Improving comprehension of jury instructions with audio‐visual presentation

This study examined whether mock‐jurors' comprehension of judicial self‐defence instructions improved when an audio‐visual instructional format involving computer animations and a flow chart was used. In a mock‐juror paradigm, 90 law students (experts) and 90 legally untrained adults (novices) were randomly allocated to one of three instructional conditions (audio, audio‐elaborated, audio‐visual). Dependent measures of self‐defence comprehension included verdict delivery, multiple‐choice (recognition), paraphrasing (recall) and novel scenarios (transfer). Law students performed better on self‐defence comprehension tests than novices in the audio‐only conditions. The audio‐visual format significantly enhanced novices' comprehension, with their comprehension scores matching those of law students. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Tracing trajectories of audio‐visual learning in the infant brain

Although infants begin learning about their environment before they are born, little is known about how the infant brain changes during learning. Here, we take the initial steps in documenting how the neural responses in the brain change as infants learn to associate audio and visual stimuli. Using functional near‐infrared spectroscopy (fNRIS) to record hemodynamic responses in the infant cortex (temporal, occipital, and frontal cortex), we find that across the infant brain, learning is characterized by an increase in activation followed by a decrease. We take this U‐shaped response as evidence of repetition enhancement during early stages of learning and repetition suppression during later stages, a result that mirrors the Hunter and Ames model of infant visual preference. Furthermore, we find that the neural response to violations of the learned associations can be predicted by the shape of the learning curve in temporal and occipital cortex. These data provide the first look at the shape of the neural response during audio‐visual associative learning in infancy establishing that diverse regions of the infant brain exhibit systematic changes across the time‐course of learning.     

Individual differences in the acquisition of non‐linguistic audio‐visual associations in 5 year olds

Audio‐visual associative learning – at least when linguistic stimuli are employed – is known to rely on core linguistic skills such as phonological awareness. Here we ask whether this would also be the case in a task that does not manipulate linguistic information. Another question of interest is whether executive skills, often found to support learning, may play a larger role in a non‐linguistic audio‐visual associative task compared to a linguistic one. We present a new task that measures learning when having to associate non‐linguistic auditory signals with novel visual shapes. Importantly, our novel task shares with linguistic processes such as reading acquisition the need to associate sounds with arbitrary shapes. Yet, rather than phonemes or syllables, it uses novel environmental sounds – therefore limiting direct reliance on linguistic abilities. Five‐year‐old French‐speaking children (N = 76, 39 girls) were assessed individually in our novel audio‐visual associative task, as well as in a number of other cognitive tasks evaluating linguistic abilities and executive functions. We found phonological awareness and language comprehension to be related to scores in the audio‐visual associative task, while no correlation with executive functions was observed. These results underscore a key relation between foundational language competencies and audio‐visual associative learning, even in the absence of linguistic input in the associative task.     

Integration of visual information for saccade production

To foveate a visual target, subjects usually execute a primary hypometric saccade (S1) bringing the target in perifoveal vision, followed by a corrective saccade (S2) or by more than one S2. It is still debated to what extent these S2 are pre-programmed or dependent only on post-saccadic retinal error. To answer this question, we used a visually-triggered saccade task in which target position and target visibility were manipulated. In one-third of the trials, the target was slightly displaced at S1 onset (so-called double step paradigm) and was maintained until the end of S1, until the start of the first S2 or until the end of the trial. Experiments took place in two visual environments: in the dark and in a dimly lit room with a visible random square background. The results showed that S2 were less accurate for shortest target durations. The duration of post-saccadic visual integration thus appears as the main factor responsible for corrective saccade accuracy. We also found that the visual context modulates primary saccade accuracy, especially for the most hypometric subjects. These findings suggest that the saccadic system is sensitive to the visual properties of the environment and uses different strategies to maintain final gaze accuracy.     

Children's and adults' recall of children's news stories in both print and audio‐visual presentation modalities

Research into adults' recall from different presentation modalities has demonstrated a recall advantage for print over television yet recent research indicates that children remember television news better than print news. An experiment was conducted by comparing children's and adults' recall of children's news stories presented in two different modalities, television and print, in order to establish whether children's recall advantage for television is dependent on their age or level of reading proficiency. A sample of 40 adults, 40 13‐year‐olds and 40 11‐year‐olds were presented with children's news stories, either in their original televised form or in a print version. All participants were aware they would be tested for recall. The results of the cued recall test indicated that children from both age groups learned more from the television news than from the print versions, regardless of age or reading proficiency and that adults remembered equal amounts from both presentation modalities. For the 11‐year‐olds the advantage of television was only found for information that had been accompanied by redundant pictures in the televised version, providing support for the dual‐coding hypothesis. For 13‐year‐olds the recall of television was not dependent on the addition of redundant visual information. Viewers and readers were found to invest the same amounts of mental effort, but reported levels of invested mental effort were found to be dependent on age and level of reading proficiency. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Integration of information in visual search

Two experiments studied how information about the nontarget items in a visual search task is used for the control of the search. The first experiment used the detection of “hurdle” stimuli to demonstrate that efficient memory representations of the context items can be established within each particular trial. This finding is explained by a model for the short-term integration of context information. The second experiment which varied the complexity of the local but not the global context provided some information about the nature of the integration operations involved. In its final version the model postulates two stages of processing with independent mechanisms of integration. Spatial integration at the first stage deletes repetitions within small samples. Temporal integration at the second stage stores and primes the memory representations of the context items over larger intervals. It is assumed that transient temporal integration within trials is mediated by the same mechanism that underlies permanent temporal integration between trials.     

Strategies for spatial organization in adults and children

People have a tendency to organize space by extracting meaningful shapes from the configuration of elements. However, research on spatial correspondence in children suggests that when configural processing is difficult, individuation of elements may be critical. To begin to address the distinction between the use of configurations and individuation, and changes associated with age, we relied upon perceptual grouping and manipulated the colour of the displays—promoting either extraction of configural information (monochromatic) or individuation of elements (multicoloured). In a layout reproduction task (Experiments 1 and 2), children showed a robust advantage for multicoloured arrays, whereas adults showed an attenuated advantage for monochromatic displays. Visual discrimination in adults (Experiment 3) revealed that the influence of the display type occurs at the level of perception. Taken together, these results suggest that there are (at least) two routes to establishing spatial correspondence in arrays of elements, with differential dependence over development.     

Influence of vowel context on the audio‐visual speech perception of voiced stop consonants

The work reported here investigated whether the extent of McGurk effect differs according to the vowel context, and differs when cross‐modal vowels are matched or mismatched in Japanese. Two audio‐visual experiments were conducted to examine the process of audio‐visual phonetic‐feature extraction and integration. The first experiment was designed to compare the extent of the McGurk effect in Japanese in three different vowel contexts. The results indicated that the effect was largest in the /i/ context, moderate in the /a/ context, and almost nonexistent in the /u/ context. This suggests that the occurrence of McGurk effect depends on the characteristics of vowels and the visual cues from their articulation. The second experiment measured the McGurk effect in Japanese with cross‐modal matched and mismatched vowels, and showed that, except with the /u/ sound, the effect was larger when the vowels were matched than when they were mismatched. These results showed, again, that the extent of McGurk effect depends on vowel context and that auditory information processing before phonetic judgment plays an important role in cross‐modal feature integration.     

A psychophysical measure of visual and kinaesthetic spatial discriminative abilities of adults and children

Quantitative estimates of the spatial discriminative capacities of the visual and kinaesthetic systems in adults and children were obtained. Intersensory integration was investigated by including spatial discriminations based on congruent visual plus kinaesthetic reafference. The psychophysical method of adjustment was used with simultaneous comparisons of a fixed and a variable stimulus. The subject's task was to estimate when the variable stimulus (ellipse) was identical to the standard one (circle), under one of three modality conditions: vision, kinaesthesis, and vision plus kinaesthesis. After a pilot study with adults, children (aged 8, 10, and 12 years) and adults were both tested. Subjects from each age group were randomly allocated to each of the three experimental conditions. Results show that the visual and kinaesthetic estimates of the 8- and 10-year-old subjects did not differ significantly, but the visual responses of the adults and 12 year olds were significantly more accurate than corresponding kinaesthetic estimates. Bisensory estimates were significantly more accurate than visual responses only for the 8- and 10-year-old age groups. Intramodal comparisons showed the kinaesthetic estimates of the 8, 10, and 12 year olds to be significantly more accurate than the corresponding adult performance. Adult visual estimates were significantly more accurate than those made by 8 year olds, but were not significantly different from the visual responses of 10 and 12 year olds. Estimates based on bisensory reafference did not differ from each other across the four age groups. It is concluded that modality adeptness and dominance are task dependent and empirically determined rather than being innate properties of sensory systems. The data indicate that intersensory differentiation rather than integration occurs with maturity.     

Memory effects in visual spatial information processing

Eight, ten and twelve year old children were tested on a novel procedure involving the successive presentation of the standard and comparison stimuli. Two hypotheses were evaluated, one dealing with memory effects, and the other with children's pre-testing of choice responses in spatial information processing. It was found, in general, for both spatial perception and coordination of perspectives tasks, that there was no short memory decay for spatial information, but that opportunities to pre-test choice responses improved performance. It was inferred from these data that the performance superiority under simultaneous than successive conditions is attributable to opportunities to pre-test responses and not to memory effects, as opposed to successive conditions is attributable to opportunities to pre-test responses and not to memory effects.     

Undifferentiated facial electromyography responses to dynamic,audio‐visual emotion displays in individuals with autism spectrum disorders

We examined facial electromyography (fEMG) activity to dynamic, audio‐visual emotional displays in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and typically developing (TD) individuals. Participants viewed clips of happy, angry, and fearful displays that contained both facial expression and affective prosody while surface electrodes measured corrugator supercilli and zygomaticus major facial muscle activity. Across measures of average and peak activity, the TD group demonstrated emotion‐selective fEMG responding, with greater relative activation of the zygomatic to happy stimuli and greater relative activation of the corrugator to fearful stimuli. In contrast, the ASD group largely showed no significant differences between zygomatic and corrugator activity across these emotions. There were no group differences in the magnitude and timing of fEMG response in the muscle congruent to the stimuli. This evidence that fEMG responses in ASD are undifferentiated with respect to the valence of the stimulus is discussed in light of potential underlying neurobiological mechanisms.     

Integration of spatial information across vision and language

Three experiments investigated whether spatial information acquired from vision and language is maintained in distinct spatial representations on the basis of the input modality. Participants studied a visual and a verbal layout of objects at different times from either the same (Experiments 1 and 2) or different learning perspectives (Experiment 3) and then carried out a series of pointing judgments involving objects from the same or different layouts. Results from Experiments 1 and 2 indicated that participants pointed equally fast on within- and between-layout trials; coupled with verbal reports from participants, this result suggests that they integrated all locations in a single spatial representation during encoding. However, when learning took place from different perspectives in Experiment 3, participants were faster to respond to within- than between-layout trials and indicated that they kept separate representations during learning. Results are compared to those from similar studies that involved layouts learned from perception only.     

Path information effects in visual and proprioceptive spatial learning

Objects in an environment are often encountered sequentially during spatial learning, forming a path along which object locations are experienced. The present study investigated the effect of spatial information conveyed through the path in visual and proprioceptive learning of a room-sized spatial layout, exploring whether different modalities differentially depend on the integrity of the path. Learning object locations along a coherent path was compared with learning them in a spatially random manner. Path integrity had little effect on visual learning, whereas learning with the coherent path produced better memory performance than random order learning for proprioceptive learning. These results suggest that path information has differential effects in visual and proprioceptive spatial learning, perhaps due to a difference in the way one establishes a reference frame for representing relative locations of objects.     

The role of spatial and nonspatial information in visual selection

Even though it is undisputed that prior information regarding the location of a target affects visual selection, the issue of whether information regarding nonspatial features, such as color and shape, has similar effects has been a matter of debate since the early 1980s. In the study described in this article, measures derived from signal detection theory were used to show that perceptual sensitivity is affected by a top-down set for spatial information but not by a top-down set for nonspatial information. This indicates that knowing where the target singleton is affects perceptual selectivity but that knowing what it is does not help selectivity. Furthermore, perceptual sensitivity can be enhanced by nonspatial features, but only through a process related to bottom-up priming. These findings have important implications for models of visual selection.     

Long-term memory of haptic and visual information in older adults

ABSTRACT

The present study examined haptic and visual memory capacity for familiar objects through the application of an intentional free-recall task with three-time intervals in a sample of 78 healthy older adults without cognitive impairment. A wooden box and a turntable were used for the presentation of haptic and visual stimuli, respectively. The procedure consisted of two phases, a study phase that consisted of the presentation of stimuli, and a test phase (free-recall task) performed after one hour, one day or one week. The analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) indicated that there was a main effect only for the time intervals (F (2,71) = 12.511, p = .001, η² = 0.261), with a lower recall index for the interval of one week compared to the other intervals. We concluded that the memory capacity between the systems (haptic and visual) is similar for long retrieval intervals (hours to days).     

Visual-touch perceptual equivalence for shape information in children and adults

Although there has been substantial developmental research which has compared shape information processing performance under visual and touch conditions, there has been little work that bears on the shape attributes that are routinely employed, or on the similarity between shape attributes employed by adults and those employed by children. The present research was carried out to investigate the visual-touch perceptual equivalence of young children, using multidimensional scaling techniques, and to compare the visual and touch perceptual structures of this age group with those of adults. The results provide evidence for adult-like perceptions of shape among 6-year-olds, in terms of both the patterns of interstimulus similarities and the shape attributes attended to by children using each modality. In addition, it was found that children have somewhat more visual-touch perceptual equivalence than adults do.     

Customer‐induced stress in call centre work: A comparison of audio‐ and videoconference

Call centre work was simulated in an experiment with 96 experienced call centre agents. The experimental design comprised two factors. First, agents communicated with customers either via phone, pc‐videoconference or pc‐videoconference with additional instructions increasing time pressure. The second experimental factor varied customer behaviour: half of the customers were friendly whereas the other half were rude. Several indicators of strain (e.g. emotional dissonance, tiredness) were assessed by self‐reports. Moreover, the levels of immunoglobulin A (IgA) in salvia were determined at three sampling points and specific behaviours of agents (e.g. smiling to customers) were assessed using video data. It was found that unfriendly customer behaviour led to more strain and lower call performance than friendly customer behaviour. Inducing time pressure increased IgA‐levels and reduced talking‐time with customers. However, contrary to the expectations, the availability of video data did not enhance strain of agents. Instead, it was found that videoconferencing increased activation of agents if customers were friendly. Since higher levels of activation can counteract boredom and because customers often prefer to see their service providers, adding videoconference facilities in call centres seem to be a fruitful way of enriching routine call centre work.     

Rapid discrimination of visual patterns in children and adults

Rapid visual discrimination in children (9 to 11 yr.) and adults was investigated using two tasks in which the subject had to search for a target pattern embedded in 35 background patterns. The time available for inspecting the search arrays was altered by varying the stimulus duration. In one task, there was a large difference in the feature or 'texton' content of patterns between the target and the background; in the other, this difference was small. In the first task, the children could detect the target pattern in a briefly flashed search array with high accuracy, because the target 'popped out' perceptually from the array, but in the second task the same detection rate was not reached until the stimulus duration was much longer, since a serial searching strategy was required. Results achieved by children and adults were similar. It seems that serial visual search is as efficient in children as in adults.     

Sources of visual field interference in children and adults

Subjects at three grade levels, third, sixth, and college (8, 11, and 20 years of age, respectively), were asked to identify briefly presented words accompanied by either words or letter strings in the same or opposite hemifield. Results indicated two sources of visual field interference, one relating to the presence of alphanumeric information elsewhere in the visual field and the second concerning the meaningfulness (lexical identity) of that information. The former showed a decrease in importance with age, and the latter an increase. Results were discussed in terms of the development of selective attention and hemispheric interaction.