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2024 |
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. |
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 |
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. |
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. |
2023 |
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. |
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. |
Alessandra Valentini; Rachel E. Pye; Carmel Houston-Price; Jessie Ricketts; Julie A. Kirkby Onlineprocessing shows advantages of bimodal listening-while-reading for vocabulary learning: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Reading Research Quarterly, vol. 59, no. 1, pp. 79–101, 2023. @article{Valentini2023,Children can learn words incidentally from stories. This kind of learning is enhanced when stories are presented both aurally and in written format, compared to just a written presentation. However, we do not know why this bimodal presentation is beneficial. This study explores two possible explanations: whether the bimodal advantage manifests online during story exposure, or later, at word retrieval. We collected eye-movement data from 34 8-to 9-year-old children exposed to two stories, one presented in written format (reading condition), and the second presented aurally and written at the same time (bimodal condition). Each story included six unfamiliar words (non-words) that were repeated three times, as well as definitions and clues to their meaning. Following exposure, the learning of the new words' meanings was assessed. Results showed that, during story presentation, children spent less time fixating the new words in the bimodal condition, compared to the reading condition, indicating that the bimodal advantage occurs online. Learning was greater in the bimodal condition than the reading condition, which may reflect either an online bimodal advantage during story presentation or an advantage at retrieval. The results also suggest that the bimodal condition was more conducive to learning than the reading condition when children looked at the new words for a shorter amount of time. This is in line with an online advantage of the bimodal condition, as it suggests that less effort is required to learn words in this condition. These results support educational strategies that routinely present new vocabulary in two modalities simultaneously. |
Janneke E. P. Leeuwen; Amy McDougall; Dimitris Mylonas; Aida Suárez-González; Sebastian J. Crutch; Jason D. Warren Pupil responses to colorfulness are selectively reduced in healthy older adults Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 1–16, 2023. @article{Leeuwen2023a,The alignment between visual pathway signaling and pupil dynamics offers a promising non-invasive method to further illuminate the mechanisms of human color perception. However, only limited research has been done in this area and the effects of healthy aging on pupil responses to the different color components have not been studied yet. Here we aim to address this by modelling the effects of color lightness and chroma (colorfulness) on pupil responses in young and older adults, in a closely controlled passive viewing experiment with 26 broad-spectrum digital color fields. We show that pupil responses to color lightness and chroma are independent from each other in both young and older adults. Pupil responses to color lightness levels are unaffected by healthy aging, when correcting for smaller baseline pupil sizes in older adults. Older adults exhibit weaker pupil responses to chroma increases, predominantly along the Green–Magenta axis, while relatively sparing the Blue–Yellow axis. Our findings complement behavioral studies in providing physiological evidence that colors fade with age, with implications for color-based applications and interventions both in healthy aging and later-life neurodegenerative disorders. |
Katie Von Holzen; Sandrien Ommen; Katherine S. White; Thierry Nazzi The impact of phonological biases on mispronunciation sensitivity and novel accent adaptation Journal Article In: Language Learning and Development, vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 303–322, 2023. @article{VonHolzen2023,Successful word recognition requires that listeners attend to differences that are phonemic in the language while also remaining flexible to the variation introduced by different voices and accents. Previous work has demonstrated that American-English-learning 19-month-olds are able to balance these demands: although one-off one-feature mispronunciations typically disrupt English-learning toddlers' lexical access, they no longer do after toddlers are exposed to a novel accent in which these changes occur systematically. The flexibility to deal with different types of variation may not be the same for toddlers learning different first languages, however, as language structure shapes early phonological biases. We examined French-learning 19-month-olds' sensitivity and adaptation to a novel accent that shifted either the standard pronunciation of /a/ from [a] to [ɛ] (Experiment 1) or the standard pronunciation of /p/ from [p] to [t] (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, French-learning toddlers recognized words with /a/ produced as [ɛ], regardless of whether they were previously exposed to an accent that contained this vowel shift or not. In Experiment 2, toddlers did not recognize words with /p/ pronounced as [t] at test unless they were first familiarized with an accent that contained this consonant shift. These findings are consistent with evidence that French-learning toddlers privilege consonants over vowels in lexical processing. Together with previous work, these results demonstrate both differences and similarities in how French- and English-learning children treat variation, in line with their language-specific phonological biases. |
A. C. L. Vrijling; M. J. Boer; R. J. Renken; J. B. C. Marsman; A. Grillini; C. E. Petrillo; J. Heutink; N. M. Jansonius; F. W. Cornelissen Stimulus contrast, pursuit mode, and age strongly influence tracking performance on a continuous visual tracking task Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 205, pp. 1–11, 2023. @article{Vrijling2023,Human observers tend to naturally track moving stimuli. This tendency may be exploited towards an intuitive means of screening visual function as an impairment induced reduction in stimulus visibility will decrease tracking performance. Yet, to be able to detect subtle impairments, stimulus contrast is critical. If too high, the decrease in performance may remain undetected. Therefore, for this approach to become reliable and sensitive, we need a detailed understanding of how age, stimulus contrast, and the type of stimulus movement affect continuous tracking performance. To do so, we evaluated how well twenty younger and twenty older participants tracked a semi-randomly moving stimulus (Goldmann size III, 0.43 degrees of visual angle), presented at five contrast levels (5%-10%-20%-40%-80%). The stimulus could move smoothly only (smooth pursuit mode) or in alternation with displacements (saccadic pursuit mode). Additionally, we assessed static foveal and peripheral contrast thresholds. For all participants, tracking performance improved with increasing contrast in both pursuit modes. To reach threshold performance levels, older participants required about twice as much contrast (20% vs. 10% and 40% vs. 20% in smooth and saccadic modes respectively). Saccadic pursuit detection thresholds correlated significantly with static peripheral contrast thresholds (rho = 0.64). Smooth pursuit detection thresholds were uncorrelated with static foveal contrast thresholds (rho = 0.29). We conclude that continuous visual stimulus tracking is strongly affected by stimulus contrast, pursuit mode, and age. This provides essential insights that can be applied towards new and intuitive approaches of screening visual function. |
Nicholas Wagner; Emily Perkins; Yuheiry Rodriguez; Cora Ordway; Michaela Flum; Lucia Hernandez-Pena; Polina Perelstein; Kathy Sem; Yael Paz; Rista Plate; Ayomide Popoola; Sarah Lynch; Kristina Astone; Ethan Goldstein; Wanjikũ F. M. Njoroge; Adriane Raine; Donna Pincus; Koraly Pérez-Edgar; Rebecca Waller In: BMJ Open, vol. 13, no. 10, pp. 1–13, 2023. @article{Wagner2023b,Introduction: Children with callous-unemotional (CU) traits are at high lifetime risk of antisocial behaviour. Low affiliation (ie, social bonding difficulties) and fearlessness (ie, low threat sensitivity) are proposed risk factors for CU traits. Parenting practices (eg, harshness and low warmth) also predict risk for CU traits. However, few studies in early childhood have identified attentional or physiological markers of low affiliation and fearlessness. Moreover, no studies have tested whether parenting practices are underpinned by low affiliation or fearlessness shared by parents, which could further shape parent-child interactions and exacerbate risk for CU traits. Addressing these questions will inform knowledge of how CU traits develop and isolate novel parent and child targets for future specialised treatments for CU traits. Methods and analysis: The Promoting Empathy and Affiliation in Relationships (PEAR) study aims to establish risk factors for CU traits in children aged 3-6 years. The PEAR study will recruit 500 parent-child dyads from two metropolitan areas of the USA. Parents and children will complete questionnaires, computer tasks and observational assessments, alongside collection of eye-tracking and physiological data, when children are aged 3-4 (time 1) and 5-6 (time 2) years. The moderating roles of child sex, race and ethnicity, family and neighbourhood disadvantage, and parental psychopathology will also be assessed. Study aims will be addressed using structural equation modelling, which will allow for flexible characterisation of low affiliation, fearlessness and parenting practices as risk factors for CU traits across multiple domains. Ethics and dissemination: Ethical approval was granted by Boston University (#6158E) and the University of Pennsylvania (#850638). Results will be disseminated through conferences and open-access publications. All study and task materials will be made freely available on lab websites and through the Open Science Framework (OSF). |
Carla A. Wall; Frederick Shic; Sreeja Varanasi; Jane E. Roberts Distinct social attention profiles in preschoolers with autism contrasted to fragile X syndrome Journal Article In: Autism Research, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 340–354, 2023. @article{Wall2023,Social attention is a critical skill for learning and development. Social attention difficulties are present in both non-syndromic autism spectrum disorder (nsASD) and fragile X syndrome (FXS), and our understanding of these difficulties is complicated by heterogeneity in both disorders, including co-occurring diagnoses like intellectual disability and social anxiety. Existing research largely utilizes a single index of social attention and rarely includes children with intellectual impairment or uses a cross-syndrome approach. This study investigated whether multi-trait social attention profiles including naturalistic initial eye contact, facial attention, and social scene attention differ in preschool children with nsASD and FXS matched on developmental ability (DQ) and contrasted to neurotypical (NT) controls. The relationship between DQ, ASD severity, and social anxiety and social attention profiles was also examined. Initial eye contact related to social scene attention, implicating that naturalistic social attention is consistent with responses during experimental conditions. Reduced eye contact and lower social scene attention characterized nsASD and FXS. Children with nsASD displayed less facial attention than FXS and NT children, who did not differ. Lower DQ and elevated ASD severity associated with decreased eye contact in nsASD and FXS, and lower DQ was associated with lower social scene attention in FXS. Sex, social anxiety, and age were not associated with social attention. These findings suggest social attention profiles of children with nsASD are highly similar to, yet distinct from, children with FXS. Children with nsASD may present with a global social attention deficit whereas FXS profiles may reflect context-dependent social avoidance. |
Yingjia Wan; Yipu Wei; Baorui Xu; Liqi Zhu; Michael K. Tanenhaus Musical coordination affects children's perspective-taking, but musical synchrony does not Journal Article In: Developmental Science, vol. 26, no. 5, pp. 1–13, 2023. @article{Wan2023a,Perspective-taking, which is important for communication and social activities, can be cultivated through joint actions, including musical activities in children. We examined how rhythmic activities requiring coordination affect perspective-taking in a referential communication task with 100 Chinese 4- to 6-year-old children. In Study 1, 5- to 6-year-old children played an instrument with a virtual partner in one of three coordination conditions: synchrony, asynchrony, and antiphase synchrony. Eye movements were then monitored with the partner giving instructions to identify a shape referent which included a pre-nominal scalar adjective (e.g., big cubic block). When the target contrast (a small cubic block) was in the shared ground and a competitor contrast was occluded for the partner, participants who used perspective differences could, in principle, identify the intended referent before the shape was named. We hypothesized that asynchronous and antiphase synchronous musical activities, which require self-other distinction, might have stronger effects on perspective-taking than synchronous activity. Children in the asynchrony and antiphase synchrony conditions, but not the synchrony condition, showed anticipatory looks at the target, demonstrating real-time use of the partner's perspective. Study 2 was conducted to determine if asynchrony and antiphase asynchrony resulted in perspective-taking that otherwise would not have been observed, or if synchronous coordination inhibited perspective-taking that would otherwise have occurred. We found no evidence for online perspective-taking in 4- to 6-year-old children without music manipulation. Therefore, playing instruments asynchronously or in alternation, but not synchronously, increases perspective-taking in children of this age, likely by training self-other distinction and control. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://youtu.be/TM9h_GpFlsA. Research Highlights: This study is the first to show that rhythmic coordination, a form of non-linguistic interaction, can affect children's performance in a subsequent linguistic task. Eye-movement data revealed that children's perspective-taking in language processing was facilitated by prior asynchronous and antiphase synchronous musical interactions, but not by synchronous coordination. The results challenge the common “similar is better” view, suggesting that maintaining self-other distinction may benefit social interactions that involve representing individual differences. |
Yingjia Wan; Yipu Wei; Baorui Xu; Liqi Zhu; Michael K. Tanenhaus Musical coordination affects children's perspective-taking, but musical synchrony does not Journal Article In: Developmental Science, pp. 1–13, 2023. @article{Wan2023,Perspective-taking, which is important for communication and social activities, can be cultivated through joint actions, including musical activities in children. We examined how rhythmic activities requiring coordination affect perspective-taking in a referential communication task with 100 Chinese 4- to 6-year-old children. In Study 1, 5- to 6-year-old children played an instrument with a virtual partner in one of three coordination conditions: synchrony, asynchrony, and antiphase synchrony. Eye movements were then monitored with the partner giving instructions to identify a shape referent which included a pre-nominal scalar adjective (e.g., big cubic block). When the target contrast (a small cubic block) was in the shared ground and a competitor contrast was occluded for the partner, participants who used perspective differences could, in principle, identify the intended referent before the shape was named. We hypothesized that asynchronous and antiphase synchronous musical activities, which require self- other distinction, might have stronger effects on perspective-taking than synchronous activity. Children in the asynchrony and antiphase synchrony conditions, but not the synchrony condition, showed anticipatory looks at the target, demonstrating real-time use of the partner's perspective. Study 2 was conducted to determine if asynchrony and antiphase asynchrony resulted in perspective-taking that otherwise would not have been observed, or if synchronous coordination inhibited perspective-taking that wouldotherwise have occurred. We found no evidence for online perspective-taking in 4-to 6-year-old children without music manipulation. Therefore, playing instruments asynchronously or in alternation, but not synchronously, increases perspective-taking in children of this age, likely by training self-other distinction and control. |
Zhiyun Wang; Qingfang Zhang Ageing of grammatical advance planning in spoken sentence production: An eye movement study Journal Article In: Psychological Research, no. 2001, pp. 1–18, 2023. @article{Wang2023m,This study used an image-description paradigm with concurrent eye movement recordings to investigate differences of grammatical advance planning between young and older speakers in spoken sentence production. Participants were asked to produce sentences with simple or complex initial phrase structures (IPS) in Experiment 1 while producing individual words in Experiment 2. Young and older speakers showed comparable speaking latencies in sentence production task, whereas older speakers showed longer latencies than young speakers in word production task. Eye movement data showed that compared with young speakers, older speakers had higher fixation percentage on object 1, lower percentage of gaze shift from object 1 to 2, and lower fixation percentage on object 2 in simple IPS sentences, while they showed similar fixation percentage on object 1, similar percentage of gaze shift from object 1 to 2, and lower fixation percentage on object 2 in complex IPS sentences, indicating a decline of grammatical encoding scope presenting on eye movement patterns. Meanwhile, speech analysis showed that older speakers presented longer utterance duration, slower speech rate, and longer and more frequently occurred pauses in articulation, indicating a decline of speech articulation in older speakers. Thus, our study suggests that older speakers experience an ageing effect in the sentences with complex initial phrases due to limited cognitive resources. |
Sobanawartiny Wijeakumar; Samuel H. Forbes; Vincent A. Magnotta; Sean Deoni; Kiara Jackson; Vinay P. Singh; Madhuri Tiwari; Aarti Kumar; John P. Spencer Stunting in infancy is associated with atypical activation of working memory and attention networks Journal Article In: Nature Human Behaviour, vol. 7, no. 12, pp. 2199–2211, 2023. @article{Wijeakumar2023,Stunting is associated with poor long-term cognitive, academic and economic outcomes, yet the mechanisms through which stunting impacts cognition in early development remain unknown. In a first-ever neuroimaging study conducted on infants from rural India, we demonstrate that stunting impacts a critical, early-developing cognitive system—visual working memory. Stunted infants showed poor visual working memory performance and were easily distractible. Poor performance was associated with reduced engagement of the left anterior intraparietal sulcus, a region involved in visual working memory maintenance and greater suppression in the right temporoparietal junction, a region involved in attentional shifting. When assessed one year later, stunted infants had lower problem-solving scores, while infants of normal height with greater left anterior intraparietal sulcus activation showed higher problem-solving scores. Finally, short-for-age infants with poor physical growth indices but good visual working memory performance showed more positive outcomes suggesting that intervention efforts should focus on improving working memory and reducing distractibility in infancy. |
Hao Wu; Yuding Zhang; Qiong Luo; Zhengzhou Zhu The magnitude representations of fractions of Chinese students: Evidence from behavioral experiment and eye-tracking Journal Article In: Current Psychology, pp. 1–16, 2023. @article{Wu2023b,Early knowledge of fractions can largely predict later mathematical performance, and a comprehensive and in-depth understanding of fractions is fundamental to learning more advanced mathematics. The study aimed to explore the influencing factors and age characteristics of magnitude representations of fractions by a fraction comparison task, using subjects' eye-movement measures as direct evidence and the results of linear regression analyses as indirect evidence. The results found that the number of digits of fractions' components and types of fraction pairs jointly influence the magnitude representations of fractions. For one-digit fraction pairs with and without common components, componential representation is favored; for two-digit fraction pairs with common components, componential representation is preferred, while for two-digit fraction pairs without common components, holistic representation is selected. The representation styles are consistent across university students, junior high school students and primary school students, and there are significant age differences in representation levels, with university students being more flexible in their use of representation strategies of fractions than the other two ages, and junior high school students showing the same level with the primary school students. These results suggest that not only Chinese university students, but also Chinese primary and junior high school students can select and adapt representation strategies of fractions according to the characteristics and complexity of fraction processing tasks. The eye-movement technique can largely compensate for the shortcomings of the regression analysis paradigm and better reveal the critical cognitive processes involved in the processing of fractions. |
Naiqi G. Xiao; Lauren L. Emberson Visual perception is highly flexible and context dependent in young infants: A case of top-down-modulated motion perception Journal Article In: Psychological Science, vol. 34, no. 8, pp. 875–886, 2023. @article{Xiao2023,Top-down modulation is an essential cognitive component in human perception. Despite mounting evidence of top-down perceptual modulation in adults, it is largely unknown whether infants can engage in this cognitive function. Here, we examined top-down modulation of motion perception in 6- to 8-month-old infants (recruited in North America) via their smooth-pursuit eye movements. In four experiments, we demonstrated that infants' perception of motion direction can be flexibly shaped by briefly learned predictive cues when no coherent motion is available. The current findings present a novel insight into infant perception and its development: Infant perceptual systems respond to predictive signals engendered from higher-level learning systems, leading to a flexible and context-dependent modulation of perception. This work also suggests that the infant brain is sophisticated, interconnected, and active when placed in a context in which it can learn and predict. |
Kunyu Xu; Yu-Min Ku; Chenlu Ma; Chien-Hui Lin; Wan-Chen Chang Development of comprehension monitoring skill in Chinese children: Evidence from eye movement and probe interviews Journal Article In: Metacognition and Learning, pp. 1–19, 2023. @article{Xu2023,As an important construct in the cognitive process, comprehension monitoring has received much scholarly attention. Researchers have recognized comprehension monitoring as an ability closely linked with children's reading comprehension ability and working memory capacity. Evidence is also abundant to prove that comprehension monitoring skill develops with age. It remains unclear, however, how these factors interact during reading, particularly in low-grade children. Many previous empirical studies have only employed online or offline measurements to examine children's monitoring performance, which might lead to unsolid conclusions. In this study, we utilized both online eye-tracking measures and offline probe interviews to quantify the developmental features (i.e., evaluation and regulation) of comprehension monitoring skills among Chinese beginning readers. The results indicated that the comprehension monitoring performance, as quantified by eye-tracking measures, was positively related to their reading comprehension ability and working memory capacity. Moreover, the first-graders' performances lacked online regulation skills during the error-detecting tasks, while second-graders had relatively developed online monitoring performance. Additionally, the eye-tracking measures were found as a predictor for children's performances in probe interviews, as the readers with high comprehension ability and working memory capacity successfully reported more errors embedded in the self-designed reading materials. Therefore, the findings support the claim that children's comprehension monitoring is a developing skill associated with reading comprehension and working memory capacity and further question the existence of comprehension monitoring skills in beginning readers, especially first-graders. |
Licheng Xue; Ying Xiao; Tianying Qing; Urs Maurer; Wei Wang; Huidong Xue; Xuchu Weng; Jing Zhao Attention to the fine-grained aspect of words in the environment emerges in preschool children with high reading ability Journal Article In: Visual Cognition, vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 85–96, 2023. @article{Xue2023,Attention to words is closely related to the process of learning to read. However, it remains unclear how attention to words in environmental print (such as words on product labels) is changed with the growth of preschool children's reading ability. We thus used eye tracking technique to compare attention to words in environmental print in children at low (32, 15 males, 5.12 years) and high (32, 17 males, 5.16 years) reading levels during a free viewing task. To characterize which aspects of visual word form children attend to, we constructed three types of stimuli embedded in the same context: words in environment print, symbol strings (similar shape to words but without strokes), and character strings (comparable with words in the number of strokes and the structures). We observed that children at both reading levels showed lower percentages of fixations and fixation time in words relative to symbol strings, suggesting they start to attend to the coarse aspect of visual word form. Interestingly, only children at higher reading level showed lower percentages of fixations and fixation time for words relative to character strings, suggesting that attention to the fine-grained aspect of visual word form emerged, and was closely to reading ability. |
Ming Yan; Jinger Pan Joint effects of individual reading skills and word properties on Chinese children's eye movements during sentence reading Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 1–10, 2023. @article{Yan2023a,Word recognition during the reading of continuous text has received much attention. While a large body of research has investigated how linguistic properties of words affect eye movements during reading, it remains to be established how individual differences in reading skills affect momentary cognitive processes during sentence reading among typically developing Chinese readers. The present study set out to test the joint influences of word properties and individual reading skills on eye movements during reading among Chinese children. We recorded eye movements of 30 grade 3 (G3) children and 27 grade 5 (G5) children when they read sentences silently for comprehension. Predictors of linear mixed models included word frequency, visual complexity, and launch site distance, in addition to the participants' offline psychometric performances in rapid naming, morphological awareness, word segmenting, and character recognition. The results showed that word properties affected word recognition during sentence reading in both G3 and G5 children. Moreover, word segmenting predicted the G3 children's fixation durations and the G5 children's fixation location, whereas rapid naming predicted the G5 children's fixation duration. Implications are discussed based on the current findings, in light of how different literacy skills contribute to reading development. |
Tania S. Zamuner; Theresa Rabideau; Margarethe McDonald; H. Henny Yeung Developmental change in children's speech processing of auditory and visual cues: An eyetracking study Journal Article In: Journal of Child Language, vol. 50, pp. 27–51, 2023. @article{Zamuner2023,This study investigates how children aged two to eight years (N = 129) and adults (N = 29) use auditory and visual speech for word recognition. The goal was to bridge the gap between apparent successes of visual speech processing in young children in visual-looking tasks, with apparent difficulties of speech processing in older children from explicit behavioural measures. Participants were presented with familiar words in audio-visual (AV), audio-only (A-only) or visual-only (V-only) speech modalities, then presented with target and distractor images, and looking to targets was measured. Adults showed high accuracy, with slightly less target-image looking in the V-only modality. Developmentally, looking was above chance for both AV and A-only modalities, but not in the V-only modality until 6 years of age (earlier on /k/-initial words). Flexible use of visual cues for lexical access develops throughout childhood. |
Andrea M. Zawoyski; Scott P. Ardoin; Katherine S. Binder The impact of test-taking strategies on eye movements of elementary students during reading comprehension assessment Journal Article In: School Psychology, vol. 38, no. 1, pp. 59–66, 2023. @article{Zawoyski2023,Teachers often encourage students to use test-taking strategies during reading comprehension assessments, but these strategies are not always evidence-based. One common strategy involves teaching students to read the questions before reading an associated passage. Research findings comparing the passage-first (PF) and questions-first (QF) strategies are mixed. The present study employed eye-tracking technology to record 84 third and fourth-grade participants' eye movements (EMs) as they read a passage and responded to multiple-choice (MC) questions using PF and QF strategies in a within-subject design. Although there were no significant differences between groups in accuracy on MC questions, EM measures revealed that the PF condition was superior to the QF condition for elementary readers in terms of efficiency in reading and responding to questions. These findings suggest that the PF strategy supports a more comprehensive understanding of the text. Ultimately, within the PF condition, students required less time to obtain the same accuracy outcomes they attained when reading in the QF condition. School psychologists can improve reading comprehension instruction by encouraging the importance of teaching children to gain meaning from the text rather than search the passage for answers to MC questions |
Martin Zettersten; Daniel Yurovsky; Tian Linger Xu; Sarp Uner; Angeline Sin Mei Tsui; Rose M. Schneider; Annissa N. Saleh; Stephan C. Meylan; Virginia A. Marchman; Jessica Mankewitz; Kyle MacDonald; Bria Long; Molly Lewis; George Kachergis; Kunal Handa; Benjamin DeMayo; Alexandra Carstensen; Mika Braginsky; Veronica Boyce; Naiti S. Bhatt; Claire Augusta Bergey; Michael C. Frank Peekbank: An open, large-scale repository for developmental eye-tracking data of children's word recognition Journal Article In: Behavior Research Methods, vol. 55, no. 5, pp. 2485–2500, 2023. @article{Zettersten2023,The ability to rapidly recognize words and link them to referents is central to children's early language development. This ability, often called word recognition in the developmental literature, is typically studied in the looking-while-listening paradigm, which measures infants' fixation on a target object (vs. a distractor) after hearing a target label. We present a large-scale, open database of infant and toddler eye-tracking data from looking-while-listening tasks. The goal of this effort is to address theoretical and methodological challenges in measuring vocabulary development. We first present how we created the database, its features and structure, and associated tools for processing and accessing infant eye-tracking datasets. Using these tools, we then work through two illustrative examples to show how researchers can use Peekbank to interrogate theoretical and methodological questions about children's developing word recognition ability. |
Wei Zhou; Yi Fan; Yulin Chang; Wenjuan Liu; Jiuju Wang; Yufeng Wang Pathogenesis of comorbid adhd and chinese developmental dyslexia: Evidence from eye-movement tracking and rapid automatized naming Journal Article In: Journal of Attention Disorders, vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 294–306, 2023. @article{Zhou2023f,Background: ADHD and Chinese developmental dyslexia (DD) have a very high comorbidity rate; however, which cognitive deficits characterize the comorbidity and when they occur during cognitive processing are still under debate. Methods: Rapid automatic naming (RAN) tasks with eye-movement tracking were conducted with 75 children who were typically developing, had comorbid ADHD and DD, had only ADHD, and had only DD. Results: The clinical groups had longer first fixation durations than the control for RAN digits. Temporal eye-movement measures, such as gaze duration and total reading time, were found to vary between the comorbidity and ADHD groups. Spatial eye-movement measures, such as regression probability and incoming saccade amplitude, differed between the comorbidity and DD groups. Conclusions: These results indicate that investigation with eye-movement measures combined with RAN tasks can strengthen the understanding of the pathogenesis of comorbid ADHD and DD. |
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. |
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. |
Evelyn Milburn; Michael Walsh Dickey; Tessa Warren; Rebecca Hayes Increased reliance on world knowledge during language comprehension in healthy aging: evidence from verb-argument prediction Journal Article In: Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, vol. 30, no. 1, pp. 1–33, 2023. @article{Milburn2023,Cognitive aging negatively impacts language comprehension performance. However, there is evidence that older adults skillfully use linguistic context and their crystallized world knowledge to offset age-related changes that negatively impact comprehension. Two visual-world paradigm experiments examined how aging changes verb-argument prediction, a comprehension process that relies on world knowledge but has rarely been examined in the cognitive-aging literature. Older adults did not differ from younger adults in their activation of an upcoming likely verb argument, particularly when cued by a semantically-rich agent+verb combination (Experiment 1). However, older adults showed elevated activation of previously-mentioned agents (Experiment 1) and of unlikely but verb-congruent referents (Experiment 2). This is novel evidence that older adults exploit semantic context and world knowledge during comprehension to successfully activate upcoming referents. However, older adults also show elevated activation of irrelevant information, consistent with previous findings demonstrating that older adults may experience greater proactive interference and competition from task-irrelevant information. |
Lea Moersdorf; Alexandra M. Freund; Moritz M. Daum What do you focus on? An investigation of goal focus from childhood to old age Journal Article In: Psychological Research, vol. 87, no. 7, pp. 2120–2137, 2023. @article{Moersdorf2023,Goals constitute an important construct in developmental psychology. They represent a central way in which individuals shape their development. Here, we present two studies on age-related differences in one important goal dimension, goal focus, that is, the relative salience of the means and ends of goal pursuit. Extant studies on age-related differences in adults suggest a shift from focusing on the ends to focusing on the means across adulthood. The current studies aimed to expand this research to encompass the entire lifespan including childhood. The first cross-sectional study included participants spanning from early childhood into old age (N = 312, age range: 3–83 years) and used a multimethodological approach comprising eye tracking, behavioral, and verbal measures of goal focus. The second study investigated the verbal measures of the first study in more detail in an adult sample (N = 1550, age range: 17–88 years). Overall, the results do not show a clear pattern, making them difficult to interpret. There was little convergence of the measures, pointing to the difficulties in assessing a construct such as goal focus across a large range of age groups differing in social-cognitive and verbal skills. |
Padraic Monaghan; Seamus Donnelly; Katie Alcock; Amy Bidgood; Kate Cain; Samantha Durrant; Rebecca L. A. Frost; Lana S. Jago; Michelle S. Peter; Julian M. Pine; Heather Turnbull; Caroline F. Rowland Learning to generalise but not segment an artificial language at 17 months predicts children's language skills 3 years later Journal Article In: Cognitive Psychology, vol. 147, pp. 1–13, 2023. @article{Monaghan2023,We investigated whether learning an artificial language at 17 months was predictive of children's natural language vocabulary and grammar skills at 54 months. Children at 17 months listened to an artificial language containing non-adjacent dependencies, and were then tested on their learning to segment and to generalise the structure of the language. At 54 months, children were then tested on a range of standardised natural language tasks that assessed receptive and expressive vocabulary and grammar. A structural equation model demonstrated that learning the artificial language generalisation at 17 months predicted language abilities – a composite of vocabulary and grammar skills – at 54 months, whereas artificial language segmentation at 17 months did not predict language abilities at this age. Artificial language learning tasks – especially those that probe grammar learning – provide a valuable tool for uncovering the mechanisms driving children's early language development. |
Sebastián Moyano; Josué Rico-Picó; Ángela Conejero; Ángela Hoyo; María de los Ángeles Ballesteros-Duperón; M. Rosario Rueda Influence of the environment on the early development of attentional control Journal Article In: Infant Behavior and Development, vol. 71, pp. 1–17, 2023. @article{Moyano2023,The control of visual attention is key to learning and has a foundational role in the development of self-regulated behavior. Basic attention control skills emerge early in life and show a protracted development along childhood. Prior research suggests that attentional development is influenced by environmental factors in early and late childhood. Although, much less information is available about the impact of the early environment on emerging endogenous attention skills during infancy. In the current study we aimed to test the impact of parental socioeconomic status (SES) and home environment (chaos) in the emerging control of orienting in a sample of typically-developing infants. A group of 142 (73 female) 6-month-old infants were longitudinally tested at 6, 9 (n = 122; 60 female) and 16–18 (n = 91; 50 female) months of age using the gap-overlap paradigm. Median saccade latency (mdSL) and disengagement failure (DF) were computed as dependent variables for both overlap and gap conditions. Also, composite scores for a Disengagement Cost Index (DCI) and Disengagement Failure Index (DFI) were computed considering mdSL and DF of each condition, respectively. Families reported SES and chaos in the first and last follow-up sessions. Using Linear Mixed Models with Maximum Likelihood estimation (ML) we found a longitudinal decrease in mdSL in the gap but not in the overlap condition, while DF decreased with age independently of the experimental condition. Concerning early environmental factors, an SES index, parental occupation and chaos at 6 months were found to show a negative correlation with DFI at 16–18 months, although in the former case it was only marginally significant. Hierarchical regression models implementing ML showed that both SES and chaos at 6 months significantly predicted a lower DFI at 16–18 months. Results show a longitudinal progression of endogenous orienting between infancy and toddlerhood. With age, an increased endogenous control of orienting is displayed in contexts where visual disengagement is facilitated. Visual orienting involving attention disengagement in contexts of visual competition do not show changes with age. Moreover, these attentional mechanisms of endogenous control seem to be modulated by early experiences of the individual with the environment. |
Ryan M. O'Leary; Nicole M. Amichetti; Zoe Brown; Alexander J. Kinney; Arthur Wingfield Congruent prosody reduces cognitive effort in memory for spoken sentences: A pupillometric study with young and older adults Journal Article In: Experimental Aging Research, pp. 1–24, 2023. @article{OLeary2023,Background: In spite of declines in working memory and other processes, older adults generally maintain good ability to understand and remember spoken sentences. In part this is due to preserved knowledge of linguistic rules and their implementation. Largely overlooked, however, is the support older adults may gain from the presence of sentence prosody (pitch contour, lexical stress, intra-and inter-word timing) as an aid to detecting the structure of a heard sentence. Methods: Twenty-four young and 24 older adults recalled recorded sentences in which the sentence prosody corresponded to the clausal structure of the sentence, when the prosody was in conflict with this structure, or when there was reduced prosody uninformative with regard to the clausal structure. Pupil size was concurrently recorded as a measure of processing effort. Results: Both young and older adults' recall accuracy was superior for sentences heard with supportive prosody than for sentences with uninformative prosody or for sentences in which the prosodic marking and causal structure were in conflict. The measurement of pupil dilation suggested that the task was generally more effortful for the older adults, but with both groups showing a similar pattern of effort-reducing effects of supportive prosody. Conclusions: Results demonstrate the influence of prosody on young and older adults' ability to recall accurately multi-clause sentences, and the significant role effective prosody may play in preserving processing effort. |