faces during infancy is an important topic for future research. |
Yunwei Fan; Huaxin Zuo; Ping Chu; Qian Wu; Li Li; Yuan Wang; Wenhong Cao; Yunyu Zhou; Lijuan Huang; Ningdong Li Analyses of eye movement parameters in children with anisometropic amblyopia Journal Article In: BMC Ophthalmology, vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 1–9, 2024. @article{Fan2024a,Objective: To investigate the characteristics of eye movement in children with anisometropic amblyopia, and to compare those characteristics with eye movement in a control group. Methods: 31 children in the anisometropic amblyopia group (31 amblyopic eyes in group A, 31 contralateral eyes in group B) and 24 children in the control group (48 eyes in group C). Group A was subdivided into groups Aa (severe amblyopia) and Ab (mild-moderate amblyopia). The overall age range was 6–12 years (mean, 7.83 ± 1.79 years). All children underwent ophthalmic examinations; eye movement parameters including saccade latency and amplitude were evaluated using an Eyelink1000 eye tracker. Data Viewer and MATLAB software were used for data analysis. Results: Mean and maximum saccade latencies, as well as mean and maximum saccade amplitudes, were significantly greater in group A than in groups B and C before and after treatment (P < 0.05). Mean and maximum saccade latencies were significantly different among groups Aa, Ab, and C (P < 0.05). Pupil trajectories in two detection modes suggested that binocular fixation was better than monocular fixation. Conclusions: Eye movement parameters significantly differed between contralateral normal eyes and control eyes. Clinical evaluation of children with anisometropic amblyopia should not focus only on static visual acuity, but also on the assessment of eye movement. |
Eunice G. Fernandes; Benjamin W. Tatler; Gillian Slessor; Louise H. Phillips Age differences in gaze following: Older adults follow gaze more than younger adults when free-viewing scenes Journal Article In: Experimental Aging Research, vol. 50, no. 1, pp. 84–101, 2024. @article{Fernandes2024,Previous research investigated age differences in gaze following with an attentional cueing paradigm where participants view a face with averted gaze, and then respond to a target appearing in a location congruent or incongruent with the gaze cue. However, this paradigm is far removed from the way we use gaze cues in everyday settings. Here we recorded the eye movements of younger and older adults while they freely viewed naturalistic scenes where a person looked at an object or location. Older adults were more likely to fixate and made more fixations to the gazed-at location, compared to younger adults. Our findings suggest that, contrary to what was observed in the traditional gaze-cueing paradigm, in a non-constrained task that uses contextualized stimuli older adults follow gaze as much as or even more than younger adults. |
Yingtao Fu; Tingyu Guo; Jiewei Zheng; Jie He; Mowei Shen; Hui Chen Children exhibit superior memory for attended but outdated information compared to adults Journal Article In: Nature Communications, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 1–9, 2024. @article{Fu2024,Research on the development of cognitive selectivity predominantly focuses on attentional selection. The present study explores another facet of cognitive selectivity—memory selection—by examining the ability to filter attended yet outdated information in young children and adults. Across five experiments involving 130 children and 130 adults, participants are instructed to use specific information to complete a task, and then unexpectedly asked to report this information in a surprise test. The results consistently demonstrate a developmental reversal-like phenomenon, with children outperforming adults in reporting this kind of attended yet outdated information. Furthermore, we provide evidence against the idea that the results are due to different processing strategies or attentional deployments between adults and children. These results suggest that the ability of memory selection is not fully developed in young children, resulting in their inefficient filtering of attended yet outdated information that is not required for memory retention. |
Beatriz García-Carrión; Francisco Muñoz-Leiva; Salvador Del Barrio-García; Lucia Porcu The effect of online message congruence, destination-positioning, and emojis on users' cognitive effort and affective evaluation Journal Article In: Journal of Destination Marketing and Management, vol. 31, pp. 1–13, 2024. @article{GarciaCarrion2024,In today's digital world, it is crucial that Destination Management Organizations (DMOs) understand how tourists process and assimilate the information they receive through social media, whether this is posted online by the destination itself or by other users. When it comes to understanding the effectiveness of DMOs' integrated marketing communication (IMC) strategies, it is important to examine the extent to which the congruence between those online messages posted by the destination and those posted by other users (electronic word-of-mouth) influences the effectiveness of the communication. Similarly, it is also of value to understand the degree to which the use of emojis in social media messages may enhance the effect of congruence on IMC effectiveness. The scientific literature has found that tourists' responses to the information published online by the destination will depend on the type of positioning it adopts on its social media. The novelty of the present study work lies in addressing these issues from a neuroscientific perspective, using eye-tracking technology, to study (i) the user's cognitive effort (based on ocular indicators) when processing social media content and (ii) their affective evaluation of that content. A factorial experiment is conducted on a sample of 58 Facebook users. The results point to the important role played by the level of message congruence in users' information-processing and demonstrate the contextualizing effect exerted by emojis. Additionally, this study highlights the need for further research into the cognitive processing of tourism messages relative to different positioning strategies. |
Ebru Ger; Stephanie Wermelinger; Maxine Ven; Moritz M. Daum What's the point? Infants' and adults' perception of different pointing gestures Journal Article In: Infancy, vol. 29, no. 2, pp. 251–270, 2024. @article{Ger2024,Adults and infants as young as 4 months old orient to pointing gestures. Although adults are shown to orient faster to index-finger pointing than other hand shapes, it is unknown whether hand shapes influence infants' perception of pointing. In this study, we used a spatial cueing paradigm on an eye tracker to investigate whether and to what extent adults and 12-month-old infants orient their attention in the direction of pointing gestures with different hand shapes: index finger, whole hand, and pinky finger. Furthermore, we assessed infants' and their parents' pointing production. Results revealed that adults showed a reliable cueing effect: shorter saccadic reaction times (SRTs) to congruent than incongruent targets, for all hand shapes. However, they did not show a larger cueing effect triggered by the index or any other finger. This contradicts previous findings and is discussed with respect to the differences in methodology. Infants showed a cueing effect only for the whole hand but not for the index or pinky fingers. The current results suggest that infants' orienting to pointing may be more robust for the whole hand shape in the first year, and tuning in to the social-communicative relevance of the canonical index finger shape may develop later or require additional social-communicative cues. |
Leonard Gerharz; Eli Brenner; Jutta Billino; Dimitris Voudouris Age effects on predictive eye movements for action Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 24, no. 6, pp. 1–12, 2024. @article{Gerharz2024,When interacting with the environment, humans typically shift their gaze to where information is to be found that is useful for the upcoming action. With increasing age, people become slower both in processing sensory information and in performing their movements. One way to compensate for this slowing down could be to rely more on predictive strategies. To examine whether we could find evidence for this, we asked younger (19-29 years) and older (55-72 years) healthy adults to perform a reaching task wherein they hit a visual target that appeared at one of two possible locations. In separate blocks of trials, the target could appear always at the same location (predictable), mainly at one of the locations (biased), or at either location randomly (unpredictable). As one might expect, saccades toward predictable targets had shorter latencies than those toward less predictable targets, irrespective of age. Older adults took longer to initiate saccades toward the target location than younger adults, even when the likely target location could be deduced. Thus we found no evidence of them relying more on predictive gaze. Moreover, both younger and older participants performed more saccades when the target location was less predictable, but again no age-related differences were found. Thus we found no tendency for older adults to rely more on prediction. |
Fatema Ghasia; Lawrence Tychsen Inter-ocular fixation instability of amblyopia: Relationship to visual acuity, strabismus, nystagmus, stereopsis, vergence, and age Journal Article In: American Journal of Ophthalmology, vol. 267, pp. 230–248, 2024. @article{Ghasia2024,PURPOSE: Amblyopia damages visual sensory and ocular motor functions. One manifestation of the damage is abnormal fixational eye movements. Tiny fixation movements are normal; however, when these exceed a normal range, the behavior is labeled “fixation instability” (FI). Here we compare FI between normal and amblyopic subjects, and evaluate the relationship between FI and severity of amblyopia, strabismus angle, nystagmus, stereopsis, vergence, and subject age. METHODS: Fixation eye movements were recorded using infrared video-oculography from 47 controls (15.3 ± 12.2 years of age) and 104 amblyopic subjects (13.3 ± 11.2 years of age) during binocular and monocular viewing. FI and vergence instability were quantified as the bivariate contour ellipse area (BCEA). We also calculated the ratio of FI between the 2 eyes: right eye/left eye for controls, amblyopic eye/fellow eye for amblyopes. Multiple regression analysis evaluated how FI related to a range of visuo-motor measures. RESULTS: During binocular viewing, the FI of fellow and amblyopic eye, vergence instability, and inter-ocular FI ratios were least in anisometropic and most in mixed amblyopia (P < .05). Each correlated positively with the strabismus angle (P < .01). During monocular viewing, subjects with deeper amblyopia (P < .01) and larger strabismus angles (P < .05) had higher inter-ocular FI ratios. In all, 27% of anisometropic and >65% of strabismic/mixed amblyopes had nystagmus. Younger age and nystagmus increased FI and vergence instability (P < .05) but did not affect the inter-ocular FI ratios (P > .05). CONCLUSIONS: Quantitative recording of perturbed eye movements in children reveal a major functional deficit linked to amblyopia. Imprecise fixation, measured as inter-ocular FI ratios, may be used as a robust marker for amblyopia and strabismus severity. NOTE: Publication of this article is sponsored by the American Ophthalmological Society. |
Deborah E. Giaschi; Akosua K. Asare; Reed M. Jost; Krista R. Kelly; Eileen E. Birch Motion-defined form perception in deprivation amblyopia Journal Article In: Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science, vol. 65, no. 4, pp. 1–9, 2024. @article{Giaschi2024,PURPOSE. The purpose of this study was to assess motion-defined form perception, including the association with clinical and sensory factors that may drive performance, in each eye of children with deprivation amblyopia due to unilateral cataract. METHODS. Coherence thresholds for orientation discrimination of motion-defined form were measured using a staircase procedure in 30 children with deprivation amblyopia and 59 age-matched controls. Visual acuity, stereoacuity, fusion, and interocular suppression were also measured. Fixation stability and fellow-eye global motion thresholds were measured in a subset of children. RESULTS. Motion-defined form coherence thresholds were elevated in 90% of children with deprivation amblyopia when viewing with the amblyopic eye and in 40% when viewing with the fellow eye. The deficit was similar in children with a cataract that had been visually significant at birth (congenital) and in children for whom the cataract appeared later in infancy or childhood (developmental). Poorer motion-defined form perception in amblyopic eyes was associated with poorer visual acuity, poorer binocular function, greater interocular suppression, and the presence of nystagmus. Fellow-eye deficits were not associated with any of these factors, but a temporo-nasal asymmetry for global motion perception in favor of nasalward motion suggested a general disruption in motion perception. CONCLUSIONS. Deficits in motion-defined form perception are common in children with deprivation amblyopia and may reflect a problem in motion processing that relies on binocular mechanisms. |
Björn Herrmann; Jennifer D. Ryan Pupil size and eye movements differently index effort in both younger and older adults Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, vol. 36, no. 7, pp. 1325–1340, 2024. @article{Herrmann2024,The assessment of mental effort is increasingly relevant in neurocognitive and life span domains. Pupillometry, the measure of the pupil size, is often used to assess effort but has disadvantages. Analysis of eye movements may provide an alternative, but research has been limited to easy and difficult task demands in younger adults. An effort measure must be sensitive to the whole effort profile, including “giving up” effort investment, and capture effort in different age groups. The current study comprised three experiments in which younger (n = 66) and older (n = 44) adults listened to speech masked by background babble at different signal-to-noise ratios associated with easy, difficult, and impossible speech comprehension. We expected individuals to invest little effort for easy and impossible speech (giving up) but to exert effort for difficult speech. Indeed, pupil size was largest for difficult but lower for easy and impossible speech. In contrast, gaze dispersion decreased with increasing speech masking in both age groups. Critically, gaze dispersion during difficult speech returned to levels similar to easy speech after sentence offset, when acoustic stimulation was similar across conditions, whereas gaze dispersion during impossible speech continued to be reduced. These findings show that a reduction in eye movements is not a byproduct of acoustic factors, but instead suggest that neurocognitive processes, different from arousal-related systems regulating the pupil size, drive reduced eye movements during high task demands. The current data thus show that effort in one sensory domain (audition) differentially impacts distinct functional properties in another sensory domain (vision). |
Ronen Hershman; David L. Share; Elisabeth M. Weiss; Avishai Henik; Adi Shechter Insights from eye blinks into the cognitive processes involved in visual word recognition Journal Article In: Journal of Cognition, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 1–9, 2024. @article{Hershman2024,Behavioral differences in speed and accuracy between reading familiar and unfamiliar words are well-established in the empirical literature. However, these standard measures of skill proficiency are limited in their ability to capture the moment-to-moment processing involved in visual word recognition. In the present study, the effect of word familiarity was initially investigated using an eye blink rate among adults and children. The probability of eye blinking was higher for familiar (real) words than for unfamiliar (pseudo)words. This counterintuitive pattern of results suggests that the processing of unfamiliar (pseudo)words is more demanding and perhaps less rewarding than the processing of familiar (real) words, as previously observed in both behavioral and pupillometry data. Our findings suggest that the measurement of eye blinks might shed new light on the cognitive processes involved in visual word recognition and other domains of human cognition. |
Bao Hong; Jing Chen; Wenjun Huang; Li Li Serial dependence in smooth pursuit eye movements of preadolescent children and adults Journal Article In: Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science, vol. 65, no. 14, pp. 1–12, 2024. @article{Hong2024,Purpose: Serial dependence refers to the attraction of current perceptual responses toward previously seen stimuli. Despite extensive research on serial dependence, fundamental questions, such as how serial dependence changes with development, whether it affects the perception of sensory input, and what qualifies as serial dependence, remain unresolved. The current study aims to address these questions. Methods: We tested 81 children (8-9 years) and 77 adults (18-30 years) with an ocular tracking task in which participants used their eyes to track a target moving in a specific direction on each trial. This task examined both the open-loop (pursuit initiation) and closed-loop (steady-state tracking) smooth pursuit eye movements. Results: We found an attractive bias in pursuit direction toward previously seen target motion direction during pursuit initiation but not sustained pursuit in both children and adults. Such a bias displayed both feature- and temporal-tuning characteristics of serial dependence, showed oblique-cardinal directional anisotropy, and was more pronounced in children than adults. The greater effect of serial dependence around oblique than cardinal directions and its increased magnitude in children compared to adults can be explained by the larger variability in pursuit direction around oblique directions and in children, as predicted by the Bayesian framework. Conclusions: Serial dependence in smooth pursuit occurs early during pursuit initiation when the response is driven by the perception of sensory input. Age-related changes in serial dependence reflect the fine-tuning of general brain functions, enhancing precision in tracking a moving target and thus reducing serial dependence effects. |
Holger Hopp; Sarah Schimke; Freya Gastmann; David Öwerdieck; Gregory J. Poarch Processing to learn noncanonical word orders: Exploring linguistic and cognitive predictors of reanalysis in early L2 sentence comprehension Journal Article In: Studies in Second Language Acquisition, vol. 46, pp. 686–709, 2024. @article{Hopp2024,To test the contributions of processing to L2 syntax learning, this study explores (cross-) linguistic and cognitive predictors of sentence reanalysis in the L2 comprehension of relative clauses among low-intermediate L1 German adolescent learners of L2 English. Specifically, we test the degree to which L2 comprehension is affected by L2 proficiency, reanalysis ability in a related, earlier-acquired L2 structure (questions), reanalysis ability of relative clauses in the L1, cognitive control, and cognitive capacity. In visual-world eye-tracking experiments, 141 adolescent German-speaking L2 learners of English selected target pictures for auditorily presented questions and relative clauses in the L1 and in the L2. The results showed a strong subject preference for L2 relative clauses. Learners' L2 proficiency and their processing of object questions in the L2 predicted reanalysis for object relatives in eye movements, reaction times, and comprehension accuracy. In contrast, there was no evidence that cognitive control or working memory systematically affected the processing of object relatives. These findings suggest that linguistic processing outweighs cognitive processing in accounting for individual differences in low-intermediate L2 acquisition of complex grammar. Specifically, learners recruit shared processing mechanisms and routines across grammatical structures to pave a way in the acquisition of syntax. |
Jeff Huang; Matthew L. Smorenburg; Rachel Yep; Heidi C. Riek; Olivia G. Calancie; Ryan H. Kirkpatrick; Donald C. Brien; Brian C. Coe; Chin-An Wang; Douglas P. Munoz Age-related changes in pupil dynamics and task modulation across the healthy lifespan Journal Article In: Frontiers in Neuroscience, vol. 18, pp. 1–14, 2024. @article{Huang2024a,The pupil is modulated by luminance, arousal, bottom-up sensory, and top-down cognitive signals, and has increasingly been used to assess these aspects of brain functioning in health and disease. However, changes in pupil dynamics across the lifespan have not been extensively examined, hindering our ability to fully utilize the pupil in probing these underlying neural processes in development and aging in healthy and clinical cohorts. Here, we examined pupil responses during the interleaved pro−/anti-saccade task (IPAST) in healthy participants across the lifespan ( n = 567, 5–93 years of age). Based on the extracted measurements of pupil dynamics, we demonstrated age-related changes in pupil measures and task modulation. Moreover, we characterized the underlying factors and age-related effects in components of pupil responses that may be attributed to developmental and aging changes in the associated brain regions. Finally, correlations between factors of pupil dynamics and saccade behaviors revealed evidence of shared neural processes in the pupil and saccade control circuitries. Together, these results demonstrate changes in pupil dynamics as a result of development and aging, providing a baseline with which altered pupil responses due to neurological deficits at different ages can be studied. |
Brianna Hunter; Brooke Montgomery; Aditi Sridhar; Julie Markant Endogenous control and reward-based mechanisms shape infants' attention biases to caregiver faces Journal Article In: Developmental Psychobiology, vol. 66, no. 6, pp. 1–15, 2024. @article{Hunter2024,Infants rely on developing attention skills to identify relevant stimuli in their environments. Although caregivers are socially rewarding and a critical source of information, they are also one of many stimuli that compete for infants' attention. Young infants preferentially hold attention on caregiver faces, but it is unknown whether they also preferentially orient to caregivers and the extent to which these attention biases reflect reward-based attention mechanisms. To address these questions, we measured 4- to 10-month-old infants' (N = 64) frequency of orienting and duration of looking to caregiver and stranger faces within multi-item arrays. We also assessed whether infants' attention to these faces related to individual differences in Surgency, an indirect index of reward sensitivity. Although infants did not show biased attention to caregiver versus stranger faces at the group level, infants were increasingly biased to orient to stranger faces with age and infants with higher Surgency scores showed more robust attention orienting and attention holding biases to caregiver faces. These effects varied based on the selective attention demands of the task, suggesting that infants' attention biases to caregiver faces may reflect both developing attention control skills and reward-based attention mechanisms. |
Anisha Khosla; Morris Moscovitch; Jennifer D. Ryan Spatial updating of gaze position in younger and older adults – A path integration-like process in eye movements Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 250, pp. 1–15, 2024. @article{Khosla2024,Path integration (PI) is a navigation process that allows an organism to update its current location in reference to a starting point. PI can involve updating self-position continuously with respect to the starting point (continuous updating) or creating a map representation of the route which is then used to compute the homing vector (configural updating). One of the brain areas involved in PI, the entorhinal cortex, is modulated similarly by whole-body and eye movements, suggesting that if PI updates self-position, an analogous process may be used to update gaze position, and may undergo age-related changes. Here, we created an eyetracking version of a PI task in which younger and older participants followed routes with their eyes as guided by visual onsets; at the end of each route, participants were cued to return to the starting point or another enroute location. When only memory for the starting location was required for successful task performance, younger and older adults were generally not influenced by the number of locations, indicative of continuous updating. However, when participants could be cued to any enroute location, thereby requiring memory for the entire route, processing times increased, accuracy decreased, and overt revisits to enroute locations increased with the number of locations in a route, indicative of configural updating. Older participants showed evidence for similar updating strategies as younger participants, but they were less accurate and made more overt revisits to mid-route locations. These findings suggest that spatial updating mechanisms are generalizable across effector systems. |
Andy Jeesu Kim; Joshua Senior; Sonali Chu; Mara Mather Aging impairs reactive attentional control but not proactive distractor inhibition Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, vol. 153, no. 7, pp. 1938–1959, 2024. @article{Kim2024,Older adults tend to be more prone to distraction compared with young adults, and this age-related deficit has been attributed to a deficiency in inhibitory processing. However, recent findings challenge the notion that aging leads to global impairments in inhibition. To reconcile these mixed findings, we investigated how aging modulates multiple mechanisms of attentional control by tracking the timing and direction of eye movements. When engaged in feature-search mode and proactive distractor suppression, older adults made fewer first fixations to the target but inhibited the task-irrelevant salient distractor as effectively as did young adults. However, when engaged in singleton-search mode and required to reactively disengage from the distractor, older adults made significantly more first saccades toward the task-irrelevant salient distractor and showed increased fixation times in orienting to the target, longer dwell times on incorrect saccades, and increased saccadic reaction times compared with young adults. Our findings reveal that aging differently impairs attentional control depending on whether visual search requires proactive distractor suppression or reactive distractor disengagement. Furthermore, our oculomotor measures reveal both age-related deficits and age equivalence in various mechanisms of attention, including goal-directed orienting, selection history, disengagement, and distractor inhibition. These findings help explain why conclusions of age-related declines or age equivalence in mechanisms of attentional control are task specific and reveal that older adults do not exhibit global impairments in mechanisms of inhibition. |
Aylin Koçak; Nicolas Dirix; Wouter Duyck; Maaike Schellaert; Eva Derous Older and younger job seekers' attention towards metastereotypes in job ads Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 19, no. 10, pp. 1–23, 2024. @article{Kocak2024,Building on social identity theory and cognitive models on information processing, the present paper considered whether and how stereotyped information in job ads impairs older/ younger job seekers' job attraction. Two eye-tracking experiments with older (Study 1) and younger job seekers (Study 2) investigated effects of negatively metastereotyped personality requirements (i.e., traits) on job attraction and whether attention to and memory for negative information mediated these effects. Within-participants analyses showed for both older and younger job seekers that job attraction was lower when ads included negative metastereotypes and that more attention was allocated towards these negative metastereotypes. Older, but not younger job seekers, also better recalled these negative metastereotypes compared to not negative metastereotypes. The effect of metastereotypes on job attraction was not mediated by attention or recall of information. Organizations should therefore avoid negative metastereotypes in job ads that may capture older/younger job seekers' attention and lower job attraction. |
Puja Kochhar; Iti Arora; Alessio Bellato; Danielle Ropar; Chris Hollis; Madeleine (Maddie) J. Groom A comparison of visual attention to pictures in the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule in children and adolescents with ADHD and/or autism Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychiatry, vol. 15, pp. 1–12, 2024. @article{Kochhar2024,Background: Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are neurodevelopmental conditions which frequently co-occur. The Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS) is commonly used to aid with diagnostic assessment of ASD but was not originally designed for use in those with comorbid ADHD. Visual attention to social stimuli has been often studied in ASD using eye-tracking, to obtain quantitative indices of how attention is deployed to different parts of a social image/scene. As the ADOS includes tasks that rely on attending to and processing images of social scenes, these measures of visual attention could provide useful additional objective measurement alongside ADOS scores to enhance the characterisation of autistic symptoms in those with ADHD. Methods: Children with ASD, comorbid ASD and ADHD, ADHD and Neurotypical (NT) controls were recruited (n=84). Visual attention was measured using eye-tracking during free viewing of social scenes selected from the ADOS. The full ADOS was then administered. Stimulant medication was temporarily withdrawn during this assessment. Research diagnoses were based on the Development and Wellbeing Assessment (DAWBA), ADOS, Social Communication Questionnaire (SCQ, a measure of ASD severity) and Conners' Rating Scales (CRS-3, a measure of ADHD severity) following clinical consensus. Results: Using factorial ANOVAs to model ADHD, Autism and their interaction, we found that fixation duration to faces was reduced in those with ASD (ASD and ASD+ADHD) compared to those without ASD (ADHD and NT). Reduced visual attention to faces in the whole sample was associated with Autism symptom severity (SCQ subscale scores) but not ADHD symptom severity (CRS-3 scores). Discussion: Our findings provide preliminary evidence in support of implementing visual attention measurement during assessment of ASD in the context of comorbidity with ADHD. For example, if a child with ADHD was found to reduce attention to faces in ADOS pictures this may suggest additive difficulties on the autism spectrum. Replication across a larger sample would be informative. This work has future potential in the clinic to help with complex cases, including those with co-occurring ADHD and ASD. |
Justin B. Kueser; Arielle Borovsky; Patricia Deevy; Mine Muezzinoglu; Claney Outzen; Laurence B. Leonard Verb vocabulary supports event probability use in developmental language disorder Journal Article In: Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, vol. 67, no. 5, pp. 1490–1513, 2024. @article{Kueser2024,Purpose: Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) tend to interpret noncanonical sentences like passives using event probability (EP) information regardless of structure (e.g., by interpreting "The dog was chased by the squirrel" as "The dog chased the squirrel"). Verbs are a major source of EP information in adults and children with typical development (TD), who know that "chase" implies an unequal relationship among participants. Individuals with DLD have poor verb knowledge and verb-based sentence processing. Yet, they also appear to rely more on EP information than their peers. This paradox raises two questions: (a) How do children with DLD use verb-based EP information alongside other information in online passive sentence interpretation? (b) How does verb vocabulary knowledge support EP information use? Method: We created novel EP biases by showing animations of agents with consistent action tendencies (e.g., clumsy vs. helpful actions). We then used eye tracking to examine how this EP information was used during online passive sentence processing. Participants were 4- to 5-year-old children with DLD (n = 20) and same-age peers with TD (n = 20). Results: In Experiment 1, children with DLD quickly integrated verb-based EP information with morphosyntax close to the verb but failed to do so with distant morphosyntax. In Experiment 2, the quality of children's sentence-specific verb vocabulary knowledge was positively associated with the use of EP information in both groups. Conclusion: Depending on the morphosyntactic context, children with DLD and TD used EP information differently, but verb vocabulary knowledge aided its use. |
Ethan Kutlu; Jamie Klein-Packard; Charlotte Jeppsen; J. Bruce Tomblin; Bob McMurray The development of real-time spoken and word recognition derives from changes in ability, not maturation Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 251, pp. 1–28, 2024. @article{Kutlu2024,In typical adults, recognizing both spoken and written words is thought to be served by a process of competition between candidates in the lexicon. In recent years, work has used eye-tracking in the visual world paradigm to characterize this competition process over development. It has shown that both spoken and written word recognition continue to develop through adolescence (Rigler et al., 2015). It is still unclear what drives these changes in real-time word recognition over the school years, as there are dramatic changes in language, the onset of reading instruction, and gains in domain general function during this time. This study began to address these issues by asking whether changes in real-time word recognition derive from changes in overall language and reading ability or reflect more general age-related development. This cross-sectional study examined 278 school-age children (Grades 1–3) using the Visual World Paradigm to assess both spoken and written word recognition, along with multiple measures of language, reading and phonology. A structural equation model applied to these ability measures found three factors representing language, reading, and phonology. Multiple regression analyses were used to understand how these three factors relate to real-time spoken and written word recognition as well as a non-linguistic variant of the VWP intended to capture decision speed, eye-movement factors, and other non-language/reading differences. We found that for both spoken and written word recognition, the speed of activating target words in both domains was more closely tied to the relevant ability (e.g., reading for written word recognition) than was age. We also examined competition resolution (how fully competitors were suppressed late in processing). Here, spoken word recognition showed only small, developmental effects that were only related to phonological processing, suggesting links to developmental language disorder. However, in written word recognition, competitor resolution showed large impacts of development which were strongly linked to reading. This suggests the dimensionality of real-time lexical processing may differ across domains. Importantly, neither spoken nor written word recognition is fully described by changes in non-linguistic skills assessed with non-linguistic VWP, and the non-linguistic VWP was linked to differences in language and reading. These findings suggest that spoken and written word recognition continue past the first year of life and are mostly driven by ability and not only by overall maturation. |
Anne Sophie Laurin; Julie Ouerfelli-Ethier; Laure Pisella; Aarlenne Zein Khan Reduced spatial attentional distribution in older adults Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 24, no. 4, pp. 1–20, 2024. @article{Laurin2024,Older adults show decline in visual search performance, but the underlying cause remains unclear. It has been suggested that older adults' altered performance may be related to reduced spatial attention to peripheral visual information compared with younger adults. In this study, 18 younger (M = 21.6 years) and 16 older (M = 69.1 years) participants performed pop-out and serial visual search tasks with variously sized gaze-contingent artificial central scotomas (3°, 5°, or 7° diameter). By occluding central vision, we measured how attention to the periphery was contributing to the search performance.We also tested the effect of target eccentricity on search times and eye movements.We hypothesized that, if attention is reduced primarily in the periphery in older adults, we would observe longer search times for more eccentric targets and with central occlusion. During the pop-out search, older adults showed a steeper decline in search performance with increasing eccentricity and central scotoma size compared with younger adults. In contrast, during the serial search, older adults had longer search times than younger adults overall, independent of target eccentricity and scotoma size. Longer search times were attributed to higher cost-per-item slopes, indicating increased difficulty in simultaneously processing complex symbols made up of separable features in aging, possibly stemming from challenges in spatially binding individual features. Altogether, our findings point to fewer attentional resources of simultaneous visual processing to distribute over space or separable features of objects, consistent with decreased dorsal visual stream functioning in aging. |
Hyeri Lee; Yoomi Choi; Jee Eun Sung Age-related changes in connected speech production: Evidence from eye-tracking in the culturally adapted picture description task Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 15, pp. 1–14, 2024. @article{Lee2024d,Purpose: Age-related changes in connected speech production remain a subject of debate, yielding inconsistent findings across various tasks and measures. This study aimed to investigate the effects of aging on picture description tasks using two types of pictures: a standardized picture (the Beach picture) and a culturally and linguistically modified picture tailored for Korean speakers (the Han River picture). Method: Twenty-four young adults and 22 older adults participated in two picture description tasks while their eye movements were recorded. Word-level linguistic variables were used to assess informativeness (Correct Information Units per minute) and productivity (noun and verb counts per utterance) of connected speech production. Eye-movement measures were employed to evaluate real-time cognitive processing associated with planning connected speech (pre-speech fixation counts and durations; eye fixations before the speech onset of each utterance). Results and conclusions: The findings revealed age-related declines in linguistic measures, with older adults exhibiting decreased CIUs per minute and smaller counts of nouns and verbs per utterance. Age-related changes in eye movement measures were evident in that older adults displayed longer pre-speech fixation durations. Unlike younger adults, older adults exhibited higher pre-speech fixation counts on the Han River picture compared to the Beach picture, suggesting cognitive challenges in performing the task that requires producing more words and detailed descriptions. These results suggest that aging is associated with reduced informativeness and productivity of connected speech, as well as a decline in cognitive processing efficiency. |
Yao Tung Lee; Yi Hsuan Chang; Hsu Jung Tsai; Shu Ping Chao; David Yen Ting Chen; Jui Tai Chen; Yih‐Giun Cherng; Chin An Wang Altered pupil light and darkness reflex and eye-blink responses in late-life depression Journal Article In: BMC Geriatrics, vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 1–14, 2024. @article{Lee2024e,Background: Late-life depression (LLD) is a prevalent neuropsychiatric disorder in the older population. While LLD exhibits high mortality rates, depressive symptoms in older adults are often masked by physical health conditions. In younger adults, depression is associated with deficits in pupil light reflex and eye blink rate, suggesting the potential use of these responses as biomarkers for LLD. Methods: We conducted a study using video-based eye-tracking to investigate pupil and blink responses in LLD patients (n = 25), older (OLD) healthy controls (n = 29), and younger (YOUNG) healthy controls (n = 25). The aim was to determine whether there were alterations in pupil and blink responses in LLD compared to both OLD and YOUNG groups. Results: LLD patients displayed significantly higher blink rates and dampened pupil constriction responses compared to OLD and YOUNG controls. While tonic pupil size in YOUNG differed from that of OLD, LLD patients did not exhibit a significant difference compared to OLD and YOUNG controls. GDS-15 scores in older adults correlated with light and darkness reflex response variability and blink rates. PHQ-15 scores showed a correlation with blink rates, while MoCA scores correlated with tonic pupil sizes. Conclusions: The findings demonstrate that LLD patients display altered pupil and blink behavior compared to OLD and YOUNG controls. These altered responses correlated differently with the severity of depressive, somatic, and cognitive symptoms, indicating their potential as objective biomarkers for LLD. |
Lin Li; Lingshan Bao; Zhuoer Li; Sha Li; Jingyi Liu; Pin Wang; Kayleigh L. Warrington; Sarah Gunn; Kevin B. Paterson Efficient word segmentation is preserved in older adult readers: Evidence from eye movements during Chinese reading Journal Article In: Psychology and Aging, vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 215–230, 2024. @article{Li2024b,College-aged readers use efficient strategies to segment and recognize words in naturally unspaced Chinese text. Whether this capability changes across the adult lifespan is unknown, although segmenting words in unspaced text may be challenging for older readers due to visual and cognitive declines in older age, including poorer parafoveal processing of upcoming characters. Accordingly, we conducted two eye movement experiments to test for age differences in word segmentation, each with 48 young (18–30 years) and 36 older (65+ years) native Chinese readers. Following Zhou and Li (2021), we focused on the processing of “incremental” three-character words, like 幼儿园 (meaning “kindergartens”), which contain an embedded two-character word (e.g., 幼儿, meaning “children”). In Experiment 1, either the threecharacter word or its embedded word was presented as the target word in sentence contexts where the three-character word always was plausible, and the embedded word was either plausible or implausible. Both age groups produced similar plausibility effects, suggesting age constancy in accessing the embedded word early during ambiguity processing before ultimately assigning an incremental word analysis. Experiment 2 provided further evidence that both younger and older readers access the embedded word early during ambiguity processing, but rapidly select the appropriate (incremental) word. Crucially, the findings suggest that word segmentation strategies do not differ with age. |
Yuanyuan Lu; Lintong Song; Chunxiang Huang; Tianqing Fan; Jinqiao Huang; Leyin Zhang; Xuerong Luo; Yanhua Li; Yanmei Shen The association between eye movement characteristics and cognitive function in adolescents with major depressive disorder Journal Article In: Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, vol. 345, pp. 1–9, 2024. @article{Lu2024a,Objective: This study aims to explore the relationship between eye movement characteristics and cognitive function in adolescents with major depressive disorder (MDD). Method: EyeLink 1000 eye tracker was used to obtain eye movement data in free-viewing and smooth pursuit tasks. Chi-square test and Mann-Whitney test were used for inter-group comparison of demographic and clinical data. Spearman correlation was used to analyze the correlation between eye movement characteristics and cognitive function. Results: Adolescents with MDD showed lower saccade amplitude in the free-viewing task and more fixations and saccades in the smooth pursuit task. In the free-viewing task, fixation count, saccade duration and saccade speed were found to be positively correlated with immediate memory and attention; fixation duration was negatively correlated with immediate memory. In the smooth pursuit task, saccade count was positively correlated with the faux pas test; fixation duration and saccade duration were significantly correlated with memory and attention. Conclusion: Adolescents with MDD showed abnormalities in several indices of eye movement, and altered eye movement variables were also correlated with cognitive deficits. Eye-tracking technology helps illustrate the diverse cognitive strategies employed by individuals during cognitive tasks, allowing researchers to explore subtle differences in cognitive processes. |
Jialin Ma; Xiaojing Liu; Yongxin Li A comparative study recognizing the expression of information between elderly individuals and young individuals Journal Article In: Psychology Research and Behavior Management, vol. 17, pp. 3111–3120, 2024. @article{Ma2024b,Background: Studies have shown that elderly individuals have significantly worse facial expression recognition scores than young adults. Some have suggested that this difference is due to perceptual degradation, while others suggest it is due to decreased attention of elderly individuals to the most informative regions of the face. Methods: To resolve this controversy, this study recruited 85 participants and used a behavioral task and eye-tracking techniques (EyeLink 1000 Plus eye tracker). It adopted the “study-recognition” paradigm, and a mixed experimental design of 3 (facial expressions: positive, neutral, negative) × 2 (subjects' age: young, old) × 3 (facial areas of interest: eyes, nose, and mouth) was used to explore whether there was perceptual degradation in older people's attention to facial expressions and investigate the differences in diagnostic areas between young and older people. Results: The behavioral results revealed that young participants had significantly higher facial expression recognition scores than older participants did; moreover, the eye-tracking results revealed that younger people generally fixated on faces significantly more than elderly people, demonstrating the perceptual degradation in elderly people. Young people primarily look at the eyes, followed by the nose and, finally, the mouth when examining facial expressions. The elderly participants primarily focus on the eyes, followed by the mouth and then the nose. Conclusion: The findings confirmed that young participants have better facial expression recognition performance than elderly participants, which may be related more to perceptual degradation than to decreased attention to informative areas of the face. For elderly people, the duration of gaze toward the facial diagnosis area (such as the eyes) should be increased when recognizing faces to compensate for the disadvantage of decreased facial recognition performance caused by perceptual aging. |
Kaiwen Man; Joni M. Lakin An exploratory study using innovative graphical network analysis to model eye movements in spatial reasoning problem solving Journal Article In: Journal of Educational Measurement, vol. 61, no. 4, pp. 710–739, 2024. @article{Man2024a,Eye-tracking procedures generate copious process data that could be valuable in establishing the response processes component of modern validity theory. However, there is a lack of tools for assessing and visualizing response processes using process data such as eye-tracking fixation sequences, especially those suitable for young children. This study, which explored student responses to a spatial reasoning task, employed eye tracking and social network analysis to model, examine, and visualize students' visual transition patterns while solving spatial problems to begin to elucidate these processes. Fifty students in Grades 2–8 completed a spatial reasoning task as eye movements were recorded. Areas of interest (AoIs) were defined within the task for each spatial reasoning question. Transition networks between AoIs were constructed and analyzed using selected network measures. Results revealed shared transition sequences across students as well as strategic differences between high and low performers. High performers demonstrated more integrated transitions between AoIs, while low performers considered information more in isolation. Additionally, age and the interaction of age and performance did not significantly impact these measures. The study demonstrates a novel modeling approach for investigating visual processing and provides initial evidence that high-performing students more deeply engage with visual information in solving these types of questions. |
Athina Manoli; Simon P. Liversedge; Edmund Sonuga-Barke; Julie A. Hadwin Distinct patterns of emotional processing in ADHD and anxiety. Evidence from an eye-movement Go/No-Go task Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Psychology, pp. 1–16, 2024. @article{Manoli2024,Young people with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) demonstrate cognitive control difficulties, particularly when emotional processing is involved. In contrast, individuals with anxiety show disruptions primarily in threat-related contexts. ADHD and anxiety frequently co-occur and the impact of emotional stimuli on cognitive processes in these groups remains unclear. This study used an eye-tracking Go/No-Go task with emotional (happy, angry) and neutral stimuli to explore attentional processing in children/adolescents with ADHD, anxiety and typically developing (TD) controls. The results showed that children with ADHD had slower disengagement from angry compared to happy faces, while those with anxiety exhibited no such differences. Inhibitory control challenges were evident in the ADHD group for both emotional faces, whereas the anxiety group demonstrated improved control with angry faces. Exploratory analyses suggested that children with comorbid ADHD and anxiety might have distinct cognitive-affective profile, characterized by heightened difficulties in processing emotional stimuli. |
Nicolas Masson; Valérie Dormal; Martine Stephany; Christine Schiltz Eye movements reveal that young school children shift attention when solving additions and subtractions Journal Article In: Developmental Science, vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 1–12, 2024. @article{Masson2024,Abstract: Adults shift their attention to the right or to the left along a spatial continuum when solving additions and subtractions, respectively. Studies suggest that these shifts not only support the exact computation of the results but also anticipatively narrow down the range of plausible answers when processing the operands. However, little is known on when and how these attentional shifts arise in childhood during the acquisition of arithmetic. Here, an eye-tracker with high spatio-temporal resolution was used to measure spontaneous eye movements, used as a proxy for attentional shifts, while children of 2nd (8 y-o; N = 50) and 4th (10 y-o; N = 48) Grade solved simple additions (e.g., 4+3) and subtractions (e.g., 3-2). Gaze patterns revealed horizontal and vertical attentional shifts in both groups. Critically, horizontal eye movements were observed in 4th Graders as soon as the first operand and the operator were presented and thus before the beginning of the exact computation. In 2nd Graders, attentional shifts were only observed after the presentation of the second operand just before the response was made. This demonstrates that spatial attention is recruited when children solve arithmetic problems, even in the early stages of learning mathematics. The time course of these attentional shifts suggests that with practice in arithmetic children start to use spatial attention to anticipatively guide the search for the answer and facilitate the implementation of solving procedures. Research Highlights: Additions and subtractions are associated to right and left attentional shifts in adults, but it is unknown when these mechanisms arise in childhood. Children of 8–10 years old solved single-digit additions and subtractions while looking at a blank screen. Eye movements showed that children of 8 years old already show spatial biases possibly to represent the response when knowing both operands. Children of 10 years old shift attention before knowing the second operand to anticipatively guide the search for plausible answers. |
Natalia Meir; Olga Parshina; Irina A. Sekerina Prediction in bilingual sentence processing Journal Article In: Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, vol. 14, no. 4, pp. 544–576, 2024. @article{Meir2024,The Unified Competition Model (MacWhinney, 2012) accounts for cross-linguistic differences in thematic role mapping. We investigated production and predictive use of accusative case morphology in Russian-Hebrew bilingual children. We also investigated the role of production in predictive processing testing the Prediction-by-Production Account (Pickering & Garrod, 2018) vs. the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis (Prévost & White, 2000). Three groups of children aged 4–8 participated: Russian-Hebrew-speaking bilinguals, Russian-speaking and Hebrew-speaking monolingual controls. All children participated in the accusative case production and Visual-World eye-tracking comprehension experiments. Bilinguals were tested in both of their languages. The results of the study confirmed the predictions of the Unified Competition Model showing typological differences in the strength of the case-marking cue and its predictive use in sentence processing in Russian- and Hebrew-speaking controls. While Russian-speaking monolinguals relied on case marking to predict the upcoming agent/patient, the performance of Hebrew-speaking monolingual children varied. The findings for bilinguals showed that despite their lower production accuracy in both languages, they were either indistinguishable from monolinguals or showed an advantage in the predictive use of case morphology. The findings support the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis , which predicts a dissociation between production and comprehension. |
Johannes M. Meixner; Jochen Laubrock Executive functioning predicts development of reading skill and perceptual span seven years later Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 136, pp. 1–15, 2024. @article{Meixner2024,What is the role of executive functions in longitudinally predicting reading success in general and perceptual-span size in particular? We present two new waves of our sequential-cohort longitudinal study of perceptual-span development, including five waves totally spanning grades 1 to 10. Using nonlinear mixed effects growth-curve modeling we here show that executive functioning measured in the early primary-school years predicts reading performance seven years later, even if controlled for initial reading performance. Moreover, the two variables exerted an interactive influence, suggesting mutual benefit. Effects of initial executive functioning on the final perceptual span were even more pronounced than on reading rate, suggesting a substantial contribution of executive processes to perceptual-span development. Perceptual-span development is critical for successful reading: The initial reading-rate difference between slower and faster readers diverged at the point when perceptual-span development was fastest, and stabilized at inflated differences thereafter. In an educational setting, early tests of executive functioning may be useful for identifying children who are likely to need intervention to become proficient readers. |
Padraic Monaghan; Lana S. Jago; Lydia Speyer; Heather Turnbull; Katie J. Alcock; Caroline F. Rowland; Kate Cain Statistical learning ability at 17 months relates to early reading skills via oral language Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, vol. 246, pp. 1–16, 2024. @article{Monaghan2024,Statistical learning ability has been found to relate to children's reading skills. Yet, statistical learning is also known to be vital for developing oral language skills, and oral language and reading skills relate strongly. These connections raise the question of whether statistical learning ability affects reading via oral language or directly. Statistical learning is multifaceted, and so different aspects of statistical learning might influence oral language and reading skills distinctly. In a longitudinal study, we determined how two aspects of statistical learning from an artificial language tested on 70 17-month-old infants—segmenting sequences from speech and generalizing the sequence structure—related to oral language skills measured at 54 months and reading skills measured at approximately 75 months. Statistical learning segmentation did not relate significantly to oral language or reading, whereas statistical learning generalization related to oral language, but only indirectly related to reading. Our results showed that children's early statistical learning ability was associated with learning to read via the children's oral language skills. |
Gina Monov; Henrik Stein; Leonie Klock; Juergen Gallinat; Simone Kühn; Tania Lincoln; Katarina Krkovic; Peter R. Murphy; Tobias H. Donner Linking cognitive integrity to working memory dynamics in the aging human brain Journal Article In: The Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 44, no. 26, pp. 1–20, 2024. @article{Monov2024,Aging is accompanied by a decline of working memory, an important cognitive capacity that involves stimulus-selective neural activity that persists after stimulus presentation. Here, we unraveled working memory dynamics in older human adults (male and female) including those diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) using a combination of behavioral modeling, neuropsychological assessment, and MEG recordings of brain activity. Younger adults (male and female) were studied with behavioral modeling only. Participants performed a visuospatial delayed match-to-sample task under systematic manipulation of the delay and distance between sample and test stimuli. Their behavior (match/nonmatch decisions) was fit with a computational model permitting the dissociation of noise in the internal operations underlying the working memory performance from a strategic decision threshold. Task accuracy decreased with delay duration and sample/test proximity.When sample/test distances were small, older adults committed more false alarms than younger adults. The computational model explained the participants' behavior well. The model parameters reflecting internal noise (not decision threshold) correlated with the precision of stimulus-selective cortical activity measured with MEG during the delay interval. The model uncovered an increase specifically in working memory noise in older compared with younger participants. Furthermore, in the MCI group, but not in the older healthy controls, internal noise correlated with the participants' clinically assessed cognitive integrity. Our results are consistent with the idea that the stability of working memory contents deteriorates in aging, in a manner that is specifically linked to the overall cognitive integrity of individuals diagnosed with MCI. |
Corrin Moss; Scott P. Ardoin; Joshua A. Mellott; Katherine S. Binder The effects of question previewing on response accuracy and text processing: An eye-movement study Journal Article In: Journal of School Psychology, vol. 104, pp. 1–16, 2024. @article{Moss2024,The present study investigated the impact of manipulating reading strategies (i.e., reading the questions first [QF] or reading the passage first [PF]) during a reading comprehension test where we explored how reading strategy was related to student characteristics (i.e., reading achievement and working memory capacity). Participants' eye movements were monitored as they read 12 passages and answered multiple-choice questions. We examined differences in (a) response accuracy, (b) average total time on words in the text, (c) total task reading time, and (d) time reading text relevant to questions as a function of PF and QF strategies. Analyses were conducted to examine whether findings varied as a function of student characteristics (i.e., reading achievement and working memory capacity) and grade level (Grades 3, 5, and 8). Several interesting findings emerged from our study, including a limited effect of reading strategy use on response accuracy, with only eighth graders demonstrating better accuracy in the QF condition, and several demonstrations of PF leading to more efficient test-taking processes, including (a) longer average total reading times on words in the passage in the PF condition that could be associated with creating a better mental model of the text, (b) often being associated with less total-task time, and (c) being associated with more successful search strategies. Implications for providing teachers and students with strategies are discussed. |
Sven C. Mueller; Marta De Franceschi; Julia Brzozowska; Aleksandra M. Herman; Marco Ninghetto; Kalina Burnat; Monika Grymowicz; Artur Marchewka An influence of menopausal symptoms on mental health, emotion perception, and quality of life: A multi-faceted approach Journal Article In: Quality of Life Research, vol. 33, no. 7, pp. 1925–1935, 2024. @article{Mueller2024,Purpose: The menopausal transition brings with it many physical, cognitive, and affective changes in a woman's life, impacting quality of life. Whereas prior work has examined impact on general mental health and cognitive function, research on basic affective processing during menopause remains scarce. Methods: Using a median-split procedure, this pre-registered study examined the impact of stronger (N = 46 women) vs. milder (N = 47 women) menopausal symptoms using a behavioural task of subjective emotion perception (embody) and a passive eye tracking viewing task of emotional faces in addition to self-report questionnaires. After 3 months, participants completed the questionnaires again to examine whether objective measures of emotion perception (eye tracking) might predict mental health at follow-up. Results: As anticipated, women with stronger vs. milder menopausal symptoms reported increased symptoms of anxiety, depression, stress, emotion regulation difficulties, and lower quality of life during both time points. While no evidence was found in the behavioural task, eye tracking data indicated blunted emotion perception in women with high menopausal symptoms, while women with low symptoms spent more time looking at happy faces relative to fearful or surprised faces. Although eye tracking or hormonal data did not predict mental health at follow-up, a higher estradiol/FSH ratio indicated a higher quality of life. Conclusions: This study documented an impact of the menopausal transition and strength of menopausal symptoms in particular on objective emotion perception as well as mental health and quality of life in women suffering from stronger vs. milder menopausal symptoms. Clinical implications are discussed. |
Douglas P. Munoz; Brian J. White; Donald C. Brien; Kajaal Parbhoo; Carmen Yea; E. Ann Yeh Saccade and pupil changes in children recovering from opsoclonus‐myoclonus ataxia syndrome reveal midbrain alterations in oculomotor circuits Journal Article In: Annals of the Child Neurology Society, vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 212–224, 2024. @article{Munoz2024,Objective: This study measured eye movements in children with a history of opsoclonus‐myoclonus ataxia syndrome in order to identify abnormalities in saccade and pupil behavior that map onto specific alterations in brainstem pathways. Methods: We used video‐based eye tracking while participants freely viewed 10 min of short (2–4 s) video clips without instructions. Clip transitions represented a large visual perturbation and we quantified multiple characteristics of saccade and pupil responses following these transitions in 13 children recovering from opsoclonus‐myoclonus and 13 healthy, age‐matched control participants. Results: The frequency of saccades and distribution of fixation durations differed between the groups. Following the clip transitions, children recovering from opsoclonus‐myoclonus ataxia syndrome exhibited longer time to initiate saccades, leading to a delay in harvesting visual information. Clip transitions to lighter clips produced similar pupil constriction responses in the two groups. However, clip transitions to darker clips produced dilation responses that were initiated earlier and of greater magnitude in opsoclonus‐myoclonus ataxia syndrome, suggesting removal or suppression of a signal that delays dilation. Interpretation: Children with a history of opsoclonus‐myoclonus ataxia syndrome demonstrated key abnormalities in saccade and pupil metrics. We propose a novel hypothesis in which dysfunction in the pathway from the superior colliculus to the mesencephalic and pontine reticular formation that houses the saccade and pupil premotor circuits could produce these results. |
Victoria I. Nicholls; Jan Wiener; Andrew Isaac Meso; Sebastien Miellet The impact of perceptual complexity on road crossing decisions in younger and older adults Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 14, no. 479, pp. 1–14, 2024. @article{Nicholls2024,Cognitive abilities decline with healthy ageing which can have a critical impact on day-to-day activities. One example is road crossing where older adults (OAs) disproportionally fall victim to pedestrian accidents. The current research examined two virtual reality experiments that investigated how the complexity of the road crossing situation impacts OAs (N = 19, ages 65–85) and younger adults (YAs |
Kaegan E. Ortlund; Susan L. Schantz; Andrea Aguiar; Francheska M. Merced-Nieves; Megan L. Woodbury; Dana E. Goin; Antonia M. Calafat; Ginger L. Milne; Stephanie M. Eick Oxidative stress as a potential mechanism linking gestational phthalate exposure to cognitive development in infancy Journal Article In: Neurotoxicology and Teratology, vol. 106, pp. 1–9, 2024. @article{Ortlund2024,Background: Gestational exposure to phthalates, endocrine disrupting chemicals widely used in consumer products, has been associated with poor recognition memory in infancy. Oxidative stress may represent one pathway linking this association. Hence, we examined whether exposure to phthalates was associated with elevated oxidative stress during pregnancy, and whether oxidative stress mediates the relationship between phthalate exposure and recognition memory. Methods: Our analysis included a subset of mother-child pairs enrolled in the Illinois Kids Development Study (IKIDS |
Shireen Parimoo; Anika Choi; Lauren Iafrate; Cheryl Grady; Rosanna Olsen Are older adults susceptible to visual distraction when targets and distractors are spatially separated? Journal Article In: Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 38–74, 2024. @article{Parimoo2024,Older adults show preserved memory for previously distracting information due to reduced inhibitory control. In some previous studies, targets and distractors overlap both temporally and spatially. We investigated whether age differences in attentional orienting and disengagement affect recognition memory when targets and distractors are spatially separated at encoding. In Experiments 1 and 2, eye movements were recorded while participants completed an incidental encoding task under covert (i.e., restricted viewing) and overt (i.e., free-viewing) conditions, respectively. The encoding task consisted of pairs of target and distractor item-color stimuli presented in separate visual hemifields. Prior to stimulus onset, a central cue indicated the location of the upcoming target. Participants were subsequently tested on their recognition of the items, their location, and the associated color. In Experiment 3, targets were validly cued on 75% of the encoding trials; on invalid trials, participants had to disengage their attention from the distractor and reorient to the target. Associative memory for colors was reduced among older adults across all experiments, though their location memory was only reduced in Experiment 1. In Experiment 2, older and younger adults directed a similar proportion of fixations toward targets and distractors. Explicit recognition of distractors did not differ between age groups in any of the experiments. However, older adults were slower to correctly recognize distractors than false alarm to novel items in Experiment 2, suggesting some implicit memory for distraction. Together, these results demonstrate that older adults may only be vulnerable to encoding visual distraction when viewing behavior is unconstrained. |
Hannah Pickard; Petrina Chu; Claire Essex; Emily J. Goddard; Katie Baulcombe; Ben Carter; Rachael Bedford; Tim J. Smith Toddler screen use before bed and its effect on sleep and attention: A randomized clinical trial Journal Article In: JAMA Pediatrics, vol. 178, no. 12, pp. 1270–1279, 2024. @article{Pickard2024,IMPORTANCE Toddler screen time has been associated with poorer sleep and differences in attention. Understanding the causal impact of screen time on early development is of the highest importance. OBJECTIVE To test (1) the feasibility of the 7-week parent-administered screen time intervention (PASTI) in toddlers (aged 16-30 months) who have screen time in the hour before bed and (2) the impact of PASTI on toddlers' sleep and attention. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS This assessor-blinded, UK-based randomized clinical trial was conducted between July 2022 and July 2023. This was a single-site study that enrolled families with a toddler aged between 16 and 30 months, living within 75 miles of the Babylab, and with 10 minutes or more of screen time in the hour before bed on 3 or more days a week. Exclusion criteria were (1) a genetic or neurological condition, (2) premature birth (<37 weeks), and (3) current participation in another study. INTERVENTIONS Families were randomized (1:1:1) to (1) PASTI: caregivers removed toddler screen time in the hour before bed and used activities from a bedtime box instead (eg, reading, puzzles); (2) bedtime box (BB only): used matched before-bed activities, with no mention of screen time; or (3) no intervention (NI): continued as usual. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES Feasibility outcomes: participation rate, intervention adherence, retention, family experiences, and assessment acceptability. Efficacy outcomes: screen use, actigraphy-measured sleep, and eye-tracking attention measures. RESULTS A total of 427 families were screened, 164 were eligible (38.4%), and 105 families were randomized (mean [SD] age, 23.7 [4.6] months; 60 male [57%]). The trial was feasible, with 99% participant (104 of 105) retention and 94% of families (33 of 35) adhering to PASTI. PASTI showed reductions in parent-reported screen time (vs NI: Cohen d = -0.96; 95% CI, -1.32 to -0.60; vs BB only: Cohen d = -0.65; 95% CI, -1.03 to -0.27). PASTI showed small to medium improvements in objectively measured sleep efficiency (vs NI: Cohen d = 0.27; 95% CI, -0.11 to 0.66; vs BB only: Cohen d = 0.56; 95% CI, 0.17-0.96), night awakenings (vs NI: Cohen d = -0.28; 95% CI, -0.67 to 0.12; vs BB only: Cohen d = -0.31; 95% CI, -0.71 to 0.10), and reduced daytime sleep (vs NI: Cohen d = -0.30; 95% CI, -0.74 to 0.13) but no difference compared with BB only. There was no observable effect of PASTI on objective measures of attention. Compared with BB only, PASTI showed a difference on parent-reported effortful control (Cohen d = -0.40; 95% CI, -0.75 to -0.05) and inhibitory control (Cohen d = -0.48; 95% CI, -0.77 to -0.19), due to an increase in BB-only scores. CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE Results of this randomized clinical trial show that, supporting pediatric recommendations, removing screen time before toddler bedtime was feasible and showed modest preliminary beneficial effects on sleep. A future full confirmatory trial is needed before PASTI's adoption by parents and pediatricians. |
Leonardo Piot; Hui Chen; Anthony Picaud; Maxine Dos Santos; Lionel Granjon; Zili Luo; Ann Wai Huen To; Regine Y. Lai; Hintat Cheung; Thierry Nazzi Tonal interference in word learning? A comparison of Cantonese and French Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, vol. 242, pp. 1–26, 2024. @article{Piot2024,Most languages of the world use lexical tones to contrast words. Thus, understanding how individuals process tones when learning new words is fundamental for a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying word learning. The current study asked how tonal information is integrated during word learning. We investigated whether variability in tonal information during learning can interfere with the learning of new words and whether this is language and age dependent. Cantonese- and French-learning 30-month-olds (N = 97) and Cantonese- and French-speaking adults (N = 50) were tested with an eye-tracking task on their ability to learn phonetically different pairs of novel words in two learning conditions: a 1-tone condition in which each object was named with a single label and a 3-tone condition in which each object was named with three different labels varying in tone. We predicted learning in all groups in the 1-tone condition. For the 3-tone condition, because tones are part of the phonological system of Cantonese but not of French, we expected the Cantonese groups to either fail (toddlers) or show lower performance than in the 1-tone condition (adults), whereas the French groups might show less sensitivity to this manipulation. The results show that all participants learned in the 1-tone condition and were sensitive to tone variation to some extent. Learning in the 3-tone condition was impeded in both groups of toddlers. We argue that tonal interference in word learning likely comes from the phonological level in the Cantonese groups and from the acoustic level in the French groups. |
Rista C. Plate; Tralucia Powell; Rachael Bedford; Tim J. Smith; Ankur Bamezai; Quentin Wedderburn; Alexis Broussard; Natasha Soesanto; Caroline Swetlitz; Rebecca Waller; Nicholas J. Wagner Social threat processing in adults and children: Faster orienting to, but shorter dwell time on, angry faces during visual search Journal Article In: Developmental Science, vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 1–8, 2024. @article{Plate2024,Attention to emotional signals conveyed by others is critical for gleaning information about potential social partners and the larger social context. Children appear to detect social threats (e.g., angry faces) faster than non-threatening social signals (e.g., neutral faces). However, methods that rely on behavioral responses alone are limited in identifying different attentional processes involved in threat detection or responding. To address this question, we used a visual search paradigm to assess behavioral (i.e., reaction time to select a target image) and attentional (i.e., eye-tracking fixations, saccadic shifts, and dwell time) responses in children (ages 7–10 years old |
Claire Prendergast Losing the thread: How three- and five-year-olds predict the outcome of a story when non-literal language is used to update events Journal Article In: Cogent Psychology, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 1–15, 2024. @article{Prendergast2024,How do children learn to interpret nonliteral utterances nonliterally? A multidisciplinary report highlighting the role of reasoning about abstract meanings in nonliteral language comprehension is presented to shed light on why young children struggle to infer some, but not all, nonliteral meanings. An experimental paradigm using picture selection is then used to test differences in three- and five-year-old's predictions when idioms are used to update stories. Norwegian-speaking children (N = 162; N = 86 females) are asked to predict story outcomes that are based on cognitive heuristics. The results show that five-year-olds are more likely than three-year-olds to choose literal interpretations of idioms as outcomes (δ = 0.12). Five-year-olds choose the correct outcome more when there is no literal outcome available (δ = 0.15). The increase in literalism observed with age is explained through development in metalinguistic reflexivity. This suggests that children may increasingly hold speakers at their word, enabling access to abstract meanings over time. |
Swati Rane Levendovszky; Jaqueline Flores; Elaine R. Peskind; Lena Václavů; Matthias J. P. Osch; Jeffrey Iliff Preliminary investigations into human neurofluid transport using multiple novel non-contrast MRI methods Journal Article In: Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow & Metabolism, vol. 44, no. 12, pp. 1580–1592, 2024. @article{RaneLevendovszky2024,We discuss two potential non-invasive MRI methods to study phenomena related to subarachnoid cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) motion and perivascular fluid transport, and their association with sleep and aging. We apply diffusion-based intravoxel incoherent motion (IVIM) imaging to evaluate pseudodiffusion coefficient, D*, or CSF movement across large spaces like the subarachnoid space (SAS). We also performed perfusion-based multi-echo, Hadamard encoded arterial spin labeling (ASL) to evaluate whole brain cortical cerebral blood flow (CBF) and trans-endothelial exchange (Tex) of water from the vasculature into the perivascular space and parenchyma. Both methods were used in young adults (N = 9, 6 F, 23 ± 3 years old) in the setting of sleep and sleep deprivation. To study aging, 10 older adults (6 F, 67 ± 3 years old) were imaged after a night of normal sleep and compared with the young adults. D* in SAS was significantly (p < 0.05) reduced with sleep deprivation (0.016 ± 0.001 mm2/s) compared to normal sleep (0.018 ± 0.001 mm2/s) and marginally reduced with aging (0.017 ± 0.001 mm2/s |
Elizabeth Riley; Hamid Turker; Dongliang Wang; Khena M. Swallow; Adam K. Anderson; Eve De Rosa Nonlinear changes in pupillary attentional orienting responses across the lifespan Journal Article In: GeroScience, vol. 46, no. 1, pp. 1017–1033, 2024. @article{Riley2023,The cognitive aging process is not necessarily linear. Central task-evoked pupillary responses, representing a brainstem-pupil relationship, may vary across the lifespan. Thus we examined, in 75 adults ranging in age from 19 to 86, whether task-evoked pupillary responses to an attention task may serve in as an index of cognitive aging. This is because the locus coeruleus (LC), located in the brainstem, is not only among the earliest sites of degeneration in pathological aging, but also supports both attentional and pupillary behaviors. We assessed brief, task-evoked phasic attentional orienting to behaviorally relevant and irrelevant auditory tones, stimuli known specifically to recruit the LC in the brainstem and evoke pupillary responses. Due to potential nonlinear changes across the lifespan, we used a novel data-driven analysis on 6 dynamic pupillary behaviors on 10% of the data to reveal cut off points that best characterized the three age bands: young (19–41 years old), middle aged (42–68 years old), and older adults (69 + years old). Follow-up analyses on independent data, the remaining 90%, revealed age-related changes such as monotonic decreases in tonic pupillary diameter and dynamic range, along with curvilinear phasic pupillary responses to the behaviorally relevant target events, increasing in the middle-aged group and then decreasing in the older group. Additionally, the older group showed decreased differentiation of pupillary responses between target and distractor events. This pattern is consistent with potential compensatory LC activity in midlife that is diminished in old age, resulting in decreased adaptive gain. Beyond regulating responses to light, pupillary dynamics reveal a nonlinear capacity for neurally mediated gain across the lifespan, thus providing evidence in support of the LC adaptive gain hypothesis. |
Audun Rosslund; Julien Mayor; Alejandrina Cristia; Natalia Kartushina Native and non-native vowel discrimination in 6-month-old Norwegian infants Journal Article In: Infant Behavior and Development, vol. 77, pp. 1–10, 2024. @article{Rosslund2024,In the current preregistered study, we tested n = 67 6-month-old Norwegian infants' discrimination of a native vowel contrast /y-i/ and a non-native (British) vowel contrast /ʌ-æ/ in an eye-tracking habituation paradigm. Our results showed that, on a group level, infants did not discriminate either contrast. Yet, exploratory analyses revealed a negative association between infants' performance in each experiment, that is, better discrimination of the native contrast was associated with worse discrimination of the non-native contrast. Potentially, infants in this study might have been on the cusp of perceptual reorganisation towards their native language. |
Sabrina Schwarzmeier; Andreas Obersteiner; Martha Wagner Alibali; Vijay Marupudi In: Journal of Mathematical Behavior, vol. 75, pp. 1–16, 2024. @article{Schwarzmeier2024,Adults and children are able to compare visually represented fractions. Past studies show that people are more efficient with continuous visualizations than with discretized ones, but the specific reasons are unclear. Presumably, continuous visualizations highlight magnitudes more directly, while discretized ones encourage less efficient strategies such as counting. In two experiments, adults and children compared the magnitudes of continuous and discretized tape diagrams of fractions. In both experiments, participants answered more accurately, faster, and with fewer eye saccades when the visualizations were continuous rather than discretized. Sequences of saccades indicated that participants used counting strategies less often with continuous than discretized diagrams. The results suggest that adults and children are more efficient with continuous than discretized visualizations because they use more efficient, magnitude-based strategies with continuous visualizations. The findings indicate that integrating continuous visualizations in classroom teaching more frequently could be beneficial for supporting students in developing fraction magnitude concepts. |
Amanda H. Seidl; Michelle Indarjit; Arielle Borovsky Touch to learn: Multisensory input supports word learning and processing Journal Article In: Developmental Science, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 1–20, 2024. @article{Seidl2024,Infants experience language in rich multisensory environments. For example, they may first be exposed to the word applesauce while touching, tasting, smelling, and seeing applesauce. In three experiments using different methods we asked whether the number of distinct senses linked with the semantic features of objects would impact word recognition and learning. Specifically, in Experiment 1 we asked whether words linked with more multisensory experiences were learned earlier than words linked fewer multisensory experiences. In Experiment 2, we asked whether 2-year-olds' known words linked with more multisensory experiences were better recognized than those linked with fewer. Finally, in Experiment 3, we taught 2-year-olds labels for novel objects that were linked with either just visual or visual and tactile experiences and asked whether this impacted their ability to learn the new label-to-object mappings. Results converge to support an account in which richer multisensory experiences better support word learning. We discuss two pathways through which rich multisensory experiences might support word learning. |
Alayna Shoenfelt; Didem Pehlivanoglu; Tian Lin; Maryam Ziaei; David Feifel; Natalie C. Ebner Effects of chronic intranasal oxytocin on visual attention to faces vs. natural scenes in older adults Journal Article In: Psychoneuroendocrinology, vol. 164, pp. 1–7, 2024. @article{Shoenfelt2024,Aging is associated with changes in face processing, including desensitization to face cues like gaze direction and an attentional preference to faces with positive over negative emotional valence. A parallel line of research has shown that acute administration of oxytocin (OT) increases visual attention to social stimuli such as human faces. The current study examined effects of chronic OT administration among older adults on fixation duration to faces that varied in emotional expression, gaze direction, age, and sex. One hundred and twelve generally healthy older adults (aged 55–95 years) underwent a randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind, between-subject clinical trial in which they self-administered either OT or placebo (P) intranasally twice a day for 4 weeks. The behavioral task involved rating the trustworthiness of faces (i.e., social stimuli) and natural scenes (i.e., non-social control stimuli) during eye tracking and was conducted before and after the intervention. Fixation duration to both the faces and the natural scenes declined from pre- to post-intervention, however this decline was less pronounced among older adults in the OT compared to the P group for faces but not scenes. Further, face cues (emotional expression, gaze direction, age, sex) did not moderate the treatment effect. This study provides first evidence that chronic intranasal OT maintains salience of social cues over time in older adults, perhaps buffering effects of habituation. These findings enhance understanding of OT effects on social cognition among older adults, and would benefit from follow up with a young adult comparison group to directly speak to specificity of observed effects to older adults and reflection of the aging process. |
Maverick E. Smith; Lester C. Loschky; Heather R. Bailey Eye movements and event segmentation: Eye movements reveal age-related differences in event model updating Journal Article In: Psychology and Aging, vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 180–187, 2024. @article{Smith2023,People spontaneously segment continuous ongoing actions into sequences of events. Prior research found that gaze similarity and pupil dilation increase at event boundaries and that older adults segmentmore idiosyncratically than do young adults.We used eye tracking to explore age-related differences in gaze similarity (i.e., the extent to which individuals look at the same places at the same time as others) and pupil dilation at event boundaries. Older and young adults watched naturalistic videos of actors performing everyday activities while we tracked their eye movements. Afterward, they segmented the videos into subevents. Replicating prior work, we found that pupil size and gaze similarity increased at event boundaries. Thus, there were fewer individual differences in eye position at boundaries.We also found that young adults had higher gaze similarity than older adults throughout an entire video and at event boundaries. This study is the first to show that age-related differences in how people parse continuous everyday activities into events may be partially explained by individual differences in gaze patterns. Those who segment less normatively may do so because they fixate less normative regions. Results have implications for future interventions designed to improve encoding in older adults. |
Dawid Strzelczyk; Nicolas Langer Pre-stimulus activity mediates event-related theta synchronization and alpha desynchronization during memory formation in healthy aging Journal Article In: Imaging Neuroscience, vol. 2, pp. 1–22, 2024. @article{Strzelczyk2024,The capacity to learn is a key determinant for the quality of life, but is known to decline to varying degrees with age. However, despite mounting evidence of memory deficits in older age, the neural mechanisms contributing to successful or impeded memory remain unclear. Previous research has primarily focused on memory formation through remembered versus forgotten comparisons, lacking the ability to capture the incremental nature of learning. Moreover, previous electroencephalography (EEG) studies have primarily examined oscillatory brain activity during the encoding phase, such as event- related synchronization (ERS) of mid-frontal theta and desynchronization (ERD) of parietal alpha, while neglecting the potential influence of pre-stimulus activity. To address these limitations, we employed a sequence learning paradigm, where 113 young and 117 older participants learned a fixed sequence of visual locations through repeated observations (6,423 sequence repetitions, 55 '944 stimuli). This paradigm enabled us to investigate mid- frontal theta ERS, parietal alpha ERD, and how they are affected by pre-stimulus activity during the incremental learning process. Behavioral results revealed that young subjects learned significantly faster than older subjects, in line with expected age-related cognitive decline. Successful incremental learning was directly linked to decreases of mid-frontal theta ERS and increases of parietal alpha ERD. Notably, these neurophysiological changes were less pronounced in older individuals, reflecting a slower rate of learning. Importantly, the mediation analysis revealed that in both age groups, mid-frontal pre-stimulus theta partially mediated the relationship between learning and mid- frontal theta ERS. Furthermore, the overall impact of learning on parietal alpha ERD was primarily driven by its positive influence on pre-stimulus alpha activity. Our findings offer new insights into the age- related differences in memory formation and highlight the importance of pre-stimulus activity in explaining post- stimulus responses during learning. |
Binbin Sun; Elombe Issa Calvert; Alyssa Ye; Heng Mao; Kevin Liu; Raymond Kong Wang; Xin Yuan Wang; Zhi Liu Wu; Zhen Wei; Xue Jun Kong Interest paradigm for early identification of autism spectrum disorder: An analysis from electroencephalography combined with eye tracking Journal Article In: Frontiers in Neuroscience, vol. 18, pp. 1–13, 2024. @article{Sun2024,Introduction: Early identification of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is critical for effective intervention. Restricted interests (RIs), a subset of repetitive behaviors, are a prominent but underutilized domain for early ASD diagnosis. This study aimed to identify objective biomarkers for ASD by integrating electroencephalography (EEG) and eye-tracking (ET) to analyze toddlers' visual attention and cortical responses to RI versus neutral interest (NI) objects. Methods: The study involved 59 toddlers aged 2-4 years, including 32 with ASD and 27 non-ASD controls. Participants underwent a 24-object passive viewing paradigm, featuring RI (e.g., transportation items) and NI objects (e.g., balloons). ET metrics (fixation time and pupil size) and EEG time-frequency (TF) power in theta (4-8 Hz) and alpha (8-13 Hz) bands were analyzed. Statistical methods included logistic regression models to assess the predictive potential of combined EEG and ET biomarkers. Results: Toddlers with ASD exhibited significantly increased fixation times and pupil sizes for RI objects compared to NI objects, alongside distinct EEG patterns with elevated theta and reduced alpha power in occipital regions during RI stimuli. The multimodal logistic regression model, incorporating EEG and ET metrics, achieved an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.75, demonstrating robust predictive capability for ASD. Discussion: This novel integration of ET and EEG metrics highlights the potential of RIs as diagnostic markers for ASD. The observed neural and attentional distinctions underscore the utility of multimodal biomarkers for early diagnosis and personalized intervention strategies. Future work should validate findings across broader age ranges and diverse populations. |
Maria Theobald; Joseph Colantonio; Igor Bascandziev; Elizabeth Bonawitz; Garvin Brod Do reflection prompts promote children's conflict monitoring and revision of misconceptions? Journal Article In: Child Development, vol. 95, no. 4, pp. e253–e269, 2024. @article{Theobald2024,We tested whether reflection prompts enhance conflict monitoring and facilitate the revision of misconceptions. German children (N = 97 |
Marius Tröndle; Nicolas Langer Decomposing neurophysiological underpinnings of age-related decline in visual working memory Journal Article In: Neurobiology of Aging, vol. 139, pp. 30–43, 2024. @article{Troendle2024,Exploring the neural basis of age-related decline in working memory is vital in our aging society. Previous electroencephalographic studies suggested that the contralateral delay activity (CDA) may be insensitive to age-related decline in lateralized visual working memory (VWM) performance. Instead, recent evidence indicated that task-induced alpha power lateralization decreases in older age. However, the relationship between alpha power lateralization and age-related decline of VWM performance remains unknown, and recent studies have questioned the validity of these findings due to confounding factors of the aperiodic signal. Using a sample of 134 participants, we replicated the age-related decrease of alpha power lateralization after adjusting for the aperiodic signal. Critically, the link between task performance and alpha power lateralization was found only when correcting for aperiodic signal biases. Functionally, these findings suggest that age-related declines in VWM performance may be related to the decreased ability to prioritize relevant over irrelevant information. Conversely, CDA amplitudes were stable across age groups, suggesting a distinct neural mechanism possibly related to preserved VWM encoding or early maintenance. |
Alessandra Valentini; Rachel E. Pye; Carmel Houston-Price; Jessie Ricketts; Julie A. Kirkby Online processing shows advantages of bimodal listening-while-reading for vocabulary learning: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Reading Research Quarterly, vol. 59, no. 1, pp. 79–101, 2024. @article{Valentini2024,Children can learn words incidentally from stories. This kind of learning is enhanced when stories are presented both aurally and in written format, compared to just a written presentation. However, we do not know why this bimodal presentation is beneficial. This study explores two possible explanations: whether the bimodal advantage manifests online during story exposure, or later, at word retrieval. We collected eye-movement data from 34 8-to 9-year-old children exposed to two stories, one presented in written format (reading condition), and the second presented aurally and written at the same time (bimodal condition). Each story included six unfamiliar words (non-words) that were repeated three times, as well as definitions and clues to their meaning. Following exposure, the learning of the new words' meanings was assessed. Results showed that, during story presentation, children spent less time fixating the new words in the bimodal condition, compared to the reading condition, indicating that the bimodal advantage occurs online. Learning was greater in the bimodal condition than the reading condition, which may reflect either an online bimodal advantage during story presentation or an advantage at retrieval. The results also suggest that the bimodal condition was more conducive to learning than the reading condition when children looked at the new words for a shorter amount of time. This is in line with an online advantage of the bimodal condition, as it suggests that less effort is required to learn words in this condition. These results support educational strategies that routinely present new vocabulary in two modalities simultaneously. |
Monica Vanoncini; Stefanie Hoehl; Birgit Elsner; Sebastian Wallot; Natalie Boll-Avetisyan; Ezgi Kayhan Mother-infant social gaze dynamics relate to infant brain activity and word segmentation Journal Article In: Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, vol. 65, pp. 1–8, 2024. @article{Vanoncini2024,The ‘social brain', consisting of areas sensitive to social information, supposedly gates the mechanisms involved in human language learning. Early preverbal interactions are guided by ostensive signals, such as gaze patterns, which are coordinated across body, brain, and environment. However, little is known about how the infant brain processes social gaze in naturalistic interactions and how this relates to infant language development. During free-play of 9-month-olds with their mothers, we recorded hemodynamic cortical activity of ´social brain` areas (prefrontal cortex, temporo-parietal junctions) via fNIRS, and micro-coded mother's and infant's social gaze. Infants' speech processing was assessed with a word segmentation task. Using joint recurrence quantification analysis, we examined the connection between infants' ´social brain` activity and the temporal dynamics of social gaze at intrapersonal (i.e., infant's coordination, maternal coordination) and interpersonal (i.e., dyadic coupling) levels. Regression modeling revealed that intrapersonal dynamics in maternal social gaze (but not infant's coordination or dyadic coupling) coordinated significantly with infant's cortical activity. Moreover, recurrence quantification analysis revealed that intrapersonal maternal social gaze dynamics (in terms of entropy) were the best predictor of infants' word segmentation. The findings support the importance of social interaction in language development, particularly highlighting maternal social gaze dynamics. |
Luc Virlet; Laurent Sparrow; Jose Barela; Patrick Berquin; Cedrick Bonnet Proprioceptive intervention improves reading performance in developmental dyslexia: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Research in Developmental Disabilities, vol. 153, pp. 1–10, 2024. @article{Virlet2024,Developmental dyslexia is characterized by difficulties in learning to read, affecting cognition and causing failure at school. Interventions for children with developmental dyslexia have focused on improving linguistic capabilities (phonics, orthographic and morphological instructions), but developmental dyslexia is accompanied by a wide variety of sensorimotor impairments. The goal of this study was to examine the effects of a proprioceptive intervention on reading performance and eye movement in children with developmental dyslexia. Nineteen children diagnosed with developmental dyslexia were randomly assigned to a regular Speech Therapy (ST) or to a Proprioceptive and Speech Intervention (PSI), in which they received both the usual speech therapy and a proprioceptive intervention aimed to correct their sensorimotor impairments (prism glasses, oral neurostimulation, insoles and breathing instructions). Silent reading performance and eye movements were measured pre- and post-intervention (after nine months). In the PSI group, reading performance improved and eye movements were smoother and faster, reaching values similar to those of children with typical reading performance. The recognition of written words also improved, indicating better lexical access. These results show that PSI might constitute a valuable tool for reading improvement children with developmental dyslexia. |
Zhiyun Wang; Qingfang Zhang Ageing of grammatical advance planning in spoken sentence production: An eye movement study Journal Article In: Psychological Research, vol. 88, pp. 652–669, 2024. @article{Wang2024m,This study used an image-description paradigm with concurrent eye movement recordings to investigate differences of grammatical advance planning between young and older speakers in spoken sentence production. Participants were asked to produce sentences with simple or complex initial phrase structures (IPS) in Experiment 1 while producing individual words in Experiment 2. Young and older speakers showed comparable speaking latencies in sentence production task, whereas older speakers showed longer latencies than young speakers in word production task. Eye movement data showed that compared with young speakers, older speakers had higher fixation percentage on object 1, lower percentage of gaze shift from object 1 to 2, and lower fixation percentage on object 2 in simple IPS sentences, while they showed similar fixation percentage on object 1, similar percentage of gaze shift from object 1 to 2, and lower fixation percentage on object 2 in complex IPS sentences, indicating a decline of grammatical encoding scope presenting on eye movement patterns. Meanwhile, speech analysis showed that older speakers presented longer utterance duration, slower speech rate, and longer and more frequently occurred pauses in articulation, indicating a decline of speech articulation in older speakers. Thus, our study suggests that older speakers experience an ageing effect in the sentences with complex initial phrases due to limited cognitive resources. |