Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2019-07-20
Abstract： A wealth of research shows that positive and negative reinforcement critically influence behavior. While it is well established that rewards and penalties can strongly influence mechanisms of executive control, it is unclear whether these two factors exert symmetric or qualitatively distinct behavioral effects. In the current research, we conducted two eye-movement experiments to investigate the influence of monetary reward or punishment on attentional control. We employed these cues in pro/Anti-saccade tasks in Experiment 1 and Go/No-go tasks in Experiment 2. Crucially, we investigated how either a reward (also referred to as “gain”) or penalty (also referred to as “loss”)influenced inhibitory control in the following trial. In Experiment 1, participants were instructed to produce simple pro-saccades or more difficult anti-saccades, in conditions in which they received a reward for correct responses or a punishment for incorrect responses or either a reward or punishment. The results showed that, while the accuracy of the pro-saccades was facilitated by reward, the accuracy of the anti-saccades was facilitated by punishment. And the velocity of pro-saccades and anti-saccades were significantly improved by both reward and punishment. In Experiment 2, we further adopted the Go/No-go tasks to explore how reward and punishment affect attentional control via exogenous parafoveal visual cues. This showed essentially the same pattern of effects as Experiment 1. For the Go task, saccade latency significantly decreased when rewards were given relative to punishment or no motivation conditions. And for the No-go task, accuracy increased more in the punishment condition compared to the reward or no motivation conditions. An increase in saccade velocity was observed in the no motivation condition, similarly to in Experiment 1. In sum, the overall results suggest that both reward and punishment can facilitate the oculomotor control, although the findings reveal a striking asymmetry in the effects of the reward and punishment on behavior. Specifically, positive reinforcement appears to improve approach behaviors, while punishment influences inhibitory behavior. These findings suggest that the two forms of reinforcement are distinct in their influence on behavior.
Subjects: Psychology >> Developmental Psychology submitted time 2021-08-24
Abstract： An important question for research on reading across the lifespan concerns whether mechanisms of cognitive processing undergo only quantitative changes or also qualitative changes with aging. To process written language effectively, readers use their existing knowledge to make predictive inferences about linguistic information. As Older adults appear to rely more heavily on lexical prediction during reading. However, it is currently unknown whether, like young adults, they experience a processing cost due to predictive error, and whether the magnitude of this cost differs across age adult groups. Accordingly, the present research aims to understand the processing consequence of predictive error in both young and older adults. This will be achieved using novel co-registration methods that synchronize the recording of electroencephalographic (EEG) signals with eye movements. In particular, this approach will enable the analysis of fixated-related potentials (FRPs), which are averaged EEG waveforms time-locked to a fixation on a target word in a sentence during normal reading. Study 1 will manipulate the degree to which the prior linguistic constrains the probable identity of a word, to investigate age differences (young versus older adults) in predication error cost on word recognition in reading. Study 2, the parafoveal information availability, working memory load and the language ability will be manipulated to investigate the why the older adults produce prediction error cost. Study 3 will use linear mixed-effects modelling, and data-mining methods, to assess the effects of aging and these key individual differences variables on the effects of contextual constraint in reading (using data from Study 1 and 2). The findings from these studies will provide important insights into the nature of aging and individual difference effects on neural and cognitive mechanisms underlying word prediction in reading, and will form the basis for future models of these effects in Chinese reading.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： A wealth of research shows that irrelevant background speech can interfere with reading behavior. This effect is often described as the irrelevant speech effect (ISE). Two key theories have been proposed to account for this effect; namely, the Phonological-Interference Hypothesis and the Semantic-Interference Hypothesis. Few studies have investigated the irrelevant speech effect in Chinese reading. Moreover, the underlying mechanisms for the effect also remain unclear. Accordingly, with the present research we examined the irrelevant speech effect in Chinese using eye movement measures. Three experiments were conducted to explore the effects of different kinds of background speech. Experiment 1 used simple sentences, Experiment 2 used complex sentence, and Experiment 3 used paragraphs. The participants in each experiment were skilled readers who were undergraduate recruited from the university, who read the sentence while their eye movements were recorded using an EyeLink 1000 eye-tracker (SR Research inc.). The three experiments used the same background speech conditions. In an unintelligible background speech condition, participants heard irrelevant speech in Spanish (which none of the participants could understand), while in an intelligible background speech condition, they heard irrelevant speech in Chinese. Finally, in third condition, the participants read in silence, with no background speech present. The results showed no significant difference in key eye movement measures (total reading time, average fixation duration, number of fixations, number of regressions, total fixation time, and regression path reading time) for the silent compared to the unintelligible background speech condition across all three experiments. In Experiment 1, which used simple sentences as stimuli, there was also no significant difference between the silent and intelligible background speech condition. However, in Experiment 2, which used more complex sentences, normal reading was disrupted in the intelligible background speech condition compared to silence, revealing an ISE for these more difficult sentences. Compared with the silent condition, the intelligible background speech produced longer reading times and average fixation duration, more numbers of fixations and regressions, longer regression path reading time and longer total fixation times. Finally, Experiment 3 also produced evidence for an ISE, with longer total reading times, more fixations, and longer regression path reading times and total reading times in the intelligible background speech condition compared with silence. To sum up, the results of the current three experiments suggest that: (1) unintelligible speech does not disrupt normal reading significantly, contrary to the Phonological-Interference Hypothesis; (2) intelligible background speech can disrupt the reading of complex (but not simpler) sentences and also paragraph reading, supporting the Semantic-Interference Hypothesis. Such findings suggest that irrelevant speech might disrupt later stages of lexical processing and semantic integration in reading, and that this effect is modulated by the difficulty of the reading task.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： Understanding the cognitive mechanisms underlying word segmentation has been an important focus for research on Chinese reading. Previous research shows that Chinese readers can identify words very efficiently even though the Chinese script does not use spaces between words or other visual cues to demarcate word boundaries. One possibility is that Chinese readers can make use of their knowledge of the positional frequency of characters (i.e., how often they are used as the first or second character in words) to facilitate the word segmentation and recognition. Nevertheless, this potential role for position frequency remains controversial. Accordingly, with the present research we used the lexical decision task and eye movements during reading to investigate the use of positional frequency information about the first and second character of two-character words in both visual word recognition and reading. Four experiments were conducted to explore the effects of character positional frequency. In Experiments 1a and 1b, we manipulated both first and second character positional frequency (high vs. low) for target words that were of either high or low lexical frequency. Sixty college students were instructed to perform visual lexical decision tasks on words and pseudo-words. In Experiment 2a and 2b, we used measures of eye movements to investigate the use of character positional frequency in natural sentence reading. Sixty college students were required to read sentences while their eye movements were recorded using an EyeLink 1000 eye-tracker (sampling rate = 1000 Hz). The results of Experiments 1a and 1b revealed an effect of first character positional frequency in both the accuracy and latency of lexical decisions only for target words with low lexical frequency, and no effect of second character positional frequency regardless of the lexical frequency of the target word. The results of Experiment 2a and 2b showed a clear effect of first character position frequency on reading times (gaze duration, regression path reading time, and total reading time) for target words of low lexical frequency only, and no effect of second character positional frequency for either high or low frequency target words. Participants made shorter response times and fixation duration in high character positional frequency condition than in low character positional frequency condition for target words with low lexical frequency. In sum, findings from both the lexical decision task and measures of eye movements in reading reveal a privileged role for first character positional frequency as a cue to word segmentation and recognition. However, this influence of character positional frequency depends on word frequency, and is only observed for words of lower lexical frequency. We argue that these findings support the augmented addressed morphology model theory of Chinese word recognition, and can help inform the development of a model of character positional processing model in Chinese reading.
Subjects: Psychology >> Experimental Psychology submitted time 2022-08-03
Abstract： Understanding the cognitive mechanisms underlying word segmentation has been an important focus for research on Chinese reading. Previous research shows that Chinese readers can identify words very efficiently even though the Chinese script does not use spaces between words or other visual cues to demarcate word boundaries. One possibility is that Chinese readers can make use of their knowledge of the positional frequency of characters (i.e., how often they are used as the first or second character in words) to facilitate the word segmentation and recognition. Nevertheless, this potential role for position frequency remains controversial. Accordingly, with the present research we used the lexical decision task and eye movements during reading to investigate the use of positional frequency information about the first and second character of two-character words in both visual word recognition and reading. Four experiments were conducted to explore the effects of character positional frequency. In Experiments 1a and 1b, we manipulated both first and second character positional frequency (high vs. low) for target words that were of either high or low lexical frequency. Sixty college students were instructed to perform visual lexical decision tasks on words and pseudo-words. In Experiment 2a and 2b, we used measures of eye movements to investigate the use of character positional frequency in natural sentence reading. Sixty college students were required to read sentences while their eye movements were recorded using an EyeLink 1000 eye-tracker (sampling rate = 1000 Hz). The results of Experiments 1a and 1b revealed an effect of first character positional frequency in both the accuracy and latency of lexical decisions only for target words with low lexical frequency, and no effect of second character positional frequency regardless of the lexical frequency of the target word. The results of Experiment 2a and 2b showed a clear effect of first character position frequency on reading times (gaze duration, regression path reading time, and total reading time) for target words of low lexical frequency only, and no effect of second character positional frequency for either high or low frequency target words. Participants made shorter response times and fixation duration in high character positional frequency condition than in low character positional frequency condition for target words with low lexical frequency. In sum, findings from both the lexical decision task and measures of eye movements in reading reveal a privileged role for first character positional frequency as a cue to word segmentation and recognition. However, this influence of character positional frequency depends on word frequency, and is only observed for words of lower lexical frequency. We argue that these findings support the augmented addressed morphology model theory (Caramazza et al., 1988) of Chinese word recognition, and can help inform the development of a model of character positional processing model in Chinese reading.
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