Mindless reading: Eye-movement characteristics are similar in scanning letter strings and reading texts

The purpose of the present study was to compare the oculomotor behavior of readers scanning meaningful and meaningless materials. Four conditions were used—a normal-text-reading control condition, and three experimental conditions in which the amount of linguistic processing was reduced, either by presenting the subjects with repeated letter strings or by asking the subjects to search for a target letter in texts or letter strings. The results show that global eye-movement characteristics (such as saccade size and fixation duration), as well as local characteristics (such as word-skipping rate, landing site, refixation probability, and refixation position), are very similar in the four conditions. The finding that the eyes are capable of generating an autonomous oculomotor scanning strategy in the absence of any linguistic information to process argues in favor of the idea that such predetermined oculomotor strategies might be an important determinant of eye movements in reading.     

Perceived motion in structure from motion: Pointing responses to the axis of rotation

We investigated the ability to match finger orientation to the direction of the axis of rotation in structure-from-motion displays. Preliminary experiments verified that subjects could accurately use the index finger to report direction. The remainder of the experiments studied the perception of the axis of rotation from full rotations of a group of discrete points, the profiles of a rotating ellipsoid, and two views of a group of discrete points. Subjects’ responses were analyzed by decomposing the pointing responses into their slant and tilt components. Overall, the results indicated that subjects were sensitive to both slant and tilt. However, when the axis of rotation was near the viewing direction, subjects had difficulty reporting tilt with profiles and two views and showed a large bias in their slant judgments with two views and full rotations. These results are not entirely consistent with theoretical predictions. The results, particularly for two views, suggest that additional constraints are used by humans in the recovery of structure from motion.     

Social context,student's motivation,and academic achievement: Toward a process model

The purpose of the present research was to propose and test a motivational process model of academic achievement. The model posits that parental, teachers, and school administration support for students' autonomy positively influences students' perceived school competence and autonomy. In turn, perceived school competence and autonomy affect positively self-determined school motivation which in turn influences academic achievement. Two studies using a prospective design tested the adequacy of the model. In Study I, participants were 1,623 ninth-grade students. Results from structural equation modeling supported the motivational model. Participants in Study 2 were 1,098 tenth-grade students. Results from this study corroborated those of Study 1 controlling for students' prior achievement in the ninth grade. The role of self-determinod school motivation in academic achievement is discussed and avenues for future research are considered. This research is part of a larger project that is being funded by grants from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; the San Francisco Foundation; the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; the Danforth Foundation; the Smart Foundations; the Pew Charitable Trusts; the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; the Annenberg Foundation; Spunk Fund, Inc.; the DeWitt Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund, Inc.; Louise and Claude Rosenberg; and the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The views expressed in the paper are those of the authors and not necessarily of the funders. We are grateful to the many educators, students, and colleagues who cooperated with us on this project and to several anonymous reviewers who provided helpful suggestions.     

What place does religion have in the ethical thinking of scientists and engineers?

Religion, defined as ‘the idea of a state that transcends ourselves and our world and the working out of the consequences of that idea’, may influence the ethical thinking of scientists and engineers in two ways. The first is at the level of the individual and how personal beliefs affect the choice of research, design or development projects, relationships with other researchers and the understandings of the consequences of research on other aspects of life. The second level is that of the social and cultural setting in which scientists and engineers work; how society decides which research to sponsor, how to apply the results of scientific discovery and which technology it chooses to develop and for what purposes. In neither of these areas is religious belief a necessary condition for scientists and engineers to pursue one course of action rather than another. The existence of religious belief within the individual and society is, though, part of the ethical framework in which scientist and engineers work and therefore something to which attention should be paid. Religion provides a particular perspective on what should be. Conversely science and technology provide information on the nature of the person and the universe in which we live, which must be taken into account when theologians and religious moralists apply their ethical norms and principles.     

Interaction of genetics and separation in canine hyperkinesis and in differential responses to amphetamine

A model of childhood hyperkinesis, using the Telomian-beagle hybrid dog, is described, demonstrating the interactions of genetics and separation in the development of this syndrome and in the favorable responses of some of these dogs to amphetamine. This work represents the collaboration of three laboratories, utilizing chiefly methods of inhibitory training. Inducing separation distress enhanced the resistance to inhibitory training and the favorable responses to amphetamine.     

Response competition effects insame-different judgments

An account ofsame-different discriminations that is based upon a continuous-flow model of visual information processing (C. W. Eriksen & Schultz, 1979) and response competition and inhibition between the responses by which the subject signifies his judgment is presented. We show that a response signifyingsame will on the average be executed faster due to less priming or incipient activation of the competing response,different. In the experiment, the subjects matched letters on the basis of physical identity. The degree of priming ofdifferent responses on same trials and ofsame responses ondifferent trials was manipulated by an extraneous noise letter placed in the display. Latency for judgments onsame trials increased as the feature overlap of noise and target letters decreased. Latencies were shorter ondifferent trials when the noise letter was dissimilar to either target letter than when the noise letter was the same as one of the targets. These results were consistent with the response-competition interpretation.     

Adaptation in distance perception with head-movement parallax serving as the veridical cue

When head-movement parallax functioned as the sole veridical distance cue during exposure to spectacles that altered the eyes’ oculomotor adjustments, sizable adaptation was obtained. This result showed that a discrimination of the distances of 60 and 30 cm can be based on head-movement parallax. Using adaptation in demonstrating that head-movement parallax can serve as a distance cue circumvents the problem that the presence of accommodation normally presents when such a demonstration is attempted. The usual contamination of head-movement parallax with accommodation is avoided, because accommodation is altered by the spectacles and does pot function as a veridical cue along with head-movement parallax.     

Saccade size control in reading: Evidence for the linguistic control hypothesis

In Experiment 1, it is shown that during reading the eye makes larger saccades near long words than near short words. The effects are reduced when the subject’s peripheral vision is diminished by the use of a moving “window” centered on the subject’s fixation point, outside of which letters are replaced by Xs. In Experiment 2, it is shown that even if linguistic predictions are kept constant, the eye tends to make longer jumps when approaching THE than when approaching a three-letter verb. This “THE-skipping” effect is weaker if THE is compared with an auxiliary (HAD, WAS, or ARE) than if it is compared with a less frequently occurring verb (ATE, RAN, MET). It follows that knowledge of the lexicon can combine with information from peripheral vision fast enough to influence saccade size from moment to moment.     

Memory for pictures and words as a function of level of processing: Depth or dual coding?

The experiment was designed to test differential predictions derived from dual-coding and depth-of-processing hypotheses. Subjects under incidental memory instructions free recalled a list of 36 test events, each presented twice. Within the list, an equal number of events were assigned to structural, phonemic, and semantic processing conditions. Separate groups of subjects were tested with a list of pictures, concrete words, or abstract words. Results indicated that retention of concrete words increased as a direct function of the processing-task variable (structural < phonemic 相似文献