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Pastoral Psychology -     

Word segmentation by alternating colors facilitates eye guidance in Chinese reading

During sentence reading, low spatial frequency information afforded by spaces between words is the primary factor for eye guidance in spaced writing systems, whereas saccade generation for unspaced writing systems is less clear and under debate. In the present study, we investigated whether word-boundary information, provided by alternating colors (consistent or inconsistent with word-boundary information) influences saccade-target selection in Chinese. In Experiment 1, as compared to a baseline (i.e., uniform color) condition, word segmentation with alternating color shifted fixation location towards the center of words. In contrast, incorrect word segmentation shifted fixation location towards the beginning of words. In Experiment 2, we used a gaze-contingent paradigm to restrict the color manipulation only to the upcoming parafoveal words and replicated the results, including fixation location effects, as observed in Experiment 1. These results indicate that Chinese readers are capable of making use of parafoveal word-boundary knowledge for saccade generation, even if such information is unfamiliar to them. The present study provides novel support for the hypothesis that word segmentation is involved in the decision about where to fixate next during Chinese reading.     

The being a patient effect: negative expectations based on group labeling and corresponding treatment affect patient performance

Patient studies provide insights into mechanisms underlying diseases and thus represent a cornerstone of clinical research. In this study, we report evidence that differences between patients and controls might partly be based on expectations generated by the patients’ knowledge of being invited and treated as a patient: the Being a Patient effect (BP effect). This finding extends previous neuropsychological reports on diagnosis threat. Participants with mild allergies were addressed either as patients or control subjects in a clinical study. We measured the impact of this group labeling and corresponding instructions on pain perception and cognitive performance. Our results provide evidence that the BP effect can indeed affect physiological and cognitive measures in clinical settings. Importantly, these effects can lead to systematic overestimation of genuine disease effects and should be taken into account when disease effects are investigated. Finally, we propose strategies to avoid or minimize this critical confound.     

A closer look at self-reported suicide attempts: false positives and false negatives

The validity of self-reported suicide attempt information is undermined by false positives (e.g., incidences without intent to die), or by unreported suicide attempts, referred to as false negatives. In a sample of 1,385 Austrian adults, we explored the occurrence of false positives and false negatives with detailed, probing questions. Removing false positives decreased the rate of suicide attempters from 4.3% to 2.7%. Probing questions also revealed 0.8% false negatives. We recommend using probing questions with both those who report a suicide attempt and those who do not report a suicide attempt to increase the validity of self-reported suicide-related information.     

Adult age differences in the perceptual span during reading

Following up on research suggesting an age-related reduction in the rightward extent of the perceptual span during reading (Rayner, Castelhano, & Yang, 2009), we compared old and young adults in an N + 2-boundary paradigm in which a nonword preview of word N + 2 or word N + 2 itself is replaced by the target word once the eyes cross an invisible boundary located after word N. The intermediate word N + 1 was always three letters long. Gaze durations on word N + 2 were significantly shorter for identical than nonword N + 2 preview both for young and for old adults, with no significant difference in this preview benefit. Young adults, however, did modulate their gaze duration on word N more strongly than old adults in response to the difficulty of the parafoveal word N + 1. Taken together, the results suggest a dissociation of preview benefit and parafoveal-on-foveal effect. Results are discussed in terms of age-related decline in resilience towards distributed processing while simultaneously preserving the ability to integrate parafoveal information into foveal processing. As such, the present results relate to proposals of regulatory compensation strategies older adults use to secure an overall reading speed very similar to that of young adults.     

Aggregate and individual replication probability within an explicit model of the research process

We study a model of the research process in which the true effect size, the replication jitter due to changes in experimental procedure, and the statistical error of effect size measurement are all normally distributed random variables. Within this model, we analyze the probability of successfully replicating an initial experimental result by obtaining either a statistically significant result in the same direction or any effect in that direction. We analyze both the probability of successfully replicating a particular experimental effect (i.e., the individual replication probability) and the average probability of successful replication across different studies within some research context (i.e., the aggregate replication probability), and we identify the conditions under which the latter can be approximated using the formulas of Killeen (2005a, 2007). We show how both of these probabilities depend on parameters of the research context that would rarely be known in practice. In addition, we show that the statistical uncertainty associated with the size of an initial observed effect would often prevent accurate estimation of the desired individual replication probability even if these research context parameters were known exactly. We conclude that accurate estimates of replication probability are generally unattainable.