Literal, fictive and metaphorical motion sentences preserve the motion component of the verb: a TMS study

We used Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) to assess whether reading literal, non-literal (i.e., metaphorical, idiomatic) and fictive motion sentences modulates the activity of the motor system. Sentences were divided into three segments visually presented one at a time: the noun phrase, the verb and the final part of the sentence. Single pulse-TMS was delivered at the end of the sentence over the leg motor area in the left hemisphere and motor evoked potentials (MEPs) were recorded from the right gastrocnemius and tibialis anterior muscles. MEPs were larger when participants were presented with literal, fictive and metaphorical motion sentences than with idiomatic motion or mental sentences. These results suggest that the excitability of the motor system is modulated by the motor component of the verb, which is preserved in fictive and metaphorical motion sentences.     

Representational momentum in children born preterm and at term

The term representational momentum (RM) refers to the idea that our memory representations for moving objects incorporate information about movement – a fact that can lead us to make errors when judging an object’s location (the RM effect). In this study, we explored the RM effect in a sample of children born very prematurely and a sample born at term. Because preterm children are known to be at risk for problems with motion perception, we anticipated that they would show a weaker or absent RM effect. This prediction was confirmed. In addition, we found that, in both samples of children, 5–6 year olds showed a reduced RM effect compared to 7–9 year olds. These results demonstrate that the ability to represent motion information in memory shows continued development over this age range, and may help to elucidate factors contributing to problems with fine and gross motor planning and execution that have been observed in the preterm population. We propose that problems affecting the formation, maintenance, or use of predictive models, or motion extrapolation skills, may have cascading effects on the development of other abilities.     

Psychologie sociale et perception du temps : l'estimation temporelle des stimuli sociaux et émotionnels

Two experiments using a temporal bisection task investigated the influence of the social meaning of stimuli on the estimation of their duration. The results showed that: a) the duration of faces expressing diverse emotional states was overestimated relative to the duration of neutral faces; b) the duration of faces representing elderly people was underestimated relative to the duration of faces representing young people. In both cases, this influence was found to appear at the earliest stage of the estimation process, modulating the rhythm of the estimator's internal clock. In the discussion, we suggest three different perspectives to account for the observed link between social and temporal perception.     

Young infants’ sensitivity to shading stimuli with radial motion1

Abstract: The purpose of this study was to examine 5‐month‐old infant's sensitivity to a shading cue with radial motion. Our stimuli were radially expanding or contracting circles with vertical or horizontal shadings. We tested infants’ preference for vertical (top‐ and bottom‐lit) and horizontal (left‐ and right‐lit) shadings. The results indicate that infants tested with the vertical shading showed significant preference for the top‐lit shading, whereas infants tested with the horizontal shading did not show any significant preference. The fact that the significant preference was observed only in the vertical shading condition suggests that 5‐month‐old infants might use shading information on the basis of the “light‐from‐above assumption.” We revealed that even 5‐month‐old infants are sensitive to shading information when they are exposed to shading stimuli with radial motion.     

Développement de la reconnaissance des émotions chez l'enfant avec trisomie 21

We proposed a matching task consisting of pairing an emotional sound and a human face and, after that a noise with an animal. Down syndrome children do not differ with other children in emotional recognition abilities of human faces pictures. Results are compared with those of children with mental retardation and typical children matched on developmental age (K ABC, non-verbal scale). Results do not validate Kasari's presumption concerning with emotional recognition deficit in Down children of 4 years of developmental age mental.     

Behavioral speed contagion: automatic modulation of movement timing by observation of body movements

To coordinate our actions with those of others, it is crucial to not only choose an appropriate category of action but also to execute it at an appropriate timing. It is widely documented that people tend to unconsciously mimic others' behavior. The present study show that people also tend to modify their movement timing according to others' movements even when the observed and the to-be-executed movements are unrelated. Observers viewed either point-light biological motion, scrambled biological motion, or solid object motion. The stimulus sequence was presented at three different (half, normal, and double) rates. After a 300-2400-ms blank period, the observers performed a simple choice reaction-time task that was unrelated to the presented stimulus sequence. The observation of the biological motion produced a negative correlation between reaction time and stimulus speed, whereas no such trend was observed with the scrambled or solid object motion. Furthermore, speed-dependent modulation occurred only when the task was imposed within approximately 1s after the offset of the biological motion. These results suggest that behavioral tempo may be contagious; the speed of others' movements may automatically influence the timing of movement execution by the observer.     

Determination of visual figure and ground in dynamically deforming shapes

Figure/ground assignment - determining which part of the visual image is foreground and which background - is a critical step in early visual analysis, upon which much later processing depends. Previous research on the assignment of figure and ground to opposing sides of a contour has almost exclusively involved static geometric factors - such as convexity, symmetry, and size - in non-moving images. Here, we introduce a new class of cue to figural assignment based on the motion of dynamically deforming contours. Subjects viewing an animated, deforming shape tended to assign figure and ground so that articulating curvature extrema - i.e., "hinging" vertices - had negative (concave) contour curvature. This articulating-concavity bias is present when all known static cues to figure/ground are absent or neutral in each of the individual frames of the animation, and even seems to override a number of well-known static cues when they are in opposition to the motion cue. We propose that the phenomenon reflects the visual system's inbuilt expectations about the way shapes will deform - specifically, that deformations tend to involve rigid parts articulating at concavities.     

The role of language in memory for actions

Languages differ with respect to how aspects of motion events tend to be lexicalized. English typically conflates MOTION with MANNER, but Japanese and Spanish typically do not. We report a set of experiments that assessed the effect of this cross-linguistic difference on participants' decisions in a similarity-judgment task about scenes containing novel animations as stimuli. In Experiment 1, which required participants to encode the stimuli briefly into memory, we observed a language effect; in Experiment 2, which required participants to analyze the same stimuli, but not remember them, the language effect disappeared. Hence, these experiments reveal a task-dependent effect, which, we argue, points to working memory as the source of the language effect observed in Experiment 1 and, potentially, other experiments that have shown a linguistic relativity effect.     

动觉监督早期介入对动作技能形成的影响

通过人工动作技能项目和典型职业操作技能项目的训练活动,研究了动觉监督早期介入对动作技能形成的影响,结果表明早期进行动觉监督训练可以更为充分、有效地发挥动觉监督的作用,提高动作技能形成的成绩和效率。据此讨论了“视觉为主转化为动觉为主”监督机制观点的局限性,认为自觉的职业操作技能训练活动无须遵循这一结论;提出了含有动觉训练的职业操作技能训练模式。     

Implied motion produces real depth

Static images taken from an animation of continuous motion, such as a photograph of a figure in a running pose, contain no real motion (RM) information. Interestingly, while imaging studies have shown that passively viewing these implied motion (IM) stimuli activate the same brain regions as RM, the perceptual effects of adding IM to RM are not fully understood. Given that IM appears to recruit the same neural mechanisms as RM, it should be possible to capitalize on this functional overlap and use IM in addition to, or in place of, RM to influence the perception of depth from motion parallax (MP). In the current study, we found that IM influenced depth-sign judgments as expected based on the geometry of MP with RM. These results bolster our understanding of the neural mechanisms of both IM and MP by demonstrating that IM coupled with pursuit eye movements generates unambiguous depth from MP.