Words in a sentence become less accessible when an anaphor is resolved

A noun that identifies an entity in a discourse becomes less accessible following an anaphoric reference to another entity. The phenomenon cannot be attributed to ad hoc strategies, memory decay, or context checking. It occurs for both common and proper nouns and for nouns that identify both characters and inanimate objects. It is stronger for nouns that identify important entities, as opposed to more peripheral ones.     

Comparison of brain mechanisms underlying the processing of Chinese characters and pseudo-characters: an event-related potential study

Most Chinese characters are composed of a semantic radical on the left and a phonetic radical on the right. The semantic radical provides the semantic information; the phonetic radical provides information concerning the pronunciation of the whole character. The pseudo‐characters in the study consisted of different sub‐lexical parts of real Chinese characters and consequently they also had the semantic radical and the phonetic radical. But they were not readable and had no actual meaning. In order to investigate the spatiotemporal cortical activation patterns underlying the orthographic, phonological and semantic processing of Chinese characters, we used event‐related brain potentials (ERPs) to explore the processing of Chinese characters and pseudo‐characters when 14 healthy Chinese college students viewed the characters passively. Results showed that both Chinese characters and pseudo‐characters elicited an evident negative potential peaking around 120 ms (N120), which appeared to reflect initial orthographic distinction and evaluation. Then, Chinese pseudo‐characters elicited a more positive ERP deflection (P220) than did Chinese characters 200–250 ms after onset of the stimuli. It was similar to the recognition potential (RP) and might reflect the integration processes of phonological and semantic processing on the basis of early orthographic information. Dipole source analysis of the difference wave (pseudo‐characters minus characters) indicated that a generator localized in the left temporal‐occipital junction contributed to this effect, which was possibly related to phonological and perceptual–semantic information integration. Between 350–450 ms, a greater negativity (N360) in pseudo‐characters as compared to characters was found over midline fronto‐central scalp regions. Dipole analysis localized the generator of N360 in the right parahippocampal cortex. Therefore, the N360 might be an N400 component and reflect the higher‐level semantic activation on the basis of orthographic, phonological and perceptual–semantic processing.     

Perceptions of sexual harassment in an academic context

This study assessed the influence of two subject variables, gender and gender role, and one contextual variable, power of the harasser, on perceptions of sexual harassment in an academic context. Fifty-one white males and 73 white females evaluated a series of vignettes depicting a range of behavioral interactions. When the harasser was a higher power individual, vignettes were more likely to be viewed as examples of sexual harassment, male characters were perceived more negatively, and female characters were perceived more favorably. Female respondents rated the male characters less favorably than did the male respondents, although there were no gender differences in the number of vignettes interpreted as sexual harassment. Subtle differences in the way males and females interpret harassment behaviors are examined and discussed.Portions of this paper were presented at the meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association, Boston, Massachusetts, April 1992.     

Unveiling the reasoning processes of robots through introspective dialogues in a storytelling system: A study on the elicited empathy

The work studies the empathy elicited by a storytelling system in which the characters in the story are interpreted by humanoid robots and modelled as cognitive agents. The ACT-R architecture is exploited to shape the characters’ personalities and equip them with knowledge and behaviours typical of social practices. The narration is enriched with gestures and emotional expressions obtained by setting parameters that can be correlated to some emotions, such as the pitch and speech rate, the LEDs colour and the head inclination. The system has been evaluated by comparing a simple narrative modality with an enhanced one, where an introspective dialogue is adopted to explain and let transparent the internal reasoning processes of the characters. The obtained results show that storytelling affected the cognitive component of empathy, especially through the advanced narrative mode.     

Interactive braille output for blind computer users

Blind readers were tested using two methods of reading text displayed by an Apple microcomputer. The first method employed an Optacon system, a device that displays tactile representations of single characters, and the second used an interactive single electronic braille cell that displayed grade 1 braille characters. The results demonstrated no difference in accuracy or reading speed between these two methods. Thus, the serial presentation of braille characters at a single position appears to be a viable method of information transfer between computers and braille readers.     

An early electrophysiological response associated with expertise in letter perception

Expertise with print is likely to optimize visual processes for recognizing characters of a familiar writing system. Although brain activations have been identified for words and letter strings in contrast with other stimuli, relatively little work has focused on the neural basis of single-letter perception. English readers and Chinese-English bilinguals participated in an ERP study and performed a 1-back identity judgment on Roman letters, Chinese characters, pseudofonts, and their string versions. The Chinese-English bilinguals showed an enhanced N170 for both Roman letters and Chinese characters relative to pseudofonts. For the non-Chinese readers, the N170 amplitude was larger for Roman letters relative to Chinese characters and pseudofonts. Our results suggest that changes in relatively early visual processes underlie expert letter perception.     

Attentional capture triggers an attentional blink

Two experiments examined the possibility that attention directed to a distractor during rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) can produce an attentional blink (AB). A to-be-ignored distractor (D1) preceded a target word (T2) by a variable lag in RSVP streams of black false-font distractors. D1 was highlighted by color and was a word, a string of consonants, a string of digits, or a string of false-font characters. Recall of T2 was significantly suppressed at short D1-T2 lags (the AB) but only when D1 contained letters; the AB was completely absent when D1 was composed of digits or false-font characters. Thus, the AB can be triggered by a highlighted distractor if the distractor shares features with a target.     

Empirical study of Kanji as archetypal images: understanding the collective unconscious as part of the Japanese language

Chinese characters originated as a semiotic system independent from spoken language and in the Japanese language they function non-phonetically with speakers exhibiting right-hemispheric advantage in their processing. We tested the hypothesis that Chinese characters are archetypal images and therefore part of our collective unconscious memory. Our study builds on the first empirical study of archetypal memory of Rosen et al. (1991) which demonstrated that archetypal symbols presented matched with their correct meaning were better learned and recalled. In a series of three experiments we used 40 Chinese characters instead of the archetypal symbols used by Rosen, et al. (1991). The results provided empirical evidence that Chinese characters matched with their correct meaning were significantly better recalled than the ones that were mismatched. Thus, we demonstrated that there appears to be unconscious knowledge of the meaning of the Chinese characters which was triggered as a result of priming when the characters were correctly matched with their meaning. On this basis, we suggest that Chinese characters exhibit the same cognitive qualities as archetypal symbols. Thus, in the Japanese language an archetypal image is integrated non-phonetically into the system of language and signifies the concept independent from the phonetic signifier and is equal to it.     

Orthographic combinability and phonological consistency effects in reading Chinese phonograms: an event-related potential study

In this study, event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to trace the temporal dynamics of phonological consistency and phonetic combinability in the reading of Chinese phonograms. The data showed a significant consistency-by-combinability interaction at N170. High phonetic combinability characters elicited greater negativity at N170 than did low phonetic combinability characters, and the combinability effect was only found in the reading of high consistency characters. The results support the phonological mapping hypothesis of the reading-related N170 effect and suggest that the earlier stages of visual word recognition are shaped by the mapping of orthography to phonology even in Chinese. Moreover, our data revealed both consistency and combinability effects at P200 and N400, accounted for by the two-stage framework for visual word recognition. That is, characters with high combinability or high consistency facilitated the earlier stages of orthographic or phonological processing which were due to increased activation at the perceptual level; consequently, less positive P200 was demonstrated. In the later stages, high combinability or high consistency characters were associated with a larger semantic neighborhood, which increased semantic competition and exaggerated the N400 effect. These data support the assumption of radical-based inputs proposed by the lexical constituent model. However, the phonetic consistency effects found at N170 and P200 cannot be reconciled with the current framework of the lexical constituent model. A possible revision will be discussed.     

Children's performance on a false-belief task is impaired by activation of an evolutionarily-canalized response system

We examine whether children's performance on a false-belief task is impaired by task content that activates an early-developing, prepotent motivational system: predator-avoidance. In two studies (N = 46 and N = 37), children aged 3-4 years completed variants of a false-belief task that involved predator-avoidance, playmate-avoidance, prey-seeking, and playmate-seeking, respectively. The proportion of correct answers on the playmate-avoidance task (Study 1: 52%; Study 2: 51%) was significantly greater than the proportion of correct answers on the analogous predator-avoidance task (Study 1: 28%; Study 2: 22%). This difference was not an artifact of children generally performing better on playmate stories than on predator-prey stories. The findings are consistent with the hypothesis that activation of the predator-avoidance system generates prepotent response patterns that pre-empt full consideration of the mental states of the prey characters in false-belief stories.     

Letter processing in the visual system: different activation patterns for single letters and strings

One would expect that a lifetime of experience recognizing letters would have an important influence on the visual system. Surprisingly, there is limited evidence of a specific neural response to letters over visual control stimuli. We measured brain activation during a sequential matching task using isolated characters (Roman letters, digits, and Chinese characters) and strings of characters. We localized the visual word form area (VWFA) by contrasting the response to pseudowords against that for letter strings, but this region did not show any other sign of visual specialization for letters. In addition, a left fusiform area posterior to the VWFA was selective for letter strings, whereas a more anterior left fusiform region showed selectivity for single letters. The results of different analyses using both large regions of interest and inspections of individual patterns of response reveal a dissociation between selectivity for letter strings and selectivity for single letters. The results suggest that reading experience fine-tunes visual representations at different levels of processing. An important conclusion is that the processing of nonpronounceable letter strings cannot be assumed to be equivalent to single-letter perception.     

Dynamic presentation of magnified graphical characters on the IBM-compatible computers

Software that provides extremely smooth gliding and scrolling of magnified characters and pictograms on standard PCs is described. The program was designed as a tool for reading research, as a computer aid for visually impaired readers, and as a subtitle generator for multimedia applications. Change of font, size of characters, speed, color, and direction of movement can be made interactively. The system is useful for reading remediation and for creation of various visual effects.     

Short-term memory for Chinese characters and radicals

Short-term memory for Chinese radicals and characters, varying in orthographic complexity, frequency, and—for radicals—intercharacter frequency (the number of compound characters that contain the radical), was studied using an immediate free-recall task. When radicals or characters are relatively frequent, so that their pronunciations are well known by literate Chinese, they seem to be maintained in verbal form in short-term memory. For these stimuli, intercharacter frequency and complexity have relatively small influences on memory span. Stimuli low in frequency, with pronunciations that are not apt to be known, seem to be maintained in visual form in short-term memory. Memory span is much smaller for these stimuli and is influenced by both intercharacter frequency and complexity. Furthermore, short-term memory for relatively high-frequency characters is interfered with more by a verbal than by a visual intervening task, whereas the opposite is true for low-frequency characters.     

Lexical decomposition of complex Kanji characters in Japanese readers

Summary The study investigates the question whether during recognition of a complex Kanji character readers also access the meaning of opaque components of the character. The experiment used a speeded semantic-categorization task of two characters, in which readers were requested to decide whether two characters represented words related in meaning or not. The control pairs consisted of (a) graphically similar, but semantically unrelated, characters, and (b) a simple character and a complex character, of which the simple character was a component (part-whole relation), the two characters being again semantically unrelated. The critical pairs consisted of two characters unrelated in meaning, one of which contained an opaque component element related in meaning to the other character. A corresponding trial with English and its alphabetic system would be to ask a subject to decide whether boycott is related in meaning to girl or not. In this condition the subject is expected to give a No response, but if the pseudocomponent boy is activated, interference could occur. (If boy is recovered during recognition of the pseudocompound boycott, the appropriate No response for boycott-girl could become more difficult to take.) The result of the experiment indicated interference in all three conditions (graphically similar characters, part-whole related characters, and opaque-component related characters. Thus, in an analogous task with alphabetic material, it would be more difficult to say No about the existence of a semantic relation between (a) tree and free, (b) boy and boycott, and (c) boycott and girl. The last result can be interpreted as offering evidence for the activation of the opaque component upon recognition of the complex character.This account is somewhat oversimplified. It is not always easy to determine which is a radical in a complex character. A higher radical can in fact be a combination of a lower radical with the addition of one or more strokes.     

汉字:国人释梦实践的本土化面向

汉字释梦是根据梦像的视觉形象构造,寻找书写结构与其相对应的汉字,再依于汉字的本义把握梦的意义。首先依据现代心理学探讨传统梦学中汉字释梦的思想;然后对汉字释梦的可行性进行深入分析,认为梦和汉字都以表意为首要目的,都采取象形的表达方式,进而提出汉字释梦的操作思路;最后结合案例展现了汉字释梦在实践中的应用。     

THE DIMENSIONAL STRUCTURE OF CHILDREN'S PERCEPTIONS OF TELEVISION CHARACTERS: A REPLICATION

This study was an attempt to replicate and extend the findings of previous research which explored the cognitive dimensions used by children to differentiate television characters. Results indicate that humor remains the primary attribute that children use to differentiate television characters, although this characteristic does not seem to be important in children's modeling decisions. Attractiveness and activity remain secondary attributes but also discriminate between male and female children in predicting identification with the characters. These findings are similar to those of the original study. Sex represents an additional important attribute for both sexes in differentiating the characters but is important only for female decisions about which characters are appropriate role models.     

浅析信息接受者认知调节在组织沟通中的作用

组织沟通是实现组织目标的基础,组织沟通效果受沟通要素、组织结构、个人因素以及组织文化和社会环境等众多因素的影响,而信息接受者的认知调节作用在沟通过程中起重要作用,决定着沟通有效的程度。本文旨在为今后研究沟通效果的改善策略提供依据。     

Activation of face expertise and the inversion effect

We used a contextual priming paradigm to examine top-down influences on the face-inversion effect. Adult participants were primed with either faces or Chinese characters and then tested on ambiguous figures that could be perceived as either faces or Chinese characters, dependent on the priming condition. The ambiguous figures differed from one another in their configural information, which is crucial for processing faces but not Chinese characters. The inversion effect was observed in the face-priming condition, but not in the character-priming condition. The present results provide the first direct evidence that top-down activation of the face-processing expertise system plays a crucial role in the face-inversion effect.