Differential Decline of Verbal and Visuospatial Processing Speed Across the Adult Life Span

The present study compared the age-related decline in verbal and visuospatial processing speed in 131 participants aged 18 to 90 years. Participants performed four verbal and four visuospatial tasks. Age differences in processing speed were compared at the group and individual levels. For the group-level analyses, participants were divided into a young adult group and six older groups subdivided by decade. The mean verbal and visuospatial response times (RTs) for each group were regressed on the corresponding RTs of the young adult group. The slope of the visuospatial regression was greater than that for the verbal regression at all ages, and the difference between the visuospatial and verbal slopes increased with each decade. For the individual-level analyses, a verbal and a visuospatial processing-time coefficient (Hale & Jansen, 1994) was obtained for each individual, and these values were then regressed on age. Verbal processing time increased linearly by approximately 50% while visuospatial processing time increased exponentially by approximately 500% from 18 to 90 years. Taken together, the results at both the group and the individual level demonstrate that aging affects visuospatial processing to a much greater extent than verbal processing.     

Attentional Capture in Younger and Older Adults

The present study was designed to examine age-related differences in attentional capture. In the first experiment, participants identified targets defined either by an abrupt onset or by color difference. Prior to the presentation of the targets, onset or color cues were presented. It was found that color cues, but not onset cues, captured attention for color targets for both younger and older adults. It was also found, however, that onset and color cues captured attention for onset targets for both age groups. Moreover, while both types of cues yielded equivalent attentional capture effects with the younger adults, onset cues yielded greater effects for the older adults. The second experiment, using only younger adults, replicated the pattern of results found with the younger adults in the first experiment. The findings from these two experiments provide only partial support for the contingent involuntary orienting hypothesis, which suggests that only cues that share critical features with targets will capture attention. Moreover, the results also indicate that there are age-related differences in attentionalcapture.     

The time course of access to semantic information in high-performing older adults: Behavioral evidence for the hemispheric asymmetry reduction in OLDer individuals

ABSTRACT

The possibility that the HAROLD phenomenon (i.e., Hemispheric Asymmetry Reduction in OLDer adults) is manifested in the course of access to semantic information, in particular the meaning of emotional words, was investigated using the visual half-field priming paradigm. The time course of priming was tracked in the cerebral hemispheres across three SOAs: 150, 300, and 750 ms. The results showed older and young adults had the same level of accuracy. While priming occurred unilaterally in young participants, the pattern of priming in older participants appeared to be bilateral whenever it was present, that is, at the 300- and 750-ms SOAs. The delay in the appearance of priming in older adults may be due to an increase in sensory thresholds that causes older adults to need more time to encode stimuli and fully activate their semantic network. It is concluded that the bilateral pattern of priming in the presence of an equivalent level of performance in older adults provides behavioral evidence supporting the compensatory role of the HAROLD phenomenon for this particular task.     

Framing fast and slow: a dual processing account of multimodal framing effects

ABSTRACT

Human reasoning can be characterized by a continuum anchored by two extremes: fast, automatic, and emotional processing on the one side; versus slow, controlled and rational processing on the other. Despite theoretical linkages, no studies have empirically connected these types of information processing with the mechanisms of multimodal (visual and textual) media effects. We employ tools from dual processing theories in a framing effects paradigm to test whether the effects of news visuals and text take place via relatively more automatic and controlled information processing, respectively. To do so, we combine experimental manipulations and individual differences data collected across two experiments using different political issues. Results from experimental manipulations provide converging evidence for the distinct processing of visuals and text. Individual differences data paint a more nuanced picture, suggesting that the processing of multimodal news frames does not always conform to a simple automatic-controlled dichotomy.     

The SNARC effect in the processing of second-language number words: Further evidence for strong lexico-semantic connections

We present new evidence that word translation involves semantic mediation. It has been shown that participants react faster to small numbers with their left hand and to large numbers with their right hand. This SNARC (spatial-numerical association of response codes) effect is due to the fact that in Western cultures the semantic number line is oriented from left (small) to right (large). We obtained a SNARC effect when participants had to indicate the parity of second-language (L2) number words, but not when they had to indicate whether L2 number words contained a particular sound. Crucially, the SNARC effect was also obtained in a translation verification task, indicating that this task involved the activation of number magnitude.     

Sex differences in mental rotation with polygons of different complexity: Do men utilize holistic processes whereas women prefer piecemeal ones?

Sex differences in mental rotation were investigated as a function of stimulus complexity with a sample size of N = 72. Replicating earlier findings with polygons, mental rotation was faster for males than for females, and reaction time increased with more complex polygons. Additionally, sex differences increased for complex polygons. Most importantly, however, mental rotation speed decreased with increasing complexity for women but did not change for men. Thus, the sex effects reflect a difference in strategy, with women mentally rotating the polygons in an analytic, piecemeal fashion and men using a holistic mode of mental rotation.     

Rapid extraction of mean identity from sets of faces

Recent evidence suggests that the notion that the visual system can rapidly extract summary statistics from complex scenes extends to representing sets of faces in terms of mean emotion or gender. Here we show that observers can also extract a mean identity from a set of faces with different identities. Observers first saw a set of four faces with different identities and were subsequently asked whether or not a single test face had been present in the preceding set. They were significantly more likely to respond that the test face had been present in the set if it was the morphed mean of all four set faces than when it was an actual set member. This finding suggests that representations based on summary statistics are available for face identity.     

Eye movements when reading text messaging (txt msgng)

The growing popularity of mobile-phone technology has led to changes in the way people—particularly younger people—communicate. A clear example of this is the advent of Short Message Service (SMS) language, which includes orthographic abbreviations (e.g., omitting vowels, as in wk, week) and phonetic respelling (e.g., using u instead of you). In the present study, we examined the pattern of eye movements during reading of SMS sentences (e.g., my hols wr gr8), relative to normally written sentences, in a sample of skilled “texters”. SMS sentences were created by using (mostly) orthographic or phonological abbreviations. Results showed that there is a reading cost—both at a local level and at a global level—for individuals who are highly expert in SMS language. Furthermore, phonological abbreviations resulted in a greater cost than orthographic abbreviations.     

Is morphological decomposition limited to low-frequency words?

On the basis of data from masked priming experiments, it has been argued that an automatic process of decomposition is applied to all morphologically structured stimuli, irrespective of their lexical characteristics (Rastle, Davis, & New, 2004). So far, this claim has been tested only with respect to low-frequency primes and nonword primes. This is a limitation because some models of morphological processing postulate that only high-frequency complex words are recognized as whole forms. Thus, a more stringent test would be to determine whether high-frequency complex words also show evidence of masked priming. We report an experiment that compares masked-priming effects observed when the primes constitute morphologically structured nonwords (e.g., alarmer–ALARM), low-frequency words with a mean frequency of 2 per million (e.g., notional–NOTION), and high-frequency words with a mean frequency of 60 per million (e.g., national–NATION). These three conditions yielded significant and equivalent effects, lending strong support to the notion of a routine form of decomposition that is applied to all morphologically structured stimuli.     

The processing of subject and object relative clauses in Spanish: An eye-tracking study

A normative study and an eye-tracking experiment investigated the influence of animacy on the processing of subject and object relative clauses in Spanish. The results showed that object relative clauses caused more difficulty than subject relative clauses, but that animacy modulated this preference. The overall pattern was similar to findings in other languages. However, because of the syntactic characteristics of Spanish relative clauses, the results give novel insights into the processing mechanisms that underlie relative clause processing.