Sampling the process of autobiographical memory construction

In three autobiographical memory retrieval experiments participants reported the contents of consciousness to a probe presented at early and late points during retrieval. Classification of the protocols according to the specificity of the reported knowledge found that early in retrieval abstract knowledge predominated whereas at the later point, close to generation or formation of a memory, knowledge related to specific events was more frequent. For some memories very fast and full retrieval was observed at the early point and this was independent of other concurrent processing demands. These findings show that generative retrieval entails iterative access of autobiographical knowledge but this is not observed in direct retrieval.     

Physical self-similarity enhances the gaze-cueing effect

Important social information can be gathered from the direction of another person's gaze, such as their intentions and aspects of the environment that are relevant to those intentions. Previous work has examined the effect of gaze on attention through the gaze-cueing effect: an enhancement of performance in detecting targets that appear where another person is looking. The present study investigated whether the physical self-similarity of a face could increase its impact on attention. Self-similarity was manipulated by morphing participants' faces with those of strangers. The effect of gaze direction on target detection was strongest for faces morphed with the participant's face. The results support previous work suggesting that self-similar faces are processed differently from dissimilar faces. The data also demonstrate that a face's similarity to one's own face influences the degree to which that face guides our attention in the environment.     

An eye-tracking investigation into readers' sensitivity to actual versus expected utility in the comprehension of conditionals

The successful comprehension of a utility conditional (i.e., an “if p, then q” statement where p and/or q is valued by one or more agents) requires the construction of a mental representation of the situation described by that conditional and integration of this representation with prior context. In an eye-tracking experiment, we examined the time course of integrating conditional utility information into the broader discourse model. Specifically, the experiment determined whether readers were sensitive, during rapid heuristic processing, to the congruency between the utility of the consequent clause of a conditional (positive or negative) and a reader's subjective expectations based on prior context. On a number of eye-tracking measures we found that readers were sensitive to conditional utility—conditionals for which the consequent utility mismatched the utility that would be anticipated on the basis of prior context resulted in processing disruption. Crucially, this sensitivity emerged on measures that are accepted to indicate early processing within the language comprehension system and suggests that the evaluation of a conditional's utility informs the early stages of conditional processing.     

Working memory capacity predicts conflict-task performance

The relationship between the ability to maintain task goals and working memory capacity (WMC) is firmly established, but evidence for WMC-related differences in conflict processing is mixed. We investigated whether WMC (measured using two complex-span tasks) mediates differences in adjustments of cognitive control in response to conflict. Participants performed a Simon task in which congruent and incongruent trials were equiprobable, but in which the proportion of congruency repetitions (congruent trials followed by congruent trials or incongruent trials followed by incongruent trials) and thus the need for trial-by-trial adjustments in cognitive control varied by block. The overall Simon effect did not depend on WMC capacity. However, for the low-WMC participants the Simon effect decreased as the proportion of congruency repetitions decreased, whereas for the high- and average-WMC participants it was relatively constant across conditions. Distribution analysis of the Simon effect showed more evidence for the inhibition of stimulus location in the low- than in the high-WMC participants, especially when the proportion of congruency repetitions was low. We hypothesize that low-WMC individuals exhibit more interference from task-irrelevant information due to weaker preparatory control prior to stimulus presentation and, thus, stronger reliance on reactive recruitment of cognitive control.     

The thematic hierarchy in sentence comprehension: A study on the interaction between verb class and word order in Spanish

Linking is the theory that captures the mapping of the semantic roles of lexical arguments to the syntactic functions of the phrases that realize them. At the sentence level, linking allows us to understand “who did what to whom” in an event. In Spanish, linking has been shown to interact with word order, verb class, and case marking. The current study aims to provide the first piece of experimental evidence about the interplay between word order and verb type in Spanish. We achieve this by adopting role and reference grammar and the extended argument dependency model. Two different types of clauses were examined in a self-paced reading task: clauses with object–experiencer psychological verbs and activity verbs. These types of verbs differ in the way that their syntactic and semantic structures are linked, and thus they provide interesting evidence on how information that belongs to the syntax–semantics interface might influence the predictive and integrative processes of sentence comprehension with alternative word orders. Results indicate that in Spanish, comprehension and processing speed is enhanced when the order of the constituents in the sentence mirrors their ranking on a semantic hierarchy that encodes a verb's lexical semantics. Moreover, results show that during online comprehension, predictive mechanisms based on argument hierarchization are used rapidly to inform the processing system. Our findings corroborate already existing cross-linguistic evidence on the issue and are briefly discussed in the light of other sentence-processing models.     

Foreign accents reduce false recognition rates in the DRM paradigm

ABSTRACT

More cognitive resources are required to comprehend foreign-accented than native speech. Focusing these cognitive resources on resolving the acoustic mismatch between the foreign-accented input and listeners’ stored representations of spoken words can affect other cognitive processes. Across two studies, we explored whether processing foreign-accented speech reduces the activation of semantic information. This was achieved using the DRM paradigm, in which participants study word lists and typically falsely remember non-studied words (i.e. critical lures) semantically associated with the studied words. In two experiments, participants were presented with word lists spoken both by a native and a foreign-accented speaker. In both experiments we observed lower false recognition rates for the critical lures associated with word lists presented in a foreign accent, compared to native speech. In addition, participants freely recalled more studied words when they had been presented in a native, compared to a foreign, accent, although this difference only emerged in Experiment 2, where the foreign speaker had a very strong accent. These observations suggest that processing foreign-accented speech modulates the activation of semantic information.

Highlights

• The DRM paradigm was used to explore whether semantic activation is reduced when processing foreign-accented speech.

• Across two experiments, false recognition of non-studied semantic associates was lower when word lists were presented in a foreign accent, compared to native speech.

• The above results suggest semantic activation may be reduced when processing foreign-accented speech.

• Additionally, it was found that when the foreign speaker had a mild accent, correct recall of studied words was uninfluenced. If the foreign speaker had a strong accent, however, correct recall of studied words was reduced.

     

Early maturity of face recognition: No childhood development of holistic processing, novel face encoding, or face-space

Historically, it was believed the perceptual mechanisms involved in individuating faces developed only very slowly over the course of childhood, and that adult levels of expertise were not reached until well into adolescence. Over the last 10 years, there has been some erosion of this view by demonstrations that all adult-like behavioural properties are qualitatively present in young children and infants. Determining the age of maturity, however, requires quantitative comparison across age groups, a task made difficult by the need to disentangle development in face perception from development in all the other cognitive factors that affect task performance. Here, we argue that full quantitative maturity is reached early, by 5-7 years at the latest and possibly earlier. This is based on a comprehensive literature review of results in the 5-years-to-adult age range, with particular focus on the results of the few previous studies that are methodologically suitable for quantitative comparison of face effects across age, plus three new experiments testing development of holistic/configural processing (faces versus objects, disproportionate inversion effect), ability to encode novel faces (assessed via implicit memory) and face-space (own-age bias).     

What a Rational Parser Would Do

This article examines cognitive process models of human sentence comprehension based on the idea of informed search. These models are rational in the sense that they strive to find a good syntactic analysis quickly. Informed search derives a new account of garden pathing that handles traditional counterexamples. It supports a symbolic explanation for local coherence as well as an algorithmic account of entropy reduction. The models are expressed in a broad framework for theories of human sentence comprehension.     

The relationship between pitch and space in congenital amusia

Congenital amusia manifests as a lifelong difficulty in making sense of musical sound. The extent to which this disorder is accompanied by deficits in visuo-spatial processing is an important question, bearing on the issue of whether pitch processing draws on supramodal spatial representations. The present study assessed different aspects of visuo-spatial processing with a range of tasks (Shepard-Metzler Mental Rotation, Corsi Blocks Task, Visual Patterns Test) in 14 amusics and matched controls. The absence of a group difference on any of these tasks fails to support a previous claim that the disorder is strongly related to deficits in spatial processing. However, a subgroup of amusics, with significantly elevated thresholds on a pitch direction discrimination task relative to the rest of the group, were slower, but equally accurate, at Mental Rotation. This finding is discussed in relation to the nature of supramodal representations of contour and strategies for dynamic mental transformation.