Not All Visual Expertise Is Holistic, but It May Be Leftist: The Case of Chinese Character Recognition

ABSTRACT— We examined whether two purportedly face-specific effects, holistic processing and the left-side bias, can also be observed in expert-level processing of Chinese characters, which are logographic and share many properties with faces. Non-Chinese readers (novices) perceived these characters more holistically than Chinese readers (experts). Chinese readers had a better awareness of the components of characters, which were not clearly separable to novices. This finding suggests that holistic processing is not a marker of general visual expertise; rather, holistic processing depends on the features of the stimuli and the tasks typically performed on them. In contrast, results for the left-side bias were similar to those obtained in studies of face perception. Chinese readers exhibited a left-side bias in the perception of mirror-symmetric characters, whereas novices did not; this effect was also reflected in eye fixations. Thus, the left-side bias may be a marker of visual expertise.     

The Role of Emotion in Parent-Child Relationships: Children’s Emotionality,Maternal Meta-Emotion,and Children’s Attachment Security

This study was intended to examine the relationship among children’s emotionality, parental meta-emotion, and parent–child attachment. The sample consisted of 546 5th and 6th grade children and their mothers. The test instruments used in this study were the Emotionality subscale of the EAS Temperament Survey (mothers’ ratings only), the Parental Meta-Emotion Survey (mothers’ ratings only) and the Attachment Security Scale (children’s ratings only). Our results showed that maternal meta-emotion (emotion coaching plus emotion dismissing) was associated with children’s attachment security vis-à-vis their mothers. Mothers who tended to adopt an emotion-coaching philosophy were more likely to achieve secure parent–child attachments, as reported by their children. Children whose mothers tended to adopt an emotion-dismissing philosophy reported lower levels of attachment security. There were no direct or indirect effects of children’s emotionality on their attachment security. Parental meta-emotion, but not children’s emotionality, was significantly associated with children’s attachment security. The results indicate the importance of parenting factors in determining the parent–child relationship. Parental education programs that focus on parental attitudes and practices related to emotion should be advocated.     

Perceived Marital Problems in Taiwan

With the expansion of the practice of marriage and family therapy outside of the U.S. and Western Europe, it important to gain a better understanding of family interaction and processes in other cultures and countries. Several studies have examined the problems that couples experience in the United States, but little is understood about problems that couples in Asia experience. In this study, perceptions of relationship problems experienced by 213 married couples living in urban Taiwan were examined. Results indicated that raising children and communication were the two problems most frequently reported by both husbands and wives. Among eight relationship problem areas, the only gender difference was in the area of communication, with wives significantly more likely to report it as a problem. An examination of within-dyad agreement indicated that couples generally had high consensus regarding relationship problems. Implications of this research for culturally-sensitive MFT practice are discussed.     

The dual-task SRT procedure: fine-tuning the timing

In the standard sequential reaction time study, subjects are presented with a repeating sequence of targets to which they must respond as rapidly as possible. With practice reaction times decrease, suggesting a learned ability to exploit the repeating patterns in the display. In a common variation, a second task is interposed, typically a tone-counting task in which subjects must keep track of the frequency with which particular tones occur. In the canonical experiment, these tones appear at varying times in the interval between the subjects’ response to a target and the next target. Data are presented that show that this latter variable (the RSOA, response-secondary stimulus onset asynchrony) actually plays an important but previously hidden role in these experiments. A model based on an extension of the notion of the psychological refractory period is introduced to explain these findings.     

How does reading direction modulate perceptual asymmetry effects?

Left-side bias effects refer to a bias towards the left side of the stimulus/space in perceptual/visuospatial judgments, and are argued to reflect dominance of right hemisphere processing. It remains unclear whether reading direction can also account for the bias effect. Previous studies comparing readers of languages read from left to right with those read from right to left (e.g., French vs. Hebrew) have obtained inconsistent results. As a language that can be read from left to right or from right to left, Chinese provides a unique opportunity for a within-culture examination of reading direction effects. Chinese participants performed a perceptual judgment task (with both face and Chinese character stimuli; Experiment 1) and two visuospatial attention tasks (the greyscales and line bisection tasks; Experiment 2) once before and once after a reading task, in which they read Chinese passages either from left to right or from right to left for about 20 min. After reading from right to left, participants showed significantly reduced left-side bias in Chinese character perceptual judgments but not in the other three tasks. This effect suggests that the role of reading direction on different forms of left-side bias may differ, and its modulation may be stimulus-specific.     

Holistic but with reduced right-hemisphere involvement: The case of dyslexia in Chinese character recognition

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - Recent research on visual object recognition has suggested that the right hemisphere can engage either holistic or part-based processing depending on whether the...