Lexical processing during saccades in text comprehension

We asked whether people process words during saccades when reading sentences. Irwin (1998) demonstrated that such processing occurs when words are presented in isolation. In our experiment, participants read part of a sentence ending in a high- or low-frequency target word and then made a long (40°) or short (10°) saccade to the rest of the sentence. We found a frequency effect on the target word and the first word after the saccade, but the effect was greater for short than for long saccades. Readers therefore performed more lexical processing during long saccades than during short ones. Hence, lexical processing takes place during saccades in text comprehension.     

Determinants of following headway in congested traffic

This paper reports on results of a study undertaken in the UK aimed at investigating factors affecting the car following process. An understanding of the factors affecting this complex decision making process is essential to a wide range of theoretical issues including driver workload, capacity and the modeling of freeway flow, as well as practical applications such as the design of in-vehicle driver aids and assistance systems, many of which have direct relevance to increasing driver safety. The study used an instrumented vehicle to collect time dependent following data for a group of test drivers. Data was collected on two differing types of high speed road, using six primary subjects who drove a test vehicle, supplemented by data on 123 drivers that were observed following the test vehicle. Examination was made of how the time headway chosen by a driver is influenced by a range of situational variables commonly believed to effect behavior, with four main findings. Firstly, headway was found to change according to the type of vehicle being followed (i.e. subjects followed closer to trucks than to cars), secondly, little variation was found with changes in overall traffic flow, thirdly, little correlation was found with road type, and lastly a distinct day-to-day variation in individual behavior was observed.     

Moving Toward Evidence-Based Human Participant Protection

There is near universal recognition that human participant protection is both morally and practically essential for all forms of research involving humans. Yet most of the discourse around human participant protection has focussed on norms—rules, regulations and governance arrangements—rather than on the actual effectiveness of these norms in achieving their ends—protecting participants from undue risk and ensuring respectful treatment as well as advancing the generation of useful knowledge. In recent years there has been increasing advocacy for evidence-based human participant protection that would be grounded on the careful investigation of the effects of research on human participants. We offer an analysis of evidence-based protection and then focus on Canadian examples of research on evidence-based protection. We consider the prospects for such research being put into practice in Canada. Finally we connect our remarks to the theme of “the changing landscape of human participant protection.”     

Partner aggression and children's externalizing problems: maternal and partner warmth as protective factors.

This research examined maternal and partner warmth as moderators of the relation between men's intimate partner aggression and children's externalizing problems. Participants were 157 mothers and their children (ages 7-9 years). Results indicate that maternal and partner warmth each moderated the relation between men's intimate partner aggression and children's externalizing problems. Partner-to-mother aggression was positively associated with child reports of externalizing problems at lower, but not higher, levels of maternal warmth. Similarly, partner-to-mother aggression was positively associated with mother reports of girls', but not boys', externalizing problems at lower, but not higher, levels of maternal warmth. On the other hand, the moderating effect of partner warmth was in the opposite direction and was found only with child-reported externalizing problems. Increased levels of partner-to-mother aggression related positively to child-reported externalizing problems when partners were higher, but not lower, in warmth.     

Values and adolescents' self-esteem: The role of value content and congruence with classmates

The study examined the relations between adolescents’ self-esteem and two aspects of values: content and congruence with classmates. Using a large sample of Israeli adolescents (N = 1,683; M_age = 14.36, SD = 2.24, range = 11–18, 54.31% females), we found that self-esteem related negatively to self-enhancement values and positively to conservation values using zero order correlations. Multilevel polynomial regressions, controlling for demographic differences, found significant quadratic associations of self-esteem with self-enhancement, self-transcendence, openness-to-change, and conservation values. Furthermore, using Response Surface Analyses, it was found that adolescents who were congruent with their classmates’ self-enhancement and self-transcendence values showed the highest levels of self-esteem. The findings point to the importance of social context for the relations between values and self-esteem among adolescents.     

Achievement and beliefs outcomes of students with high and low expectation teachers

Social Psychology of Education - Teacher expectation models have theorized that expectations are likely to affect student socio-psychological as well as academic outcomes. Effects on...     

Some algebraic properties of the Reticular Action Model for moment structures

A number of models for the analysis of moment structures, such as LISREL, have recently been shown to be capable of being given a particularly simple and economical representation, in terms of the Reticular Action Model (RAM). In contrast to previous treatments, a formal algebraic treatment is provided which shows that RAM directly incorporates many common structural models, including models describing the structure of means. It is also shown here that RAM treats coefficient matrices with patterned inverses simply and generally.     

Evidence for word length coding during visual word recognition

In a masked priming procedure manipulating orthographic neighbourhood size, the priming word activates a number of word candidates of which the target could be one. Whether the target is one of the candidates or not determines how quickly it is recognised. However, the efficiency of lexical processing may be markedly less if all possible candidates are activated. One solution to this problem is if the visual system uses prime length information to reduce the number of candidates to a more manageable amount. Here, we investigated in two masked priming experiments whether prime length and orthographic information combine to facilitate target word recognition. In Experiment 1, we showed that the efficiency of visual word recognition is not influenced by the length of primes alone. However, when combined with orthographically related primes, word length coding is preserved. In Experiment 2, we investigated whether length priming affects recognition of short and long words differently. Results showed that only short words benefit from a same-length orthographically related prime, and that the priming effect does not generalise to longer words. These results suggest that the length of a word is not an essential feature in lexical processing, but that it can facilitate recognition by constraining the activation of orthographically related words.