Simon effect with and without awareness of the accessory stimulus

The authors investigated whether a Simon effect could be observed in an accessory-stimulus Simon task when participants were unaware of the task-irrelevant accessory cue. In Experiment 1A a central visual target was accompanied by a suprathreshold visual lateral cue. A regular Simon effect (i.e., faster cue-response corresponding reaction times [RTs]) was found. Experiment 1B demonstrated that this effect cannot be attributed to perceptual grouping of the target and cue. Experiments 2A, 2B, and 2C showed a reverse Simon effect (i.e., faster noncorresponding RTs) when participants were not aware of the cue. In this condition, the Simon effect would occur relative to the reorientation of attention from the cue, which would initially capture attention, toward the target. This conclusion is supported by the results of Experiments 3A and 3B, in which the reorientation of attention was induced by having the target flash after its onset. With suprathreshold cues either a reverse or regular Simon effect was observed by using a 100-ms or > or = 200-ms onset flashing interval, respectively, whereas with subthreshold cues a reverse Simon effect was found irrespective of the interval length.     

Why the body comes first: effects of experimenter touch on infants' word finding

The lexicon of 6‐month‐olds is comprised of names and body part words. Unlike names, body part words do not often occur in isolation in the input. This presents a puzzle: How have infants been able to pull out these words from the continuous stream of speech at such a young age? We hypothesize that caregivers' interactions directed at and on the infant's body may be at the root of their early acquisition of body part words. An artificial language segmentation study shows that experimenter‐provided synchronous tactile cues help 4‐month‐olds to find words in continuous speech. A follow‐up study suggests that this facilitation cannot be reduced to the highly social situation in which the directed interaction occurs. Taken together, these studies suggest that direct caregiver–infant interaction, exemplified in this study by touch cues, may play a key role in infants' ability to find word boundaries, and suggests that early vocabulary items may consist of words often linked with caregiver touches. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at http://youtu.be/NfCj5ipatyE     

Development of infants' segmentation of words from native speech: a meta‐analytic approach

Infants start learning words, the building blocks of language, at least by 6 months. To do so, they must be able to extract the phonological form of words from running speech. A rich literature has investigated this process, termed word segmentation. We addressed the fundamental question of how infants of different ages segment words from their native language using a meta‐analytic approach. Based on previous popular theoretical and experimental work, we expected infants to display familiarity preferences early on, with a switch to novelty preferences as infants become more proficient at processing and segmenting native speech. We also considered the possibility that this switch may occur at different points in time as a function of infants' native language and took into account the impact of various task‐ and stimulus‐related factors that might affect difficulty. The combined results from 168 experiments reporting on data gathered from 3774 infants revealed a persistent familiarity preference across all ages. There was no significant effect of additional factors, including native language and experiment design. Further analyses revealed no sign of selective data collection or reporting. We conclude that models of infant information processing that are frequently cited in this domain may not, in fact, apply in the case of segmenting words from native speech.     

Is systemic thinking really extraneous to common sense?

Systemic therapists assume, but have not yet proved that ordinary people: (i) normally do not use triadic thinking and (ii) are able, thanks to therapists' interviewing techniques, to construct triadic explanations. To test these assumptions this study analyses the explanations provided by 400 undergraduates of an unexpected piece of behaviour framed in four stimulus situations where the breadth of the observation field was manipulated. The results show that triadic explanations are unusual and increase with the widening of the field of observation from the monad to the triad. It is the ‘enigmatic’ triadic situation – adding a puzzling discrepancy between the actors' forms of behaviour – that elicits more triadic explanations. This suggests that therapists should explore with clients the contradictions disclosed by the widening of the field of observation and support reframings actively co‐constructed with them instead of ‘pre‐packaged’ ones.     

Res Computans: The Living Subject from Yeast to Human

Since modernity, the concept of subject supposes both an anthropocentric and a dualistic view of life and reality. In this study, we carry out an analytic interpretation of the Descartes’ notion of subject, in order to build a different dimension of the concept of subject. We discuss the activity of computing, as the manner by which the living subject relates with and in-forms the world. We further examine computing in the aging yeast as an example of living subject and we try to comprehend the maturity of the subjectivity in Descartes’ res cogitans and in our proposed res computans.     

Hyperbole, abstract motion and spatial knowledge: sequential versus simultaneous scanning

Hyperbole is an interesting trope in the perspective of Space Grammar, since it is related to the displacing of a limit (Lausberg in Elemente der literarischen Rhetorik. M.H. Verlag, Munchen 1967; see the Ancient Greek meaning 'to throw over' > 'exaggerate'). Hyperbole semantic mechanisms are related to virtual scanning (Holmqvist and P?uciennik in Imagery in language. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main, pp 777-785, 2004). Basic concepts of SIZE and QUANTITY, related image-schemas (IS) and conceptual metaphors (UP IS MORE; IMPORTANT IS BIG: Lakoff 1987, Johnson 1987) are implied in hyperbole processing. The virtual scanning is the simulation of a perceptual domain (here, the vertically oriented space). The virtual limit is defined by expected values on the relevant scale. Since hyperbole is a form of intensification, its linguistic interest lies in cases involving the extremes of a scale, for which a limit can be determined (Schemann 1994). In this experimental study, we analyze the concept of 'limit' in terms of 'abstract motion' and 'oriented space' domains (Langacker 1990) with respect to hyperboles expressed by Italian Verbs of movement. The IS considered are PATH and SOURCE-PATH-GOAL. The latter corresponds to a virtual scale whose limit is arrived at, or overcome, in hyperboles.     

The evolution of alexia in two cases of posterior cortical atrophy

Posterior cortical atrophy (PCA) is an uncommon presentation of Alzheimer's disease (AD), characterised by prevalent anatomo-functional involvement of posterior cortical areas. Accordingly, the main clinical features at onset are disorders of high-order visual processing, such as alexia and impairments of visuo-spatial and visuo-constructional abilities. The clinical features in the early stages of disease are variable, and they have been suggested to stem from prevalent ventral or dorsal brain pathology, and/or asymmetric hemispheric involvement. With disease progression, these differences tend to blur with the increasing severity of neuropsychological dysfunction. We report two PCA patients showing different patterns of reading impairment (respectively, letter-by-letter reading and neglect dyslexia). A follow-up study suggested that the qualitative features of alexia remain distinctive with disease evolution. In addition, single photon emission tomography (SPECT) studies revealed different patterns of hypoperfusion, consistent with the alexia types. A careful reading assessment can provide important insights to the pattern of progression of the disease in patients with PCA up to the late stages of the pathology.     

Developmental changes in the weighting of prosodic cues

Previous research has shown that the weighting of, or attention to, acoustic cues at the level of the segment changes over the course of development (Nittrouer & Miller, 1997; Nittrouer, Manning & Meyer, 1993). In this paper we examined changes over the course of development in weighting of acoustic cues at the suprasegmental level. Specifically, we tested English-learning 4-month-olds' performance on a clause segmentation task when each of three acoustic cues to clausal units was neutralized and contrasted it with performance on a Baseline condition where no cues were manipulated. Comparison with the reported performance of 6-month-olds on the same task (Seidl, 2007) reveals that 4-month-olds weight prosodic cues to clausal boundaries differently than 6-month-olds, relying more heavily on all three correlates of clausal boundaries (pause, pitch and vowel duration) than 6-month-olds do, who rely primarily on pitch. We interpret this as evidence that 4-month-olds use a holistic processing strategy, while 6-month-olds may already be able to attend separately to isolated cues in the input stream and may, furthermore, be able to exploit a language-specific cue weighting. Thus, in a way similar to that in other cognitive domains, infants begin as holistic auditory scene processors and are only later able to process individual auditory cues.