Cognitive engagement in emotional text reading: concurrent recordings of eye movements and head motion

ABSTRACT

The present study examined the effects of emotions on eye movements, head motion, and iPad motion during reading. Thirty-one participants read neutral, emotionally negative texts and emotionally positive texts on a digital tablet and both participants’ eye movements and body movements were recorded using respectively eye-tracking glasses and a motion capture system. The results showed that emotionally positive texts were read faster than neutral texts, and that readers’ movements decreased when reading emotional texts regardless of valence polarity. Recent studies suggested that postural movements may reflect cognitive engagement and especially the engagement in the task to be done. Our findings seem to validate this hypothesis of a bodily engagement in reading emotional contents. The present results suggest that the novel methodology of eye and postural movement recordings is informative in studying the readers’ embodied engagement during reading emotional materials.     

Cognitive processes in writing during pause and execution periods

The present study investigated how writing processes are activated during pause and execution periods. In two experiments, handwriting demands were manipulated by asking participants to compose with their familiar handwriting or with a high-demanding cursive uppercase calligraphy. Experiment 1 investigated narrative writing, a task with low planning demands. Experiment 2 addressed essay writing, a task with stronger planning demands. Occurrences of processes and their cognitive effort were analysed by asking participants to respond to random auditory probes and then to report their ongoing mental activity according to learned categories referring to the planning, translating, and revising writing processes. All together, the findings indicate that demands on planning did not affect how writing processes were activated during pauses and execution periods but automaticity of handwriting did. When handwriting was effortless, translating was mostly activated in parallel with motor execution, whereas revising and planning were mainly activated during pauses. However, none of the writing processes could be characterised as being typical of pauses, since translating was activated to a similar extent as the other two processes. By contrast, when handwriting was effortful, participants shifted to a more sequential functioning and activated translating mainly during pauses.     

Implicit Identification with Academic Achievement among Latino College Students: The Role of Ethnic Identity and Significant Others

Two studies were conducted to test the hypothesis that identification with academic achievement among Latino college students was related to the extent to which their ethnic group and significant others were linked to academic achievement. Participants completed a series of implicit association tests measuring the interrelations among academic achievement, self, and ethnic groups (Study 1) or significant others (Study 2). Study 1 revealed that the more college students identified with Latinos (relative to Caucasians) and stereotyped Latinos as low academic achievers (relative to Caucasians), the less they identified with academic achievement. Study 2 showed that the more Latino college students identified with significant others and viewed these significant others as high academic achievers, the more they identified with academic achievement. These findings are consistent with principles of cognitive consistency and stress the socio-relational facets of the academic self-concept.     

Awareness of the origin of knowledge predicts child witnesses' recall of alleged sexual and physical abuse

Children who understand that knowledge may have different origins produce more information in their free‐recall accounts than children who are less aware of source. We examined whether the tendency to make knowledge attributions was related to the number and proportion of details elicited from child witnesses using open‐ended invitations and whether this relationship varied depending on the number of incidents of abuse reported. The tendency to make knowledge attributions was measured in the presubstantive portion of protocol‐guided interviews with 3‐ to 11‐year‐old alleged victims of abuse. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that the production of knowledge attribution details was positively related to the proportion of substantive episodic details produced by 3‐ to 6‐year‐olds recalling a single incident and by 3‐ to 11‐year‐olds recalling multiple incidents of abuse. Presubstantive source details were also positively correlated with the amount of source information recalled about incidents of abuse. These findings remained significant after controlling for the children's verbosity, the relative prominence of open‐ended invitations, and the children's ages. © 2003 US Government work.     

Lexical stress and phonetic processing in word learning in 20- to 24-month-old English-learning children

To investigate the interaction between segmental and supra-segmental stress-related information in early word learning, two experiments were conducted with 20- to 24-month-old English-learning children. In an adaptation of the object categorization study designed by Nazzi and Gopnik (2001), children were presented with pairs of novel objects whose labels differed by their initial consonant (Experiment 1) or their medial consonant (Experiment 2). Words were produced with a stress initial (trochaic) or a stress final (iambic) pattern. In both experiments successful word learning was established when the to-be-remembered contrast was embedded in a stressed syllable, but not when embedded in unstressed syllables. This was independent of the overall word pattern, trochaic or iambic, or the location of the phonemic contrast, word-initial or -medial. Results are discussed in light of the use of phonetic information in early lexical acquisition, highlighting the role of lexical stress and ambisyllabicity in early word processing.     

Exploration of perceptual and motor inhibition in children with traumatic brain injury

Perceptual and motor inhibition were examined using conflict resolution tasks for 12 children with traumatic brain injury and 24 matched controls. Direct comparisons of inhibition performances between the two groups showed a specific and disproportionate impairment of motor inhibition (compared with perceptual inhibition) for the children with traumatic brain injury, which suggests that inhibition processes might be differentially impaired in children after traumatic brain injury.     

Tracking irregular morphophonological dependencies in natural language: evidence from the acquisition of subject-verb agreement in French

This study examines French-learning infants’ sensitivity to grammatical non-adjacent dependencies involving subject-verb agreement (e.g., le/les garçons lit/lisent ‘the boy(s) read(s)’) where number is audible on both the determiner of the subject DP and the agreeing verb, and the dependency is spanning across two syntactic phrases. A further particularity of this subsystem of French subject-verb agreement is that number marking on the verb is phonologically highly irregular. Despite the challenge, the HPP results for 24- and 18-month-olds demonstrate knowledge of both number dependencies: between the singular determiner le and the non-adjacent singular verbal forms and between the plural determiner les and the non-adjacent plural verbal forms. A control experiment suggests that the infants are responding to known verb forms, not phonological regularities. Given the paucity of such forms in the adult input documented through a corpus study, these results are interpreted as evidence that 18-month-olds have the ability to extract complex patterns across a range of morphophonologically inconsistent and infrequent items in natural language.     

Human values priorities: effects of self-centredness and age

This study aims to assess the effects of the degree of self-centredness/selflessness and age on human values priorities according to Schwartz model. This model displays two main dimensions which oppose on one hand, self-enhancement to self-transcendence and on the other hand, openness to change to conservation. The sample consisted of 307 adults aged 18 to 65 who filled in two questionnaires: the Self-Transcendence Inventory (STI) and the Questionnaire of Values by Portraits (QVP). The results show that the more people were selfless, the more they gave greater importance to self-transcendence and less importance to self-enhancement; and inversely. Moreover, the older the participants were, the more they valorised collective values compared to individual values. Finally, age appeared as a more relevant predictor of values priorities than the degree of self-centredness. Such results could be of first importance in terms of designing moral education strategies.     

Infants’ statistical word segmentation in an artificial language is linked to both parental speech input and reported production abilities

Individual variability in infant's language processing is partly explained by environmental factors, like the quantity of parental speech input, as well as by infant‐specific factors, like speech production. Here, we explore how these factors affect infant word segmentation. We used an artificial language to ensure that only statistical regularities (like transitional probabilities between syllables) could cue word boundaries, and then asked how the quantity of parental speech input and infants’ babbling repertoire predict infants’ abilities to use these statistical cues. We replicated prior reports showing that 8‐month‐old infants use statistical cues to segment words, with a preference for part‐words over words (a novelty effect). Crucially, 8‐month‐olds with larger novelty effects had received more speech input at 4 months and had greater production abilities at 8 months. These findings establish for the first time that the ability to extract statistical information from speech correlates with individual factors in infancy, like early speech experience and language production. Implications of these findings for understanding individual variability in early language acquisition are discussed.