Deconstructing Frith and Snowling's homograph-reading task: Implications for autism spectrum disorders

The poor performance of autistic individuals on a test of homograph reading is widely interpreted as evidence for a reduction in sensitivity to context termed “weak central coherence”. To better understand the cognitive processes involved in completing the homograph-reading task, we monitored the eye movements of nonautistic adults as they completed the task. Using single trial analysis, we determined that the time between fixating and producing the homograph (eye-to-voice span) increased significantly across the experiment and predicted accuracy of homograph pronunciation, suggesting that participants adapted their reading strategy to minimize pronunciation errors. Additionally, we found evidence for interference from previous trials involving the same homograph. This progressively reduced the initial advantage for dominant homograph pronunciations as the experiment progressed. Our results identify several additional factors that contribute to performance on the homograph reading task and may help to reconcile the findings of poor performance on the test with contradictory findings from other studies using different measures of context sensitivity in autism. The results also undermine some of the broader theoretical inferences that have been drawn from studies of autism using the homograph task. Finally, we suggest that this approach to task deconstruction might have wider applications in experimental psychology.     

Naming fluency in dyslexic and nondyslexic readers: Differential effects of visual crowding in foveal,parafoveal, and peripheral vision

Reading fluency is often indexed by performance on rapid automatized naming (RAN) tasks, which are known to reflect speed of access to lexical codes. We used eye tracking to investigate visual influences on naming fluency. Specifically, we examined how visual crowding affects fluency in a RAN-letters task on an item-by-item basis, by systematically manipulating the interletter spacing of items, such that upcoming letters in the array were viewed in the fovea, parafovea, or periphery relative to a given fixated letter. All lexical information was kept constant. Nondyslexic readers’ gaze durations were longer in foveal than in parafoveal and peripheral trials, indicating that visual crowding slows processing even for fluent readers. Dyslexics’ gaze durations were longer in foveal and parafoveal trials than in peripheral trials. Our results suggest that for dyslexic readers, influences of crowding on naming speed extend to a broader visual span (to parafoveal vision) than that for nondyslexic readers, but do not extend as far as peripheral vision. The findings extend previous research by elucidating the different visual spans within which crowding operates for dyslexic and nondyslexic readers in an online fluency task.     

Inhibitory stroke neighbour priming in character recognition and reading in Chinese

In alphabetic languages, prior exposure to a target word's orthographic neighbour influences word recognition in masked priming experiments and the process of word identification that occurs during normal reading. We investigated whether similar neighbour priming effects are observed in Chinese in 4 masked priming experiments (employing a forward mask and 33-ms, 50-ms, and 67-ms prime durations) and in an experiment that measured eye movements while reading. In these experiments, the stroke neighbour of a Chinese character was defined as any character that differed by the addition, deletion, or substitution of one or two strokes. Prime characters were either stroke neighbours or stroke non-neighbours of the target character, and each prime character had either a higher or a lower frequency of occurrence in the language than its corresponding target character. Frequency effects were observed in all experiments, demonstrating that the manipulation of character frequency was successful. In addition, a robust inhibitory priming effect was observed in response times for target characters in the masked priming experiments and in eye fixation durations for target characters in the reading experiment. This stroke neighbour priming was not modulated by the relative frequency of the prime and target characters. The present findings therefore provide a novel demonstration that inhibitory neighbour priming shown previously for alphabetic languages is also observed for nonalphabetic languages, and that neighbour priming (based on stroke overlap) occurs at the level of the character in Chinese.     

The Religion of the Educated Classes Revisited: New Religions,the Nonreligious,and Educational Levels

A number of different studies carried out in the late 20th century indicated that new religious movements (NRMs) tended to recruit individuals who were highly educated. In the present study, we confirm this pattern utilizing data from the national censuses of Australia, New Zealand, Canada, England, and Wales. Additionally, we found that educational patterns for NRMs in the censuses tended to fall into at least two subgroups, one of which had educational levels comparable to mainline denominations and the other of which had significantly higher educational achievements. Furthermore, census respondents who expressed some variety of nonbelief were comparable to this latter group in terms of educational accomplishments. We discuss this latter finding in terms of Ernst Troeltsch and Colin Campbell's analysis of secularization.     

“Baba Has Come to Civilize Us”: Developmental Idealism and Framing the Strict Demands of the Brahma Kumaris

This article extends and complicates the theory that “strict churches are strong” based on the strict demands that were followed and not followed by the Brahma Kumaris in Nepal. To be successful, strict religious groups must not only be strict, but also frame their strictness in ways that resonate with the everyday experiences and commonly held beliefs of their members. Nepali women involved with the Brahma Kumaris tend to accept and follow the group's demands when those demands have been framed as modern, and that framing is resonant with the prevailing definitions of modernity offered by Western development agencies. When the modern framing is not resonant, as with the case of framing celibacy as “spiritual birth control,” the strict demand is not followed, and the frame itself is rejected in favor of the practice being defined in different terms.     

Eye movements reveal mechanisms underlying attentional biases towards threat

Mechanisms underlying attentional biases towards threat (ABTs), such as attentional avoidance and difficulty of disengagement, are still unclear. To address this issue, we recorded participants' eye movements during a dot detection task in which threatening or neutral stimuli served as peripheral cues. We evaluated response times (RTs) in trials where participants looked at the central fixation cross (not at the cues), as they were required, and number and duration of (unwanted) fixations towards threatening or neutral cues; in all analyses trait anxiety was treated as a covariate. Difficulty in attentional disengagement (longer RTs) was found when peripheral threatening stimuli were presented for 100?ms. Moreover, we observed significantly shorter (unwanted) fixations on threatening than on neutral peripheral stimuli, compatible with an avoidance bias, for longer presentation times. These findings demonstrate that, independent of trait anxiety levels, disengagement bias occurs without eye movements, whereas eye movements are implied in threat avoidance.     

Oculomotor responses of stereo‐anomalous observers to pulse and ramp disparities

We examined oculomotor responses to binocular disparities of one stereo‐normal and three stereo‐anomalous observers, who were identified through a stereoscopic depth‐discrimination task, in two experimental conditions. In the pulse disparity condition, crossed and uncrossed disparities (1–6°) were briefly presented (for .25–2.0 s). In the ramp disparity condition, disparities were varied continuously with constant velocities (.7–2.0°/s) and with an amplitude of 10°. The stereo‐normal observer showed vergence responses to both pulse and ramp disparities. The three stereo‐anomalous observers showed a marked reduction or absence of vergence responses to pulse disparities but showed vergence responses to ramp disparities. The results suggest the existence of separate sub‐systems mediating disparity vergence eye movements.     

Shift of manual preference in right-handers following unimanual practice

The effect of unimanual practice of the non-preferred hand on manual asymmetry and manual preference for sequential finger movements was evaluated in right-handers before, immediately after, and 30 days following practice. The results demonstrate that unimanual practice induced a persistent shift of manual preference for the experimental task in most participants, but no significant correlation between manual asymmetry and manual preference was detected. These findings are explained by proposing that manual preference is influenced by a task-specific confidence developed from the recent history of differential use of the limbs, in interaction with a generalized confidence on a single hand for performance of motor skills.     

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.     

上行比较影响行为表现—不同类型高自尊的作用

已有研究表明,上行比较对高自尊个体产生积极效应。然而鉴于高自尊包括安全性高自尊和防御性高自尊,有必要在上行比较影响不同任务领域内的行为表现这一观点的基础上探讨高自尊的不同类型对上行比较与行为表现之间关系的影响。两个实验均采用高自尊类型、上行比较和任务领域一致性的2×2×2混合因素设计,不同之处在于其分别采用创造性测验和非创造性的语词测验作为不同领域任务。结果表明,防御性高自尊个体没有像安全性高自尊个体那样采取领域转换策略来修复自我关注,由上行比较所引起的领域转换只对安全性高自尊个体产生积极影响。