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.     

Phonological neighbourhood spread facilitates lexical decisions

In visual word recognition, words with many phonological neighbours are processed more rapidly than are those with few neighbours. The research reported here tested whether the distribution of phonological neighbours across phoneme positions influences lexical decisions. The results indicate that participants responded more rapidly to words where all phoneme positions can be changed to form a neighbour than they did to those where only a limited number of phoneme positions can be changed to form a neighbour. It is argued that this distribution effect arises because of differences between the two groups of words in how they overlap with their neighbours.     

Contrast constancy revisited: The perceived contrast of sinusoidal gratings above threshold

The contrast sensitivity function of the human visual system, measured with sinusoidal luminance gratings, has an inverted U shape with a peak around 2–4?c/deg. Above threshold, it is thought that luminance gratings of equal physical contrasts but of distinguishably different spatial frequencies are all perceived as having similar contrasts, a phenomenon that has been termed contrast constancy. However, when suprathreshold contrast matches were measured for pairs of luminance gratings whose spatial frequencies were indistinguishable, the matching curves were not flat and followed a similar inverted U shape form as the contrast sensitivity function at threshold. It was therefore suggested that contrast constancy may only be revealed when matching the contrasts of clearly distinguishable spatial frequencies. Here, observers matched the perceived contrasts of suprathreshold luminance gratings of similar but visibly different spatial frequencies between 0.25 and 16?c/deg. The results show that, much like the contrast sensitivity function at threshold, observers are more sensitive to intermediate spatial frequencies (1–6?c/deg) than they are to either higher or to lower spatial frequencies. This tuning is evident when matching reference contrasts of 30–80%, implying a significant role in everyday vision. To demonstrate that these results were not due to local adaptation, the experiment was repeated with shorter stimulus duration, producing the same results. The extent of departure from contrast constancy found in the present study is compared to previously reported suprathreshold measurements. The results are also discussed with consideration to limitations with display apparatus such as monitor blur.     

Self-face recognition is characterized by “bilateral gain” and by faster,more accurate performance which persists when faces are inverted

We examine interhemispheric cooperation in the recognition of personally known faces whose long-term familiarity ensures frequent co-activation of face-sensitive areas in the right and left brain. Images of self, friend, and stranger faces were presented for 150 ms in upright and inverted orientations both unilaterally, in the right or left visual field, and bilaterally. Consistent with previous research, we find a bilateral advantage for familiar but not for unfamiliar faces, and we demonstrate that this gain occurs for inverted as well as upright faces. We show that friend faces are recognized more quickly than unfamiliar faces in upright but not in inverted orientations, suggesting that configural processing underlies this particular advantage. Novel to this study is the finding that people are faster and more accurate at recognizing their own face over both stranger and friend faces and that these advantages occur for both upright and inverted faces. These findings are consistent with evidence for a bilateral representation of self-faces.     

Mental representations of arithmetic facts: Evidence from eye movement recordings supports the preferred operand-order-specific representation hypothesis

There are three main hypotheses about mental representations of arithmetic facts: the independent representation hypothesis, the operand-order-free single-representation hypothesis, and the operand-order-specific single-representation hypothesis. The current study used electrical recordings of eye movements to examine the organization of arithmetic facts in long-term memory. Subjects were presented single-digit addition and multiplication problems and were asked to report the solutions. Analyses of the horizontal electrooculograph (HEOG) showed an operand order effect for multiplication in the time windows 150–300 ms (larger negative potentials for smaller operand first problems than for larger operand first ones). The operand order effect was reversed in the time windows from 400 to 1,000 ms (i.e., larger operand first problems had larger negative potentials than smaller operand first problems). For addition, larger operand first problems had larger negative potentials than smaller operand first in the series of time windows from 300 to 1,000 ms, but the effect was smaller than that for multiplication. These results confirmed the dissociated representation of addition and multiplication facts and were consistent with the prediction of the preferred operand-order-specific representation hypothesis.     

Eye movements and parafoveal preview of compound words: Does morpheme order matter?

Recently, there has been considerable debate about whether readers can identify multiple words in parallel or whether they are limited to a serial mode of word identification, processing one word at a time (see, e.g., Reichle, Liversedge, Pollatsek, & Rayner, 2009). Similar questions can be applied to bimorphemic compound words: Do readers identify all the constituents of a compound word in parallel, and does it matter which of the morphemes is identified first? We asked subjects to read compound words embedded in sentences while monitoring their eye movements. Using the boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975), we manipulated the preview that subjects received of the compound word before they fixated it. In particular, the morpheme order of the preview was either normal (cowboy) or reversed (boycow). Additionally, we manipulated the preview availability for each of the morphemes separately. Preview was thus available for the first morpheme only (cowtxg), for the second morpheme only (enzboy), or for neither of the morphemes (enztxg). We report three major findings: First, there was an effect of morpheme order on gaze durations measured on the compound word, indicating that, as expected, readers obtained a greater preview benefit when the preview presented the morphemes in the correct order than when their order was reversed. Second, gaze durations on the compound word were influenced not only by preview availability for the first, but also by that for the second morpheme. Finally, and most importantly, the results show that readers are able to extract some morpheme information even from a reverse order preview. In summary, readers obtain preview benefit from both constituents of a short compound word, even when the preview does not reflect the correct morpheme order.