EyeLink fMRI / MEG Publications
All EyeLink fMRI and MEG research publications (with concurrent eye tracking) up until 2023 (with some early 2024s) are listed below by year. You can search the publications using keywords such as Visual Cortex, Neural Plasticity, MEG, etc. You can also search for individual author names. If we missed any EyeLink fMRI or MEG articles, please email us!
2024 |
Hong Zhou; Luhua Wei; Yanyan Jiang; Xia Wang; Yunchuang Sun; Fan Li; Jing Chen; Wei Sun; Lin Zhang; Guiping Zhao; Zhaoxia Wang Abnormal Ocular Movement in the Early Stage of Multiple-System Atrophy With Predominant Parkinsonism Distinct From Parkinson's Disease Journal Article In: Journal of Clinical Neurology, vol. 20, no. 1, pp. 37–45, 2024. @article{Zhou2024, Background and Purpose The eye-movement examination can be applied as a noninvasive method to identify multiple-system atrophy (MSA). Few studies have investigated eye movements during the early stage of MSA with predominant parkinsonism (MSA-P). We aimed to determine the characteristic oculomotor changes in the early stage of MSA-P. Methods We retrospectively selected 17 patients with MSA-P and 40 with Parkinson's disease (PD) with disease durations of less than 2 years, and 40 age-matched healthy controls (HCs). Oculomotor performance in the horizontal direction was measured in detail using videonystagmography. Results We found that the proportions of patients with MSA-P and PD exhibiting abnormal eye movements were 82.4% and 77.5%, respectively, which were significantly higher than that in the HCs (47.5%, p<0.05). Compared with HCs, patients with MSA-P presented significantly higher abnormal proportions of fixation and gaze-holding (17.6% vs. 0%), without-fixation (47.1% vs. 0%), prolonged latency in reflexive saccades (29.4% vs. 5.0%), memory-guided saccades (93.3% vs. 10.0%), and catch-up saccades in smooth-pursuit movement (SPM, 41.2% vs. 0) (all p<0.05). Compared with those with PD, patients with MSA-P presented a signifi- cantly higher proportion of catch-up saccades in SPM (41.2% vs. 2.5%, p<0.001). Conclusions MSA-P presented the characteristic of catch-up saccades in SPM in the early stage, which may provide some value in differentiating MSA-P from PD. |
Eser Sendesen; Didem Turkyilmaz Listening handicap in tinnitus patients by controlling extended high frequencies - Effort or fatigue? Journal Article In: Auris Nasus Larynx, vol. 51, no. 1, pp. 198–205, 2024. @article{Sendesen2024, Objective: In previous studies, the results regarding the presence of listening effort or fatigue in tinnitus patients were inconsistent. The reason for this inconsistency could be that extended high frequencies, which can cause listening handicap, were not considered. Therefore, this study aimed to evaluate the listening skills in tinnitus patients by matching the hearing thresholds at all frequencies, including the extended high frequency. Methods: Eighteen chronic tinnitus patients and thirty matched healthy controls having normal pure-tone average with symmetrical hearing thresholds was included. Subjects were evaluated with 0.125-20 kHz pure-tone audiometry, Montreal cognitive assessment test (MoCA), Tinnitus Handicap Inventory (THI), Matrix Test, Pupillometry. Results: Pupil dilatation in the 'coding' phase of the sentence presented in tinnitus patients was less than in the control group (p<0.05). There was no difference between the groups for Matrix test scores (p> 0.05) Also, there was no statistically significant correlation between THI and Pupillometry components nor between MoCA (p>0.05). Conclusion: The results were interpreted for potential listening fatigue in tinnitus patients. Considering the possible listening handicap in tinnitus patients, reducing the listening difficulties especially in noisy environments, can be added to the goals of tinnitus therapy protocols. |
Nora Geiser; Brigitte Charlotte Kaufmann; Samuel Elia Johannes Knobel; Dario Cazzoli; Tobias Nef; Thomas Nyffeler Comparison of uni- and multimodal motion stimulation on visual neglect: A proof-of-concept study Journal Article In: Cortex, vol. 171, pp. 194–203, 2024. @article{Geiser2024, Spatial neglect is characterized by the failure to attend stimuli presented in the contralesional space. Typically, the visual modality is more severely impaired than the auditory one. This dissociation offers the possibility of cross-modal interactions, whereby auditory stimuli may have beneficial effects on the visual modality. A new auditory motion stimulation method with music dynamically moving from the right to the left hemispace has recently been shown to improve visual neglect. The aim of the present study was twofold: a) to compare the effects of unimodal auditory against visual motion stimulation, i.e., smooth pursuit training, which is an established therapeutical approach in neglect therapy and b) to explore whether a combination of auditory + visual motion stimulation, i.e., multimodal motion stimulation, would be more effective than unimodal auditory or visual motion stimulation. 28 patients with left-sided neglect due to a first-ever, right-hemispheric subacute stroke were included. Patients either received auditory, visual, or multimodal motion stimulation. The between-group effect of each motion stimulation condition as well as a control group without motion stimulation was investigated by means of a one-way ANOVA with the patient's visual exploration behaviour as an outcome variable. Our results showed that unimodal auditory motion stimulation is equally effective as unimodal visual motion stimulation: both interventions significantly improved neglect compared to the control group. Multimodal motion stimulation also significantly improved neglect, however, did not show greater improvement than unimodal auditory or visual motion stimulation alone. Besides the established visual motion stimulation, this proof-of-concept study suggests that auditory motion stimulation seems to be an alternative promising therapeutic approach to improve visual attention in neglect patients. Multimodal motion stimulation does not lead to any additional therapeutic gain. In neurorehabilitation, the implementation of either auditory or visual motion stimulation seems therefore reasonable. |
Omer Azriel; Gal Arad; Daniel S. Pine; Amit Lazarov; Yair Bar-Haim Attention bias vs. attention control modification for social anxiety disorder: A randomized controlled trial Journal Article In: Journal of Anxiety Disorders, vol. 101, pp. 1–10, 2024. @article{Azriel2024, Gaze-Contingent Music Reward Therapy (GC-MRT) is an eye-tracking-based attention bias modification protocol for social anxiety disorder (SAD) with established clinical efficacy. However, it remains unclear if improvement following GC-MRT hinges on modification of threat-related attention or on more general enhancement of attention control. Here, 50 patients with SAD were randomly allocated to GC-MRT using either threat faces or shapes. Results indicate comparable reductions in social anxiety and co-morbid depression symptoms in the two conditions. Patients in the shapes condition showed a significant increase in attention control and a reduction in attention to both the trained shapes and threat faces, whereas patients in the faces condition showed a reduction in attention to threat faces only. These findings suggest that enhancement of attention control, independent of valence-specific attention modification, may facilitate reduction in SAD symptoms. Alternative interpretations and clinical implications of the current findings are discussed. |
Zoé Bollen; Arthur Pabst; Nicolas Masson; Reinout W. Wiers; Matt Field; Pierre Maurage Craving modulates attentional bias towards alcohol in severe alcohol use disorder: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Addiction, vol. 119, no. 1, pp. 1–11, 2024. @article{Bollen2024, Background and aims: Competing models disagree on three theoretical questions regarding alcohol-related attentional bias (AB), a key process in severe alcohol use disorder (SAUD): (1) is AB more of a trait (fixed, associated with alcohol use severity) or state (fluid, associated with momentary craving states) characteristic of SAUD; (2) does AB purely reflect the over-activation of the reflexive/reward system or is it also influenced by the activity of the reflective/control system and (3) does AB rely upon early or later processing stages? We addressed these issues by investigating the time-course of AB and its modulation by subjective craving and cognitive load in SAUD. Design: A free-viewing eye-tracking task, presenting pictures of alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages, combined with a concurrent cognitive task with three difficulty levels. Setting: A laboratory setting in the detoxification units of three Belgian hospitals. Participants: We included 30 patients with SAUD self-reporting craving at testing time, 30 patients with SAUD reporting a total absence of craving and 30 controls matched on sex and age. All participants from SAUD groups met the DSM-5 criteria for SAUD. Measurements: We assessed AB through early and late eye-tracking indices. We evaluated the modulation of AB by craving (comparison between patients with/without craving) and cognitive load (variation of AB with the difficulty level of the concurrent task). Findings: Dwell time measure indicated that SAUD patients with craving allocated more attention towards alcohol-related stimuli than patients without craving (P < 0.001 |
Andy Brendler; Max Schneider; Immanuel G. Elbau; Rui Sun; Taechawidd Nantawisarakul; Dorothee Pöhlchen; Tanja Brückl; A. K. Brem; E. B. Binder; A. Erhardt; J. Fietz; N. C. Grandi; Y. Kim; S. Ilić-Ćoćić; L. Leuchs; S. Lucae; T. Namendorf; J. Pape; L. Schilbach; I. Mücke-Heim; J. Ziebula; Michael Czisch; Philipp G. Sämann; Michael D. Lee; Victor I. Spoormaker In: Scientific Reports, vol. 14, no. 344, pp. 1–11, 2024. @article{Brendler2024, Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a devastating and heterogenous disorder for which there are no approved biomarkers in clinical practice. We recently identified anticipatory hypo-arousal indexed by pupil responses as a candidate mechanism subserving depression symptomatology. Here, we conducted a replication and extension study of these findings. We analyzed a replication sample of 40 unmedicated patients with a diagnosis of depression and 30 healthy control participants, who performed a reward anticipation task while pupil responses were measured. Using a Bayesian modelling approach taking measurement uncertainty into account, we could show that the negative correlation between pupil dilation and symptom load during reward anticipation is replicable within MDD patients, albeit with a lower effect size. Furthermore, with the combined sample of 136 participants (81 unmedicated depressed and 55 healthy control participants), we further showed that reduced pupil dilation in anticipation of reward is inversely associated with anhedonia items of the Beck Depression Inventory in particular. Moreover, using simultaneous fMRI, particularly the right anterior insula as part of the salience network was negatively correlated with depressive symptom load in general and anhedonia items specifically. The present study supports the utility of pupillometry in assessing noradrenergically mediated hypo-arousal during reward anticipation in MDD, a physiological process that appears to subserve anhedonia. |
Claudio M. Privitera; Sean Noah; Thom Carney; Stanley A. Klein; Agatha Lenartowicz; Stephen P. Hinshaw; James T. McCracken; Joel T. Nigg; Sarah L. Karalunas; Rory C. Reid; Mercedes T. Oliva; Samantha S. Betts; Gregory V. Simpson Pupillary dilations in a Target/Distractor visual task paradigm and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) Journal Article In: Neuroscience Letters, vol. 818, pp. 1–6, 2024. @article{Privitera2024, ADHD is a neurocognitive disorder characterized by attention difficulties, hyperactivity, and impulsivity, often persisting into adulthood with substantial personal and societal consequences. Despite the importance of neurophysiological assessment and treatment monitoring tests, their availability outside of research settings remains limited. Cognitive neuroscience investigations have identified distinct components associated with ADHD, including deficits in sustained attention, inefficient enhancement of attended Targets, and altered suppression of ignored Distractors. In this study, we examined pupil activity in control and ADHD subjects during a sustained visual attention task specifically designed to evaluate the mechanisms underlying Target enhancement and Distractor suppression. Our findings revealed some distinguishing factors between the two groups which we discuss in light of their neurobiological implications. |
Xu Liu; Yu Li; Lihua Xu; Tianhong Zhang; Huiru Cui; Yanyan Wei; Mengqing Xia; Wenjun Su; Yingying Tang; Xiaochen Tang; Dan Zhang; Lothar Spillmann; Ian Max Andolina; Niall McLoughlin; Wei Wang; Jijun Wang Spatial and temporal abnormalities of spontaneous fixational saccades and their correlates with positive and cognitive symptoms in schizophrenia Journal Article In: Schizophrenia Bulletin, vol. 50, no. 1, pp. 78–88, 2024. @article{Liu2024, BACKGROUND AND HYPOTHESIS: Visual fixation is a dynamic process, with the spontaneous occurrence of microsaccades and macrosaccades. These fixational saccades are sensitive to the structural and functional alterations of the cortical-subcortical-cerebellar circuit. Given that dysfunctional cortical-subcortical-cerebellar circuit contributes to cognitive and behavioral impairments in schizophrenia, we hypothesized that patients with schizophrenia would exhibit abnormal fixational saccades and these abnormalities would be associated with the clinical manifestations. STUDY DESIGN: Saccades were recorded from 140 drug-naïve patients with first-episode schizophrenia and 160 age-matched healthy controls during ten separate trials of 6-second steady fixations. Positive and negative symptoms were assessed using the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS). Cognition was assessed using the Measurement and Treatment Research to Improve Cognition in Schizophrenia Consensus Cognitive Battery (MCCB). STUDY RESULTS: Patients with schizophrenia exhibited fixational saccades more vertically than controls, which was reflected in more vertical saccades with angles around 90° and a greater vertical shift of horizontal saccades with angles around 0° in patients. The fixational saccades, especially horizontal saccades, showed longer durations, faster peak velocities, and larger amplitudes in patients. Furthermore, the greater vertical shift of horizontal saccades was associated with higher PANSS total and positive symptom scores in patients, and the longer duration of horizontal saccades was associated with lower MCCB neurocognitive composite, attention/vigilance, and speed of processing scores. Finally, based solely on these fixational eye movements, a K-nearest neighbors model classified patients with an accuracy of 85%. Conclusions: Our results reveal spatial and temporal abnormalities of fixational saccades and suggest fixational saccades as a promising biomarker for cognitive and positive symptoms and for diagnosis of schizophrenia. |
Arthur Pabst; Zoé Bollen; Nicolas Masson; Mado Gautier; Christophe Geus; Pierre Maurage Altered attentional processing of facial expression features in severe alcohol use disorder: An eye-tracking study. Journal Article In: Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science, vol. 133, no. 1, pp. 103–114, 2024. @article{Pabst2024, Social cognition impairments, and notably emotional facial expression (EFE) recognition difficulties, as well as their functional and clinical correlates, are increasingly documented in severe alcohol use disorder (SAUD). However, insights into their underlying mechanisms are lacking. Here, we tested if SAUD was associated with alterations in the attentional processing of EFEs. In a preregistered study, 40 patients with SAUD and 40 healthy controls (HCs) had to identify the emotional expression conveyed by faces while having their gaze recorded by an eye-tracker. We assessed indices of initial (first fixation locations) and later (number of fixations and dwell-time) attention with reference to regions of interest corresponding to the eyes, mouth, and nose, which carry key information for EFE recognition. We centrally found that patients had less first fixations to key facial features in general, as well as less fixations and dwell time to the eyes specifically, relative to the rest of the face, compared to controls. These effects were invariant across emotional expressions. Additional exploratory analyses revealed that patients with SAUD had a less structured viewing pattern than controls. These results offer novel, direct, evidence that patients with SAUD's socioaffective difficulties already emerge at the facial attentional pro- cessing stage, along with precisions regarding the nature and generalizability of the effects. Potential implications for the mechanistic conceptualization and treatment of social cognition difficulties in SAUD are discussed. |
Larisa-maria Dinu; Alexandra-Livia Georgescu; Samriddhi N. Singh; Nicola C. Byrom; G. Overton; Bryan F. Singer; Eleanor J. Dommett Sign-tracking and goal-tracking in humans: Utilising eye-tracking in clinical and non-clinical populations Journal Article In: Behavioural Brain Research, vol. 461, pp. 1–10, 2024. @article{Dinu2024, Background: In Pavlovian conditioning, learned behaviour varies according to the perceived value of environmental cues. For goal-trackers (GT), the cue merely predicts a reward, whilst for sign-trackers (ST), the cue holds incentive value. The sign-tracking/goal-tracking model is well-validated in animals, but translational work is lacking. Despite the model's relevance to several conditions, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), we are unaware of any studies that have examined the model in clinical populations. Methods: The current study used an eye-tracking Pavlovian conditioning paradigm to identify ST and GT in non- clinical (N = 54) and ADHD (N = 57) participants. Eye movements were recorded whilst performing the task. Dwell time was measured for two areas of interest: sign (i.e., cue) and goal (i.e., reward), and an eye-gaze index (EGI) was computed based on the dwell time sign-to-goal ratio. Higher EGI values indicate sign-tracking behaviour. ST and GT were determined using median and tertiary split approaches in both samples. Results: Despite greater propensity for sign-tracking in those with ADHD, there was no significant difference between groups. The oculomotor conditioned response was reward-specific (CS+) and present, at least partly, from the start of the task indicating dispositional and learned components. There were no differences in externalising behaviours between ST and GT for either sample. Conclusions: Sign-tracking is associated with CS+ trials only. There may be both dispositional and learned components to sign-tracking, potentially more common in those with ADHD. This holds translational potential for understanding individual differences in reward-learning. |
Vaibhav A. Diwadkar; Deborah Kashy; Jacqueline Bao; Katharine N. Thakkar Abnormal oculomotor corollary discharge signaling as a trans-diagnostic mechanism of psychosis Journal Article In: Schizophrenia Bulletin, pp. 1–11, 2024. @article{Diwadkar2024, Background and Hypothesis: Corollary discharge (CD) signals are “copies” of motor signals sent to sensory areas to predict the corresponding input. They are a posited mechanism enabling one to distinguish actions generated by oneself vs external forces. Consequently, altered CD is a hypothesized mechanism for agency disturbances in psychosis. Previous studies have shown a decreased influence of CD signals on visual perception in individuals with schizophrenia—particularly in those with more severe positive symptoms. We therefore hypothesized that altered CD may be a trans-diagnostic mechanism of psychosis. Study Design: We examined oculomotor CD (using the blanking task) in 49 participants with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder (SZ), 36 bipolar participants with psychosis (BPP), and 40 healthy controls (HC). Participants made a saccade to a visual target. Upon saccade initiation, the target disappeared and reappeared at a horizontally displaced position. Participants indicated the direction of displacement. With intact CD, participants can make accurate perceptual judgements. Otherwise, participants may use saccade landing site as a proxy of pre-saccadic target to inform perception. Thus, multi-level modeling was used to examine the influence of target displacement and saccade landing site on displacement judgements. Study Results: SZ and BPP were equally less sensitive to target displacement than HC. Moreover, regardless of diagnosis, SZ and BPP with more severe positive symptoms were more likely to rely on saccade landing site. Conclusions: These results suggest that altered CD may be a trans-diagnostic mechanism of psychosis. |
Yawen Guo; Jon D. Elhai; Christian Montag; Yang Wang; Haibo Yang Problematic mobile gamers have attention bias toward game social information Journal Article In: Computers in Human Behavior, vol. 152, pp. 1–13, 2024. @article{Guo2024, Attention bias towards game information influences players' problematic mobile game usage (PMGU). Social experience is an important part of games. This study aimed to explore attention bias mechanisms of problematic mobile gamers for game social information. Experiments 1 and 2 recruited 68 participants (19.82 ± 1.38 years), and used the dot-probe task to investigate attention bias among problematic mobile gamers. Results showed that reaction time and trial-level bias scores (TL-BS) of socially anxious problematic mobile gamers toward game social information were not significantly different from those toward game non-social information. Experiment 3 recruited 35 participants (19.71 ± 1.18 years), and combined eye-tracking technology with the dot-probe task to investigate problematic mobile gamers' attention bias and dynamic visual processing. Results of this last experiment showed that socially anxious problematic mobile gamers' first fixation latency for game social information was significantly shorter than for game non-social information, and their gaze duration and total fixation duration were significantly longer for social than game non-social information. In summary, the eye tracking experiments give support for the idea that socially anxious problematic mobile gamers show attention bias towards game social information, which is presented as the vigilance-maintenance pattern. |
Laura Nuding; Linda Lukas; Belinda Platt; Gerd Schulte-Körne; Anca Sfärlea Look me in the eyes! A preliminary study on eye-contact in adolescents with anorexia nervosa Journal Article In: European Eating Disorders Review, vol. 32, no. 1, pp. 13–19, 2024. @article{Nuding2024, Objective: Anorexia nervosa (AN) is often associated with impairments in the socio-emotional domain. Avoidance of eye-contact may underlie some of these difficulties and has been found in adults with AN in several studies. This study aimed to clarify whether adolescents with AN also show reduced eye-contact when viewing social stimuli, that is, faces. Methods: In this cross-sectional study, girls aged 12–18 years with AN (n = 38) were compared with a clinical (girls with depression and/or anxiety disorders; n = 30) and a healthy (n = 36) control group. Eye-contact was operationalised as maintenance of visual attention to the eye-area of faces showing different emotional expressions (happy, angry, afraid, sad, neutral), recorded via eye-tracking. Results: Contrary to our expectations, we did not find adolescents with AN to dwell less on the eye-area than control groups; instead, we found preliminary evidence for increased attention to the eye-area in the AN group compared to the healthy control group. Conclusions: The results suggest that reduced eye-contact found in adult AN samples is not (yet) present in adolescents with AN but may develop with the prolonged duration of the disorder. However, replication and longitudinal studies are needed to confirm this assumption. |
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. |
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. |
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 |
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. |
Lei Yuan; Miriam Novack; David Uttal; Steven Franconeri Language systematizes attention: How relational language enhances relational representation by guiding attention Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 243, pp. 1–14, 2024. @article{Yuan2024, Language can affect cognition, but through what mechanism? Substantial past research has focused on how labeling can elicit categorical representation during online processing. We focus here on a particularly powerful type of language-relational language-and show that relational language can enhance relational representation in children through an embodied attention mechanism. Four-year-old children were given a color-location conjunction task, in which they were asked to encode a two-color square, split either vertically or horizontally (e.g., red on the left, blue on the right), and later recall the same configuration from its mirror reflection. During the encoding phase, children in the experimental condition heard relational language (e.g., "Red is on the left of blue"), while those in the control condition heard generic non-relational language (e.g., "Look at this one, look at it closely"). At recall, children in the experimental condition were more successful at choosing the correct relational representation between the two colors compared to the control group. Moreover, they exhibited different attention patterns as predicted by the attention shift account of relational representation (Franconeri et al., 2012). To test the sustained effect of language and the role of attention, during the second half of the study, the experimental condition was given generic non-relational language. There was a sustained advantage in the experimental condition for both behavioral accuracies and signature attention patterns. Overall, our findings suggest that relational language enhances relational representation by guiding learners' attention, and this facilitative effect persists over time even in the absence of language. Implications for the mechanism of how relational language can enhance the learning of relational systems (e.g., mathematics, spatial cognition) by guiding attention will be discussed. |
Inbal Ziv; Inbar Avni; Ilan Dinstein; Gal Meiri; Yoram S. Bonneh Oculomotor randomness is higher in autistic children and increases with the severity of symptoms Journal Article In: Autism Research, pp. 1–17, 2024. @article{Ziv2024, A variety of studies have suggested that at least some children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) view the world differently. Differences in gaze patterns as measured by eye tracking have been demonstrated during visual exploration of images and natural viewing of movies with social content. Here we analyzed the temporal randomness of saccades and blinks during natural viewing of movies, inspired by a recent measure of “randomness” applied to micro-movements of the hand and head in ASD (Torres et al., 2013; Torres & Denisova, 2016). We analyzed a large eye-tracking dataset of 189 ASD and 41 typically developing (TD) children (1–11 years old) who watched three movie clips with social content, each repeated twice. We found that oculomotor measures of randomness, obtained from gamma parameters of inter-saccade intervals (ISI) and blink duration distributions, were significantly higher in the ASD group compared with the TD group and were correlated with the ADOS comparison score, reflecting increased “randomness” in more severe cases. Moreover, these measures of randomness decreased with age, as well as with higher cognitive scores in both groups and were consistent across repeated viewing of each movie clip. Highly “random” eye movements in ASD children could be associated with high “neural variability” or noise, poor sensory-motor control, or weak engagement with the movies. These findings could contribute to the future development of oculomotor biomarkers as part of an integrative diagnostic tool for ASD. |
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. |
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. |
Michela Redolfi; Chiara Melloni Processing adjectives in development: Evidence from eye-tracking Journal Article In: Journal of Child Language, pp. 1–24, 2024. @article{Redolfi2024, Combining adjective meaning with the modified noun is particularly challenging for children under three years. Previous research suggests that in processing noun-adjective phrases children may over-rely on noun information, delaying or omitting adjective interpretation. However, the question of whether this difficulty is modulated by semantic differences among (subsective) adjectives is underinvestigated. A visual-world experiment explores how Italian-learning children (N=38, 2;4–5;3) process noun-adjective phrases and whether their processing strategies adapt based on the adjective class. Our investigation substantiates the proficient integration of noun and adjective semantics by children. Nevertheless, alligning with previous research, a notable asymmetry is evident in the interpretation of nouns and adjectives, the latter being integrated more slowly. Remarkably, by testing toddlers across a wide age range, we observe a developmental trajectory in processing, supporting a continuity approach to children's development. Moreover, we reveal that children exhibit sensitivity to the distinct interpretations associated with each subsective adjective. |
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. |
2023 |
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, pp. 1–8, 2023. @article{Plate2023, 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 |
Belinda Platt; Anca Sfärlea; Johanna Löchner; Elske Salemink; Gerd Schulte-Körne The role of cognitive biases and negative life events in predicting later depressive symptoms in children and adolescents Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychopathology, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 1–16, 2023. @article{Platt2023, Aims: Cognitive models propose that negative cognitive biases in attention (AB) and interpretation (IB) contribute to the onset of depression. This is the first prospective study to test this hypothesis in a sample of youth with no mental disorder. Methods: Participants were 61 youth aged 9–14 years with no mental disorder. At baseline (T1) we measured AB (passive- viewing task), IB (scrambled sentences task) and self-report depressive symptoms. Thirty months later (T2) we measured onset of mental disorder, depressive symptoms and life events (parent- and child-report). The sample included children of parents with (n = 31) and without (n = 30) parental depression. Results: Symptoms of depression at T2 were predicted by IB (ß = .35 |
Elie Poncet; Gaelle Nicolas; Nathalie Guyader; Elena Moro; Aurélie Campagne Spatio-temporal attention toward emotional scenes across adulthood Journal Article In: Emotion, vol. 23, no. 6, pp. 1726–1739, 2023. @article{Poncet2023, Research on emotion suggests that the attentional preference observed toward the negative stimuli in young adults tends to disappear in normal aging and, sometimes, to shift toward a preference for positive stimuli. The current eye-tracking study investigated visual exploration of paired natural scenes of different valence (Negative–Neutral, Positive–Neutral, and Negative–Positive pairs) in three age groups (young, middle-aged, and older adults). Two arousal levels of stimuli (high and low arousal) were also considered given role of this factor in age-related effects on emotion. Results showed the automatic attentional orienting toward the negative stimuli was relatively preserved in our three age groups although reduced in the elderly, in both arousal conditions. A similar negativity bias was also observed in initial attention focusing but shifted toward a positivity bias over time in the three age groups. Moreover, it appeared the spatial exploration of emotional scenes evolved over time differently for older adults compared with other age groups. No difference between young adults and middle-aged adults in ocular behavior was observed. This study confirms the interest of studying both spatial and temporal characteristics of oculomotor behaviors to better understand the age-related effects on emotion. |
Gwendolyn Rehrig; Taylor R. Hayes; John M. Henderson; Fernanda Ferreira Visual attention during seeing for speaking in healthy aging Journal Article In: Psychology and Aging, vol. 38, no. 1, pp. 1–18, 2023. @article{Rehrig2023, As we age, we accumulate a wealth of information, but cognitive processing becomes slower and less efficient. There is mixed evidence on whether world knowledge compensates for age- related cognitive decline (Umanath & Marsh, 2014). We investigated whether older adults are more likely to fixate more meaningful scene locations than are young adults. Young (N=30) and older adults (N=30, aged 66-82) described scenes while eye movements and descriptions were recorded. We used a logistic mixed-effects model to determine whether fixated scene locations differed in meaning, salience, and center distance from locations that were not fixated, and whether those properties differed for locations young and older adults fixated. Meaning predicted fixated locations well overall, though the locations older adults fixated were less meaningful than those that young adults fixated. These results suggest that older adults' visual attention is less sensitive to meaning than young adults, despite extensive experience with scenes. |
Anja Rettig; Ulrich Schiefele Relations between reading motivation and reading efficiency—evidence from a longitudinal eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Reading Research Quarterly, vol. 58, no. 4, pp. 685–709, 2023. @article{Rettig2023, Studies on the relation between children's reading motivation and early developmental stages of reading competence are rare and have neglected on-line measures of reading skill (e.g., eye movements indicating word decoding). For this reason, we investigated the effects of intrinsic and extrinsic reading motivation on the efficiency of reading processes based on eye-movement data. Moreover, we examined reading efficiency as a mediator of the relation between motivation and comprehension. German elementary school students in Grades 1–3 (N = 131) were tested on three measurement occasions. Specifically, we assessed reading motivation, reading amount, and sentence comprehension at Time 1, reading efficiency at Time 2 (2 months after Time 1), and all of the variables again at Time 3 (10 months after Time 2). Reading efficiency was assessed while children read age-appropriate sentences and comprised measures of first-fixation duration, gaze duration, total reading time, forward-saccade length, and refixation probability. Linear and cross-lagged panel models showed significant favorable relations between intrinsic reading motivation (operationalized as involvement and enjoyment of reading), but not extrinsic reading motivation (operationalized as striving to outperform one's peers), and most measures of reading efficiency, while controlling for gender, grade level, and reading amount. The reverse effects of reading-efficiency indicators on intrinsic reading motivation were all significant. Moreover, the test of the mediation model revealed a significant indirect effect of Time 1 intrinsic reading motivation on Time 3 sentence comprehension mediated by Time 2 reading efficiency. We concluded that intrinsic reading motivation, in contrast to extrinsic reading motivation, facilitates reading comprehension through its effect on reading efficiency, independent of variations in reading amount. |
Tracy Reuter; Carolyn Mazzei; Casey Lew-Williams; Lauren Emberson Infants' lexical comprehension and lexical anticipation abilities are closely linked in early language development Journal Article In: Infancy, vol. 28, no. 3, pp. 532–549, 2023. @article{Reuter2023, Theories across cognitive domains propose that anticipating upcoming sensory input supports information processing. In line with this view, prior findings indicate that adults and children anticipate upcoming words during real-time language processing, via such processes as prediction and priming. However, it is unclear if anticipatory processes are strictly an outcome of prior language development or are more entwined with language learning and development. We operationalized this theoretical question as whether developmental emergence of comprehension of lexical items occurs before or concurrently with the anticipation of these lexical items. To this end, we tested infants of ages 12, 15, 18, and 24 months (N = 67) on their abilities to comprehend and anticipate familiar nouns. In an eye-tracking task, infants viewed pairs of images and heard sentences with either informative words (e.g., eat) that allowed them to anticipate an upcoming noun (e.g., cookie), or uninformative words (e.g., see). Findings indicated that infants' comprehension and anticipation abilities are closely linked over developmental time and within individuals. Importantly, we do not find evidence for lexical comprehension in the absence of lexical anticipation. Thus, anticipatory processes are present early in infants' second year, suggesting they are a part of language development rather than solely an outcome of it. |
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, pp. 1–17, 2023. @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. |
Helen Rodger; Nayla Sokhn; Junpeng Lao; Yingdi Liu; Roberto Caldara Developmental eye movement strategies for decoding facial expressions of emotion Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, vol. 229, pp. 1–23, 2023. @article{Rodger2023, In our daily lives, we routinely look at the faces of others to try to understand how they are feeling. Few studies have examined the perceptual strategies that are used to recognize facial expressions of emotion, and none have attempted to isolate visual information use with eye movements throughout development. Therefore, we recorded the eye movements of children from 5 years of age up to adulthood during recognition of the six “basic emotions” to investigate when perceptual strategies for emotion recognition become mature (i.e., most adult-like). Using iMap4, we identified the eye movement fixation patterns for recognition of the six emotions across age groups in natural viewing and gaze-contingent (i.e., expanding spotlight) conditions. While univariate analyses failed to reveal significant differences in fixation patterns, more sensitive multivariate distance analyses revealed a U-shaped developmental trajectory with the eye movement strategies of the 17- to 18-year-old group most similar to adults for all expressions. A developmental dip in strategy similarity was found for each emotional expression revealing which age group had the most distinct eye movement strategy from the adult group: the 13- to 14-year-olds for sadness recognition; the 11- to 12-year-olds for fear, anger, surprise, and disgust; and the 7- to 8-year-olds for happiness. Recognition performance for happy, angry, and sad expressions did not differ significantly across age groups, but the eye movement strategies for these expressions diverged for each group. Therefore, a unique strategy was not a prerequisite for optimal recognition performance for these expressions. Our data provide novel insights into the developmental trajectories underlying facial expression recognition, a critical ability for adaptive social relations. |
Soroosh Shalileh; Dmitry Ignatov; Anastasiya Lopukhina; Olga Dragoy Identifying dyslexia in school pupils from eye movement and demographic data using artificial intelligence Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 18, pp. 1–26, 2023. @article{Shalileh2023, This paper represents our research results in the pursuit of the following objectives: (i) to introduce a novel multi-sources data set to tackle the shortcomings of the previous data sets, (ii) to propose a robust artificial intelligence-based solution to identify dyslexia in primary school pupils, (iii) to investigate our psycholinguistic knowledge by studying the importance of the features in identifying dyslexia by our best AI model. In order to achieve the first objective, we collected and annotated a new set of eye-movement-during-reading data. Furthermore, we collected demographic data, including the measure of non-verbal intelligence, to form our three data sources. Our data set is the largest eye-movement data set globally. Unlike the previously introduced binary-class data sets, it contains (A) three class labels and (B) reading speed. Concerning the second objective, we formulated the task of dyslexia prediction as regression and classification problems and scrutinized the performance of 12 classifications and eight regressions approaches. We exploited the Bayesian optimization method to fine-tune the hyperparameters of the models: and reported the average and the standard deviation of our evaluation metrics in a stratified ten-fold cross-validation. Our studies showed that multi-layer perceptron, random forest, gradient boosting, and k-nearest neighbor form the group having the most acceptable results. Moreover, we showed that although separately using each data source did not lead to accurate results, their combination led to a reliable solution. We also determined the importance of the features of our best classifier: our findings showed that the IQ, gender, and age are the top three important features; we also showed that fixation along the y-axis is more important than other fixation data. Dyslexia detection, eye fixation, eye movement, demographic, classification, regression, artificial intelligence. |
Frederick Shic; Erin C. Barney; Adam J. Naples; Kelsey J. Dommer; Shou An Chang; Beibin Li; Takumi McAllister; Adham Atyabi; Quan Wang; Raphael Bernier; Geraldine Dawson; James Dziura; Susan Faja; Shafali Spurling Jeste; Michael Murias; Scott P. Johnson; Maura Sabatos-DeVito; Gerhard Helleman; Damla Senturk; Catherine A. Sugar; Sara Jane Webb; James C. McPartland; Katarzyna Chawarska In: Autism Research, vol. 16, pp. 2150–2159, 2023. @article{Shic2023, The Selective Social Attention (SSA) task is a brief eye-tracking task involving experimental conditions varying along socio-communicative axes. Traditionally the SSA has been used to probe socially-specific attentional patterns in infants and toddlers who develop autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This current work extends these findings to preschool and school-age children. Children 4- to 12-years-old with ASD (N = 23) and a typically-developing comparison group (TD; N = 25) completed the SSA task as well as standardized clinical assessments. Linear mixed models examined group and condition effects on two outcome variables: percent of time spent looking at the scene relative to scene presentation time (%Valid), and percent of time looking at the face relative to time spent looking at the scene (%Face). Age and IQ were included as covariates. Outcome variables' relationships to clinical data were assessed via correlation analysis. The ASD group, compared to the TD group, looked less at the scene and focused less on the actress' face during the most socially-engaging experimental conditions. Additionally, within the ASD group, %Face negatively correlated with SRS total T-scores with a particularly strong negative correlation with the Autistic Mannerism subscale T-score. These results highlight the extensibility of the SSA to older children with ASD, including replication of between-group differences previously seen in infants and toddlers, as well as its ability to capture meaningful clinical variation within the autism spectrum across a wide developmental span inclusive of preschool and school-aged children. The properties suggest that the SSA may have broad potential as a biomarker for ASD. |
Alice E. Skelton; Anna Franklin; Jenny M. Bosten Colour vision is aligned with natural scene statistics at 4 months of age Journal Article In: Developmental Science, vol. 26, no. 6, pp. 1–8, 2023. @article{Skelton2023, Visual perception in adult humans is thought to be tuned to represent the statistical regularities of natural scenes. For example, in adults, visual sensitivity to different hues shows an asymmetry which coincides with the statistical regularities of colour in the natural world. Infants are sensitive to statistical regularities in social and linguistic stimuli, but whether or not infants' visual systems are tuned to natural scene statistics is currently unclear. We measured colour discrimination in infants to investigate whether or not the visual system can represent chromatic scene statistics in very early life. Our results reveal the earliest association between vision and natural scene statistics that has yet been found: even as young as 4 months of age, colour vision is aligned with the distributions of colours in natural scenes. Research Highlights: We find infants' colour sensitivity is aligned with the distribution of colours in the natural world, as it is in adults. At just 4 months, infants' visual systems are tailored to extract and represent the statistical regularities of the natural world. This points to a drive for the human brain to represent statistical regularities even at a young age. |
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, pp. 1–8, 2023. @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. |
Linda Sommerfeld; Maria Staudte; Nivedita Mani; Jutta Kray Even young children make multiple predictions in the complex visual world Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, vol. 235, pp. 1–29, 2023. @article{Sommerfeld2023, Children can anticipate upcoming input in sentences with semantically constraining verbs. In the visual world, the sentence context is used to anticipatorily fixate the only object matching potential sentence continuations. Adults can process even multiple visual objects in parallel when predicting language. This study examined whether young children can also maintain multiple prediction options in parallel during language processing. In addition, we aimed at replicating the finding that children's receptive vocabulary size modulates their prediction. German children (5–6 years |
John P. Spencer; Samuel H. Forbes; Sophie Naylor; Vinay P. Singh; Kiara Jackson; Sean Deoni; Madhuri Tiwari; Aarti Kumar Poor air quality is associated with impaired visual cognition in the first two years of life: A longitudinal investigation Journal Article In: eLife, vol. 12, pp. 1–19, 2023. @article{Spencer2023, Background: Poor air quality has been linked to cognitive deficits in children, but this relationship has not been examined in the first year of life when brain growth is at its peak. Methods: We measured in-home air quality focusing on particulate matter with diameter of <2.5 μm (PM2.5) and infants' cognition longitudinally in a sample of families from rural India. Results: Air quality was poorer in homes that used solid cooking materials. Infants from homes with poorer air quality showed lower visual working memory scores at 6 and 9 months of age and slower visual processing speed from 6 to 21 months when controlling for family socio-economic status. Conclusions: Thus, poor air quality is associated with impaired visual cognition in the first two years of life, consistent with animal studies of early brain development. We demonstrate for the first time an association between air quality and cognition in the first year of life using direct measures of in-home air quality and looking-based measures of cognition. Because indoor air quality was linked to cooking materials in the home, our findings suggest that efforts to reduce cooking emissions should be a key target for intervention. |
Sybren Spit; Andreea Geambașu; Daan Renswoude; Elma Blom; Paula Fikkert; Sabine Hunnius; Caroline Junge; Josje Verhagen; Ingmar Visser; Frank Wijnen; Clara C. Levelt Robustness of the cognitive gains in 7-month-old bilingual infants: A close multi-center replication of Kovács and Mehler (2009) Journal Article In: Developmental Science, vol. 26, no. 6, pp. 1–16, 2023. @article{Spit2023, We present an exact replication of Experiment 2 from Kovács and Mehler's 2009 study, which showed that 7-month-old infants who are raised bilingually exhibit a cognitive advantage. In the experiment, a sound cue, following an AAB or ABB pattern, predicted the appearance of a visual stimulus on the screen. The stimulus appeared on one side of the screen for nine trials and then switched to the other side. In the original experiment, both mono- and bilingual infants anticipated where the visual stimulus would appear during pre-switch trials. However, during post-switch trials, only bilingual children anticipated that the stimulus would appear on the other side of the screen. The authors took this as evidence of a cognitive advantage. Using the exact same materials in combination with novel analysis techniques (Bayesian analyses, mixed effects modeling and cluster based permutation analyses), we assessed the robustness of these findings in four babylabs (N = 98). Our results did not replicate the original findings: although anticipatory looks increased slightly during post-switch trials for both groups, bilingual infants were not better switchers than monolingual infants. After the original experiment, we presented additional trials to examine whether infants associated sound patterns with cued locations, for which we did not find any evidence either. The results highlight the importance of multicenter replications and more fine-grained statistical analyses to better understand child development. Highlights: We carried out an exact replication across four baby labs of the high-impact study by Kovács and Mehler (2009). We did not replicate the findings of the original study, calling into question the robustness of the claim that bilingual infants have enhanced cognitive abilities. After the original experiment, we presented additional trials to examine whether infants correctly associated sound patterns with cued locations, for which we did not find any evidence. The use of novel analysis techniques (Bayesian analyses, mixed effects modeling and cluster based permutation analyses) allowed us to draw better-informed conclusions. |
Vladislava Staroverova; Anastasiya Lopukhina; Nina Zdorova; Nina Ladinskaya; Olga Vedenina; Sofya Goldina; Anastasiia Kaprielova; Ksenia Bartseva; Olga Dragoy Phonological and orthographic parafoveal processing during silent reading in Russian children and adults Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, vol. 226, pp. 1–11, 2023. @article{Staroverova2023, Studies on German and English have shown that children and adults can rely on phonological and orthographic information from the parafovea during reading, but this reliance differs between ages and languages. In the current study, we investigated the development of phonological and orthographic parafoveal processing during silent reading in Russian-speaking 8-year-old children, 10-year-old children, and adults using the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm. The participants read sentences with embedded nouns that were presented in original, pseudohomophone, control for pseudohomophone, transposed-letter, and control for transposed-letter conditions in the parafoveal area to assess phonological and orthographic preview benefit effects. The results revealed that all groups of participants relied only on orthographic but not phonological parafoveal information. These findings indicate that 8-year-old children already preprocess parafoveal information similarly to adults. |
Binbin Sun; Bryan Wang; Zhen Wei; Zhe Feng; Zhi Liu Wu; Walid Yassin; William S. Stone; Yan Lin; Xue Jun Kong Identification of diagnostic markers for ASD: A restrictive interest analysis based on EEG combined with eye tracking Journal Article In: Frontiers in Neuroscience, vol. 17, pp. 1–16, 2023. @article{Sun2023, Electroencephalography (EEG) functional connectivity (EFC) and eye tracking (ET) have been explored as objective screening methods for autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but no study has yet evaluated restricted and repetitive behavior (RRBs) simultaneously to infer early ASD diagnosis. Typically developing (TD) children (n = 27) and ASD (n = 32), age- and sex-matched, were evaluated with EFC and ET simultaneously, using the restricted interest stimulus paradigm. Network-based machine learning prediction (NBS-predict) was used to identify ASD. Correlations between EFC, ET, and Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule-Second Edition (ADOS-2) were performed. The Area Under the Curve (AUC) of receiver-operating characteristics (ROC) was measured to evaluate the predictive performance. Under high restrictive interest stimuli (HRIS), ASD children have significantly higher α band connectivity and significantly more total fixation time (TFT)/pupil enlargement of ET relative to TD children (p = 0.04299). These biomarkers were not only significantly positively correlated with each other (R = 0.716 |
Cheng-Hui Tan; Qi-Qi Xing; Yuan Zhao; Bo-Hai Song; Chuan-Lin Zhu; Jun-Jie Qiu; Mu-Ye He; Dian-Zhi Liu Goal-directed action anticipation and prediction error processing in children with autism spectrum disorders: An eye-movement study Journal Article In: Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, vol. 106, pp. 1–13, 2023. @article{Tan2023, Background: Differences in predictive ability have been proposed as a possible explanation for the core symptoms of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This study aimed to investigate potential differences in prior knowledge acquisition and application for goal-directed anticipation in children with ASD. Method: The study included 22 children with ASD and 19 typically developing (TD) children between the ages of 5–10 years. Two eye-tracking phases were used to examine the formation of goal-directed action anticipations and the processing of action prediction errors. In the action anticipation formation phase, participants were asked to observe goal-directed actions repeatedly to examine prior knowledge acquisition about agent-goal association. In the action anticipation violation phase, the goals of actions were changed to examine the application of previously acquired knowledge. Results: Children with ASD required more trials to form goal-directed anticipations than TD children. Furthermore, prior knowledge acquisition was characterized by variability and instability in children with ASD. During the action anticipation violation phase, children with ASD exhibited lower preference for the action goal determined by prior knowledge in uncertain situations. This atypical processing of prior knowledge was significantly correlated with the severity of ASD symptoms. Conclusions: Our findings support the Bayesian perception theory and predictive coding theory, suggesting that children with ASD may experience difficulties in both the acquisition and application of prior knowledge in anticipation. These findings have implications for developing interventions to improve goal-directed anticipation and reduce social and communication difficulties in individuals with ASD. |
Yasuo Terao; Yoshiko Nomura; Hideki Fukuda; Okihide Hikosaka; Kazue Kimura; Shun-ichi Matsuda; Akihiro Yugeta; Francesco Fisicaro; Kyoko Hoshino; Yoshikazu Ugawa The pathophysiology of Gilles de la Tourette Syndrome: Changes in saccade performance by low-dose L-Dopa and dopamine receptor blockers Journal Article In: Brain Sciences, vol. 13, no. 12, pp. 1–23, 2023. @article{Terao2023, Aim: To elucidate the pathophysiology of Gilles de la Tourette syndrome (GTS), which is associated with prior use of dopamine receptor antagonists (blockers) and treatment by L-Dopa, through saccade performance. Method: In 226 male GTS patients (5–14 years), we followed vocal and motor tics and obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) after discontinuing blockers at the first visit starting with low-dose L-Dopa. We recorded visual- (VGS) and memory-guided saccades (MGS) in 110 patients and 26 normal participants. Results: At the first visit, prior blocker users exhibited more severe vocal tics and OCD, but not motor tics, which persisted during follow-up. Patients treated with L-Dopa showed greater improvement of motor tics, but not vocal tics and OCD. Patients with and without blocker use showed similarly impaired MGS performance, while patients with blocker use showed more prominently impaired inhibitory control of saccades, associated with vocal tics and OCD. Discussion: Impaired MGS performance suggested a mild hypodopaminergic state causing reduced direct pathway activity in the (oculo-)motor loops of the basal ganglia–thalamocortical circuit. Blocker use may aggravate vocal tics and OCD due to disinhibition within the associative and limbic loops. The findings provide a rationale for discouraging blocker use and using low-dose L-Dopa in GTS. |
Argyro Fella; Maria Loizou; Christoforos Christoforou; Timothy C. Papadopoulos Eye movement evidence for simultaneous cognitive processing in reading Journal Article In: Children, vol. 10, no. 12, pp. 1–17, 2023. @article{Fella2023, Measuring simultaneous processing, a reliable predictor of reading development and reading difficulties (RDs), has traditionally involved cognitive tasks that test reaction or response time, which only capture the efficiency at the output processing stage and neglect the internal stages of information processing. However, with eye-tracking methodology, we can reveal the underlying temporal and spatial processes involved in simultaneous processing and investigate whether these processes are equivalent across chronological or reading age groups. This study used eye-tracking to investigate the simultaneous processing abilities of 15 Grade 6 and 15 Grade 3 children with RDs and their chronological-age controls (15 in each Grade). The Grade 3 typical readers were used as reading-level (RL) controls for the Grade 6 RD group. Participants were required to listen to a question and then point to a picture among four competing illustrations demonstrating the spatial relationship raised in the question. Two eye movements (fixations and saccades) were recorded using the EyeLink 1000 Plus eye-tracking system. The results showed that the Grade 3 RD group produced more and longer fixations than their CA controls, indicating that the pattern of eye movements of young children with RD is typically deficient compared to that of their typically developing counterparts when processing verbal and spatial stimuli simultaneously. However, no differences were observed between the Grade 6 groups in eye movement measures. Notably, the Grade 6 RD group outperformed the RL-matched Grade 3 group, yielding significantly fewer and shorter fixations. The discussion centers on the role of the eye-tracking method as a reliable means of deciphering the simultaneous cognitive processing involved in learning. |
Jade Guénot; Yves Trotter; Angélique Delaval; Robin Baurès; Vincent Soler; Benoit R. Cottereau Processing of translational, radial and rotational optic flow in older adults Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 1–11, 2023. @article{Guenot2023, Aging impacts human observer's performance in a wide range of visual tasks and notably in motion discrimination. Despite numerous studies, we still poorly understand how optic flow processing is impacted in healthy older adults. Here, we estimated motion coherence thresholds in two groups of younger (age: 18–30 |
Thomas Günther; Annika Kirschenkern; Axel Mayer; Frederike Steinke; Jürgen Cholewa In: Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, vol. 66, no. 10, pp. 3907–3924, 2023. @article{Guenther2023, Purpose: Many models of language comprehension assume that listeners predict the continuation of an incoming linguistic stimulus immediately after itonset, based on only partial linguistic and contextual information. Their related developmental models try to determine which cues (e.g., semantic or morpho-syntactic) trigger such prediction, and to which extent, during different period of language acquisition. One morphosyntactic cue utilized predictively in many languages, inter alia German, is grammatical gender. However, studies of the developmental trajectories of the acquisition of predictive gender processing in German remain a few. Method: This study attempts to shed light on such processing strategies usein noun phrase decoding among children acquiring German as their first language by examining their eye movements during a language–picture matching task (N = 78, 5–10 years old). Its aim was to confirm whether the eye moments indicated the presence of age-specific differences in the processing of gender cue, provided either in isolation or in combination with a semantic cue. Results: The results revealed that German children made use of predictive gender processing strategies from the age of 5 years onward; however, the pace online gender processing, as well as confidence in the predicted continuation increased up to the age of 10 years. Conclusion: Predictive processing of gender cues plays a role in German language comprehension even in children younger than 8 years. |
Tami Harel-Arbeli; Yuval Palgi; Boaz M. Ben-David Sow in tears and reap in joy: Eye tracking reveals age-related differences in the cognitive cost of spoken context processing Journal Article In: Psychology and Aging, vol. 38, no. 6, pp. 534–547, 2023. @article{HarelArbeli2023, Older adults have been found to use context to facilitate word recognition at least as efficiently as young adults. This may pose a conundrum, as context use is based on cognitive resources that are considered to decrease with aging. The goal of this study was to shed light on this question by testing age-related differences in context use and the cognitive demands associated with it. The eye movements of 30 young (21–27 years old) and 30 older adults (61–79 years old) were examined as they listened to spoken instructions to touch an image on a monitor. The predictability of the target word was manipulated between trials: nonpredictive (baseline), predictive (context), or predictive of two images (competition). In tandem, listeners were asked to retain one or four spoken digits (low or high cognitive load) for later recall. Separate analyses were conducted for the preceding sentence and the (final) target word. Sentence processing: Older adults were slower than young adults to accumulate evidence for target-word prediction (context condition), and they were more negatively affected by the increase in cognitive load (context and competition). Targetword recognition: No age-related differences were found in word recognition rate or the effect of cognitive load following predictive context (context and competition). Although older adults have greater difficulty processing context, they can use context to facilitate word recognition as efficiently as young adults. These results provide a better understanding of how cognitive processing changes with aging. They may help develop interventions aimed at improving communication in older adults. |
Marc M. Himmelberg; Ekin Tünçok; Jesse Gomez; Kalanit Grill-Spector; Marisa Carrasco; Jonathan Winawer Comparing retinotopic maps of children and adults reveals a late-stage change in how V1 samples the visual field Journal Article In: Nature Communications, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 1–15, 2023. @article{Himmelberg2023, Adult visual performance differs with angular location –it is better for stimuli along the horizontal than vertical, and lower than upper vertical meridian of the visual field. These perceptual asymmetries are paralleled by asymmetries in cortical surface area in primary visual cortex (V1). Children, unlike adults, have similar visual performance at the lower and upper vertical meridian. Do children have similar V1 surface area representing the upper and lower vertical meridian? Using MRI, we measure the surface area of retinotopic maps (V1-V3) in children and adults. Many features of the maps are similar between groups, including greater V1 surface area for the horizontal than vertical meridian. However, unlike adults, children have a similar amount of V1 surface area representing the lower and upper vertical meridian. These data reveal a late-stage change in V1 organization that may relate to the emergence of the visual performance asymmetry along the vertical meridian by adulthood. |
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, pp. 1–24, 2023. @article{Hopp2023, 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; Donald Brien; Brian C. Coe; Giulia Longoni; Donald J. Mabbott; Douglas P. Munoz; E. Ann Yeh Delayed oculomotor response associates with optic neuritis in youth with demyelinating disorders Journal Article In: Multiple Sclerosis and Related Disorders, vol. 79, pp. 1–9, 2023. @article{Huang2023a, Introduction: Impairment in visual and cognitive functions occur in youth with demyelinating disorders such as multiple sclerosis, neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder, and myelin oligodendrocyte glycoprotein antibody-associated disease. Quantitative behavioral assessment using eye-tracking and pupillometry can provide functional metrics for important prognostic and clinically relevant information at the bedside. Methods: Children and adolescents diagnosed with demyelinating disorders and healthy, age-matched controls completed an interleaved pro- and anti-saccade task using video-based eye-tracking and underwent spectral-domain optical coherence tomography examination for evaluation of retinal nerve fiber layer and ganglion cell inner plexiform layer thickness. Low-contrast visual acuity and Symbol Digit Modalities Test were performed for visual and cognitive functional assessments. We assessed saccade and pupil parameters including saccade reaction time, direction error rate, pupil response latency, peak constriction time, and peak constriction and dilation velocities. Generalized Estimating Equations were used to examine the association of eye-tracking parameters with optic neuritis history, structural metrics, and visual and cognitive scores. Results: The study included 36 demyelinating disorders patients, aged 8–18 yrs. (75% F; median = 15.22 yrs. |
Sagi Jaffe-Dax; Christine E. Potter; Tiffany S. Leung; Lauren L. Emberson; Casey Lew-Williams The influence of memory on visual perception in infants, children, and adults Journal Article In: Cognitive Science, vol. 47, no. 11, pp. 1–20, 2023. @article{JaffeDax2023, Perception is not an independent, in-the-moment event. Instead, perceiving involves integrating prior expectations with current observations. How does this ability develop from infancy through adulthood? We examined how prior visual experience shapes visual perception in infants, children, and adults. Using an identical task across age groups, we exposed participants to pairs of colorful stimuli and implicitly measured their ability to discriminate relative saturation levels. Results showed that adult participants were biased by previously experienced exemplars, and exhibited weakened in-the-moment discrimination between different levels of saturation. In contrast, infants and children showed less influence of memory in their perception, and they actually outperformed adults in discriminating between current levels of saturation. Our findings suggest that as humans develop, their perception relies more on prior experience and less on current observation. |
Tinghu Kang; Tinghao Tang; Peizhi Zhang; Shu Luo; Huanhuan Qi Metacognitive prompts and numerical ordinality in solving word problems: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: British Journal of Educational Psychology, vol. 93, no. 3, pp. 862–877, 2023. @article{Kang2023a, Background: The ability to translate concrete manipulatives into abstract mathematical formulas can aid in the solving of mathematical word problems among students, and metacognitive prompts play a significant role in enhancing this process. Aims: Based on the concept of semantic congruence, we explored the effects of metacognitive prompts and numerical ordinality on information searching and cognitive processing, throughout the process of solving mathematical word problems among primary school students in China. Sample: Participants included 73 primary school students (38 boys and 35 girls) with normal or corrected visual acuity. Methods: This study was based on a 2 (prompt information: no-prompt, metacognitive-prompt) × 2 (number attribute: cardinal number, ordinal number) mixed experimental design. We analysed multiple eye-movement indices, such as fixation duration, saccadic amplitude, and pupil size, since they pertained to the areas of interest. Results: When solving both types of problems, pupil sizes were significantly smaller under the metacognitive-prompt condition compared with the no-prompt condition, and shorter dwell time for specific sentences, conditional on metacognitive prompts, indicated the optimization of the presented algorithm. Additionally, the levels of fixation durations and saccadic amplitudes were significantly higher when solving ordinal number word problems compared with solving ordinal number problems, indicating that primary school students were less efficient in reading and faced increased levels of difficulty when solving ordinal number problems. Conclusions: The results indicate that for Chinese upper-grade primary school students, cognitive load was lower in the metacognitive prompting condition and when solving cardinal problems, and higher when solving ordinal problems. |
Natalia Kartushina; Julien Mayor Coping with dialects from birth: Role of variability on infants' early language development. Insights from Norwegian dialects Journal Article In: Developmental Science, vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 1–19, 2023. @article{Kartushina2023, Previous research suggests that exposure to accent variability can affect toddlers' familiar word recognition and word comprehension. The current preregistered study addressed the gap in knowledge on early language development in infants exposed to two dialects from birth and assessed the role of dialect similarity in infants' word recognition and comprehension. A 12-month-old Norwegian-learning infants, exposed to native Norwegian parents speaking the same or two Norwegian dialects, took part in two eye-tracking tasks, assessing familiar word form recognition and word comprehension. Their parents' speech was assessed for similarity by native Norwegian speakers. First, in contrast to previous research, our results revealed no listening preference for words over nonwords in both monodialectal and bidialectal infants, suggesting potential language-specific differences in the onset of word recognition. Second, the results showed evidence for word comprehension in monodialectal infants, but not in bidialectal infants, suggesting that exposure to dialectal variability impacts early word acquisition. Third, perceptual similarity between parental dialects tendentially facilitated bidialectal infants' word recognition and comprehension. Forth, the results revealed a strong correlation between the raters and parents' assessment of similarity between dialects, indicating that parental estimations can be reliably used to assess infants' speech variability at home. Finally, our results revealed a strong relationship between word recognition and comprehension in monodialectal infants and the absence of such a relationship in bidialectal infants, suggesting that either these two skills do not necessarily align in infants exposed to more variable input, or that the alignment might occur at a later stage. |
I. M. Dushyanthi Karunathilake; Jason L. Dunlap; Janani Perera; Alessandro Presacco; Lien Decruy; Samira Anderson; Stefanie E. Kuchinsky; Jonathan Z. Simon Effects of aging on cortical representations of continuous speech Journal Article In: Journal of Neurophysiology, vol. 129, no. 6, pp. 1359–1377, 2023. @article{Karunathilake2023, Understanding speech in a noisy environment is crucial in day-to-day interactions and yet becomes more challenging with age, even for healthy aging. Age-related changes in the neural mechanisms that enable speech-in-noise listening have been investigated previously; however, the extent to which age affects the timing and fidelity of encoding of target and interfering speech streams is not well understood. Using magnetoencephalography (MEG), we investigated how continuous speech is represented in auditory cortex in the presence of interfering speech in younger and older adults. Cortical representations were obtained from neural responses that time-locked to the speech envelopes with speech envelope reconstruction and temporal response functions (TRFs). TRFs showed three prominent peaks corresponding to auditory cortical processing stages: early (∼50 ms), middle (∼100 ms), and late (∼200 ms). Older adults showed exaggerated speech envelope representations compared with younger adults. Temporal analysis revealed both that the age-related exaggeration starts as early as ∼50 ms and that older adults needed a substantially longer integration time window to achieve their better reconstruction of the speech envelope. As expected, with increased speech masking envelope reconstruction for the attended talker decreased and all three TRF peaks were delayed, with aging contributing additionally to the reduction. Interestingly, for older adults the late peak was delayed, suggesting that this late peak may receive contributions from multiple sources. Together these results suggest that there are several mechanisms at play compensating for age-related temporal processing deficits at several stages but which are not able to fully reestablish unimpaired speech perception. |
Anastasia Kerr-German; A. Caglar Tas; Aaron T. Buss A multi-method approach to addressing the toddler data desert in attention research Journal Article In: Cognitive Development, vol. 65, pp. 1–14, 2023. @article{KerrGerman2023, Visual attention skills undergo robust development change during infancy and continue to co-develop with other cognitive processes in early childhood. Despite this, this is a general disconnect between measures of the earliest foundations of attention during infancy and later development of attention in relation to executive functioning during the toddler years. To examine associations between these different measures of attention, the current study administered an oculomotor task (infant orienting with attention, IOWA) and a manual response (Flanker) task with a group of toddlers. We collected simultaneous neural recordings (using functional near-infrared spectroscopy), eye-tracking, and behavioral responses in 2.5- and 3.5-year-olds to examine the neural and behavioral associations between these skills. Results revealed that oculomotor facilitation in the IOWA task was negatively associated with accuracy on neutral trials in the Flanker task. Second, conflict scores between the two tasks were positively associated. At the neural level, however, the tasks showed distinct patterns of activation. Left frontal cortex was engaged during the Flanker task whereas right frontal and parietal cortex was engaged during the IOWA task. Activation during the IOWA task differed based on how well children could control oculomotor behavior during the task. Children with high levels of stimulus reactivity activated parietal cortex more strongly, but children with more controlled oculomotor behavior activated frontal cortex more strongly. |
Jiae Kim; Jiyeon Lee; Sang Beom Jun; Jee Eun Sung Pupillometry as a window to detect cognitive aging in the brain Journal Article In: Biomedical Engineering Letters, pp. 91–101, 2023. @article{Kim2023b, This study investigated whether there are aging-related differences in pupil dilation (pupillometry) while the cognitive load is manipulated using digit- and word-span tasks. A group of 17 younger and 15 cognitively healthy older adults performed digit- and word-span tasks. Each task comprised three levels of cognitive loads with 10 trials for each level. For each task, the recall accuracy and the slope of pupil dilation were calculated and analyzed. The raw signal of measured pupil size was low-pass filtered and interpolated to eliminate blinking artifacts and spike noises. Two-way ANOVA was used for statistical analyses. For the recall accuracy, the significant group differences emerged as the span increases in digit-span (5- vs. 7-digit) and word-span (4- vs. 5-word) tasks, while the group differences were not significant on 3-digit- and 3-word-span tasks with lower cognitive load. In digit-span tasks, there was no aging-related difference in the slope of pupil dilation. However, in word-span tasks, the slope of pupil dilation differed significantly between two groups as cognitive load increased, indicating that older adults presented a higher pupil dilation slope than younger adults especially under the conditions with higher cognitive load. The current study found significant aging effects in the pupil dilations under the more cognitive demanding span tasks when the types of span tasks varied (e.g., digit vs. word). The manipulations successfully elicited differential aging effects, given that the aging effects became most salient under word-span tasks with greater cognitive load especially under the maximum length. |
Kelsey E. Klein; Elizabeth A. Walker; Bob McMurray In: Ear & Hearing, vol. 44, no. 2, pp. 338–357, 2023. @article{Klein2023a, Objective: The objective of this study was to characterize the dynamics of real-time lexical access, including lexical competition among phonologically similar words, and spreading semantic activation in school-age children with hearing aids (HAs) and children with cochlear implants (CIs). We hypothesized that developing spoken language via degraded auditory input would lead children with HAs or CIs to adapt their approach to spoken word recognition, especially by slowing down lexical access. Design: Participants were children ages 9- to 12-years old with normal hearing (NH), HAs, or CIs. Participants completed a Visual World Paradigm task in which they heard a spoken word and selected the matching picture from four options. Competitor items were either phonologically similar, semantically similar, or unrelated to the target word. As the target word unfolded, children's fixations to the target word, cohort competitor, rhyme competitor, semantically related item, and unrelated item were recorded as indices of ongoing lexical access and spreading semantic activation. Results: Children with HAs and children with CIs showed slower fixations to the target, reduced fixations to the cohort competitor, and increased fixations to the rhyme competitor, relative to children with NH. This wait-and-see profile was more pronounced in the children with CIs than the children with HAs. Children with HAs and children with CIs also showed delayed fixations to the semantically related item, although this delay was attributable to their delay in activating words in general, not to a distinct semantic source. Conclusions: Children with HAs and children with CIs showed qualitatively similar patterns of real-time spoken word recognition. Findings suggest that developing spoken language via degraded auditory input causes long-term cognitive adaptations to how listeners recognize spoken words, regardless of the type of hearing device used. Delayed lexical access directly led to delays in spreading semantic activation in children with HAs and CIs. This delay in semantic processing may impact these children's ability to understand connected speech in everyday life. |
Arnout Koornneef On the readability of texts presented in sentence-by-sentence segments to beginner readers: Evidence from self-paced reading and eye tracking Journal Article In: Reading and Writing, vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 69–87, 2023. @article{Koornneef2023, Many digital reading applications have built-in features to control the presentation flow of texts by segmenting those texts into smaller linguistic units. Whether and how these segmentation techniques affect the readability of texts is largely unknown. With this background, the current study examined a recent proposal that a sentence-by-sentence presentation mode of texts improves reading comprehension of beginning readers because this presentation mode encourages them to engage in more effortful sentence wrap-up processing. In a series of self-paced reading and eye-tracking experiments with primary school pupils as participants (6–9 years old; n = 134), reading speed and text comprehension were assessed in a full-page control condition—i.e., texts were presented in their entirety—and in an experimental condition in which texts were presented in sentence-by-sentence segments. The results showed that text comprehension scores were higher for segmented texts than for full-page texts. Furthermore, in the final word-regions of the sentences in the texts, the segmented layout induced longer reading times than the full-page layout did. However, mediation analyses revealed that these inflated reading times had no, or even a disruptive influence on text comprehension. This indicates that the observed comprehension advantage for segmented texts cannot be attributed to more effortful sentence wrap-up. A more general implication of these findings is that the segmentation features of reading applications should be used with caution (e.g., in educational or professional settings) because it is unclear how they affect the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms that underlie reading. |
Wupadrasta Santosh Kumar; Supratim Ray Healthy ageing and cognitive impairment alter EEG functional connectivity in distinct frequency bands Journal Article In: European Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 58, no. 6, pp. 3432–3449, 2023. @article{Kumar2023, Functional connectivity (FC) indicates the interdependencies between brain signals recorded from spatially distinct locations in different frequency bands, which is modulated by cognitive tasks and is known to change with ageing and cognitive disorders. Recently, the power of narrow-band gamma oscillations induced by visual gratings have been shown to reduce with both healthy ageing and in subjects with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). However, the impact of ageing/MCI on stimulus-induced gamma FC has not been well studied. We recorded electroencephalogram (EEG) from a large cohort (N = 229) of elderly subjects (>49 years) while they viewed large cartesian gratings to induce gamma oscillations and studied changes in alpha and gamma FC with healthy ageing (N = 218) and MCI (N = 11). Surprisingly, we found distinct differences across age and MCI groups in power and FC. With healthy ageing, alpha power did not change but FC decreased significantly. MCI reduced gamma but not alpha FC significantly compared with age and gender matched controls, even when power was matched between the two groups. Overall, our results suggest distinct effects of ageing and disease on EEG power and FC, suggesting different mechanisms underlying ageing and cognitive disorders. |
Crystal Lee; Andrew Jessop; Amy Bidgood; Michelle S. Peter; Julian M. Pine; Caroline F. Rowland; Samantha Durrant How executive functioning, sentence processing, and vocabulary are related at 3 years of age Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, vol. 233, pp. 1–21, 2023. @article{Lee2023, There is a wealth of evidence demonstrating that executive function (EF) abilities are positively associated with language development during the preschool years, such that children with good executive functions also have larger vocabularies. However, why this is the case remains to be discovered. In this study, we focused on the hypothesis that sentence processing abilities mediate the association between EF skills and receptive vocabulary knowledge, in that the speed of language acquisition is at least partially dependent on a child's processing ability, which is itself dependent on executive control. We tested this hypothesis in longitudinal data from a cohort of 3- and 4-year-old children at three age points (37, 43, and 49 months). We found evidence, consistent with previous research, for a significant association between three EF skills (cognitive flexibility, working memory [as measured by the Backward Digit Span], and inhibition) and receptive vocabulary knowledge across this age range. However, only one of the tested sentence processing abilities (the ability to maintain multiple possible referents in mind) significantly mediated this relationship and only for one of the tested EFs (inhibition). The results suggest that children who are better able to inhibit incorrect responses are also better able to maintain multiple possible referents in mind while a sentence unfolds, a sophisticated sentence processing ability that may facilitate vocabulary learning from complex input. |
Sungyoon Lee The role of spatial ability and attention shifting in reading of illustrated scientific texts: An eye tracking study Journal Article In: Reading Psychology, vol. 44, no. 8, pp. 915–935, 2023. @article{Lee2023b, The purpose of the study is to examine the role of spatial ability and attention shifting in reading of illustrated science texts. Thirty-five fourth/fifth elementary students read two science texts. Prior knowledge and retention/transfer learning outcomes were measured using researcher-developed measures. While reading, students' eye movements were monitored with an eye-tracker. Several eye movement indices were used to reflect reading processes. Fixation count on text/picture was used to represent students' attentional focus on text or picture. Text to text saccades and picture to picture saccades were used to reflect students' information organization. Students' integrative reading behavior was measured by eye movement transitions between text and picture. Wisconsin Card Sorting Test and Visual Perception Skill Test were used to assess attention shifting and visuospatial working memory, respectively. Multiple regressions were conducted to examine whether students' spatial ability and attention shifting predict text processing, picture processing, or integrative processing of text and picture. Hierarchical regressions were conducted to examine whether students' integrative reading make unique and direct contributions to their learning outcomes. The study found that 1) both spatial ability and attention shifting are significant predictors for integrative reading behavior while they are not for other processing behaviors (i.e., text processing and picture processing) and 2) integrative reading behaviors in illustrated text reading account for significant amounts of variance in the transfer outcomes while not in the retention outcomes. This study gives practical implications on the development of visual literacy interventions and on how teachers design their instruction about science text reading. |
Mathieu Lesourd; Alia Afyouni; Franziska Geringswald; Fabien Cignetti; Lisa Raoul; Julien Sein; Bruno Nazarian; Jean-Luc Anton; Marie-Hélène Grosbras Action observation network activity related to object-directed and socially-directed actions in adolescents Journal Article In: Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 43, no. 1, pp. 125–141, 2023. @article{Lesourd2023, The human action observation network (AON) encompasses brain areas consistently engaged when we observe other's actions. Although the core nodes of the AON are present from childhood, it is not known to what extent they are sensitive to different action features during development. Because social cognitive abilities continue to mature during adolescence, the AON response to socially-oriented actions, but not to object-related actions, may differ in adolescents and adults. To test this hypothesis, we scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) male and female typically-developing teenagers (n = 28; 13 females) and adults (n = 25; 14 females) while they passively watched videos of manual actions varying along two dimensions: sociality (i.e., directed toward another person or not) and transitivity (i.e., involving an object or not). We found that action observation recruited the same fronto-parietal and occipito-temporal regions in adults and adolescents. The modulation of voxel-wise activity according to the social or transitive nature of the action was similar in both groups of participants. Multivariate pattern analysis, however, revealed that decoding accuracies in intraparietal sulcus (IPS)/superior parietal lobe (SPL) for both sociality and transitivity were lower for adolescents compared with adults. In addition, in the lateral occipital temporal cortex (LOTC), generalization of decoding across the orthogonal dimension was lower for sociality only in adolescents. These findings indicate that the representation of the content of others' actions, and in particular their social dimension, in the adolescent AON is still not as robust as in adults. |
Na Li; Junsheng Liu; Yong Xie; Weidong Ji; Zhongting Chen Age-related decline of online visuomotor adaptation: A combined effect of deteriorations of motor anticipation and execution Journal Article In: Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, vol. 15, pp. 1–17, 2023. @article{Li2023f, The literature has established that the capability of visuomotor adaptation decreases with aging. However, the underlying mechanisms of this decline are yet to be fully understood. The current study addressed this issue by examining how aging affected visuomotor adaptation in a continuous manual tracking task with delayed visual feedback. To distinguish separate contributions of the declined capability of motor anticipation and deterioration of motor execution to this age-related decline, we recorded and analyzed participants' manual tracking performances and their eye movements during tracking. Twenty-nine older people and twenty-three young adults (control group) participated in this experiment. The results showed that the age-related decline of visuomotor adaptation was strongly linked to degraded performance in predictive pursuit eye movement, indicating that declined capability motor anticipation with aging had critical influences on the age-related decline of visuomotor adaptation. Additionally, deterioration of motor execution, measured by random error after controlling for the lag between target and cursor, was found to have an independent contribution to the decline of visuomotor adaptation. Taking these findings together, we see a picture that the age-related decline of visuomotor adaptation is a joint effect of the declined capability of motor anticipation and the deterioration of motor execution with aging. |
Feifei Liang; Qi Gao; Xin Li; Yongsheng Wang; Xuejun Bai; Simon P. Liversedge In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 49, no. 1, pp. 98–115, 2023. @article{Liang2023b, Word spacing is important in guiding eye movements during spaced alphabetic reading. Chinese is unspaced and it remains unclear as to how Chinese readers segment and identify words in reading. We conducted two parallel experiments to investigate whether the positional probabilities of the initial and the final characters of a multicharacter word affected word segmentation and identification in Chinese reading. Two-character words were selected as targets. In Experiment 1, the initial character's positional probability was manipulated as being either high or low, and the final character was kept identical across the two conditions. In Experiment 2, an analogous manipulation was made for the final character of the target word. We recorded adults' and children's eye movements when they read sentences containing these words. In Experiment 1, reading times on targets did not differ in the two conditions for both children and adults, providing no evidence that a word initial character's positional probability contributes to word segmentation. In Experiment 2, adults had shorter reading times and made fewer refixations on targets that comprised final characters with high relative to low positional probabilities; a similar effect was observed in children, but this effect had a slower time course. The results demonstrate that the positional probability of the final (but not the initial) character of a word influences segmentation commitments in reading. It suggests that Chinese readers identify where a currently fixated word ends, and via this commitment, by default, they identify where the subsequent word begins |
Jialin Ma; Rui Zhang; Yongxin Li Age weakens the other-race effect among Han subjects in recognizing own- and other-ethnicity faces Journal Article In: Behavioral Sciences, vol. 13, no. 8, pp. 1–17, 2023. @article{Ma2023, The development and change in the other-race effect (ORE) in different age groups have always been a focus of researchers. Previous studies have mainly focused on the influence of maturity of life (from infancy to early adulthood) on the ORE, while few researchers have explored the ORE in older people. Therefore, this study used behavioral and eye movement techniques to explore the influence of age on the ORE and the visual scanning pattern of Han subjects recognizing own- and other-ethnicity faces. All participants were asked to complete a study-recognition task for faces, and the behavioral results showed that the ORE of elderly Han subjects was significantly lower than that of young Han subjects. The results of eye movement showed that there were significant differences in the visual scanning pattern of young subjects in recognizing the faces of individuals of their own ethnicity and other ethnicities, which were mainly reflected in the differences in looking at the nose and mouth, while the differences were reduced in the elderly subjects. The elderly subjects used similar scanning patterns to recognize the own- and other-ethnicity faces. This indicates that as age increases, the ORE of older people in recognizing faces of those from different ethnic groups becomes weaker, and elderly subjects have more similar visual scanning patterns in recognizing faces of their own and other ethnicities. |
Wenbo Ma; Mingsha Zhang Multiple step saccades are generated by internal real-time saccadic error correction Journal Article In: Frontiers in Neuroscience, vol. 17, pp. 1–9, 2023. @article{Ma2023a, Objectives: Multiple step saccades (MSSs) are an atypical form of saccade that consists of a series of small-amplitude saccades. It has been argued that the mechanism for generating MSS is due to the automatic saccadic plan. This argument was based on the observation that trials with MSS had shorter saccadic latency than trials without MSS in the reactive saccades. However, the validity of this argument has never been verified by other saccadic tasks. Alternatively, we and other researchers have speculated that the function of MSS is the same as that of the corrective saccade (CS), i.e., to correct saccadic errors. Thus, we propose that the function of the MSS is also to rectify saccadic errors and generated by forward internal models. The objective of the present study is to examine whether the automatic theory is universally applicable for the generation of MSSs in various saccadic tasks and to seek other possible mechanisms, such as error correction by forward internal models. Methods: Fifty young healthy subjects (YHSs) and fifty elderly healthy subjects (EHSs) were recruited in the present study. The task paradigms were prosaccade (PS), anti-saccade (AS) and memory-guided saccade (MGS) tasks. Results: Saccadic latency in trials with MSS was shorter than without MSS in the PS task but similar in the AS and MGS tasks. The intersaccadic intervals (ISI) were similar among the three tasks in both YHSs and EHSs. Conclusion: Our results indicate that the automatic theory is not a universal mechanism. Instead, the forward internal model for saccadic error correction might be an important mechanism. |
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, pp. 1–12, 2023. @article{Masson2023, 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. |
Mishika Mehrotra; Sebastian P. Dys; Tina Malti Children's sympathy moderates the link between their attentional orientation and ethical guilt Journal Article In: British Journal of Developmental Psychology, vol. 41, no. 3, pp. 276–290, 2023. @article{Mehrotra2023, This study examined how children's attentional orientation towards environmental cues, dispositional sympathy and inhibitory control were associated with their ethical guilt. Participants were 4- and 6-year-old children (N = 211; 55% male) from ethnically diverse backgrounds. To assess ethical guilt, children were presented with two vignettes depicting ethical violations and reported how they would feel and why, if they had committed those transgressions. Using eye tracking, we calculated attentional orientation as the percentage of time children attended to other-oriented (i.e., victim) minus self-serving (i.e., object gained by transgressing) cues during these vignettes. Children also reported on their sympathy and completed an observational measure of inhibitory control. Although main effects were not significant, sympathy moderated the link between attentional orientation and ethical guilt: attentional orientation was positively associated with ethical guilt for children with low levels of sympathy but had no effect among those high in sympathy. These findings suggest that practices centred on prompting children to attend to other-oriented cues – and away from self-serving ones – may be effective particularly for children who are generally less sympathetic. |
Salome Pedrett; Alain Chavaillaz; Andrea Frick Age-related changes in how 3.5- to 5.5-year-olds observe and imagine rotational object motion Journal Article In: Spatial Cognition & Computation, vol. 23, no. 2, pp. 83–111, 2023. @article{Pedrett2023, Mental representations of rotation were investigated in 3.5- to 5.5-year-olds (N = 74) using a multi-method approach. In a novel mental-rotation task, children were asked to choose one of two rotated shapes that would fit onto a counterpart. The developmental trajectory of mental rotation was compared to eye-tracking results on how the same children observed and anticipated circular object motion. On the mental-rotation task, children below age 4 performed above chance up to angles of 150°, and performance improved with age. Eye-tracking results indicated that mental representations of circular motion were largely developed by the age of 3.5 years. In contrast, perception of rotational motion and mental rotation of asymmetrical shapes continued to develop between 3.5 and 5.5 years of age. |
Greta N. Minor; Deborah E. Hannula; Andrew Gordon; J. Daniel Ragland; Ana Maria Iosif; Marjorie Solomon Relational memory weakness in autism despite the use of a controlled encoding task Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 14, pp. 1–21, 2023. @article{Minor2023, Introduction: Recent work challenged past findings that documented relational memory impairments in autism. Previous studies often relied solely on explicit behavioral responses to assess relational memory integrity, but successful performance on behavioral tasks may rely on other cognitive abilities (e.g., executive functioning) that are impacted in some autistic individuals. Eye-tracking tasks do not require explicit behavioral responses, and, further, eye movements provide an indirect measure of memory. The current study examined whether memory-specific viewing patterns toward scenes differ between autistic and non-autistic individuals. Methods: Using a long-term memory paradigm that equated for complexity between item and relational memory tasks, participants studied a series of scenes. Following the initial study phase, scenes were re-presented, accompanied by an orienting question that directed participants to attend to either features of an item (i.e., in the item condition) or spatial relationships between items (i.e., in the relational condition) that might be subsequently modified during test. At test, participants viewed scenes that were unchanged (i.e., repeated from study), scenes that underwent an “item” modification (an exemplar switch) or a “relational” modification (a location switch), and scenes that had not been presented before. Eye movements were recorded throughout. Results: During study, there were no significant group differences in viewing directed to regions of scenes that might be manipulated at test, suggesting comparable processing of scene details during encoding. However, there was a group difference in explicit recognition accuracy for scenes that underwent a relational change. Marginal group differences in the expression of memory-based viewing effects during test for relational scenes were consistent with this behavioral outcome, particularly when analyses were limited to scenes recognized correctly with high confidence. Group differences were also evident in correlational analyses that examined the association between study phase viewing and recognition accuracy and between performance on the Picture Sequence Memory Test and recognition accuracy. Discussion: Together, our findings suggest differences in the integrity of relational memory representations and/or in the relationships between subcomponents of memory in autism. |
Miranda J. Munoz; Rishabh Arora; Yessenia M. Rivera; Quentin H. Drane; Gian D. Pal; Leo Verhagen Metman; Sepehr B. Sani; Joshua M. Rosenow; Lisa C. Goelz; Daniel M. Corcos; Fabian J. David In: Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, vol. 17, pp. 1–12, 2023. @article{Munoz2023, Background: Antiparkinson medication and subthalamic nucleus deep brain stimulation (STN-DBS), two common treatments of Parkinson's disease (PD), effectively improve skeletomotor movements. However, evidence suggests that these treatments may have differential effects on eye and limb movements, although both movement types are controlled through the parallel basal ganglia loops. Objective: Using a task that requires both eye and upper limb movements, we aimed to determine the effects of medication and STN-DBS on eye and upper limb movement performance. Methods: Participants performed a visually-guided reaching task. We collected eye and upper limb movement data from participants with PD who were tested both OFF and ON medication (n = 34) or both OFF and ON bilateral STN-DBS while OFF medication (n = 11). We also collected data from older adult healthy controls (n = 14). Results: We found that medication increased saccade latency, while having no effect on reach reaction time (RT). Medication significantly decreased saccade peak velocity, while increasing reach peak velocity. We also found that bilateral STN-DBS significantly decreased saccade latency while having no effect on reach RT, and increased saccade and reach peak velocity. Finally, we found that there was a positive relationship between saccade latency and reach RT, which was unaffected by either treatment. Conclusion: These findings show that medication worsens saccade performance and benefits reaching performance, while STN-DBS benefits both saccade and reaching performance. We explore what the differential beneficial and detrimental effects on eye and limb movements suggest about the potential physiological changes occurring due to treatment. |
M. J. Nelson; S. Moeller; M. Seckin; E. J. Rogalski; M. M. Mesulam; R. S. Hurley The eyes speak when the mouth cannot: Using eye movements to interpret omissions in primary progressive aphasia Journal Article In: Neuropsychologia, vol. 184, pp. 1–9, 2023. @article{Nelson2023, Though it may seem simple, object naming is a complex multistage process that can be impaired by lesions at various sites of the language network. Individuals with neurodegenerative disorders of language, known as primary progressive aphasias (PPA), have difficulty with naming objects, and instead frequently say “I don't know” or fail to give a vocal response at all, known as an omission. Whereas other types of naming errors (paraphasias) give clues as to which aspects of the language network have been compromised, the mechanisms underlying omissions remain largely unknown. In this study, we used a novel eye tracking approach to probe the cognitive mechanisms of omissions in the logopenic and semantic variants of PPA (PPA-L and PPA-S). For each participant, we identified pictures of common objects (e.g., animals, tools) that they could name aloud correctly, as well as pictures that elicited an omission. In a separate word-to-picture matching task, those pictures appeared as targets embedded among an array with 15 foils. Participants were given a verbal cue and tasked with pointing to the target, while eye movements were monitored. On trials with correctly-named targets, controls and both PPA groups ceased visual search soon after foveating the target. On omission trials, however, the PPA-S group failed to stop searching, and went on to view many foils “post-target”. As further indication of impaired word knowledge, gaze of the PPA-S group was subject to excessive “taxonomic capture”, such that they spent less time viewing the target and more time viewing related foils on omission trials. In contrast, viewing behavior of the PPA-L group was similar to controls on both correctly-named and omission trials. These results indicate that the mechanisms of omission in PPA differ by variant. In PPA-S, anterior temporal lobe degeneration causes taxonomic blurring, such that words from the same category can no longer be reliably distinguished. In PPA-L, word knowledge remains relatively intact, and omissions instead appear to be caused by downstream factors (e.g., lexical access, phonological encoding). These findings demonstrate that when words fail, eye movements can be particularly informative. |
Jenny A. Nij Bijvank; Sam N. Hof; Stefanos E. Prouskas; Menno M. Schoonheim; Bernard M. J. Uitdehaag; Laurentius J. Rijn; Axel Petzold A novel eye-movement impairment in multiple sclerosis indicating widespread cortical damage Journal Article In: Brain, vol. 146, no. 6, pp. 2476–2488, 2023. @article{NijBijvank2023, In multiple sclerosis, remyelination trials have yet to deliver success like that achieved for relapse rates with disease course modifying treatment trials. The challenge is to have a clinical, functional outcome measure. Currently, there are none that have been validated, other than visual evoked potentials in optic neuritis. Like vision, quick eye movements (saccades) are heavily dependent on myelination. We proposed that it is possible to extrapolate from demyelination of the medial longitudinal fasciculus in the brainstem to quantitative assessment of cortical networks governing saccadic eye movements in multiple sclerosis. We have developed and validated a double-step saccadic test, which consists of a pair of eye movements towards two stimuli presented in quick succession (the demonstrate eye movement networks with saccades protocol). In this single-centre, cross-sectional cohort study we interrogated the structural and functional relationships of double-step saccades in multiple sclerosis. Data were collected for double-step saccades, cognitive function (extended Rao's Brief Repeatable Battery), disability (Expanded Disability Status Scale) and visual functioning in daily life (National Eye Institute Visual Function Questionnaire). MRI was used to quantify grey matter atrophy and multiple sclerosis lesion load. Multivariable linear regression models were used for analysis of the relationships between double-step saccades and clinical and MRI metrics. We included 209 individuals with multiple sclerosis (mean age 54.3 ± 10.5 years, 58% female, 63% relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis) and 60 healthy control subjects (mean age 52.1 ± 9.2 years, 53% female). The proportion of correct double-step saccades was significantly reduced in multiple sclerosis (mean 0.29 ± 0.22) compared to controls (0.45 ± 0.22, P < 0.001). Consistent with this, there was a significantly larger double-step dysmetric saccadic error in multiple sclerosis (mean vertical error −1.18 ± 1.20°) compared to controls (−0.54 ± 0.86°, P < 0.001). Impaired double-step saccadic metrics were consistently associated with more severe global and local grey matter atrophy (correct responses—cortical grey matter: β = 0.42, P < 0.001), lesion load (vertical error: β = −0.28, P < 0.001), progressive phenotypes, more severe physical and cognitive impairment (correct responses—information processing: β = 0.46, P < 0.001) and visual functioning. In conclusion, double-step saccades represent a robust metric that revealed a novel eye-movement impairment in individuals with multiple sclerosis. Double-step saccades outperformed other saccadic tasks in their statistical relationship with clinical, cognitive and visual functioning, as well as global and local grey matter atrophy. Double-step saccades should be evaluated longitudinally and tested as a potential novel outcome measure for remyelination trials in multiple sclerosis. |
Ryan M. O'Leary; Jonathan Neukam; Thomas A. Hansen; Alexander J. Kinney; Nicole Capach; Mario A. Svirsky; Arthur Wingfield In: Trends in Hearing, vol. 27, pp. 1–22, 2023. @article{OLeary2023a, Speech that has been artificially accelerated through time compression produces a notable deficit in recall of the speech content. This is especially so for adults with cochlear implants (CI). At the perceptual level, this deficit may be due to the sharply degraded CI signal, combined with the reduced richness of compressed speech. At the cognitive level, the rapidity of time-compressed speech can deprive the listener of the ordinarily available processing time present when speech is delivered at a normal speech rate. Two experiments are reported. Experiment 1 was conducted with 27 normal-hearing young adults as a proof-of-concept demonstration that restoring lost processing time by inserting silent pauses at linguistically salient points within a time-compressed narrative (“time-restoration”) returns recall accuracy to a level approximating that for a normal speech rate. Noise vocoder conditions with 10 and 6 channels reduced the effectiveness of time-restoration. Pupil dilation indicated that additional effort was expended by participants while attempting to process the time-compressed narratives, with the effortful demand on resources reduced with time restoration. In Experiment 2, 15 adult CI users tested with the same (unvocoded) materials showed a similar pattern of behavioral and pupillary responses, but with the notable exception that meaningful recovery of recall accuracy with time-restoration was limited to a subgroup of CI users identified by better working memory spans, and better word and sentence recognition scores. Results are discussed in terms of sensory-cognitive interactions in data-limited and resource-limited processes among adult users of cochlear implants. |
Kosuke Okazaki; Kenichiro Miura; Junya Matsumoto; Naomi Hasegawa; Michiko Fujimoto; Hidenaga Yamamori; Yuka Yasuda; Manabu Makinodan; Ryota Hashimoto Discrimination in the clinical diagnosis between patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls using eye movement and cognitive functions Journal Article In: Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, vol. 77, no. 7, pp. 393–400, 2023. @article{Okazaki2023, Aim: Eye movements and cognitive functions are significantly impaired in patients with schizophrenia. The authors aimed to develop promising clinical diagnostic markers that fit practical digital health applications in psychiatry using eye movement and cognitive function data from 1254 healthy individuals and 336 patients with schizophrenia. Methods: Multivariate analyses using logistic regression were performed to confirm net performance of eye movements and cognitive functions scored using the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, Third Edition, and Wechsler Memory Scale-Revised. The authors then examined the discrimination performance of pairs containing an eye movement and a cognitive function measure to search the pairs that would be effective in practical application for the discrimination according to the diagnostic criterion between the groups. Results: Multivariate analyses confirmed that eye movements and cognitive functions were effective modalities for discriminating between patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls. The discriminant analyses of the pairs demonstrated that seven eye movement measures and seven scores from cognitive function tests showed high discrimination performance when paired with one measure from the other modality. Moreover, seven pairs of digit-symbol coding or symbol-search and eye movement measures had high and robust discrimination performance. Conclusion: Seven pairs of an eye movement and a cognitive function measure were effective, robust, and less time-consuming in assisting with clinical diagnosis by categorizing healthy individuals or patients with schizophrenia. These findings may help develop an objective auxiliary diagnosis method working even on portable devices, which facilitates the consistency of diagnosis, earlier intervention, and shared decision-making. |
Henri Olkoniemi; Mikko Hurme; Henry Railo Neurologically healthy humans' ability to make saccades toward unseen targets Journal Article In: Neuroscience, vol. 513, pp. 111–125, 2023. @article{Olkoniemi2023a, Some patients with a visual field loss due to a lesion in the primary visual cortex (V1) can shift their gaze to stimuli presented in their blind visual field. The extent to which a similar “blindsight” capacity is present in neurologically healthy individuals remains unknown. Using retinotopically navigated transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) of V1 (Experiment 1) and metacontrast masking (Experiment 2) to suppress conscious vision, we examined neurologically healthy humans' ability to make saccadic eye movements toward visual targets that they reported not seeing. In the TMS experiment, the participants were more likely to initiate a saccade when a stimulus was presented, and they reported not seeing it, than in trials which no stimulus was presented. However, this happened only in a very small proportion (∼8%) of unseen trials, suggesting that saccadic reactions were largely based on conscious perception. In both experiments, saccade landing location was influenced by unconscious information: When the participants denied seeing the target but made a saccade, the saccade was made toward the correct location (TMS: 68%, metacontrast: 63%) more often than predicted by chance. Signal detection theoretic measures suggested that in the TMS experiment, saccades toward unseen targets may have been based on weak conscious experiences. In both experiments, reduced visibility of the target stimulus was associated with slower and less precise gaze shifts. These results suggest that saccades made by neurologically healthy humans may be influenced by unconscious information, although the initiation of saccades is largely based on conscious vision. |
Julie Ouerfelli-Ethier; Romain Fournet; Aarlenne Z. Khan; Laure Pisella Spatial bias in anti-saccade endpoints following bilateral dorsal posterior parietal lesions Journal Article In: European Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 58, no. 6, pp. 3488–3502, 2023. @article{OuerfelliEthier2023a, Anti-saccades are eye movements in which the saccade is executed in the opposite direction of a visual target and are often hypometric. Because the visual target and saccade goal are decoupled, it has been suggested that competition between the two locations occurs and needs to be resolved. It has been hypothesized that the hypometria of anti-saccades reflects this spatial competition by revealing a bias towards the visual target. To confirm that this hypometria is not simply due to reduced gain, we tested 10 healthy subjects on three different anti-saccade spatial configuration tasks: 90° away across hemifields, 90° away within the same hemifield and 180° away (classic, diagonally opposite). Specifically, we examined whether saccade endpoints showed evidence for the visual target location's interference with anti-saccade programming and execution processes. Among other neural substrates involved in anti-saccades production, the dorsal posterior parietal cortex (PPC) has been implicated in the spatial inhibition of contralateral visual target. To gain insight into the neural processes involved in spatial competition during anti-saccades, we also tested one patient with a bilateral dorsal PPC lesion. In all spatial configurations, we observed that anti-saccade endpoints demonstrated a spatial bias towards the visual target for all participants, likely due to an incomplete inhibition of the visual target location. This spatial bias was exacerbated in our patient, which suggests that the dorsal PPC contributes to the amalgamation of the two competing spatial representations. |
Francesca Ales; Luciano Giromini; Lara Warmelink; Megan Polden; Thomas Wilcockson; Claire Kelly; Christina Winters; Alessandro Zennaro; Trevor Crawford On the use of eye movements in symptom validity assessment of feigned schizophrenia Journal Article In: Psychological Injury and Law, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 83–97, 2023. @article{Ales2023a, Assessing the credibility of reported mental health problems is critical in a variety of assessment situations, particularly in forensic contexts. Previous research has examined how the assessment of performance validity can be improved through the use of bio-behavioral measures (e.g., eye movements). To date, however, there is a paucity of literature on the use of eye tracking technology in assessing the validity of presented symptoms of schizophrenia, a disorder that is known to be associated with oculomotor abnormalities. Thus, we collected eye tracking data from 83 healthy individuals during the completion of the Inventory of Problems – 29 and investigated whether the oculomotor behavior of participants instructed to feign schizophrenia would differ from those of control participants asked to respond honestly. Results showed that feigners had a longer dwell time and a greater number of fixations in the feigning-keyed response options, regardless of whether they eventually endorsed those options (d > 0.80). Implications on how eye tracking technology can deepen comprehension on simulation strategies are discussed, as well as the potential of investigating eye movements to advance the field of symptom validity assessment. |
Talia Ariss; Catharine E. Fairbairn; Michael A. Sayette; Brynne A. Velia; Howard Berenbaum; Sarah Brown-Schmidt Where to look? Alcohol, affect, and gaze behavior during a virtual social interaction Journal Article In: Clinical Psychological Science, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 1–14, 2023. @article{Ariss2023, COVID-19 forced social interactions to move online. Yet researchers have little understanding of the mental-health consequences of this shift. Given pandemic-related surges in emotional disorders and problematic drinking, it becomes imperative to understand the cognitive and affective processes involved in virtual interactions and the impact of alcohol in virtual social spaces. Participants (N = 246) engaged in an online video call while their gaze behavior was tracked. Before the interaction, participants were randomly assigned to receive an alcoholic or control beverage. Participants' affect was repeatedly assessed. Results indicated that a proportionally larger amount of time spent gazing at oneself (vs. one's interaction partner) predicted significantly higher negative affect after the exchange. Furthermore, alcohol independently increased self-directed attention, failing to demonstrate its typically potent social-affective enhancement in this virtual context. Results carry potential implications for understanding factors that increase risk for hazardous drinking and negative affect in an increasingly virtual world. |
Katharine Aveni; Juweiriya Ahmed; Arielle Borovsky; Ken McRae; Mary E. Jenkins; Katherine Sprengel; J. Alexander Fraser; Joseph B. Orange; Thea Knowles; Angela C. Roberts Predictive language comprehension in Parkinson's disease Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 18, pp. 1–32, 2023. @article{Aveni2023, Verb and action knowledge deficits are reported in persons with Parkinson's disease (PD), even in the absence of dementia or mild cognitive impairment. However, the impact of these deficits on combinatorial semantic processing is less well understood. Following on previous verb and action knowledge findings, we tested the hypothesis that PD impairs the ability to integrate event-based thematic fit information during online sentence processing. Specifically, we anticipated persons with PD with age-typical cognitive abilities would perform more poorly than healthy controls during a visual world paradigm task requiring participants to predict a target object constrained by the thematic fit of the agent-verb combination. Twenty-four PD and 24 healthy age-matched participants completed comprehensive neuropsychological assessments. We recorded participants' eye movements as they heard predictive sentences (The fisherman rocks the boat) alongside target, agent-related, verb-related, and unrelated images. We tested effects of group (PD/control) on gaze using growth curve models. There were no significant differences between PD and control participants, suggesting that PD participants successfully and rapidly use combinatory thematic fit information to predict upcoming language. Baseline sentences with no predictive information (e.g., Look at the drum) confirmed that groups showed equivalent sentence processing and eye movement patterns. Additionally, we conducted an exploratory analysis contrasting PD and controls' performance on low-motion-content versus high-motion-content verbs. This analysis revealed fewer predictive fixations in high-motion sentences only for healthy older adults. PD participants may adapt to their disease by relying on spared, non-action-simulation-based language processing mechanisms, although this conclusion is speculative, as the analyses of high- vs. low-motion items was highly limited by the study design. These findings provide novel evidence that individuals with PD match healthy adults in their ability to use verb meaning to predict upcoming nouns despite previous findings of verb semantic impairment in PD across a variety of tasks. |
Elisabeth E. F. Bradford; Victoria E. A. Brunsdon; Heather J. Ferguson Cognitive mechanisms of perspective-taking across adulthood: An eye-tracking study using the director task Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 49, no. 6, pp. 959–973, 2023. @article{Bradford2023, Perspective-taking plays an important role in daily life, allowing consideration of other people's per- spectives and viewpoints. This study used a large sample of 265 community-based participants (aged 20–86 years) to examine changes in perspective-taking abilities—a component of “Theory of Mind”— across adulthood, and how these changes may relate to individual differences in executive functions at different ages. Participants completed a referential-communication task (the “Director” task) while be- havioral responses and eye movements were recorded, along with four measures of executive functions (inhibitory control, working memory, cognitive flexibility, and planning). Results revealed a quadratic fit of age in egocentric errors; performance on the task plateaued between 20 to $37 years old but showed a substantial decline from $38 years onward (i.e., increased egocentric errors). A similar pattern was established in eye-movement measures, demonstrating that advancing age led to a decrease in efficient attention orientation to a target. In other words, older adults were more distracted by a hidden competitor object (egocentric interference) and were therefore delayed in orienting their attention to the correct target object. Mediation analyses revealed that executive functions partially mediated the effect of age on perspective-taking abilities. Importantly, however, the relationship between age and egocentric bias in task performance remained significant when controlling for changes in executive functions, indicating a decline in social cognition abilities with advancing age that was independent of age-related declines in more domain-general abilities, such as executive functions. |
Christina Buhl; Anca Sfärlea; Johanna Loechner; Kornelija Starman-Wöhrle; Elske Salemink; Gerd Schulte-Körne; Belinda Platt Biased maintenance of attention on sad faces in Clinically depressed youth: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Child Psychiatry and Human Development, vol. 54, no. 1, pp. 189–201, 2023. @article{Buhl2023, The role of negative attention biases (AB), central to cognitive models of adult depression, is yet unclear in youth depression. We investigated negative AB in depressed compared to healthy youth and tested whether AB are more pronounced in depressed than at-risk youth. Negative AB was assessed for sad and angry faces with an eye-tracking paradigm [Passive Viewing Task (PVT)] and a behavioural task [Visual Search Task (VST)], comparing three groups of 9–14-year-olds: youth with major depression (MD; n = 32), youth with depressed parents (high-risk; HR; n = 49) and youth with healthy parents (low-risk; LR; n = 42). The PVT revealed MD participants to maintain attention longer on sad faces compared to HR, but not LR participants. This AB correlated positively with depressive symptoms. The VST revealed no group differences. Our results provide preliminary evidence for a negative AB in maintenance of attention on disorder-specific emotional information in depressed compared to at-risk youth. |
Olivia G. Calancie; Ashley C. Parr; Don C. Brien; Jeff Huang; Isabell C. Pitigoi; Brian C. Coe; Linda Booij; Sarosh Khalid-Khan; Douglas P. Munoz In: Frontiers in Neuroscience, vol. 17, pp. 1–18, 2023. @article{Calancie2023, Shifting motor actions from reflexively reacting to an environmental stimulus to predicting it allows for smooth synchronization of behavior with the outside world. This shift relies on the identification of patterns within the stimulus – knowing when a stimulus is predictable and when it is not – and launching motor actions accordingly. Failure to identify predictable stimuli results in movement delays whereas failure to recognize unpredictable stimuli results in early movements with incomplete information that can result in errors. Here we used a metronome task, combined with video-based eye-tracking, to quantify temporal predictive learning and performance to regularly paced visual targets at 5 different interstimulus intervals (ISIs). We compared these results to the random task where the timing of the target was randomized at each target step. We completed these tasks in female pediatric psychiatry patients (age range: 11–18 years) with borderline personality disorder (BPD) symptoms, with (n = 22) and without (n = 23) a comorbid attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnosis, against controls (n = 35). Compared to controls, BPD and ADHD/BPD cohorts showed no differences in their predictive saccade performance to metronome targets, however, when targets were random ADHD/BPD participants made significantly more anticipatory saccades (i.e., guesses of target arrival). The ADHD/BPD group also significantly increased their blink rate and pupil size when initiating movements to predictable versus unpredictable targets, likely a reflection of increased neural effort for motor synchronization. BPD and ADHD/BPD groups showed increased sympathetic tone evidenced by larger pupil sizes than controls. Together, these results support normal temporal motor prediction in BPD with and without ADHD, reduced response inhibition in BPD with comorbid ADHD, and increased pupil sizes in BPD patients. Further these results emphasize the importance of controlling for comorbid ADHD when querying BPD pathology. |
Christoforos Christoforou; Maria Theodorou; Argyro Fella; Timothy C. Papadopoulos RAN-related neural-congruency: A machine learning approach toward the study of the neural underpinnings of naming speed Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 14, pp. 1–15, 2023. @article{Christoforou2023, Objective: Naming speed, behaviorally measured via the serial Rapid automatized naming (RAN) test, is one of the most examined underlying cognitive factors of reading development and reading difficulties (RD). However, the unconstrained-reading format of serial RAN has made it challenging for traditional EEG analysis methods to extract neural components for studying the neural underpinnings of naming speed. The present study aims to explore a novel approach to isolate neural components during the serial RAN task that are (a) informative of group differences between children with dyslexia (DYS) and chronological age controls (CAC), (b) improve the power of analysis, and (c) are suitable for deciphering the neural underpinnings of naming speed. Methods: We propose a novel machine-learning-based algorithm that extracts spatiotemporal neural components during serial RAN, termed RAN-related neural-congruency components. We demonstrate our approach on EEG and eye-tracking recordings from 60 children (30 DYS and 30 CAC), under phonologically or visually similar, and dissimilar control tasks. Results: Results reveal significant differences in the RAN-related neural-congruency components between DYS and CAC groups in all four conditions. Conclusion: Rapid automatized naming-related neural-congruency components capture the neural activity of cognitive processes associated with naming speed and are informative of group differences between children with dyslexia and typically developing children. Significance: We propose the resulting RAN-related neural-components as a methodological framework to facilitate studying the neural underpinnings of naming speed and their association with reading performance and related difficulties. |
Joseph Colantonio; Igor Bascandziev; Maria Theobald; Garvin Brod; Elizabeth Bonawitz In: Entropy, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 1–24, 2023. @article{Colantonio2023, Bayesian models allow us to investigate children's belief revision alongside physiological states, such as “surprise”. Recent work finds that pupil dilation (or the “pupillary surprise response”) following expectancy violations is predictive of belief revision. How can probabilistic models inform the interpretations of “surprise”? Shannon Information considers the likelihood of an observed event, given prior beliefs, and suggests stronger surprise occurs following unlikely events. In contrast, Kullback–Leibler divergence considers the dissimilarity between prior beliefs and updated beliefs following observations—with greater surprise indicating more change between belief states to accommodate information. To assess these accounts under different learning contexts, we use Bayesian models that compare these computational measures of “surprise” to contexts where children are asked to either predict or evaluate the same evidence during a water displacement task. We find correlations between the computed Kullback–Leibler divergence and the children's pupillometric responses only when the children actively make predictions, and no correlation between Shannon Information and pupillometry. This suggests that when children attend to their beliefs and make predictions, pupillary responses may signal the degree of divergence between a child's current beliefs and the updated, more accommodating beliefs. |
Sarah E. Colby; Bob McMurray Efficiency of spoken word recognition slows across the adult lifespan Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 240, pp. 1–11, 2023. @article{Colby2023, Spoken word recognition is a critical hub during language processing, linking hearing and perception to meaning and syntax. Words must be recognized quickly and efficiently as speech unfolds to be successfully integrated into conversation. This makes word recognition a computationally challenging process even for young, normal hearing adults. Older adults often experience declines in hearing and cognition, which could be linked by age-related declines in the cognitive processes specific to word recognition. However, it is unclear whether changes in word recognition across the lifespan can be accounted for by hearing or domain-general cognition. Participants (N = 107) responded to spoken words in a Visual World Paradigm task while their eyes were tracked to assess the real-time dynamics of word recognition. We examined several indices of word recognition from early adolescence through older adulthood (ages 11–78). The timing and proportion of eye fixations to target and competitor images reveals that spoken word recognition became more efficient through age 25 and began to slow in middle age, accompanied by declines in the ability to resolve competition (e.g., suppressing sandwich to recognize sandal). There was a unique effect of age even after accounting for differences in inhibitory control, processing speed, and hearing thresholds. This suggests a limited age range where listeners are peak performers. |
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, pp. 1–13, 2023. @article{Coloma2023, 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. |
Erin Conwell; Gregor Horvath; Allyson Kuznia; Stephen J. Agauas Developmental consistency in the use of subphonemic information during real-time sentence processing Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, vol. 38, no. 6, pp. 860–871, 2023. @article{Conwell2023, Apparently homophonous sequences contain acoustic information that differentiates their meanings [Gahl. (2008). Time and thyme are not homophones: The effect of lemma frequency on word durations in spontaneous speech. Language, 84(3), 474–496; Quené. (1992). Durational cues for word segmentation in Dutch. Journal of Phonetics, 20(3), 331–350]. Adults use this information to segment embedded homophones [e.g. ham vs. hamster; Salverda et al. (2003). The role of prosodic boundaries in the resolution of lexical embedded in speech comprehension. Cognition, 90(1), 51–89] in fluent speech. Whether children also do this is unknown, as is whether listeners of any age use such information to disambiguate lexical homophones. In two experiments, 48 English-speaking adults and 48 English-speaking 7 to 10-year-old children viewed sets of four images and heard sentences containing phonemically identical sequences while their eye movements were continuously tracked. As in previous research, adults showed greater fixation of target meanings when the acoustic properties of an embedded homophone were consistent with the target than when they were consistent with the alternate interpretation. They did not show this difference for lexical homophones. Children's behaviour was similar to that of adults, indicating that the use of subphonemic information in homophone processing is consistent over development. |
Catia Correia-Caeiro; Abbey Lawrence; Abdelhady Abdelrahman; Kun Guo; Daniel Mills How do children view and categorise human and dog facial expressions? Journal Article In: Developmental Science, vol. 26, no. 3, pp. 1–14, 2023. @article{CorreiaCaeiro2023, Children are often surrounded by other humans and companion animals (e.g., dogs, cats); and understanding facial expressions in all these social partners may be critical to successful social interactions. In an eye-tracking study, we examined how children (4–10 years old) view and label facial expressions in adult humans and dogs. We found that children looked more at dogs than humans, and more at negative than positive or neutral human expressions. Their viewing patterns (Proportion of Viewing Time, PVT) at individual facial regions were also modified by the viewed species and emotion, with the eyes not always being most viewed: this related to positive anticipation when viewing humans, whilst when viewing dogs, the mouth was viewed more or equally compared to the eyes for all emotions. We further found that children's labelling (Emotion Categorisation Accuracy, ECA) was better for the perceived valence than for emotion category, with positive human expressions easier than both positive and negative dog expressions. They performed poorly when asked to freely label facial expressions, but performed better for human than dog expressions. Finally, we found some effects of age, sex, and other factors (e.g., experience with dogs) on both PVT and ECA. Our study shows that children have a different gaze pattern and identification accuracy compared to adults, for viewing faces of human adults and dogs. We suggest that for recognising human (own-face-type) expressions, familiarity obtained through casual social interactions may be sufficient; but for recognising dog (other-face-type) expressions, explicit training may be required to develop competence. Highlights: We conducted an eye-tracking experiment to investigate how children view and categorise facial expressions in adult humans and dogs Children's viewing patterns were significantly dependent upon the facial region, species, and emotion viewed Children's categorisation also varied with the species and emotion viewed, with better performance for valence than emotion categories Own-face-types (adult humans) are easier than other-face-types (dogs) for children, and casual familiarity (e.g., through family dogs) to the latter is not enough to achieve perceptual competence. |
Nicholas Dovorany; Schea Brannick; Nathan Johnson; Ileana Ratiu; Arianna N. LaCroix Happy and sad music acutely modulate different types of attention in older adults Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 14, pp. 1–15, 2023. @article{Dovorany2023, Of the three subtypes of attention outlined by the attentional subsystems model, alerting (vigilance or arousal needed for task completion) and executive control (the ability to inhibit distracting information while completing a goal) are susceptible to age-related decline, while orienting remains relatively stable. Yet, few studies have investigated strategies that may acutely maintain or promote attention in typically aging older adults. Music listening may be one potential strategy for attentional maintenance as past research shows that listening to happy music characterized by a fast tempo and major mode increases cognitive task performance, likely by increasing cognitive arousal. The present study sought to investigate whether listening to happy music (fast tempo, major mode) impacts alerting, orienting, and executive control attention in 57 middle and older-aged adults (M = 61.09 years |
Marion Durteste; Louise Van Poucke; Sonia Combariza; Bilel Benziane; José-Alain Sahel; Stephen Ramanoël; Angelo Arleo The vertical position of visual information conditions spatial memory performance in healthy aging Journal Article In: Communications Psychology, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 1–12, 2023. @article{Durteste2023, Memory for objects and their location is a cornerstone of adequate cognitive functioning across the lifespan. Considering that human visual perception depends on the position of stimuli within the visual field, we posit that the position of objects in the environment may be a determinant aspect of mnemonic performance. In this study, a population of 25 young and 20 older adults completed a source-monitoring task with objects presented in the upper or lower visual field. Using standard Pr and multinomial processing tree analyses, we revealed that although familiarity-based item memory remained intact in older age, spatial memory was impaired for objects presented in the upper visual field. Spatial memory in aging is conditioned by the vertical position of information. These findings raise questions about the view that age-related spatial mnemonic deficits are attributable to associative dysfunctions and suggest that they could also originate from the altered encoding of object attributes. |
Jay A. Edelman; Tim A. Ahles; Neelam Prashad; Madalyn Fernbach; Yuelin Li; Robert D. Melara; James C. Root The effect of visual target presence and age on antisaccade performance Journal Article In: Journal of Neurophysiology, vol. 129, no. 2, pp. 307–319, 2023. @article{Edelman2023, Antisaccade and prosaccade (PS) performance were studied in a large cohort of females (age range 42-74 yr). Antisaccade performance was assessed in two variants of the task, a “traditional” antisaccade (TA) task, in which no visual stimuli were present at the saccade goal, and a visually guided antisaccade (VGA) task, in which small visual stimuli were present at the possible saccade goals prior to the imperative visual stimulus. Directional error frequency was similar in the two antisaccade tasks. However, reaction time (RT) was ~33 ms longer in the VGA task than in the TA task. Across participants, the average saccade amplitudes of prosaccades and TAs were both correlated with those of VGAs but not with each other. TAs had a hypermetria that increased with age. Saccade amplitude variability was much higher for TAs than for PSs and VGAs. Saccade polar angle variability was low for all three tasks. Age diminished performance with modest task dependence, except for an increase in TA hypermetria. These results suggest that the generation of antisaccade directional errors does not depend on visual target presence at the saccade goal, that antisaccade RT can be affected by target presence, that age can increase saccade hypermetria in the absence of visual guidance, and that visually guided antisaccades are governed by distinct voluntary and visually guided saccade mechanisms. Moreover, these results suggest that an understanding of human motor performance benefits from the use of a participant pool with a larger age range than that used in most studies. |
Elizabeth A. Enright; Stephanie M. Eick; Rachel Morello-Frosch; Andréa Aguiar; Megan L. Woodbury; Jenna L. N. Sprowles; Sarah Dee Geiger; Jessica Trowbridge; Aileen Andrade; Sabrina Smith; June-Soo Park; Erin DeMicco; Amy M. Padula; Tracey J. Woodruff; Susan L. Schantz In: Neurotoxicology and Teratology, vol. 98, pp. 1–10, 2023. @article{Enright2023, Background: Prenatal exposure to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) has been linked to a wide array of adverse maternal and child health outcomes. However, studies examining PFAS in relation to offspring cognition have been inconclusive. Objective: We examined whether prenatal exposure to a mixture of PFAS was related to cognition in 7.5-month-old infants. Methods: Our analytic sample included participants enrolled in the Chemicals in Our Bodies (CIOB) and Illinois Kids Development Study (IKIDS) cohorts (N = 163). Seven PFAS were measured in 2nd trimester maternal serum samples and were detected in >65% of participants. Infant cognition was measured with a visual recognition memory task using an infrared eye tracker when infants were 7.5 months old. This task included familiarization trials where each infant was shown two identical faces and test trials where each infant was shown the familiar face paired with a novel face. In familiarization, we assessed average run duration (time looking at familiarization stimuli before looking away) as a measure of information processing speed, in addition to time to familiarization (time to reach 20 s of looking at stimuli) and shift rate (the number of times infants looked between stimuli), both as measures of attention. In test trials, we assessed novelty preference (proportion of time looking to the novel face) to measure recognition memory. Linear regression was used to estimate associations of individual PFAS with cognitive outcomes, while Bayesian kernel machine regression (BKMR) was used to estimate mixture effects. Results: In adjusted single-PFAS linear regression models, an interquartile range increase in PFNA, PFOA, PFOS, PFHxS, PFDeA, and PFUdA was associated with an increase in shift rate, reflecting better visual attention. Using BKMR, increasing quartiles of the PFAS mixture was similarly associated with a modest increase in shift rate. There were no significant associations between PFAS exposure and time to reach familiarization (another measure of attention), average run duration (information processing speed), or novelty preference (visual recognition memory). Conclusion: In our study population, prenatal PFAS exposure was modestly associated with an increase in shift rate and was not strongly associated with any adverse cognitive outcomes in 7.5-month-old infants. |
Bret Eschman; Shannon Ross-Sheehy Visual short-term memory persists across multiple fixations: An n-back approach to quantifying capacity in infants and adults Journal Article In: Psychological Science, vol. 34, no. 3, pp. 1–14, 2023. @article{Eschman2023, Visual short-term memory (STM) is a foundational component of general cognition that develops rapidly during the first year of life. Although previous research has revealed important relations between overt visual fixation and memory formation, it is unknown whether infants can maintain distinct memories for sequentially fixated items or remember nonfixated array items. Participants (5-month-olds, 11-month-olds, and adults; n = 24 at each age) from the United States were tested in a passive change-detection paradigm with an n-back manipulation to examine memory for the last fixated item (one-back), second-to-last fixated item (two-back), or nonfixated item (change-other). Eye tracking was used to measure overt fixation while participants passively viewed arrays of colored circles. Results for all ages revealed convergent evidence of memory for up to two sequentially fixated objects (i.e., one-back, two-back), with moderate evidence for nonfixated array items (change-other). A permutation analysis examining change preference over time suggested that differences could not be explained by perseverative looking or location biases. |
Eeva Eskola; Eeva-Leena Kataja; Jukka Hyönä; Saara Nolvi; Tuomo Häikiö; Alice S. Carter; Hasse Karlsson; Linnea Karlsson; Riikka Korja Higher attention bias for fear at 8 months of age is associated with better socioemotional competencies during toddlerhood Journal Article In: Infant Behavior and Development, vol. 71, pp. 1–12, 2023. @article{Eskola2023, Background: In previous studies, an attention bias for signals of fear and threat has been related to socioemotional problems, such as anxiety symptoms, and socioemotional competencies, such as altruistic behaviors in children, adolescents and adults. However, previous studies lack evidence about these relations among infants and toddlers. Aims: Our aim was to study the association between the individual variance in attention bias for faces and, specifically, fearful faces during infancy and socioemotional problems and competencies during toddlerhood. Study design and subjects: The study sample was comprised of 245 children (112 girls). We explored attentional face and fear biases at the age of 8 months using eye tracking and the face-distractor paradigm with neutral, happy and fearful faces and a scrambled-face control stimulus. Socioemotional problems and competencies were reported by parents with the Brief Infant and Toddler Social Emotional Assessment (BITSEA) when children were 24 months old. Outcome measures and results: A higher attentional fear bias at 8 months of age was related to higher levels of socioemotional competence at 24 months of age (β = .18 |
Eeva Eskola; Eeva-Leena Kataja; Juho Pelto; Jetro J. Tuulari; Jukka Hyönä; Tuomo Häikiö; Roy S. Hessels; Eeva Holmberg; Elisabeth Nordenswan; Hasse Karlsson; Linnea Karlsson; Riikka Korja Attention biases for emotional facial expressions during a free viewing task increase between 2.5 and 5 years of age. Journal Article In: Developmental Psychology, vol. 59, no. 11, pp. 2065–2079, 2023. @article{Eskola2023a, The normative, developmental changes in affect-biased attention during the preschool years are largely unknown. To investigate the attention bias for emotional versus neutral faces, an eye-tracking measurement and free viewing of paired pictures of facial expressions (i.e., happy, fearful, sad, or angry faces) and nonface pictures with neutral faces were conducted with 367 children participating in a Finnish cohort study at the age of 2.5 years and with 477 children at the age of 5 years, 216 of which having follow-up measurements. We found an attention-orienting bias for happy and fearful faces versus neutral faces at both age points. An attention-orienting bias for sad faces emerged between 2.5 and 5 years. In addition, there were significant biases in sustained attention toward happy, fearful, sad, and angry faces versus neutral faces, with a bias in sustained attention for fearful faces being the strongest. All biases in sustained attention increased between 2.5 and 5 years of age. Moderate correlations in saccadic latencies were found between 2.5 and 5 years. In conclusion, attention biases for emotional facial expressions seem to be age-specific and specific for the attentional subcomponent. This implies that future studies on affect-biased attention during the preschool years should use small age ranges and cover multiple subcomponents of attention. |
Yunwei Fan; Li Li; Ping Chu; Qian Wu; Yuan Wang; Wen Hong Cao; Ningdong Li Clinical analysis of eye movement-based data in the medical diagnosis of amblyopia Journal Article In: Methods, vol. 213, pp. 26–32, 2023. @article{Fan2023a, Amblyopia is an abnormal visual processing-induced developmental disorder of the central nervous system that affects static and dynamic vision, as well as binocular visual function. Currently, changes in static vision in one eye are the gold standard for amblyopia diagnosis. However, there have been few comprehensive analyses of changes in dynamic vision, especially eye movement, among children with amblyopia. Here, we proposed an optimization scheme involving a video eye tracker combined with an “artificial eye” for comprehensive examination of eye movement in children with amblyopia; we sought to improve the diagnostic criteria for amblyopia and provide theoretical support for practical treatment. The resulting eye movement data were used to construct a deep learning approach for diagnostic and predictive applications. Through efforts to manage the uncooperativeness of children with strabismus who could not complete the eye movement assessment, this study quantitatively and objectively assessed the clinical implications of eye movement characteristics in children with amblyopia. Our results indicated that an amblyopic eye is always in a state of adjustment, and thus is not “lazy.” Additionally, we found that the eye movement parameters of amblyopic eyes and eyes with normal vision are significantly different. Finally, we identified eye movement parameters that can be used to supplement and optimize the diagnostic criteria for amblyopia, providing a diagnostic basis for evaluation of binocular visual function. |
Julia Farrell; Stefania Conte; Ryan Barry-Anwar; Lisa S. Scott Face race and sex impact visual fixation strategies for upright and inverted faces in 3- to 6-year-old children Journal Article In: Developmental Psychobiology, vol. 65, no. 2, pp. 1–15, 2023. @article{Farrell2023, Everyday face experience tends to be biased, such that infants and young children interact more often with own-race and female faces leading to differential processing of faces within these groups relative to others. In the present study, visual fixation strategies were recorded using eye tracking to determine the extent to which face race and sex/gender impact a key index of face processing in 3- to 6-year-old children (n = 47). Children viewed male and female upright and inverted White and Asian faces while visual fixations were recorded. Face orientation was found to have robust effects on children's visual fixations, such that children exhibited shorter first fixation and average fixation durations and a greater number of fixations for inverted compared to upright face trials. First fixations to the eye region were also greater for upright compared to inverted faces. Fewer fixations and longer duration fixations were found for trials with male compared to female faces and for upright compared to inverted unfamiliar-race faces, but not familiar-race faces. These findings demonstrate evidence of differential fixation strategies toward different types of faces in 3- to 6-year-old chil- dren, illustrating the importance of experience in the development of visual attention to faces. |
Maria Celeste Fasano; Joana Cabral; Angus Stevner; Peter Vuust; Pauline Cantou; Elvira Brattico; Morten L. Kringelbach The early adolescent brain on music: Analysis of functional dynamics reveals engagement of orbitofrontal cortex reward system Journal Article In: Human Brain Mapping, vol. 44, no. 2, pp. 429–446, 2023. @article{Fasano2023, Music listening plays a pivotal role for children and adolescents, yet it remains unclear how music modulates brain activity at the level of functional networks in this young population. Analysing the dynamics of brain networks occurring and dissolving over time in response to music can provide a better understanding of the neural underpinning of music listening. We collected functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from 17 preadolescents aged 10–11 years while listening to two similar music pieces separated by periods without music. We subsequently tracked the occurrence of functional brain networks over the recording time using a recent method that detects recurrent patterns of phase-locking in the fMRI signals: the leading eigenvector dynamics analysis (LEiDA). The probabilities of occurrence and switching profiles of different functional networks were compared between periods of music and no music. Our results showed significantly increased occurrence of a specific functional network during the two music pieces compared to no music, involving the medial orbitofrontal and ventromedial prefrontal cortices—a brain subsystem associated to reward processing. Moreover, the higher the musical reward sensitivity of the preadolescents, the more this network was preceded by a pattern involving the insula. Our findings highlight the involvement of a brain subsystem associated with hedonic and emotional processing during music listening in the early adolescent brain. These results offer novel insight into the neural underpinnings of musical reward in early adolescence, improving our understanding of the important role and the potential benefits of music at this delicate age. |
Maria Feldmann; Jessica Borer; Walter Knirsch; Moritz M. Daum; Stephanie Wermelinger; Beatrice Latal Atypical gaze-following behaviour in infants with congenital heart disease Journal Article In: Early Human Development, vol. 181, pp. 1–7, 2023. @article{Feldmann2023a, Background: Neurodevelopmental impairments are the most prevalent non-cardiac long-term sequelae in children with complex congenital heart disease (CHD). Deficits include the social-emotional and social-cognitive domains. Little is known about the predecessors of social-cognitive development in infants with CHD during the first year of life. Gaze-following behaviour can be used to measure early social-cognitive abilities. Aims: To assess gaze-following development in infants with CHD compared to healthy controls. Study design: Prospective cohort study. Participants: Twenty-three infants who underwent neonatal correction for CHD and 84 healthy controls. Outcome measures: Gaze-following behaviour was assessed by eye tracking at 6 and 12 months. Difference scores for first fixation, fixation frequency and fixation duration towards the gaze-cued object were calculated across 6 trials and compared between groups at both testing time points while adjusting for known confounders. Linear mixed models were calculated to assess the longitudinal trajectory of gaze-following development while accounting for the nested and dependent data structure. Results: At 6 months, no difference in gaze-following behaviour between CHD and healthy controls was found. At 12 months, fixation frequency towards the gaze-cued was lower and looking duration was shorter in CHD compared to controls (p = 0.0077; p = 0.0068). Infants with CHD showed less increase with age in the fixation frequency towards the congruent object (p = 0.041) compared to controls. Conclusion: During the first year of life, gaze-following development diverges in infants with CHD compared to healthy controls. Further research is needed to investigate the clinical relevance of these findings and the association with later social-cognitive development. |
Serena Micheletti; Giacomo Vivanti; Stefano Renzetti; Matteo Paolo Lanaro; Paola Martelli; Stefano Calza; Patrizia Accorsi; Stefania Agostini; Anna Alessandrini; Nicole D'Adda; Laura Ferrari; Valentina Foresti; Jessica Galli; Lucio Giordano; Melissa Marras; Alessandro Rizzi; Elisa Fazzi Social attention and social-emotional modulation of attention in Angelman syndrome: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 1–10, 2023. @article{Micheletti2023, Individuals with Angelman syndrome (AS) present with severe intellectual disability alongside a social phenotype characterised by social communication difficulties and an increased drive for social engagement. As the social phenotype in this condition is poorly understood, we examined patterns of social attention and social modulation of attention in AS. Twenty-four individuals with AS and twenty-one young children with similar mental age were shown videos featuring unfamiliar actors who performed simple actions across two conditions: a playful condition, in which the actor showed positive facial emotions, and a neutral condition, in which the actor showed a neutral facial expression. During the passive observation of the videos, participants' proportion of time spent watching the two areas of interest (faces and actions) was examined using eye-tracking technology. We found that the playful condition elicited increased proportion of fixations duration to the actor's face compared to the neutral condition similarly across groups. Additionally, the proportion of fixations duration to the action area was similar across groups in the two conditions. However, children with AS looked towards the actor's face for a shorter duration compared to the comparison group across conditions. This pattern of similarities and differences provides novel insight on the complex social phenotype of children with AS. |