听障学生汉语唇读面部加工方式的差异：来自眼动的证据

为探讨高低唇读理解能力听障学生唇读面部加工方式的差异,研究采用视频—图片匹配范式并结合眼动技术,考察高低唇读能力组语前-语中-语后和整体面部加工方式。结果发现,虽然两组都表现出社会协调模式,但高唇读能力组社会协调分数更高,且眼部维持时间更长。表明高唇读能力者整体加工和眼部、口形并行加工能力强,支持凝视假说和社会协调模式;低唇读能力者整体加工效率低,更依赖口形,未能通过补偿策略获得良好的补偿效果。     

Investigating individual differences in children's real-time sentence comprehension using language-mediated eye movements

Individual differences in children's online language processing were explored by monitoring their eye movements to objects in a visual scene as they listened to spoken sentences. Eleven skilled and 11 less-skilled comprehenders were presented with sentences containing verbs that were either neutral with respect to the visual context (e.g., Jane watched her mother choose the cake, where all of the objects in the scene were choosable) or supportive (e.g., Jane watched her mother eat the cake, where the cake was the only edible object). On hearing the supportive verb, the children made fast anticipatory eye movements to the target object (e.g., the cake), suggesting that children extract information from the language they hear and use this to direct ongoing processing. Less-skilled comprehenders did not differ from controls in the speed of their anticipatory eye movements, suggesting normal sensitivity to linguistic constraints. However, less-skilled comprehenders made a greater number of fixations to target objects, and these fixations were of a duration shorter than those observed in the skilled comprehenders, especially in the supportive condition. This pattern of results is discussed in terms of possible processing limitations, including difficulties with memory, attention, or suppressing irrelevant information.     

"The W and M are mixing me up": use of a visual code in verbal short-term memory tasks

When normal participants are presented with written verbal short-term memory tasks (e.g., remembering a set of letters for immediate spoken recall) there is evidence to suggest that the information is re-coded into phonological form. This paper presents a single case study of MJK whose reading follows the pattern of phonological dyslexia. In short-term memory tasks MJK does not phonologically re-code written materials but, it is argued, uses a visual code. There are three main lines of evidence for this, (a) MJK tends to substitute visually similar items for one another, (b) her performance is better with visual than auditory stimuli, and (c) she is able to remember numbers (e.g., 8) better than written words (e.g., eight). Investigation of short-term memory in others with phonological dyslexia is warranted.     

Does a visual reference help ballet dancers turn more successfully?

In dance, performing multiple rotations around the longitudinal axis is a complex task that can only be accomplished proficiently by highly skilled dancers. However, this extraordinary skill has been investigated sparsely. The few studies to date have focused on the biomechanical analysis of ballet rotations. However, none have investigated the influence of visual information on continuous rotations, such as Fouettés or à la Seconde turns. Therefore, the present study aims to examine the role of a visual reference on balance control and the dance-specific head coordination – spotting – during turning performance of highly skilled ballet dancers. To this end, 12 participants performed 12 Fouettés (females) or à la Seconde turns (males) with and without a visual reference. As dependent measures, we analysed balance control (i.e., supporting foot path length), spotting duration, head isolation, and orientation (i.e., deviation of pelvis from the front). A linear mixed model was performed to analyse the influence of the visual conditions overall and over the continued performance of 12 consecutive rotations. The results revealed that overall, path length was significantly smaller in the condition without a visual reference. Spotting duration and head isolation did not differ significantly between conditions. Moreover, dancers oriented themselves better towards the front in the condition with a visual reference. When looking closer into the progression of performance over each consecutive rotation, highly skilled ballet dancers significantly decreased the supporting foot path length, and improved orientation when turning with a visual reference. On the other hand, without a visual reference, the dancers increased the spotting duration over time. Additionally, dancers increased head isolation towards the end of the turns in both conditions. These findings suggest that a visual reference helps ballet dancers sustain performance of consecutive rotations, mainly in optimising balance control and orientation. Thus, the more rotations a ballet dancer must turn, the more relevant a visual reference becomes for sustaining successful performance.     

Role of speechreading in audiovisual interactions during the recovery of speech comprehension in deaf adults with cochlear implants

Speechreading is an important form of communicative activity that improves social adaptation in deaf adults. Cochlear implantation allows interaction between the visual speechreading abilities developed during deafness and the auditory sensory experiences acquired through use of the cochlear implant. Crude auditory information provided by the implant is analyzed in parallel with conjectural information from speechreading, thus creating new profiles of audiovisual integration with implications for brain plasticity. Understanding the peculiarities of change in speechreading after cochlear implantation may improve our understanding of brain plasticity and provide useful information for functional rehabilitation of implanted patients. In this article, we present a generalized review of our recent studies and indicate perspectives for further research in this domain.     

Visual speech processing: Word-decoding and word-discrimination related to sentence-based speechreading and hearing-impairment

Two aspects of visual speech processing in speechreading (word decoding and word discrimination) were tested in a group of 24 normal hearing and a group of 20 hearing-impaired subjects. Word decoding and word discrimination performance were independent of factors related to the impairment, both in a quantitative and a qualitative sense. Decoding skill, but not discrimination skill, was associated with sentence-based speechreading. The results were interpreted such that, in order to represent a critical component process in sentence-based speechreading, the visual speech perception task must entail lexically induced processing as a task-demand. The theoretical status of the word decoding task as one operationalization of a speech decoding module was discussed (Fodor, 1983). An error analysis of performance in the word decoding/discrimination tasks suggested that the perception of heard stimuli, as well as the perception of lipped stimuli, were critically dependent on the same features; that is, the temporally initial phonetic segment of the word (cf. Marslen-Wilson, 1987). Implications for a theory of visual speech perception were discussed.     

The role of attention in one-handed catching

The present study investigated the contribution of attention to one-handed catching success. A group of skilled (n = 8) and less skilled (n = 9) male subjects were compared in their ability to process secondary task information while executing a primary one-handed catching task. On 40% of the trials, a secondary visual stimulus (SVS) was presented in the peripheral visual field at predetermined times during the flight of the ball. On these trials, the subject was required to complete the one-handed catch and immediately throw the ball at a stationary target. Less skilled subjects made significantly more catching errors under both normal viewing and dual-task processing conditions. The differences were due to errors of positioning rather than grasping. Positioning of the hand appears to require visual attention regardless of skill level, as both skill groups experienced increased difficulty processing secondary task information as the ball approached the catching hand.     

The role of the brain's frontal eye fields in constructing frame of reference

Establishing contextual reference during discourse is a vital part of language function. Personal pronouns (e.g., he/she/it) are used to refer to previously experienced objects, utterances and events. These items, however, are often no longer present in the environment and have to be maintained and manipulated in working memory (WM). One aspect of this is the construction of a spatial frame of reference (e.g., "He was in front of it" where "he" is established as figure and "it" is the ground). The WM processes underlying this function may be different from those involved in establishing a non-spatial relation (e.g., "He was older than her"). The brain's frontal eye fields (FEFs), responsible for eye movement control, are known to be involved in processing spatial WM. This paper reviews both functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments and a subsequent behavioral interference study demonstrating a specific role for the FEFs and the brain's eye movement control system in manipulation of WM content for establishing object-centered spatial reference frames during verbally cued recall of recent visual and linguistic experiences.     

Speechreading skill and visual movement sensitivity are related in deaf speechreaders

Individual speechreading abilities have been linked with a range of cognitive and language-processing factors. The role of specifically visual abilities in relation to the processing of visible speech is less studied. Here we report that the detection of coherent visible motion in random-dot kinematogram displays is related to speechreading skill in deaf, but not in hearing, speechreaders. A control task requiring the detection of visual form showed no such relationship. Additionally, people born deaf were better speechreaders than hearing people on a new test of silent speechreading.     

Using reinforcement learning to understand the emergence of "intelligent" eye-movement behavior during reading

The eye movements of skilled readers are typically very regular (K. Rayner, 1998). This regularity may arise as a result of the perceptual, cognitive, and motor limitations of the reader (e.g., limited visual acuity) and the inherent constraints of the task (e.g., identifying the words in their correct order). To examine this hypothesis, reinforcement learning was used to allow an artificial "agent" to learn to move its eyes to read as efficiently as possible. The resulting patterns of simulated eye movements resembled those of skilled readers and suggest that important aspects of eye-movement behavior might emerge as a consequence of satisfying the constraints that are imposed on readers. These results also suggest novel interpretations of some contentious empirical results, such as the fixation duration costs associated with word skipping (R. Kliegl & R. Engbert, 2005), and theoretical assumptions, for example the familiarity check in the E-Z Reader model of eye-movement control (E. D. Reichle, A. Pollatsek, D. L. Fisher, & K. Rayner, 1998).     

Attentional control in the aging brain: insights from an fMRI study of the stroop task

Several recent studies of aging and cognition have attributed decreases in the efficiency of working memory processes to possible declines in attentional control, the mechanism(s) by which the brain attempts to limit its processing to that of task-relevant information. Here we used fMRI measures of neural activity during performance of the color-word Stroop task to compare the neural substrates of attentional control in younger (ages: 21-27 years old) and older participants (ages: 60-75 years old) during conditions of both increased competition (incongruent and congruent neutral) and increased conflict (incongruent and congruent neutral). We found evidence of age-related decreases in the responsiveness of structures thought to support attentional control (e.g., dorsolateral prefrontal and parietal cortices), suggesting possible impairments in the implementation of attentional control in older participants. Consistent with this notion, older participants exhibited more extensive activation of ventral visual processing regions (i.e., temporal cortex) and anterior inferior prefrontal cortices, reflecting a decreased ability to inhibit the processing of task-irrelevant information. Also, the anterior cingulate cortex, a region involved in evaluatory processes at the level of response (e.g., detecting potential for error), showed age-related increases in its sensitivity to the presence of competing color information. These findings are discussed in terms of newly emerging models of attentional control in the human brain.     

Experience and backswing movement time variability : A short note concerning a serendipitous observation

Decreased variability of both response outcome and movement kinematics is generally thought to be a characteristic of skilled performance. This note reports an apparently paradoxical case in which expertise is associated with greater variability of an aspect of movement kinematics. The relative variability of backswing and downswing duration (standard deviation as a percent of movement time) was assessed for experienced and novice field hockey players performing a drive of an approaching ball. The experienced group exhibited higher relative variability of backswing duration than the novice group. It is argued that this variability is functional (in the sense that greater backswing duration variability is associated with superior task performance) and may result from the joint effects of players visually controlling movement during its execution (Bootsma 1988) and the experienced subjects' earlier pick-up of relevant information for visual control (cf. Abernethy and Russell 1987).     

The influence of action video game playing on eye movement behaviour during visual search in abstract,in-game and natural scenes

Action game playing has been associated with several improvements in visual attention tasks. However, it is not clear how such changes might influence the way we overtly select information from our visual world (i.e. eye movements). We examined whether action-video-game training changed eye movement behaviour in a series of visual search tasks including conjunctive search (relatively abstracted from natural behaviour), game-related search, and more naturalistic scene search. Forty nongamers were trained in either an action first-person shooter game or a card game (control) for 10 hours. As a further control, we recorded eye movements of 20 experienced action gamers on the same tasks. The results did not show any change in duration of fixations or saccade amplitude either from before to after the training or between all nongamers (pretraining) and experienced action gamers. However, we observed a change in search strategy, reflected by a reduction in the vertical distribution of fixations for the game-related search task in the action-game-trained group. This might suggest learning the likely distribution of targets. In other words, game training only skilled participants to search game images for targets important to the game, with no indication of transfer to the more natural scene search. Taken together, these results suggest no modification in overt allocation of attention. Either the skills that can be trained with action gaming are not powerful enough to influence information selection through eye movements, or action-game-learned skills are not used when deciding where to move the eyes.     

Spatial coding in the processing of anaphor by good and poor readers: Evidence from eye movement analyses

An experiment that examined the way in which young readers deployed eye movements while reading sentences and while answering questions containing either a pronominal or noun anaphor is reported. To evaluate the possible causal role played by differences in inspection strategies between readers of above- and below-average reading skill, a third“age control” group of younger children was also tested. This group was matched on absolute reading ability with the less skilled group of older children, and on relative reading ability (i.e. reading quotient) with the more skilled group. Differences in inspection strategy were apparent between the groups of good and poor readers. Good readers launched more selective reinspections, whereas the poorer readers were more inclined to engage in“backtracking” and appeared to make less use of the displayed text. In every case there was a marked similarity in the behaviour of the good readers and the“age controls”. These results suggest that the ability to code the spatial location of words in a sentence, and, where necessary, to use this information to launch accurately targetted selective reinspections of previously read text, plays a crucial role in the development of skilled reading performance.     

Early experience of Cued Speech enhances speechreading performance in deaf

It is known that deaf individuals usually outperform normal hearing subjects in speechreading; however, the underlying reasons remain unclear. In the present study, speechreading performance was assessed in normal hearing participants (NH), deaf participants who had been exposed to the Cued Speech (CS) system early and intensively, and deaf participants exposed to oral language without Cued Speech (NCS). Results show a gradation in performance with highest performance in CS, then in NCS, and finally NH participants. Moreover, error analysis suggests that speechreading processing is more accurate in the CS group than in the other groups. Given that early and intensive CS has been shown to promote development of accurate phonological processing, we propose that the higher speechreading results in Cued Speech users are linked to a better capacity in phonological decoding of visual articulators.     

La perception multisource : une nouvelle approche de la perception de scènes

Research conducted these last years in the field of spatial cognition report empirical findings that are difficult to account for with the traditional visual cognitive model of scene perception. One of the major contributions of these findings has been to invite rethinking scene perception, which would benefit from not being apprehended as centered mainly on the sensory modality considered. On the contrary, the Multisource model of scene perception developed by Intraub et al. offers an alternative theoretical framework considering visual perception as an act of spatial cognition, with spatial information at its core. According to this model, during the initial understanding of a view, the cognitive system would be elaborating a multisource representation, with spatial information constituting an egocentric framework that conveys to the observer a sense of the environment in which he/she is embedded. Scene representation would be organized around an amodal spatial structure combining different sources of information: a bottom-up and external source of information derived from different modalities (e.g., visual, haptic), as well as internal sources of high-level information (i.e., amodal, conceptual and contextual information). These different sources of information would work together to create a simulation of the likely environment, integrating the perceived view into a broader spatial context. Beyond rethinking scene perception, one of the advances of the model is to unify different fields of cognition apprehended until then in isolation. The current paper aims to present this model and some of the results it allows to account for.     

Stroboscopic visual training improves information encoding in short-term memory

The visual system has developed to transform an undifferentiated and continuous flow of information into discrete and manageable representations, and this ability rests primarily on the uninterrupted nature of the input. Here we explore the impact of altering how visual information is accumulated over time by assessing how intermittent vision influences memory retention. Previous work has shown that intermittent, or stroboscopic, visual training (i.e., practicing while only experiencing snapshots of vision) can enhance visual?Cmotor control and visual cognition, yet many questions remain unanswered about the mechanisms that are altered. In the present study, we used a partial-report memory paradigm to assess the possible changes in visual memory following training under stroboscopic conditions. In Experiment 1, the memory task was completed before and immediately after a training phase, wherein participants engaged in physical activities (e.g., playing catch) while wearing either specialized stroboscopic eyewear or transparent control eyewear. In Experiment 2, an additional group of participants underwent the same stroboscopic protocol but were delayed 24?h between training and assessment, so as to measure retention. In comparison to the control group, both stroboscopic groups (immediate and delayed retest) revealed enhanced retention of information in short-term memory, leading to better recall at longer stimulus-to-cue delays (640?C2,560?ms). These results demonstrate that training under stroboscopic conditions has the capacity to enhance some aspects of visual memory, that these faculties generalize beyond the specific tasks that were trained, and that trained improvements can be maintained for at least a day.     

Stroop-like interference in chess players' imagery: An unexplored possibility to be revealed by the adapted moving-spot task

Summary A group of highly skilled chess players and two control groups of subjects (nonskilled players and nonplayers) participated in a moving-spot task (cf. Attneave & Curlee, 1983). They had to move either a spot or one of several chess pieces within an imaginary grid according to instructions given by the experimenter (the imaginary motion of the imaginary object consisted of a quasirandom sequence of steps in the direction — up, right, left, or down). The general findings were as follows: (1) chess players' error rates were lower than those in the nonplayer group; (2) in a moving-spot condition there were no significant differences in the efficiency of skilled vs. nonskilled player groups; (3) in a moving chess-piece condition, ranges of spatial errors differed for chess-player and nonplayer groups, depending on the symbolic meaning of the chess pieces in the former group; (4) in a moving chess-piece condition we also found tendencies for Stroop-like interference in the group of skilled players (e. g., bishop moving illegally up, right, etc.); (5) all groups benefitted from the use of a checkerboard instead of an 8 × 8 grid as the imaginary spatial framework within which to move a piece; (6) thepost hoc analysis showed that the two small selected subgroups of subjects comprising those who used either pure visual strategy or pure chess-annotation strategy were susceptible to some Stroop-like interference and that the set of pieces with the highest incongruity of moves (bishop, knight) yielded higher error rates than the set of pieces that had congruity of moves (king, rook). Taken together, these results seem to indicate that visuospatial tasks like Attneave and Curlee's (1983) moving-spot task are performed neither on the basis of a static picture-in-the-head type of visual image, for which it is just the same whether one or another type of piece is imaginarily moved, nor on the basis of purely symbolic or propositional operations that bear no relation to the visual-configurational and spatial-localizational representations. Imagery seems to constitute a dynamicprocess of interplay between visuospatial and verbal-propositional codes.     

Identification of typographically transformed words: instance-based skill acquisition

Two hypotheses concerning the development of skill at identifying typographically transformed words were tested. One claim is that a general skill independent of specific training instances is involved, and the other is that skill is based on memory for the analysis of specific instances encountered during training. Contrary to the general skill view, a series of experiments demonstrated that transfer of word identification skill was highly specific and occurred only when training and test instances shared common letters printed in the same case (i.e., uppercase or lowercase). Transfer of skill also depended on the visual patterns formed by adjacent letters and word shape. Presentation of a word in training and test phases significantly improved test phase identification of that word even when a unique visual pattern was used. These results are compatible with an instance-based view of word identification skill in which it is assumed that subjects develop skilled analysis of the visual and conceptual characteristics of specific words, and that this skill can be used to identify repeatedly presented words as well as predictable sets of novel words.