Anticipatory looks reveal expectations about discourse relations

Previous research provides evidence for expectation-driven processing within sentences at phonological, lexical, and syntactic levels of linguistic structure. Less well-established is whether comprehenders also anticipate pragmatic relationships between sentences. To address this, we evaluate a unit of discourse structure that comprehenders must infer to hold between sentences in order for a discourse to make sense—the intersentential coherence relation. In a novel eyetracking paradigm, we trained participants to associate particular spatial locations with particular coherence relations. Experiment 1 shows that the subset of listeners who successfully acquired the location∼relation mappings during training subsequently looked to these locations during testing in response to a coherence–signaling intersentential connective. Experiment 2 finds that listeners’ looks during sentences containing coherence-biasing verbs reveal expectations about upcoming sentence types. This work extends existing research on prediction beyond sentence-internal structure and provides a new methodology for examining the cues that comprehenders use to establish relationships at the discourse level.     

Eight-year-olds,but not six-year-olds,perform just as well as adults when playing Concentration: Resolving the enigma?

Anecdotal reports suggest that children often outperform adults when playing Concentration. This is surprising as cognitive processes tend to develop progressively throughout childhood. To date, very few studies have examined this apparent paradox, and with mixed results. In the present study, the ability of 6-year-olds (n = 34), 8-year-olds (n = 48), and adults (n = 38) to play Concentration was examined in a controlled computer-based setup involving eye tracking. The main dependent variables were the number of moves and time in seconds to finish the first nine (out of 12) matching pairs. The results revealed that while 6-year-olds were outperformed by older children and adults, 8-year-olds performed just as well as adults. It is suggested that Concentration may represent a cognitive challenge rarely encountered in the real world, and when playing Concentration, adults seem to use strategies that are effective in real life situations, but may be less appropriate when playing the game.     

Updating in working memory: a comparison of good and poor comprehenders

In this research, we examined the relation between reading comprehension and success in a working memory updating task. We tested the hypotheses that poor comprehenders' deficiencies are associated with a specific difficulty in the working memory updating process, particularly in controlling for information that is no longer relevant. In the first experiment, groups of poor and good comprehenders, ages 8-11 years, were administered a working memory updating task. In the second experiment a year later, a subgroup of participants involved in the first experiment was tested with a different updating task. In both experiments, poor comprehenders had less accurate recall performance and made more intrusion errors than did good comprehenders. Moreover, distinguishing intrusion errors on the basis of their permanence in memory, we found that poor comprehenders were more likely to intrude items that were maintained longer in memory than were good comprehenders. This type of error predicted reading comprehension abilities better than did working memory recall. This suggests that the relation between reading comprehension and working memory is mediated by the ability to control for irrelevant information.     

Time-driven effects on parsing during reading

The phonological trace of perceived words starts fading away in short-term memory after a few seconds. Spoken utterances are usually 2-3 s long, possibly to allow the listener to parse the words into coherent prosodic phrases while they still have a clear representation. Results from this brain potential study suggest that even during silent reading, words are organized into 2-3 s long ‘implicit’ prosodic phrases. Participants read the same sentences word by word at different presentation rates. Clause-final words occurring at multiples of 2-3 s from sentence onset yielded increased positivity, irrespective of presentation rate. The effect was interpreted as a closure positive shift (CPS), reflecting insertion of implicit prosodic phrase boundaries every 2-3 s. Additionally, in participants with low working memory span, clauses over 3 s long produced a negativity, possibly indicating increased working memory load.     

The prosodic property of lexical stress affects eye movements during silent reading

The present study examined lexical stress in the context of silent reading by measuring eye movements. We asked whether lexical stress registers in the eye movement record and, if so, why. The study also tested the implicit prosody hypothesis, or the idea that readers construct a prosodic contour during silent reading. Participants read high and low frequency target words with one or two stressed syllables embedded in sentences. Lexical stress affected eye movements, such that words with two stressed syllables took longer to read and received more fixations than words with one stressed syllable. Findings offer empirical support for the implicit prosody hypothesis and suggest that stress assignment may be the completing phase of lexical access, at least in terms of eye movement control.     

Differentiating between verbal and spatial encoding using eye-movement recordings

Visual information processing is guided by an active mechanism generating saccadic eye movements to salient stimuli. Here we investigate the specific contribution of saccades to memory encoding of verbal and spatial properties in a serial recall task. In the first experiment, participants moved their eyes freely without specific instruction. We demonstrate the existence of qualitative differences in eye-movement strategies during verbal and spatial memory encoding. While verbal memory encoding was characterized by shifting the gaze to the to-be-encoded stimuli, saccadic activity was suppressed during spatial encoding. In the second experiment, participants were required to suppress saccades by fixating centrally during encoding or to make precise saccades onto the memory items. Active suppression of saccades had no effect on memory performance, but tracking the upcoming stimuli decreased memory performance dramatically in both tasks, indicating a resource bottleneck between display-controlled saccadic control and memory encoding. We conclude that optimized encoding strategies for verbal and spatial features are underlying memory performance in serial recall, but such strategies work on an involuntary level only and do not support memory encoding when they are explicitly required by the task.     

阅读理解中的预期推理

从工作记忆能力的个体差异的角度,探讨阅读描述日常生活事件的段落时预期推理过程的资源分配特点,及其与阅读焦点转移的关系。结果表明,（１）预期推理可以维持较长时间。（２）工作记忆能力强的被试进行预期推理的范围较广;而工作记忆能力较弱的被试推理范围较小。（３）工作记忆能力较弱者对每一个项目的激活量较大。（４）对于非常熟悉的事件,预期推理不受焦点转移的影响。     

Working memory in children with reading disabilities

This study investigated associations between working memory (measured by complex memory tasks) and both reading and mathematics abilities, as well as the possible mediating factors of fluid intelligence, verbal abilities, short-term memory (STM), and phonological awareness, in a sample of 46 6- to 11-year-olds with reading disabilities. As a whole, the sample was characterized by deficits in complex memory and visuospatial STM and by low IQ scores; language, phonological STM, and phonological awareness abilities fell in the low average range. Severity of reading difficulties within the sample was significantly associated with complex memory, language, and phonological awareness abilities, whereas poor mathematics abilities were linked with complex memory, phonological STM, and phonological awareness scores. These findings suggest that working memory skills indexed by complex memory tasks represent an important constraint on the acquisition of skill and knowledge in reading and mathematics. Possible mechanisms for the contribution of working memory to learning, and the implications for educational practice, are considered.     

How eye movements affect unpleasant memories: support for a working-memory account

Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing can reduce ratings of the vividness and emotionality of unpleasant memories-hence it is commonly used to treat posttraumatic stress disorder. The present experiments compared three accounts of how eye movements produce these benefits. Participants rated unpleasant autobiographical memories before and after eye movements or an eyes stationary control condition. In Experiment 1, eye movements produced benefits only when memories were held in mind during the movements, and eye movements increased arousal, contrary to an investigatory-reflex account. In Experiment 2, horizontal and vertical eye movements produced equivalent benefits, contrary to an interhemispheric-communication account. In Experiment 3, two other distractor tasks (auditory shadowing, drawing) produced benefits that were negatively correlated with working-memory capacity. These findings support a working-memory account of the eye movement benefits in which the central executive is taxed when a person performs a distractor task while attempting to hold a memory in mind.     

Differential constraints on the working memory and reading abilities of individuals with learning difficulties and typically developing children

This study examined the factors that constrain the working memory span performance and reading ability of individuals with generalized learning difficulties. In the study, 50 individuals with learning difficulties (LD) and 50 typically developing children (TD) matched for reading age completed two working memory span tasks. Participants also completed independent measures of the processing and storage operations involved in each working memory span task and Raven's Coloured Progressive Matrices. The results showed that despite an equivalent level of working memory span, the relative importance of the constraints on working memory differed between the groups. In addition, working memory span was not closely related to word recognition or sentence comprehension performance in the LD group. These results suggest that the working memory span performance of LD and TD individuals may reflect different working memory limitations and that individuals with generalized learning difficulties may approach cognitive tasks in a qualitatively different way from that of typically developing individuals.     

EMDR: eye movements superior to beeps in taxing working memory and reducing vividness of recollections

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is effectively treated with eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) with patients making eye movements during recall of traumatic memories. Many therapists have replaced eye movements with bilateral beeps, but there are no data on the effects of beeps. Experimental studies suggest that eye movements may be beneficial because they tax working memory, especially the central executive component, but the presence/degree of taxation has not been assessed directly. Using discrimination Reaction Time (RT) tasks, we found that eye movements slow down RTs to auditive cues (experiment I), but binaural beeps do not slow down RTs to visual cues (experiment II). In an arguably more sensitive “Random Interval Repetition” task using tactile stimulation, working memory taxation of beeps and eye movements were directly compared. RTs slowed down during beeps, but the effects were much stronger for eye movements (experiment III). The same pattern was observed in a memory experiment with healthy volunteers (experiment IV): vividness of negative memories was reduced after both beeps and eye movements, but effects were larger for eye movements. Findings support a working memory account of EMDR and suggest that effects of beeps on negative memories are inferior to those of eye movements.