Money talks in attention bias modification: Reward in a dot-probe task affects attentional biases

Attention bias modification (ABM) aimed at correcting dysfunctional biases in anxiety patients has met with only mild success. Inspired by recent studies showing large effects of financial reward upon attention shifts, we contrasted effects of traditional dot-probe ABM and reward upon attention biases in a between-subject 2 × 2 design. Twenty-seven participants in group cognitive behavioural therapy (GCBT) for social anxiety disorder (SAD) were randomly assigned to undergo six sessions of a dot-probe task consisting of ABM or placebo ABM along with random or high reward following neutral stimuli. There was no influence of ABM on participants' attention bias over and above the influence of GCBT. Reward, however, had a strong influence on attention bias. Neither ABM nor reward reduced SAD symptoms over and above the effects of GCBT. The results add to the growing evidence that benefits of ABM through dot-probe training are unreliable but suggest on the other hand that rewarding attention may strongly influence dysfunctional attention biases.     

Single-word predictions of upcoming language during comprehension: Evidence from the cumulative semantic interference task

Comprehenders predict upcoming speech and text on the basis of linguistic input. How many predictions do comprehenders make for an upcoming word? If a listener strongly expects to hear the word “sock”, is the word “shirt” partially expected as well, is it actively inhibited, or is it ignored? The present research addressed these questions by measuring the “downstream” effects of prediction on the processing of subsequently presented stimuli using the cumulative semantic interference paradigm. In three experiments, subjects named pictures (sock) that were presented either in isolation or after strongly constraining sentence frames (“After doing his laundry, Mark always seemed to be missing one …”). Naming sock slowed the subsequent naming of the picture shirt – the standard cumulative semantic interference effect. However, although picture naming was much faster after sentence frames, the interference effect was not modulated by the context (bare vs. sentence) in which either picture was presented. According to the only model of cumulative semantic interference that can account for such a pattern of data, this indicates that comprehenders pre-activated and maintained the pre-activation of best sentence completions (sock) but did not maintain the pre-activation of less likely completions (shirt). Thus, comprehenders predicted only the most probable completion for each sentence.     

Eye movements of monkey observers viewing vocalizing conspecifics

Primates, including humans, communicate using facial expressions, vocalizations and often a combination of the two modalities. For humans, such bimodal integration is best exemplified by speech-reading - humans readily use facial cues to enhance speech comprehension, particularly in noisy environments. Studies of the eye movement patterns of human speech-readers have revealed, unexpectedly, that they predominantly fixate on the eye region of the face as opposed to the mouth. Here, we tested the evolutionary basis for such a behavioral strategy by examining the eye movements of rhesus monkeys observers as they viewed vocalizing conspecifics. Under a variety of listening conditions, we found that rhesus monkeys predominantly focused on the eye region versus the mouth and that fixations on the mouth were tightly correlated with the onset of mouth movements. These eye movement patterns of rhesus monkeys are strikingly similar to those reported for humans observing the visual components of speech. The data therefore suggest that the sensorimotor strategies underlying bimodal speech perception may have a homologous counterpart in a closely related primate ancestor.     

Conditions under which children experience inhibitory difficulty with a "button-press" go/no-go task

Go/no-go tasks seem to provide a simple marker of inhibitory development in young children. Children are told to respond to one stimulus on go trials but to make no response to another stimulus on no-go trials; responding on no-go trials is assumed to reflect a failure to inhibit the go response. However, there is evidence to suggest that a type of go/no-go task, which we call the "button-press" task, does not require inhibition. We investigated the conditions under which young children (M=3 years 6 months, N=120) experience inhibitory difficulty with this type of task. The data suggest that the speed of stimulus presentation is crucial and that other studies using this type of task have presented the stimuli too briefly. The importance of establishing the inhibitory credentials of a task before it is used as a marker of inhibitory control is emphasized.     

Neural modeling and imaging of the cortical interactions underlying syllable production

This paper describes a neural model of speech acquisition and production that accounts for a wide range of acoustic, kinematic, and neuroimaging data concerning the control of speech movements. The model is a neural network whose components correspond to regions of the cerebral cortex and cerebellum, including premotor, motor, auditory, and somatosensory cortical areas. Computer simulations of the model verify its ability to account for compensation to lip and jaw perturbations during speech. Specific anatomical locations of the model's components are estimated, and these estimates are used to simulate fMRI experiments of simple syllable production.     

The On-line Study of Sentence Comprehension: An Examination of Dual Task Paradigms

This paper presents three studies which examine the susceptibility of sentence comprehension to intrusion by extra-sentential probe words in two on-line dual-task techniques commonly used to study sentence processing: the cross-modal lexical priming paradigm and the unimodal all-visual lexical priming paradigm. It provides both a general review and a direct empirical examination of the effects of task-demand in the on-line study of sentence comprehension. In all three studies, sentential materials were presented to participants together with a target probe word which constituted either a better or a worse continuation of the sentence at a point at which it was presented. Materials were identical for all three studies. The manner of presentation of the sentence materials was, however, manipulated; presentation was either visual, auditory (normal rate) or auditory (slow rate). The results demonstrate that a technique in which a visual target probe interrupts ongoing sentence processing (such as occurs in unimodal visual presentation and in very slow auditory sentence presentation) encourages the integration of the probe word into the on-going sentence. Thus, when using such ‘sentence interrupting’ techniques, additional care to equate probes is necessary. Importantly, however, the results provide strong evidence that the standard use of fluent cross-modality sentence investigation methods are immune from such external probe word intrusions into ongoing sentence processing and are thus accurately reflect underlying comprehension processes.     

A comparison of the effects of providing activity and material choice to children with autism spectrum disorders

The present study compares the effects of providing choice between activities or between materials for completion of activities on the on-task behavior of 4 boys with autism spectrum disorders. Results showed that the participants displayed higher levels of on-task behavior during the choice conditions than in the no-choice condition. However, the type of choice opportunity did not seem to have a differential effect.     

Estimation and visualization of confusability matrices from adaptive measurement data

We present a simple but effective method based on Luce’s choice axiom [Luce, R.D. (1959). Individual choice behavior: A theoretical analysis. New York: John Wiley & Sons] for consistent estimation of the pairwise confusabilities of items in a multiple-choice recognition task with arbitrarily chosen choice-sets. The method combines the exact (non-asymptotic) Bayesian way of assessing uncertainty with the unbiasedness emphasized in the classical frequentist approach.We apply the method to data collected using an adaptive computer game designed for prevention of reading disability. A player’s estimated confusability of phonemes (or more accurately, phoneme-grapheme connections) and larger units of language is visualized in an easily understood way with color cues and explicit indication of the accuracy of the estimates. Visualization of learning-related changes in the player’s performance is considered.The empirical validity of the choice axiom is evaluated using the game data itself. The axiom appears to hold reasonably well although a small systematic violation is observable for the smallest choice-set sizes.     

初中生学业延迟满足的发展特点及其相关因素研究

用问卷法对194名初中生学业延迟满足的特点及相关因素进行了研究。结果表明:初中学生的学业延迟满足存在年级和性别差异,初二和初三学生的学业延迟满足水平明显低于初一学生,女生比男生的学业延迟满足能力高。课堂目标结构与学业延迟满足有显著关系,任务取向的课堂目标与学业延迟满足呈正相关关系;自我取向的课堂目标与学业延迟满足呈负相关关系。任务价值、自我效能与学业延迟满足呈正相关关系,学业延迟满足与学业成绩呈正相关关系。