Thematic role properties of subjects and objects

This paper tests two claims about the thematic roles Agent and Patient: first, that they can be decomposed into more primitive features, as laid out in Dowty's (1991) Proto-Roles Hypothesis; and second, that these properties can be inferred directly from the grammatical roles subject and object. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants rated the Proto-Roles properties of the subject and object of transitive sentences with real verbs. Subjects were rated as more Agent-like than objects, while objects were rated as more Patient-like than subjects. Experiment 3 used transitive sentences with nonsense content words (e.g. "The rom mecked the zarg"). Even in the absence of a known verb, the results were the same. Experiment 4 examined the corollary prediction that subjects and objects should not differ on grammatically irrelevant properties (e.g. "being liquid"); this prediction was confirmed. In Experiment 5, verbs that do not permit objects (e.g. "fall," "erupt") were placed in the transitive frame. Results were the same as in Experiments 1 through 3. Moreover, the semantics of the verb were altered by the frame, indicating that participants tried to fuse the semantics of the verb with those of the frame. Possible sources of these inferences are considered.     

Perception in action: multiple roles of sensory information in action control

Perceptual processes play a central role in the planning and control of human voluntary action. Indeed, planning an action is a sensorimotor process operating on sensorimotor units, a process that is based on anticipations of perceptual action effects. I discuss how the underlying sensorimotor units emerge, and how they can be employed to tailor action plans to the goals at hand. I also discuss how even a single action can induce sensorimotor binding, how intentionally implemented short-term associations between stimuli and responses become autonomous, how feature overlap between stimulus events and actions makes them compatible, and why action plans are necessarily incomplete.

A computational model of event segmentation from perceptual prediction

People tend to perceive ongoing continuous activity as series of discrete events. This partitioning of continuous activity may occur, in part, because events correspond to dynamic patterns that have recurred across different contexts. Recurring patterns may lead to reliable sequential dependencies in observers' experiences, which then can be used to guide perception. The current set of simulations investigated whether this statistical structure within events can be used 1) to develop stable internal representations that facilitate perception and 2) to learn when to update such representations in a self-organizing manner. These simulations demonstrate that experience with recurring patterns enables a system to accurately predict upcoming stimuli within an event, to identify boundaries between such events based on transient increases in prediction error, and to use such boundaries to improve prediction about subsequent activities.     

Grammatical aspect and event recognition in children’s online sentence comprehension

This study investigated whether or not the temporal information encoded in aspectual morphemes can be used immediately by young children to facilitate event recognition during online sentence comprehension. We focused on the contrast between two grammatical aspectual morphemes in Mandarin Chinese, the perfective morpheme –le and the (imperfective) durative morpheme –zhe. The perfective morpheme –le is often used to indicate that an event has been completed, whereas the durative morpheme –zhe indicates that an event is still in progress or continuing. We were interested to see whether young children are able to use the temporal reference encoded in the two aspectual morphemes (i.e., completed versus ongoing) as rapidly as adults to facilitate event recognition during online sentence comprehension. Using the visual world eye-tracking paradigm, we tested 34 Mandarin-speaking adults and 99 Mandarin-speaking children (35 three-year-olds, 32 four-year-olds and 32 five-year-olds). On each trial, participants were presented with spoken sentences containing either of the two aspectual morphemes while viewing a visual image containing two pictures, one representing a completed event and one representing an ongoing event. Participants’ eye movements were recorded from the onset of the spoken sentences. The results show that both the adults and the three age groups of children exhibited a facilitatory effect trigged by the aspectual morpheme: hearing the perfective morpheme –le triggered more eye movements to the completed event area, whereas hearing the durative morpheme –zhe triggered more eye movements to the ongoing event area. This effect occurred immediately after the onset of the aspectual morpheme, both for the adults and the three groups of children. This is evidence that young children are able to use the temporal information encoded in aspectual morphemes as rapidly as adults to facilitate event recognition. Children’s eye movement patterns reflect a rapid mapping of grammatical aspect onto the temporal structures of events depicted in the visual scene.     

Strategic retrieval processing and the impact of knowing when a memory was first created

Retrieval orientation refers to a process where participants strategically alter how a memory cue is processed in response to different task demands. In the present study we explored whether retrieval orientation is influenced by knowing when an old stimulus was first encoded. Participants completed separate remember/know test blocks for old items from a recent delay (40 min) and old items from a remote delay (48 h). Manipulations at encoding ensured that performance levels were matched between these two blocks, thus avoiding confounds with differences in retrieval effort. Importantly, a third test block comprised old items from both delays randomly intermixed. As the nature of the old items varies unpredictably in the mixed block, it should not be possibly to adopt a specific retrieval orientation and the mixed block therefore acts as a control condition. Participants saw the words “mixed,” “recent” or “remote” prior to each test block. Comparing ERPs from the recent and remote blocks permitted an investigation of whether participants alter their retrieval orientation in response to the specific length of the retention interval. Comparing ERPs from the pure (recent and remote) test blocks to ERPs from the mixed block permitted an investigation of whether delay information per se led to differences in retrieval strategy. Analysis of the ERP data found no differences between the recent and remote blocks. However, ERPs from these pure blocks were significantly less positive than ERPs from the mixed block from 200 ms towards the end of the epoch. The findings suggest that the delay information was useful in a general sense and encouraged retrieval strategies distinct from those engaged in the mixed block. We speculate that such strategies might relate to whether or not the retrieval search is specific and constrained and/or whether processes that serve to reinstate the original encoding context are engaged.     

事件提示和时间提示对新异干扰的影响—— 来自听视跨通道和听通道的证据

采用Oddball范式考察听视跨感觉通道和听感觉通道中“无关刺激”或“无关属性”的信号提示对新异干扰的影响。实验1和实验2分别比较了听视跨通道和听通道中时间事件提示、时间提示和事件提示三种条件。结果表明：(1)时间提示条件下新异干扰效应消失, 而事件提示条件下新异干扰效应仍存在。无关刺激意外变化引起的靶任务行为受损, 不仅与偏差刺激的小概率和新颖性有关, 而且与干扰刺激与靶子间提示信号关联有关, 这种提示关联中事件发生的提示功能比时间间隔的提示功能更为重要。(2)听通道下新异干扰与视听跨通道结果一致, 无关属性也会起到提示信号作用, 同样事件提示功能比时间提示功能更重要。     

Memory for the 2008 presidential election in healthy ageing and mild cognitive impairment

The present study examined memory accuracy and confidence for personal and public event details of the 2008 presidential election in healthy older adults and those with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Participants completed phone interviews within a week after the election and after a 10-month delay. MCI patients and healthy older adults had comparable emotional reactions to learning the outcome of the election, with most people finding it to be a positive experience. After the delay period, details about the election were better remembered by all participants than a less emotionally arousing comparison event. However, MCI patients had more difficulty than healthy older adults correctly recalling details of public information about the election, although often the MCI patients could recognise the correct details. This is the first study to show that MCI patients' memory can benefit from emotionally arousing positive events, complementing the literature demonstrating similar effects for negative events.     

Affective matching moderates S–R binding

We investigated the moderating influence of affective matching on S–R binding processes in a sequential priming study in which positive and negative nouns had to be categorised as referring to a person or to an object. Irrelevant positive and negative distractor words (adjectives) were integrated with responses into S–R episodes if they had the same valence as the target (affective match condition). In this case, repeating the prime distractor in the probe led to a retrieval of the prime response, which facilitated performance for response repetition sequences but had no effect on performance when responses changed between prime and probe. However, if target and distractor had different valences (affective mismatch condition), no interaction of distractor relation and response relation occurred, indicating that distractors were less likely to be associated with responses into event files during the prime trial episode. Findings reveal that affective mismatches are detected automatically and modulate a binding of irrelevant information with responses.     

返回抑制过程中情绪面孔加工优先：ERPs研究

返回抑制(IOR)是指注意过程中个体对已搜索过的位置进行抑制, 从而在随后该位置上出现目标时发生注意重新定向或反应变慢的过程。本研究使用ERPs技术, 采用线索-靶子范式, 考察了情绪目标辨别任务中IOR的发生过程及二者的神经机制。结果发现, 与无效线索相比, 有效线索下的P1波幅更小, N1波幅更大, 正性、负性面孔N170的波幅比中性面孔大。表明当要求被试做情绪辨别任务时, IOR与对情绪信息的反应之间发生了分离, 表现出情绪加工的优先。这说明IOR和情绪偏向是发生在两种不同神经通路上的适应机制, 也为进一步探究注意与情绪的关系问题提供了来自神经电生理学的证据。     

Episodic future thought: Contributions from working memory

The ability to imagine hypothetical events in one’s personal future is thought to involve a number of constituent cognitive processes. We investigated the extent to which individual differences in working memory capacity contribute to facets of episodic future thought. College students completed simple and complex measures of working memory and were cued to recall autobiographical memories and imagine future autobiographical events consisting of varying levels of specificity (i.e., ranging from generic to increasingly specific and detailed events). Consistent with previous findings, future thought was related to analogous measures of autobiographical memory, likely reflecting overlapping cognitive factors supporting both past and future thought. Additionally, after controlling for autobiographical memory, residual working memory variance independently predicted future episodic specificity. We suggest that when imagining future events, working memory contributes to the construction of a single, coherent, future event depiction, but not to the retrieval or elaboration of event details.