Non-selective lexical access in bilinguals is spontaneous and independent of input monitoring: Evidence from eye tracking

Language non-selective lexical access in bilinguals has been established mainly using tasks requiring explicit language processing. Here, we show that bilinguals activate native language translations even when words presented in their second language are incidentally processed in a nonverbal, visual search task. Chinese–English bilinguals searched for strings of circles or squares presented together with three English words (i.e., distracters) within a 4-item grid. In the experimental trials, all four locations were occupied by English words, including a critical word that phonologically overlapped with the Chinese word for circle or square when translated into Chinese. The eye-tracking results show that, in the experimental trials, bilinguals looked more frequently and longer at critical than control words, a pattern that was absent in English monolingual controls. We conclude that incidental word processing activates lexical representations of both languages of bilinguals, even when the task does not require explicit language processing.     

Biases in orienting and maintenance of attention among weight dissatisfied women: an eye-movement study

Despite evidence indicating fatness and thinness information are processed differently among weight-preoccupied and eating disordered individuals, the exact nature of these attentional biases is not clear. In this research, eye movement (EM) tracking assessed biases in specific component processes of visual attention (i.e., orientation, detection, maintenance and disengagement of gaze) in relation to body-related stimuli among 20 weight dissatisfied (WD) and 20 weight satisfied young women. Eye movements were recorded while participants completed a dot-probe task that featured fatness-neutral and thinness-neutral word pairs. Compared to controls, WD women were more likely to direct their initial gaze toward fatness words, had a shorter mean latency of first fixation on both fatness and thinness words, had longer first fixation on fatness words but shorter first fixation on thinness words, and shorter total gaze duration on thinness words. Reaction time data showed a maintenance bias towards fatness words among the WD women. In sum, results indicated WD women show initial orienting, speeded detection and initial maintenance biases towards fat body words in addition to a speeded detection – avoidance pattern of biases in relation to thin body words. In sum, results highlight the importance of the utility of EM-tracking as a means of identifying subtle attentional biases among weight dissatisfied women drawn from a non-clinical setting and the need to assess attentional biases as a dynamic process.     

Automatic Mechanisms for Social Attention Are Culturally Penetrable

Are mechanisms for social attention influenced by culture? Evidence that social attention is triggered automatically by bottom‐up gaze cues and is uninfluenced by top‐down verbal instructions may suggest it operates in the same way everywhere. Yet considerations from evolutionary and cultural psychology suggest that specific aspects of one's cultural background may have consequence for the way mechanisms for social attention develop and operate. In more interdependent cultures, the scope of social attention may be broader, focusing on more individuals and relations between those individuals. We administered a multi‐gaze cueing task requiring participants to fixate a foreground face flanked by background faces and measured shifts in attention using eye tracking. For European Americans, gaze cueing did not depend on the direction of background gaze cues, suggesting foreground gaze alone drives automatic attention shifting; for East Asians, cueing patterns differed depending on whether the foreground cue matched or mismatched background cues, suggesting foreground and background gaze information were integrated. These results demonstrate that cultural background influences the social attention system by shifting it into a narrow or broad mode of operation and, importantly, provides evidence challenging the assumption that mechanisms underlying automatic social attention are necessarily rigid and impenetrable to culture.     

老年人与青年人阅读空格文本的注视位置效应

采用EyeLink2000眼动仪,以14名老年人和14名青年人为被试,探讨他们阅读空格汉语文本的注视位置效应.阅读材料分为正常无空格文本和词间空格文本两种.结果发现:(1)在阅读词间空格文本和正常无空格文本时,老年人与青年人都表现出单次注视的首次注视是位于词的中心,多次注视的首次注视是位于词的开头;(2)老年人阅读正常无空格文本时对词尾的注视概率显著低于词间空格文本,而青年人则没有差异.结果表明老年人与青年人在阅读空格文本时存在注视位置效应.     

Looking the other way: The role of gaze direction in the cross-race memory effect

One of the most replicable findings reported in the social psychological literature is the cross-race memory effect. We argue this effect derives from higher-order interactions among social cues that determine the perceived relevance of a face to an observer. The current research tested this hypothesis by examining the combined influences of eye gaze direction and race on face memory. The physical subtlety of eye gaze belies its powerful influence on social perception, and in this case helps specify the relevance of same- versus other-race faces. We found that only in faces making direct eye contact—not those displaying averted eye gaze—was the cross-race memory effect evident. Likewise, only in same-race faces did direct relative to averted-gaze enhance face memory. These findings have implications for our general understanding of the combinatorial nature of social perception and help clarify the underlying cause of the cross-race memory effect.     

Effect of Representational Distance Between Meanings on Recognition of Ambiguous Spoken Words

Previous research indicates that mental representations of word meanings are distributed along both semantic and syntactic dimensions such that nouns and verbs are relatively distinct from one another. Two experiments examined the effect of representational distance between meanings on recognition of ambiguous spoken words by comparing recognition of unambiguous words, noun–verb homonyms, and noun–noun homonyms. In Experiment 1, auditory lexical decision was fastest for unambiguous words, slower for noun–verb homonyms, and slowest for noun–noun homonyms. In Experiment 2, response times for matching spoken words to pictures followed the same pattern and eye fixation time courses revealed converging, gradual time course differences between conditions. These results indicate greater competition between meanings of ambiguous words when the meanings are from the same grammatical class (noun–noun homonyms) than when they are from different grammatical classes (noun–verb homonyms).     

Eight-year-olds,but not six-year-olds,perform just as well as adults when playing Concentration: Resolving the enigma?

Anecdotal reports suggest that children often outperform adults when playing Concentration. This is surprising as cognitive processes tend to develop progressively throughout childhood. To date, very few studies have examined this apparent paradox, and with mixed results. In the present study, the ability of 6-year-olds (n = 34), 8-year-olds (n = 48), and adults (n = 38) to play Concentration was examined in a controlled computer-based setup involving eye tracking. The main dependent variables were the number of moves and time in seconds to finish the first nine (out of 12) matching pairs. The results revealed that while 6-year-olds were outperformed by older children and adults, 8-year-olds performed just as well as adults. It is suggested that Concentration may represent a cognitive challenge rarely encountered in the real world, and when playing Concentration, adults seem to use strategies that are effective in real life situations, but may be less appropriate when playing the game.     

A closer look at the size of the gaze-liking effect: a preregistered replication

This study is a direct replication of gaze-liking effect using the same design, stimuli and procedure. The gaze-liking effect describes the tendency for people to rate objects as more likeable when they have recently seen a person repeatedly gaze toward rather than away from the object. However, as subsequent studies show considerable variability in the size of this effect, we sampled a larger number of participants (N?=?98) than the original study (N?=?24) to gain a more precise estimate of the gaze-liking effect size. Our results indicate a much smaller standardised effect size (d_z?=?0.02) than that of the original study (d_z?=?0.94). Our smaller effect size was not due to general insensitivity to eye-gaze effects because the same sample showed a clear (d_z?=?1.09) gaze-cuing effect – faster reaction times when eyes looked toward vs away from target objects. We discuss the implications of our findings for future studies wishing to study the gaze-liking effect.     

Processing polarity: how the ungrammatical intrudes on the grammatical

A central question in online human sentence comprehension is, “How are linguistic relations established between different parts of a sentence?” Previous work has shown that this dependency resolution process can be computationally expensive, but the underlying reasons for this are still unclear. This article argues that dependency resolution is mediated by cue‐based retrieval, constrained by independently motivated working memory principles defined in a cognitive architecture. To demonstrate this, this article investigates an unusual instance of dependency resolution, the processing of negative and positive polarity items, and confirms a surprising prediction of the cue‐based retrieval model: Partial‐cue matches—which constitute a kind of similarity‐based interference—can give rise to the intrusion of ungrammatical retrieval candidates, leading to both processing slow‐downs and even errors of judgment that take the form of illusions of grammaticality in patently ungrammatical structures. A notable achievement is that good quantitative fits are achieved without adjusting the key model parameters.     

Give and take: syntactic priming during spoken language comprehension

Syntactic priming during language production is pervasive and well-studied. Hearing, reading, speaking or writing a sentence with a given structure increases the probability of subsequently producing the same structure, regardless of whether the prime and target share lexical content. In contrast, syntactic priming during comprehension has proven more elusive, fueling claims that comprehension is less dependent on general syntactic representations and more dependent on lexical knowledge. In three experiments we explored syntactic priming during spoken language comprehension. Participants acted out double-object (DO) or prepositional-object (PO) dative sentences while their eye movements were recorded. Prime sentences used different verbs and nouns than the target sentences. In target sentences, the onset of the direct-object noun was consistent with both an animate recipient and an inanimate theme, creating a temporary ambiguity in the argument structure of the verb (DO e.g., Show the horse the book; PO e.g., Show the horn to the dog). We measured the difference in looks to the potential recipient and the potential theme during the ambiguous interval. In all experiments, participants who heard DO primes showed a greater preference for the recipient over the theme than those who heard PO primes, demonstrating across-verb priming during online language comprehension. These results accord with priming found in production studies, indicating a role for abstract structural information during comprehension as well as production.