Vocal emotion recognition in attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder: a meta-analysis.

There is debate within the literature as to whether emotion dysregulation (ED) in Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) reflects deviant attentional mechanisms or atypical perceptual emotion processing. Previous reviews have reliably examined the nature of facial, but not vocal, emotion recognition accuracy in ADHD. The present meta-analysis quantified vocal emotion recognition (VER) accuracy scores in ADHD and controls using robust variance estimation, gathered from 21 published and unpublished papers. Additional moderator analyses were carried out to determine whether the nature of VER accuracy in ADHD varied depending on emotion type. Findings revealed a medium effect size for the presence of VER deficits in ADHD, and moderator analyses showed VER accuracy in ADHD did not differ due to emotion type. These results support the theories which implicate the role of attentional mechanisms in driving VER deficits in ADHD. However, there is insufficient data within the behavioural VER literature to support the presence of emotion processing atypicalities in ADHD. Future neuro-imaging research could explore the interaction between attention and emotion processing in ADHD, taking into consideration ADHD subtypes and comorbidities.

Parafoveal processing and transposed-letter effects in dyslexic reading.

During parafoveal processing, skilled readers encode letter identity independently of letter position (Johnson et al., 2007). In the current experiment, we examined orthographic parafoveal processing in readers with dyslexia. Specifically, the eye movements of skilled readers and adult readers with dyslexia were recorded during a boundary paradigm experiment (Rayner, 1975). Parafoveal previews were either identical to the target word (e.g., nearly), a transposed-letter preview (e.g., enarly), or a substituted-letter preview (e.g., acarly). Dyslexic and non-dyslexic readers demonstrated orthographic parafoveal preview benefits during silent sentence reading and both reading groups encoded letter identity and letter position information parafoveally. However, dyslexic adults showed, that very early in lexical processing, during parafoveal preview, the positional information of a word's initial letters were encoded less flexibly compared to during skilled adult reading. We suggest that dyslexic readers are less able to benefit from correct letter identity information (i.e., in the letter transposition previews) due to the lack of direct mapping of orthography to phonology. The current findings demonstrate that dyslexic readers show consistent and dyslexic-specific reading difficulties in foveal and parafoveal processing during silent sentence reading.

A comparison of reading, in people with simulated and actual central vision loss, with static text, horizontally scrolling text, and rapid serial visual presentation.

Reading with central vision loss (CVL), as caused by macular disease, may be enhanced by presenting text using dynamic formats such as horizontally scrolling text or rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP). The rationale for these dynamic text formats is that they can be read while holding gaze away from the text, potentially supporting reading while using the eccentric viewing strategy. This study was designed to evaluate the practice of reading with CVL, with passages of text presented as static sentences, with horizontal scrolling sentences, or as single-word RSVP. In separate studies, normally sighted participants with a simulated (artificial) central scotoma, controlled by an eye-tracker, or participants with CVL resulting from macular degeneration read passages of text using the eccentric viewing technique. Comprehension was better overall with scrolling text when reading with a simulated CVL, whereas RSVP produced lower overall comprehension and high error rates. Analysis of eye movement behavior showed that participants consistently adopted a strategy of making multiple horizontal saccades on the text itself. Adherence to using eccentric viewing was better with RSVP, but this did not translate into better reading performance. Participants with macular degeneration and an actual CVL also showed the highest comprehension and lowest error rates with scrolling text and the lowest comprehension and highest errors with RSVP. We conclude that scrolling text can support effective reading in people with CVL and has potential as a reading aid.

The impact of cognitive load on processing efficiency and performance effectiveness in anxiety: evidence from event-related potentials and pupillary responses.

Anxiety has been associated with poor attentional control, as reflected in lowered performance on experimental measures of executive attention and inhibitory control. Recent conceptualisations of anxiety propose that individuals who report elevated anxiety symptoms worry about performance and will exert greater cognitive effort to complete tasks well, particularly when cognitive demands are high. Across two experiments, we examined the effect of anxiety on task performance and across two load conditions using (1) measures of inhibitory control (behavioural reaction times and eye-movement responses) and (2) task effort with pupillary and electrocortical markers of effort (CNV) and inhibitory control (N2). Experiment 1 used an oculomotor-delayed-response task that manipulated load by increasing delay duration to create a high load, relative to a low load, condition. Experiment 2 used a Go/No-Go task and load was manipulated by decreasing the No-Go probabilities (i.e., 20% No-Go in the high load condition and 50% No-Go in the low load condition). Experiment 1 showed individuals with high (vs. low) anxiety made more antisaccade errors across load conditions, and made more effort during the high load condition, as evidenced by greater frontal CNV and increased pupillary responses. In Experiment 2, individuals with high anxiety showed increased effort (irrespective of cognitive load), as characterised by larger pupillary responses. In addition, N2 amplitudes were sensitive to load only in individuals with low anxiety. Evidence of reduced performance effectiveness and efficiency across electrophysiological, pupillary, and oculomotor systems in anxiety provides some support for neurocognitive models of frontocortical attentional dysfunction in anxiety.

Binocular coordination and return-sweep saccades among skilled adult readers.

During reading, binocular coordination ensures that a unified perceptual representation of the text is maintained across eye movements. However, slight vergence errors exist. The magnitude of disparity at fixation onset is related to the length of the preceding saccade. Return-sweeps are saccadic eye movements that span a line of text and direct gaze from the end of one line to the start of the next. As these eye movements travel much farther than intraline saccades, increased binocular disparity following a return-sweep is likely. Indeed, increased disparity has been a proposed explanation for longer line-initial fixations. Thus, we sought to address the following questions: Is binocular disparity larger following a return-sweep saccade than it is following an intraline saccade, and is the duration of a line-initial fixation related to binocular disparity and coordination processes? To examine these questions, we recorded binocular eye movements as participants read multiline texts. We report that, following return-sweeps, the magnitude of disparity at fixation onset is increased. However, this increased magnitude of disparity is unrelated to the duration of line-initial fixations. We argue that longer line-initial fixations result from a lack of parafoveal preview for words at the start of the line.

Phonological processing during silent reading in teenagers who are deaf/hard of hearing: an eye movement investigation.

There has been considerable variability within the literature concerning the extent to which deaf/hard of hearing individuals are able to process phonological codes during reading. Two experiments are reported in which participants' eye movements were recorded as they read sentences containing correctly spelled words (e.g., church), pseudohomophones (e.g., cherch), and spelling controls (e.g., charch). We examined both foveal processing and parafoveal pre-processing of phonology for three participant groups-teenagers with permanent childhood hearing loss (PCHL), chronological age-matched controls, and reading age-matched controls. The teenagers with PCHL showed a pseudohomophone advantage from both directly fixated words and parafoveal preview, similar to their hearing peers. These data provide strong evidence for phonological recoding during silent reading in teenagers with PCHL.

The FVF framework and target prevalence effects.

The Functional Visual Field (FVF) offers explanatory power. To us, it relates to existing literature on the flexibility of attentional focus in visual search and reading (Eriksen & St. James 1986; McConkie & Rayner 1975). The target article promotes reflection on existing findings. Here we consider the FVF as a mechanism in the Prevalence Effect (PE) in visual search.

RadicalLocator: A software tool for identifying the radicals in Chinese characters.

This article describes a new software tool called RadicalLocator that can be used to automatically identify (e.g., for visual inspection) individual target radicals (i.e., groups of strokes) in written Chinese characters. We first briefly clarify why this software is useful for research purposes and discuss the factors that make this pattern recognition task so difficult. We then describe how the software can be downloaded and installed, and used to identify the radicals in characters for the purposes of, for example, selecting materials for psycholinguistic experiments. Finally, we discuss several known limitations of the software and heuristics for addressing them.

Word length and frequency effects in natural Chinese reading: Evidence for character representations in lexical identification.

Word length and frequency are two of the "big three" factors that affect eye movements in natural reading. Although these factors have been extensively investigated, all previous studies manipulating word length have been confounded with changes in visual complexity (longer words have more letters and are more visually complex). We controlled stroke complexity across one-character (short) and two-character (long) high- and low-frequency Chinese words (to avoid complexity confounds) and recorded readers' eye movements during sentence reading. Both word length and frequency yielded strong main effects for fixation time measures. For saccadic targeting and skipping probability, word length effects, but not word frequency effects, occurred. Critically, the interaction was not significant regardless of stroke complexity, indicating that word length and frequency independently influence lexical identification and saccade target selection during Chinese reading. The results provide evidence for character-level representations during Chinese word recognition in natural reading.

Time on task effects during interactive visual search.

There is a major shift taking place in airports across the globe, changing from 2D dual-view X-ray screening to 3D computed tomography (CT) screening. 3D CT screening is believed to improve target detection since it enables screeners to interact with images of passenger baggage (i.e., rotating and zooming into the displays). The change in screening technology is moving what was once a purely visual search task to an interactive search task. Here, we conducted two experiments with a large sample size during February of 2023 (695 participants) to examine (a) changes in search performance between a simulated dual-view and simulated interactive search task and (b) the effects of time on task upon performance. Consistent with past research, we found that interactive search, when compared with dual-view search, produced higher response accuracy rates coupled with increased reaction times (RTs). However, while we found effects of time on task (RTs reduced, and participants became more likely to respond "absent" as the experiments progressed), there was no evidence that these effects differed across simulated dual-view and simulated interactive searches. The results are discussed in relation to benefits of interactive search for supporting target detection by airport screeners. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Auditory distraction during reading: Investigating the effects of background sounds on parafoveal processing.

Previous research suggests that unexpected (deviant) sounds negatively affect reading performance by inhibiting saccadic planning, which models of reading agree takes place simultaneous to parafoveal processing. This study examined the effect of deviant sounds on foveal and parafoveal processing. Participants read single sentences in quiet, standard (repeated sounds), or deviant sound conditions (a new sound within a repeated sound sequence). Sounds were presented with a variable delay coincident with the onset of fixations on target words during a period when saccadic programming and parafoveal processing occurred. We used the moving window paradigm to manipulate the amount of information readers could extract from the parafovea (the entire sentence or a 13-character window of text). Global, sentence-level analyses showed typical disruption to reading by the window, and under quiet conditions similar effects were observed at the target and post-target word in the local analyses. Standard and deviant sounds also produced clear distraction effects of differing magnitudes at the target and post-target words, though at both regions, these effects were qualified by interactions. Effects at the target word suggested that with sounds, readers engaged in less effective parafoveal processing than under quiet. Similar patterns of effects due to standard and deviant sounds, each with a different time course, occurred at the post-target word. We conclude that distraction via auditory deviation causes disruption to parafoveal processing during reading, with such effects being modulated by the degree to which a sound's characteristics are more or less unique.

Processing multiconstituent units: Preview effects during reading of Chinese words, idioms, and phrases.

Arguably, the most contentious debate in the field of eye movement control in reading has centered on whether words are lexically processed serially or in parallel during reading. Chinese is character-based and unspaced, meaning the issue of how lexical processing is operationalized across potentially ambiguous, multicharacter strings is not straightforward. We investigated Chinese readers' processing of frequently occurring multiconstituent units (MCUs), that is, linguistic units composed of more than a single word, that might be represented lexically as a single representation. In Experiment 1, we manipulated the linguistic category of a two-constituent Chinese string (word, MCU, or phrase) and the preview of its second constituent (identical or pseudocharacter) using the boundary paradigm with the boundary located before the two-constituent string. A robust preview effect was obtained when the second constituent, alongside the first, formed a word or MCU, but not a phrase, suggesting that frequently occurring MCUs are lexicalized and processed parafoveally as single units during reading. In Experiment 2, we further manipulated the phrase type of a two-constituent but three-character Chinese string (idiom with a one-character modifier and a two-character noun, or matched phrase) and the preview of the second constituent noun (identity or pseudocharacter). A greater preview effect was obtained for idioms than phrases, indicating that idioms are processed to a greater extent in the parafovea than matched phrases. Together, the results of these two experiments suggest that lexical identification processes in Chinese can be operationalized over linguistic units that are larger than an individual word. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Column setting and text justification influence return-sweep eye movement behavior during Chinese multi-line reading.

People regularly read multi-line texts in different formats and publishers, internationally, must decide how to present text to make reading most effective and efficient. Relatively few studies have examined multi-line reading, and fewer still Chinese multi-line reading. Here, we examined whether texts presented in single or double columns, and either left-justified or fully-justified affect Chinese reading. Text format had minimal influence on overall reading time; however, it significantly impacted return-sweeps (large saccades moving the eyes from the end of one line of text to the beginning of the next). Return-sweeps were launched and landed further away from margins and involved more corrective saccades in single- than double-column format. For left- compared to fully-justified format, return-sweeps were launched and landed closer to margins. More corrective saccades also occurred. Our results showed more efficient return-sweep behavior for fully- than left-justified text. Moreover, there were clear trade-off effects such that formats requiring increased numbers of shorter return-sweeps produced more accurate targeting and reduced numbers of corrective fixations, whereas formats requiring reduced numbers of longer return-sweeps caused less accurate targeting and an increased rate of corrective fixations. Overall, our results demonstrate that text formats substantially affect return-sweep eye movement behavior during Chinese reading without affecting efficiency and effectiveness, that is, the overall time it takes to read and understand the text.

Universality in eye movements and reading: A replication with increased power.

Liversedge, Drieghe, Li, Yan, Bai and Hyönä (2016) reported an eye movement study that investigated reading in Chinese, Finnish and English (languages with markedly different orthographic characteristics). Analyses of the eye movement records showed robust differences in fine grained characteristics of eye movements between languages, however, overall sentence reading times did not differ. Liversedge et al. interpreted the entire set of results across languages as reflecting universal aspects of processing in reading. However, the study has been criticized as being statistically underpowered (Brysbaert, 2019) given that only 19-21 subjects were tested in each language. Also, given current best practice, the original statistical analyses can be considered to be somewhat weak (e.g., no inclusion of random slopes and no formal comparison of performance between the three languages). Finally, the original study did not include any formal statistical model to assess effects across all three languages simultaneously. To address these (and some other) concerns, we tested at least 80 new subjects in each language and conducted formal statistical modeling of our data across all three languages. To do this, we included an index that captured variability in visual complexity in each language. Unlike the original findings, the new analyses showed shorter total sentence reading times for Chinese relative to Finnish and English readers. The other main findings reported in the original study were consistent. We suggest that the faster reading times for Chinese subjects occurred due to cultural changes that have taken place in the decade or so that lapsed between when the original and current subjects were tested. We maintain our view that the results can be taken to reflect universality in aspects of reading and we evaluate the claims regarding a lack of statistical power that were levelled against the original article.

The importance of the positional probability of word final (but not word initial) characters for word segmentation and identification in children and adults' natural Chinese reading.

Word spacing is important in guiding eye movements during spaced alphabetic reading. Chinese is unspaced and it remains unclear as to how Chinese readers segment and identify words in reading. We conducted two parallel experiments to investigate whether the positional probabilities of the initial and the final characters of a multicharacter word affected word segmentation and identification in Chinese reading. Two-character words were selected as targets. In Experiment 1, the initial character's positional probability was manipulated as being either high or low, and the final character was kept identical across the two conditions. In Experiment 2, an analogous manipulation was made for the final character of the target word. We recorded adults' and children's eye movements when they read sentences containing these words. In Experiment 1, reading times on targets did not differ in the two conditions for both children and adults, providing no evidence that a word initial character's positional probability contributes to word segmentation. In Experiment 2, adults had shorter reading times and made fewer refixations on targets that comprised final characters with high relative to low positional probabilities; a similar effect was observed in children, but this effect had a slower time course. The results demonstrate that the positional probability of the final (but not the initial) character of a word influences segmentation commitments in reading. It suggests that Chinese readers identify where a currently fixated word ends, and via this commitment, by default, they identify where the subsequent word begins. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The influence of emotional stimuli on attention orienting and inhibitory control in pediatric anxiety.

BACKGROUND: Anxiety disorders are highly prevalent in children and adolescents, and are associated with aberrant emotion-related attention orienting and inhibitory control. While recent studies conducted with high-trait anxious adults have employed novel emotion-modified antisaccade tasks to examine the influence of emotional information on orienting and inhibition, similar studies have yet to be conducted in youths. METHODS: Participants were 22 children/adolescents diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, and 22 age-matched healthy comparison youths. Participants completed an emotion-modified antisaccade task that was similar to those used in studies of high-trait anxious adults. This task probed the influence of abruptly appearing neutral, happy, angry, or fear stimuli on orienting (prosaccade) or inhibitory (antisaccade) responses. RESULTS: Anxious compared to healthy children showed facilitated orienting toward angry stimuli. With respect to inhibitory processes, threat-related information improved antisaccade accuracy in healthy but not anxious youth. These findings were not linked to individual levels of reported anxiety or specific anxiety disorders. CONCLUSIONS: Findings suggest that anxious relative to healthy children manifest enhanced orienting toward threat-related stimuli. In addition, the current findings suggest that threat may modulate inhibitory control during adolescent development.

Binocular coordination in response to two-dimensional, three-dimensional and stereoscopic visual stimuli.

PURPOSE: We were particularly interested in whether binocular coordination when viewing stereoscopic images would be more comparable to when viewing a 2D representation, or when viewing a real stimulus array in depth. METHODS: Data are reported from an experiment examining binocular coordination in response to stereoscopically presented stimuli. Movements of both eyes were recorded as participants viewed LED stimuli in a real scene with depth, a 2D image of the scene, and a stereoscopic image of the scene. RESULTS: When viewing real LEDs, vergence during saccades re-aligned the eyes in depth where necessary, with smaller adjustments during the following fixation. In contrast, when viewing the stereoscopic representation, vergence during saccades did not re-align the eyes in depth. The only effect of target depth on vergence occurred during the following fixation. CONCLUSIONS: We conclude that disparity in parafoveal objects, in isolation from other depth cues (and, minimally, conflicting with blur), was insufficient for the visual system to target saccades appropriately in depth.

Using eye movement measures to investigate effects of age on memory for objects in a scene.

We examined whether there were age-related differences in eye movements during intentional encoding of a photographed scene that might account for age-related differences in memory of objects in the scene. Younger and older adults exhibited similar scan path patterns, and visited each region of interest in the scene with similar frequency and duration. Despite the similarity in viewing, there were fundamental differences in the viewing-memory relationship. Although overall recognition was poorer in the older than younger adults, there was no age effect on recognition probability for objects visited only once. More importantly, re-visits to objects brought gain in recognition probability for the younger adults, but not for the older adults. These results suggest that the age-related differences in object recognition performance are in part due to inefficient integration of information from working memory to longer-term memory.

Beyond isolated word recognition.

In this commentary we concur with Frost's view of the centrality of universal principles in models of word identification. However, we argue that other processes in sentence comprehension also fundamentally constrain the nature of written word identification. Furthermore, these processes appear to be universal. We, therefore, argue that universality in word identification should not be considered in isolation, but instead in the context of other linguistic processes that occur during normal reading.

The importance of the first letter in children's parafoveal preprocessing in English: Is it phonologically or orthographically driven?

For both adult and child readers of English, the first letter of a word plays an important role in lexical identification. Using the boundary paradigm during silent sentence reading, we examined whether the first-letter bias in parafoveal preprocessing is phonologically or orthographically driven and whether this differs between skilled adult and beginner child readers. Participants read sentences that contained either a correctly spelled word in preview (identity; e.g., "circus"), a preview letter string that maintained the phonology but manipulated the orthography of the first letter (P + O- preview; e.g., "sircus"), or a preview letter string that manipulated both the phonology and the orthography of the first letter (P- O- preview; e.g., "wircus"). There was a cost associated with manipulating the first letter of the target words in preview for both adults and children. Critically, during first-pass reading, both adult and child readers displayed similar reading times between P + O- and P- O- previews. This shows that the first-letter bias is driven by orthographic encoding and that the first letter's orthographic code in preview is crucial for efficient, early processing of phonology. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).