Scrutinizing visual images: The role of gaze in mental imagery and memory

Gaze was monitored by use of an infrared remote eye-tracker during perception and imagery of geometric forms and figures of animals. Based on the idea that gaze prioritizes locations where features with high information content are visible, we hypothesized that eye fixations should focus on regions that contain one or more local features that are relevant for object recognition. Most importantly, we predicted that when observers looked at an empty screen and at the same time generated a detailed visual image of what they had previously seen, their gaze would probabilistically dwell within regions corresponding to the original positions of salient features or parts. Correlation analyses showed positive relations between gaze’s dwell time within locations visited during perception and those in which gaze dwelled during the imagery generation task. Moreover, the more faithful an observer’s gaze enactment, the more accurate was the observer’s memory, in a separate test, of the dimension or size in which the forms had been perceived. In another experiment, observers saw a series of pictures of animals and were requested to memorize them. They were then asked later, in a recall phase, to answer a question about a property of one of the encoded forms; it was found that, when retrieving from long-term memory a previously seen picture, gaze returned to the location of the part probed by the question. In another experimental condition, the observers were asked to maintain fixation away from the original location of the shape while thinking about the answer, so as to interfere with the gaze enactment process; such a manipulation resulted in measurable costs in the quality of memory. We conclude that the generation of mental images relies upon a process of enactment of gaze that can be beneficial to visual memory.     

Tracking Reading: Dual Task Costs of Oral Reading for Young Versus Older Adults

A digital pursuit rotor was used to monitor oral reading costs by time-locking tracking performance to the auditory wave form produced as young and older adults were reading out short paragraphs. Multilevel modeling was used to determine how paragraph-level predictors of length, grammatical complexity, and readability and person-level predictors such as speaker age or working memory capacity predicted reading and tracking performance. In addition, sentence-by-sentence variation in tracking performance was examined during the production of individual sentences and during the pauses before upcoming sentences. The results suggest that dual tasking has a greater impact on older adults’ reading comprehension and tracking performance. At the level of individual sentences, young and older adults adopt different strategies to deal with grammatically complex and propositionally dense sentences.     

Economic Consequences of Mispredicting Utility

In a simple conceptual framework, we organize a multitude of phenomena related to the (mis)prediction of utility. Consequences in terms of distorted choices and lower well-being emerge if people have to trade-off between alternatives that are characterized by attributes satisfying extrinsic desires and alternatives serving intrinsic needs. Thereby the neglect of asymmetries in adaptation is proposed as an important driver. The theoretical analysis is consistent with econometric evidence on commuting choice using data on subjective well-being. People show substantial adaptation to a higher labor income but not to commuting. This may account for the finding that people are not compensated for the burden of commuting.     

Uncovering Substantive Patterns in Student Responses in International Large-Scale Assessments—Comparing a Latent Class to a Manifest DIF Approach

In this study, we contrast results from two differential item functioning (DIF) approaches (manifest and latent class) by the number of items and sources of items identified as DIF using data from an international reading assessment. The latter approach yielded three latent classes, presenting evidence of heterogeneity in examinee response patterns. It also yielded more DIF items with larger effect sizes and more consistent item response patterns by substantive aspects (e.g., reading comprehension processes and cognitive complexity of items). Based on our findings, we suggest empirically evaluating the homogeneity assumption in international assessments because international populations cannot be assumed to have homogeneous item response patterns. Otherwise, differences in response patterns within these populations may be under-detected when conducting manifest DIF analyses. Detecting differences in item responses across international examinee populations has implications on the generalizability and meaningfulness of DIF findings as they apply to heterogeneous examinee subgroups.     

Conscious and unconscious processing of facial expressions: Evidence from two split‐brain patients

We investigated how the brain's hemispheres process explicit and implicit facial expressions in two ‘split‐brain’ patients (one with a complete and one with a partial anterior resection). Photographs of faces expressing positive, negative or neutral emotions were shown either centrally or bilaterally. The task consisted in judging the friendliness of each person in the photographs. Half of the photograph stimuli were ‘hybrid faces’, that is an amalgamation of filtered images which contained emotional information only in the low range of spatial frequency, blended to a neutral expression of the same individual in the rest of the spatial frequencies. The other half of the images contained unfiltered faces. With the hybrid faces the patients and a matched control group were more influenced in their social judgements by the emotional expression of the face shown in the left visual field (LVF). When the expressions were shown explicitly, that is without filtering, the control group and the partially callosotomized patient based their judgement on the face shown in the LVF, whereas the complete split‐brain patient based his ratings mainly on the face presented in the right visual field. We conclude that the processing of implicit emotions does not require the integrity of callosal fibres and can take place within subcortical routes lateralized in the right hemisphere.     

Exploring the dynamics of design fluency in children with and without ADHD using artificial neural networks

The neuropsychology of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has been extensively studied, with a general focus on global performance measures of executive function. In this study, we compared how global (i.e., endpoint) versus process (i.e., dynamic) measures of performance may help characterize children with and without ADHD using a design fluency task as a case study. The secondary goal was to compare the sensitivity of standard versus connectionist statistical models to group differences in cognitive data. Thirty-four children diagnosed with ADHD and 37 children without ADHD aged 8–11 years old were tested on the Five-Point Test. The continuous process measure of performance, indexed as the number of produced designs at each consecutive 1 minute interval during 5 minutes, was analyzed against the discrete process measure, that is, the number of designs between first and last intervals and the standard global performance measure of total number of produced designs. Results show that the continuous process measure distinguished the two groups better than the two other measures. The detailed observation of production patterns revealed a decreasing linear trajectory in children without ADHD that contrasts with the flat, but fluctuating productivity pattern of children with ADHD. With regards to the second goal, results show that the connectionist and standard methods are equally sensitive to group differences for the three types of measures. This illustrates the utility of quantitative process measures together with the connectionist method in neuropsychological research and suggests great potential for a dynamical approach to cognition.     

Time‐of‐day variation of visuo‐spatial attention

Time‐of‐day variation of visuo‐spatial attention in relation to body temperature and subjective arousal was assessed. At five different times of day, alertness, covert, and overt orienting of attention were assessed in fifteen healthy subjects. Based on previous studies reporting a tight coupling of alerting and orienting the present study investigates potential attentional asymmetries induced by diurnal variations of arousal. Both covert and overt orienting of attention improved in the course of the day. However, no asymmetries between left and right visual hemifields could be detected. Covert orienting additionally covaried with body temperature, indicating a quite close relation between the attentional arousal and orienting system. Conversely, overt orienting only improved due to repeated testing but did not correlate with body temperature suggesting a partial independence of both modes of attentional orienting. It can be assumed that due to limited diurnal variations of arousal in the participants and practice effects caused by repeated testing, no attentional asymmetries could be provoked.     

The first direct replication on using verbal credibility assessment for the detection of deceptive intentions

Verbal deception detection has gained momentum as a technique to tell truth‐tellers from liars. At the same time, researchers' degrees of freedom make it hard to assess the robustness of effects. Replication research can help evaluate how reproducible an effect is. We present the first replication in verbal deception research whereby ferry passengers were instructed to tell the truth or lie about their travel plans. The original study found truth‐tellers to include more specific time references in their answers. The replication study that closely mimicked the setting, procedure, materials, coding, and analyses found no lie–truth difference for specific time references. Although the power of our replication study was suboptimal (0.77), Bayesian statistics showed evidence in favor of the null hypothesis. Given the great applied consequences of verbal credibility tests, we hope this first replication attempt ignites much needed preregistered, high‐powered, multilab replication efforts.     

Sequent-Calculi for Metainferential Logics

Studia Logica - In recent years, some theorists have argued that the clogics are not only defined by their inferences, but also by their metainferences. In this sense, logics that coincide in their...