Transfer effects from language processing to visual attention dynamics: The impact of orthographic transparency

The consistency between letters and sounds varies across languages. These differences have been proposed to be associated with different reading mechanisms (lexical vs. phonological), processing grain sizes (coarse vs. fine) and attentional windows (whole words vs. individual letters). This study aimed to extend this idea to writing to dictation. For that purpose, we evaluated whether the use of different types of processing has a differential impact on local windowing attention: phonological (local) processing in a transparent language (Spanish) and lexical (global) processing of an opaque language (English). Spanish and English monolinguals (Experiment 1) and Spanish–English bilinguals (Experiment 2) performed a writing to dictation task followed by a global–local task. The first key performance showed a critical dissociation between languages: the response times (RTs) from the Spanish writing to dictation task was modulated by word length, whereas the RTs from the English writing to dictation task was modulated by word frequency and age of acquisition, as evidence that language transparency biases processing towards phonological or lexical strategies. In addition, after a Spanish task, participants more efficiently processed local information, which resulted in both the benefit of global congruent information and the reduced cost of incongruent global information. Additionally, the results showed that bilinguals adapt their attentional processing depending on the orthographic transparency.     

The Persistent Interlocutor

A Persistent Interlocutor (PI) is someone who, in argumentative contexts, does not cease to question her opponent’s premises. The epistemic relevance of the PI has been debated throughout the history of philosophy. Pyrrhonians famously claim that our inability to dialectically vindicate our claims against a PI implies scepticism. Adam Leite disagrees (2005). Michael Resorla argues that the debate is based on a false premise (2009). In this paper, I argue that these views all fail to accurately account for the epistemic relevance of the PI. I then briefly present an account that aims to do better in this regard, based on the modal notion of safety. On the account proposed, the PI does not violate epistemic or dialectical norms. Rather, her behaviour tends to be epistemically perverse in the sense that it wastes cognitive resources. Perhaps surprisingly, this defect turns out not to be unique to the PI.

     

Sense of purpose and food insecurity during the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic brought new attention to the issues of food insecurity faced by individuals throughout the United States, a stressor exacerbated by disruptions to work status and supply chains. The burden of food insecurity likely carries consequences for whether individuals feel capable of pursuing their broad goals and life engagements; put differently, food insecurity may pose a threat to people perceiving a sense of purpose in life. The current study tested this claim across three samples taken during 2020 (n = 2009), 2021 (n = 1666), and 2022 (n = 1975). Participants completed inventories for perceived food insecurity, sense of purpose, depressive symptoms, and anxiety, among other measures. Results found consistent negative associations between food insecurity and sense of purpose across all three samples. In addition, food insecurity moderated associations between sense of purpose and depressive or anxiety symptoms. Sense of purpose was more strongly negatively associated with depressive and anxiety symptoms for those participants who reported no food insecurity. That said, sense of purpose remained negatively associated with psychological distress even among those reporting food insecurity.     

Early judgments of semantic and syntactic acceptability by children

Judgments of the acceptability of correct, word order reversed, and semantically anomalous sentences were elicited from 2- and 3-year-old children in a game played with hand puppets. All of the sentences used were simple imperatives and each child was asked to correct those he called wrong. Performance on the judgment task was correlated with each child's mean length of utterance and with his comprehension of reversible active and passive sentences. Only the linguistically most advanced children were able to make a significant number of appropriate judgments and corrections of reversed word order imperatives. Less developed children could appropriately judge and correct semantically anomalous but not incorrect word order imperatives. The importance of semantic as opposed to syntactic factors in children's judgments of the acceptability of sentences is stressed.This research was supported in part by PHS Grant HD-02908 from the National Institute of Child Health and Development. Roger Brown is the principal investigator.     

A blind woman who is mentally retarded promoting and sharing the occupational engagement of a dependent deaf-blind adolescent

A blind woman who is mentally retarded was employed (as peer care-giver) to promote and eventually share the occupational engagement of a deaf-blind adolescent (trainee) who was dependent on physical prompting. A computer-aided program was used to provide objects for the responses and facilitate orientation and mobility. The trainee was also exposed to the computer-aided program individually to assess the effects of the program per se. The results showed highly positive changes only in the condition involving the peer care-giver. In this condition, the trainee performed high frequencies of correct responses. Moreover, the care-giver managed to share responding with the trainee. Technical and practical aspects of the findings are discussed.     

Direct observation of quality of care in residential settings

Direct-observation procedures were used to objectively and efficiently assess several classes of service provided for individuals residing at two state facilities for the developmentally disabled. Time samples were taken of the condition of the clients' physical environment and of the clients themselves. The ongoing behavior of both clients and staff also was recorded. Each residence was observed at least three times during both regular work hours and evening/weekend hours. Results showed that both facilities scored high in the categories regarding the physical condition of the living areas, as well as the categories concerning the condition of the clients. Greater variability was seen in the data on client and staff behavior. More generally, the results indicate that time-sampling procedures can be used efficiently to collect data on multiple aspects of service delivery for large numbers of individuals.     

Shape from stereo: A systematic approach using quadratic surfaces

We used quadratic shapes in several psychophysical shape-from-stereo tasks. The shapes were elegantly represented in a 2-D parameter space by the scale-independentshape index and the scale-dependentcurvedness. Using random-dot stereograms to depict the surfaces, we found that the shape of hyperbolic surfaces is slightly more difficult to recognize than the shape of elliptic surfaces. We found that curvedness (and indirectly, scale) has little or no influence on shape recognition.     

The relationship between underpredicted pain and escape

Escape and avoidance that are disproportional to the danger of the pertinent stimulus are important clinical problems that are often related to inaccurate (catastrophic) expectations. One possible source of such expectations is a prior, underestimated aversive experience. In the present experiment the hypotheses that underestimated pain leads to escape and that it leads to avoidance were tested. In order to control for the effect of the intensity of the pain stimulus, a control group that received 20 pain stimuli of high intensity was formed. Subjects in the experimental condition received 17 pain stimuli of low intensity and 3 of (unexpectedly) high intensity (experimentally induced underprediction). Underprediction of the high intensity stimulus was significantly related to escape, but not to avoidance. The results suggest that the way in which avoidance was operationalized accounts for this. The strong support of the hypothesized relationship between underpredicted pain and escape is an important finding, however.