Developmental Pragmatics in Normal and Abnormal Children

We propose a critical review of current theories of developmental pragmatics. The underlying assumption is that such a theory ought to account for both normal and abnormal development. From a clinical point of view, we are concerned with the effects of brain damage on the emergence of pragmatic competence. In particular, the paper deals with direct speech acts, indirect speech acts, irony, and deceit in children with head injury, closed head injury, hydrocephalus, focal brain damage, and autism. Since no single theory covers systematically the emergence of pragmatic capacity in normal children, it is not surprising that we have not found a systematic account of deficits in the communicative performance of brain injured children. In our view, the challenge for a pragmatic theory is the determination of the normal developmental pattern within which different pragmatic phenomena may find a precise role. Such a framework of normal behavior would then permit the systematic study of abnormal pragmatic development.     

Detecting deviations from metronomic timing in music: Effects of perceptual structure on the mental timekeeper

The detectability of a deviation from metronomic timing—of a small local increment in interonset interval (IOI) duration—in a musical excerpt is subject to positional biases, or “timing expectations,” that are closely related to the expressive timing (sequence of IOI durations) typically produced by musicians in performance (Repp, 1992b, 1998c, 1998d). Experiment 1 replicated this finding with some changes in procedure and showed that the perception-performance correlation is not the result of formal musical training or availability of a musical score. Experiments 2 and 3 used a synchronization task to examine the hypothesis that participants’ perceptual timing expectations are due to systematic modulations in the period of a mental timekeeper that also controls perceptual-motor coordination. Indeed, there was systematic variation in the asynchronies between taps and metronomically timed musical event onsets, and this variation was correlated both with the variations in IOI increment detectability (Experiment 1) and with the typical expressive timing pattern in performance. When the music contained local IOI increments (Experiment 2), they were almost perfectly compensated for on the next tap, regardless of their detectability in Experiment 1, which suggests a perceptual-motor feed-back mechanism that is sensitive to subthreshold timing deviations. Overall, the results suggest that aspects of perceived musical structure influence the predictions of mental timekeeping mechanisms, thereby creating a subliminal warping of experienced time.     

Further evidence for Coren and Hakstian’s “Methodological implications of interaural correlation: Count heads not ears” and an alternative correction formula

Coren and Hakstian (1990) identified a serious methodological problem that arises in auditory research because of interaural correlation. When measures from both ears of the subjects are pooled together in an experimental design that assumes independence of measures, there can be spuriously high apparent statistical significance. The present paper provides further evidence in support of Coren and Hakstian’s argument and also derives a formula that effectively corrects inflated test statistics resulting from interaural correlation. This formula is a special case of a more general one that applies in many other experimental contexts in which nonindependence of measures is a problem. We found that statistical tests based on our formula have somewhat greater power to detect differences than the kind of correction method advocated by Coren and Hakstian.     

How the brain understands intention: different neural circuits identify the componential features of motor and prior intentions

In this paper we present theoretical and experimental evidence for a set of mechanisms by which intention is understood. We propose that three basic aspects are involved in the understanding of intention. The first aspect to consider is intention recognition, i.e., the process by which we recognize other people's intentions, distinguishing among different types. The second aspect concerns the attribution of intention to its author: the existence of shared neural representations provides a parsimonious explanation of how we recognize other people's intentions (what they are doing), but in and of itself, is not sufficient to determine who the agent is. Once the intention has been recognized and attributed to an agent, the reasons for, and the aim of, the intention are to be considered. Hence, the third aspect concerns the aim-intention motivating the execution of a certain action. We discuss the neural basis of these three theoretical aspects suggesting a conceptual synthesis.     

The visual basis of category effects in object identification: evidence from the visual hemifield paradigm

The basis for the category specific living things advantage in object recognition (i.e., faster and more accurate identification of living compared to nonliving things) was investigated in two experiments. It was hypothesised that the global shape of living things on average provides more information about their basic level identity than the global shape of nonliving things. In two experiments subjects performed name-picture or picture-name verification tasks, in which blurred or clear images of living and nonliving things were presented in either the right or the left visual hemifield. With blurred images, recognition performance was worst for nonliving things presented to the right visual field/left hemisphere, indicating that the lack of visual detail in the stimulus combined with a left hemisphere bias toward processing high frequency visual elements proved detrimental for processing nonliving stimuli in this condition. In addition, an overall living things advantage was observed in both experiments. This advantage was considerably larger with blurred images than with clear. These results are compatible with the global shape hypothesis and converge with evidence using other paradigms.     

Association between burnout and anger in oncology versus ophthalmology health care professionals

The prevalence of burnout in oncology staff was compared with that of the ophthalmology staff, who normally present a low prevalence of burnout as described in this literature. The correlation of burnout with the emotion of anger was also investigated. Thirty-six subjects working in an oncology department and 32 working in an ophthalmology department were examined using the Maslach Burnout Inventory and the State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory. The oncology group showed higher mean scores on the MBI Emotive Exhaustion and Depersonalization scales with respect to ophthalmology staff. Correlation analysis showed that increasing burnout was associated with higher anger expressed towards the environment and loss of anger control. Anger, as a response to frustration, appears to be a feature constantly associated with the clinical expression of burnout and it should not be underestimated in theoretical and preventive contexts.     

Neuropragmatics: Extralinguistic pragmatic ability is better preserved in left-hemisphere-damaged patients than in right-hemisphere-damaged patients

The aim of the present study is to compare the pragmatic ability of right- and left-hemisphere-damaged patients excluding the possible interference of linguistic deficits. To this aim, we study extralinguistic communication, that is communication performed only through gestures. The Cognitive Pragmatics Theory provides the theoretical framework: it predicts a gradient of difficulty in the comprehension of different pragmatic phenomena, that should be valid independently of the use of language or gestures as communicative means. An experiment involving 10 healthy individuals, 10 right- and 9 left-hemisphere-damaged patients, shows that pragmatic performance is better preserved in left-hemisphere-damaged (LHD) patients than in right-hemisphere-damaged (RHD) patients.     

Faces are "spatial"--holistic face perception is supported by low spatial frequencies

Faces are perceived holistically, a phenomenon best illustrated when the processing of a face feature is affected by the other features. Here, the authors tested the hypothesis that the holistic perception of a face mainly relies on its low spatial frequencies. Holistic face perception was tested in two classical paradigms: the whole-part advantage (Experiment 1) and the composite face effect (Experiments 2-4). Holistic effects were equally large or larger for low-pass filtered faces as compared to full-spectrum faces and significantly larger than for high-pass filtered faces. The disproportionate composite effect found for low-pass filtered faces was not observed when holistic perception was disrupted by inversion (Experiment 3). Experiment 4 showed that the composite face effect was enhanced only for low spatial frequencies, but not for intermediate spatial frequencies known be critical for face recognition. These findings indicate that holistic face perception is largely supported by low spatial frequencies. They also suggest that holistic processing precedes the analysis of local features during face perception.     

The path of visual attention

Visual cuing is one paradigm often used to study object- and space-based visual selective attention. A primary finding is that shifts of attention within an object can be accomplished faster than equidistant shifts between objects. The present study used a visual cuing paradigm to examine how an object's size (i.e., internal distance) and shape, influences object- and space-based visual selective attention. The first two experiments manipulated object size and compared attentional shift performance with objects where the within-object distance between cued and uncued target locations was either equal to the between-object distance (1:1 ratio condition) or three times the between-object distance (3:1 ratio condition). Within-object shifts took longer for the larger objects, but an advantage over between-object shifts was still evident. Influences associated with the shapes of the larger objects suggested by the results of the first two experiments were tested and rejected in Experiment 3. Overall, the results indicate that within-object shifts of attention become slower as the within-object distance increases, but nevertheless are still accomplished faster than between-object shifts.     

Reduced Stroop interference for opponent colors may be due to input factors: evidence from individual differences and a neural network simulation

Sensory or input factors can influence the strength of interference in the classic Stroop color-word task. Specifically, in a single-trial computerized version of the Stroop task, when color-word pairs were incongruent, opponent color pairs (e.g., the word BLUE in yellow) showed reduced Stroop interference compared with nonopponent color pairs (e.g., BLUE in red). In addition, participants' color discrimination ability was measured by standard color vision tests (i.e., Farnsworth-Munsell 100-Hue Test and Ishihara plates). Error rates in the Farnsworth-Munsell test correlated positively with the amount of Stroop interference. Neural network simulations (variants of J. D. Cohen, K. Dunbar, & J. L. McClelland's, 1990, model) showed that only a distributed trichromatic input layer was able to simulate these findings. Thus, sensory input from the color system needs to be incorporated into current accounts of the Stroop effect.