Reliability and plasticity of response inhibition and interference control

This study investigated the internal reliability, temporal stability and plasticity of commonly used measures of inhibition-related functions. Stop-signal, go/no-go, antisaccade, Simon, Eriksen flanker, Stroop and Continuous Performance tasks were administered twice to 23 healthy participants over a period of approximately 11 weeks in order to assess test–retest correlations, internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha), and systematic between as well as within session performance changes. Most of the inhibition-related measures showed good test–retest reliabilities and internal consistencies, with the exception of the stop-signal reaction time measure, which showed poor reliability. Generally no systematic performance changes were observed across the two assessments with the exception of four variables of the Eriksen flanker, Simon and Stroop task which showed reduced variability of reaction time and an improvement in the response time for incongruent trials at second assessment. Predominantly stable performance within one test session was shown for most measures. Overall, these results are informative for studies with designs requiring temporally stable parameters e.g. genetic or longitudinal treatment studies.     

Frequency and predictability effects in eye fixations for skilled and less-skilled deaf readers

The illiteracy rate in the deaf population has been alarmingly high for several decades, despite the fact that deaf children go through the standard stages of schooling. Much research addressing this issue has focused on word-level processes, but in the recent years, little research has focused on sentence-levels processes. Previous research (Fischler, 1985) investigated word integration within context in college-level deaf and hearing readers in a lexical decision task following incomplete sentences with targets that were congruous or incongruous relative to the preceding context; it was found that deaf readers, as a group, were more dependent on contextual information than their hearing counterparts. The present experiment extended Fischler's results and investigated the relationship between frequency, predictability, and reading skill in skilled hearing, skilled deaf, and less-skilled deaf readers. Results suggest that only less-skilled deaf readers, and not all deaf readers, rely more on contextual cues to boost word processing. Additionally, early effects of frequency and predictability were found for all three groups of readers, without any evidence for an interaction between frequency and predictability.     

Automatic gaze to the nose region cannot be inhibited during observation of facial expression in Eastern observers

Humans can extract a great deal of information about others very quickly. This is partly because the face automatically captures observers’ attention. Specifically, the eyes can attract overt attention. Although it has been reported that not only the eyes but also the nose can capture initial oculomotor movement in Eastern observers, its generalizability remains unknown. In this study, we applied the “don’t look” paradigm wherein participants are asked not to fixate on a specific facial region (i.e., eyes, nose, and mouth) during an emotion recognition task with upright (Experiment 1) and inverted (Experiment 2) faces. In both experiments, we found that participants were less able to inhibit the initial part of their fixations to the nose, which can be interpreted as the nose automatically capturing attention. Along with previous studies, our overt attention tends to be attracted by a part of the face, which is the nose region in Easterner observers.     

Family Unification with Reactive Attachment Disorder Children: A Brief Treatment

This is a case study of a family with a child (age eight) with reactive attachment disorder and the subsequent individual and family therapy. Treatment of choice for the child was Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) and supportive educational counseling for the parents and family. Qualitative evaluation of the process demonstrated that the parents observed an instant change in the child's attitude. The child reported that she felt better about family, school, and truthfulness, and stated about the therapy: It opened a window for me. A 12-month evaluation demonstrated continued positive effects.     

Selection and inhibition in infancy: evidence from the spatial negative priming paradigm

We used a spatial negative priming (SNP) paradigm to examine visual selective attention in infants and adults using eye movements as the motor selection measure. In SNP, when a previously ignored location becomes the target to be selected, responses to it are impaired, providing a measure of inhibitory selection. Each trial consisted of a prime and a probe, separated by 67, 200, or 550 ms interstimulus intervals (ISIs). In the prime, a target was accompanied by a distractor. In the probe, the target appeared either in the location formerly occupied by the distractor (ignored repetition) or in another location (control). Adults exhibited the SNP effect in all three ISI conditions, producing slower saccade latencies on ignored repetition versus control trials. The SNP effect obtained for infants only under 550 and 200 ms ISI conditions. These results suggest that important developments in visual selection are rooted in emerging inhibitory mechanisms.     

The developing constraints on parsing decisions: the role of lexical-biases and referential scenes in child and adult sentence processing

Two striking contrasts currently exist in the sentence processing literature. First, whereas adult readers rely heavily on lexical information in the generation of syntactic alternatives, adult listeners in world-situated eye-gaze studies appear to allow referential evidence to override strong countervailing lexical biases (Tanenhaus, Spivey-Knowlton, Eberhard, and Sedivy, 1995). Second, in contrast to adults, children in similar listening studies fail to use this referential information and appear to rely exclusively on verb biases or perhaps syntactically based parsing principles (Trueswell, Sekerina, Hill, and Logrip, 1999). We explore these contrasts by fully crossing verb bias and referential manipulations in a study using the eye-gaze listening technique with adults (Experiment 1) and five-year-olds (Experiment 2). Results indicate that adults combine lexical and referential information to determine syntactic choice. Children rely exclusively on verb bias in their ultimate interpretation. However, their eye movements reveal an emerging sensitivity to referential constraints. The observed changes in information use over ontogenetic time best support a constraint-based lexicalist account of parsing development, which posits that highly reliable cues to structure, like lexical biases, will emerge earlier during development and more robustly than less reliable cues.     

Infants perceiving and acting on the eyes: tests of an evolutionary hypothesis

It has been hypothesized that an evolutionarily ancient mechanism underlies the ability of human infants to detect and act upon the direction of eye gaze of another human face. However, the evidence from behavioral studies with infants is also consistent with a more domain-general system responsive to the lateral motion of stimuli regardless of whether or not eyes are involved. To address this issue three experiments with 4-month-old infants are reported that utilize a standard face-cueing paradigm. In the first experiment an inverted face was used to investigate whether the motion of the pupils elicits the cueing effect regardless of the surrounding face context. In the second experiment pupil motion and eye gaze direction were opposed, allowing us to assess their relative importance. In a third experiment, a more complex gaze shift sequence allowed us to analyse the importance of beginning with a period of mutual gaze. Overall, the results were consistent with the importance of the perceived direction of motion of pupils. However, to be effective in cueing spatial locations this motion needs to be preceded by a period of direct mutual gaze (eye contact). We suggest that evolution results in information-processing biases that shape and constrain the outcome of individual development to eventually result in adult adaptive specializations.     

Dissociable stages of problem solving (I): temporal characteristics revealed by eye-movement analyses

Understanding the functional neuroanatomy of planning and problem solving may substantially benefit from better insight into the chronology of the cognitive processes involved. Based on the assumption that regularities in cognitive processing are reflected in overtly observable eye-movement patterns, here we recorded eye movements while participants worked on Tower of London (TOL) problems that comprised an experimental manipulation of different task demands. Single-trial saccade-locked analyses revealed that higher demands on forming an internal problem representation were associated with an increased number of gaze alternations between start state and goal state, but did not show any effect on the durations of these inspections of the states. In contrast, higher demands on actual planning in terms of mental manipulations of working memory contents coincided with a prolonged duration of the very last inspection of the start state (i.e., immediately preceding movement execution) but did not show any effect on the number of gaze alterations. Differential task demands on internalization and planning processes during problem solving hence selectively affect different eye-movement parameters. Moreover, these findings complement previous neuroimaging data on dissociable contributions of left and right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in problem solving with novel evidence for a corresponding dissociation in the eye-movement patterns reflecting the associated cognitive processes.     

Online recognition of music is influenced by relative and absolute pitch information

Three experiments explored online recognition in a nonspeech domain, using a novel experimental paradigm. Adults learned to associate abstract shapes with particular melodies, and at test they identified a played melody's associated shape. To implicitly measure recognition, visual fixations to the associated shape versus a distractor shape were measured as the melody played. Degree of similarity between associated melodies was varied to assess what types of pitch information adults use in recognition. Fixation and error data suggest that adults naturally recognize music, like language, incrementally, computing matches to representations before melody offset, despite the fact that music, unlike language, provides no pressure to execute recognition rapidly. Further, adults use both absolute and relative pitch information in recognition. The implicit nature of the dependent measure should permit use with a range of populations to evaluate postulated developmental and evolutionary changes in pitch encoding.     

Young infants' eye movements over "natural" scenes and "experimental" scenes

Eye movements of 30 4-month-olds were tracked as infants viewed animals and vehicles in “natural” scenes and, for comparison, in homogeneous “experimental” scenes. Infants showed equivalent looking time preferences for natural and experimental scenes overall, but fixated natural scenes and objects in natural scenes more than experimental scenes and objects in experimental scenes and shifted fixations between objects and contexts more in natural than in experimental scenes. The findings show how infants treat objects and contexts in natural scenes and suggest that they treat more commonly used experimental scenes differently.