The role of syllables in word recognition among beginning Finnish readers: Evidence from eye movements during reading

The eye movements of Finnish first and second graders were monitored as they read sentences where polysyllabic words were either hyphenated at syllable boundaries, alternatingly coloured (every second syllable black, every second red) or had no explicit syllable boundary cues (e.g., ta-lo vs. talo vs. talo = “house”). The results showed that hyphenation at syllable boundaries slows down reading of first and second graders even though syllabification by hyphens is very common in Finnish reading instruction, as all first-grade textbooks include hyphens at syllable boundaries. When hyphens were positioned within a syllable (t-alo vs. ta-lo), beginning readers were even more disrupted. Alternate colouring did not affect reading speed, no matter whether colours signalled syllable structure or not. The results show that beginning Finnish readers prefer to process polysyllabic words via syllables rather than letter by letter. At the same time they imply that hyphenation encourages sequential syllable processing, which slows down the reading of children, who are already capable of parallel syllable processing or recognising words directly via the whole-word route.     

The Swedish Hayling task,and its relation to working memory,verbal ability,and speech‐recognition‐in‐noise

Cognitive functions and speech‐recognition‐in‐noise were evaluated with a cognitive test battery, assessing response inhibition using the Hayling task, working memory capacity (WMC) and verbal information processing, and an auditory test of speech recognition. The cognitive tests were performed in silence whereas the speech recognition task was presented in noise. Thirty young normally‐hearing individuals participated in the study. The aim of the study was to investigate one executive function, response inhibition, and whether it is related to individual working memory capacity (WMC), and how speech‐recognition‐in‐noise relates to WMC and inhibitory control. The results showed a significant difference between initiation and response inhibition, suggesting that the Hayling task taps cognitive activity responsible for executive control. Our findings also suggest that high verbal ability was associated with better performance in the Hayling task. We also present findings suggesting that individuals who perform well on tasks involving response inhibition, and WMC, also perform well on a speech‐in‐noise task. Our findings indicate that capacity to resist semantic interference can be used to predict performance on speech‐in‐noise tasks.     

Facial asymmetry is negatively related to assertive personality but unrelated to dominant personality in men

Fluctuating asymmetry (FA) is a putative indicator of development instability in humans and other species, and some literature supports a women’s preference for low degree of FA in opposite sex (e.g., symmetrical face). Also some personality traits associated to social status (e.g., dominance and assertiveness) are attractive to women due to direct and indirect benefits associated to high status. The aim of this work was to study the relationship between facial FA and dominant and assertive personalities. We found a negative correlation between facial FA and assertive personality but not between facial FA and dominant personality. Moreover, we found a positive correlation between assertive and dominant personality. Our results suggest that a low facial FA and assertive personality can be related to be advertising desirable traits and high status in men in order to be more attractive to women. This study supports the evidence shown by previous works which shows that a low facial FA is related with socially desirable and attractive aspects of personality.     

Unfamiliar face matching: Pairs out‐perform individuals and provide a route to training

Matching unfamiliar faces is known to be difficult. Here, we ask whether performance can be improved by asking viewers to work in pairs, a manipulation known to increase accuracy for low‐level visual discrimination tasks. Across four experiments we consistently find that face matching accuracy is higher for pairs of viewers than for individuals. This ‘pairs advantage’ is generally driven by adopting the response of the higher scoring partner. However, when the task becomes difficult, both partners' performance is improved by working in a pair. In two experiments, we find evidence that working in a pair can lead to subsequent improvements in individual performance, specifically for viewers whose accuracy is initially low. The pairs' technique therefore offers the opportunity for substantial improvements in face matching performance, along with an added training benefit.     

The own‐age face recognition bias is task dependent

The own‐age bias (OAB) in face recognition (more accurate recognition of own‐age than other‐age faces) is robust among young adults but not older adults. We investigated the OAB under two different task conditions. In Experiment 1 young and older adults (who reported more recent experience with own than other‐age faces) completed a match‐to‐sample task with young and older adult faces; only young adults showed an OAB. In Experiment 2 young and older adults completed an identity detection task in which we manipulated the identity strength of target and distracter identities by morphing each face with an average face in 20% steps. Accuracy increased with identity strength and facial age influenced older adults' (but not younger adults') strategy, but there was no evidence of an OAB. Collectively, these results suggest that the OAB depends on task demands and may be absent when searching for one identity.     

Sleep deprivation impairs object recognition in mice

Many studies in animals and humans suggest that sleep facilitates learning, memory consolidation, and retrieval. Moreover, sleep deprivation (SD) incurred after learning, impaired memory in humans, mice, rats, and hamsters. We investigated the importance of sleep and its timing in an object recognition task in OF1 mice subjected to 6h SD either immediately after the acquisition phase (0-6 SD) or 6h later (7-12 SD), and in corresponding undisturbed controls. Motor activity was continuously recorded with infrared sensors. All groups explored two familiar, previously encountered objects to a similar extent, both at the end of the acquisition phase and 24h later during the test phase, indicating intact familiarity detection. During the test phase 0-6 SD mice failed to discriminate between the single novel and the two familiar objects. In contrast, the 7-12 SD group and the two control groups explored the novel object significantly longer than the two familiar objects. Plasma corticosterone levels determined after SD did not differ from time-matched undisturbed controls, but were significantly below the level measured after learning alone. ACTH did not differ between the groups. Therefore, it is unlikely that stress contributed to the memory impairment. We conclude that the loss of sleep and the activities the mice engaged in during the SD, impaired recognition memory retrieval, when they occurred immediately after acquisition. The delayed SD enabled memory consolidation during the 6h when the mice were allowed to sleep, and had no detrimental effect on memory. Neither SD schedule impaired object familiarity processing, suggesting that only specific cognitive abilities were sensitive to the intervention. Sleep may either actively promote memory formation, or alternatively, sleep may provide optimal conditions of non-interference for consolidation.     

Specific phonological impairments in dyslexia revealed by eyetracking

Phonological deficits in dyslexia are typically assessed using metalinguistic tasks vulnerable to extraneous factors such as attention and memory. The present work takes the novel approach of measuring phonology using eyetracking. Eye movements of dyslexic children were monitored during an auditory word recognition task in which target items in a display (e.g., candle) were accompanied by distractors sharing a cohort (candy) or rhyme (sandal). Like controls, dyslexics showed slower recognition times when a cohort distractor was present than in a baseline condition with only phonologically unrelated distractors. However, unlike controls, dyslexic children did not show slowed recognition of targets with a rhyme distractor, suggesting they had not encoded rhyme relationships. This was further explored in an overt phonological awareness test of cohort and rhyme. Surprisingly, dyslexics showed normal rhyme performance but poorer judgment of initial sounds on these overt tests. The results implicate impaired knowledge of rhyme information in dyslexia; however they also indicate that testing methodology plays a critical role in how such problems are identified.     

The role of phonological recoding in orthographic learning

The objective of this research was to explore whether orthographic learning occurs as a result of phonological recoding, as expected from the self-teaching hypothesis. The participants were 32 fourth- and fifth-graders (mean age = 10 years 0 months, SD = 7 months) who performed lexical decisions for monosyllabic real words and pseudowords under two matched experimental conditions: a read aloud condition, wherein items were named prior to lexical decision to promote phonological recoding, and a concurrent articulation condition, presumed to attenuate phonological recoding. Later, orthographic learning of the pseudowords was evaluated using orthographic choice, spelling, and naming tasks. Consistent with the self-teaching hypothesis, targets learned with phonological recoding in the read aloud condition yielded greater orthographic learning than those learned with concurrent articulation. The research confirms the critical nature of phonological recoding in the development of visual word recognition skills and an orthographic lexicon.     

Semantic false memories in the form of derived relational intrusions following training

Contemporary behavior analytic research is making headway in characterizing memory phenomena that typically have been characterized by cognitive models, and the current study extends this development by producing "false memories" in the form of functional equivalence responding. A match-to-sample training procedure was administered in order to encourage participants to treat groups of unrelated English words as being interchangeable. Following training, participants were presented with a list of words from within one of the groups for a free recall test and a recognition test. Results showed that participants were more likely to falsely recall and recognize words that had been assigned to the same group as the list words during prior training, relative to words not assigned to the same group and relative to words that co-occurred with list words. These results indicate that semantic relatedness can be experimentally manipulated in order to produce specific false memories.     

The social face of emotion recognition: Evaluations versus stereotypes

The goal of the present paper was to demonstrate the influence of general evaluations and stereotype associations on emotion recognition. Earlier research has shown that evaluative connotations between social category members and emotional expression predict whether recognition of positive or negative emotional expressions will be facilitated (e.g. Hugenberg, 2005). In the current paper we tested the hypothesis that stereotype associations influence emotion recognition processes, especially when the difference between valences of emotional expressions does not come into play. In line with this notion, when participants in the present two studies were asked to classify positive versus negative emotional expressions (i.e. happy versus anger, or happy versus sadness), valence congruency effects were found. Importantly, however, in a comparative context without differences in valence in which participants were asked to classify two distinct negative emotions (i.e. anger versus sadness) we found that recognition facilitation occurred for stereotypically associated discrete emotional expressions. With this, the current results indicate that a distinction between general evaluative and cognitive routes can be made in emotion recognition processes.