Beta- and gamma-band cortico-cortical interactions support naturalistic reading of continuous text.

Large-scale integration of information across cortical structures, building on neural connectivity, has been proposed to be a key element in supporting human cognitive processing. In electrophysiological neuroimaging studies of reading, quantification of neural interactions has been limited to the level of isolated words or sentences due to artefacts induced by eye movements. Here, we combined magnetoencephalography recording with advanced artefact rejection tools to investigate both cortico-cortical coherence and directed neural interactions during naturalistic reading of full-page texts. Our results show that reading versus visual scanning of text was associated with wide-spread increases of cortico-cortical coherence in the beta and gamma bands. We further show that the reading task was linked to increased directed neural interactions compared to the scanning task across a sparse set of connections within a wide range of frequencies. Together, the results demonstrate that neural connectivity flexibly builds on different frequency bands to support continuous natural reading.

The effects of app-based mindfulness practice on the well-being of university students and staff.

Mental health problems like anxiety, depression, and stress have been increasing in many countries and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic has further exacerbated their toll. Mindfulness-based interventions have been shown to provide evidence-based treatments for anxiety and depression, and accumulating evidence is emerging in support of using mindfulness apps yielding small-to-moderate treatment effects. The study was a 4-week randomized controlled trial with 561 university students and staff as participants, divided into a treatment group (mindfulness app) and an active control group (psychoeducational online content). Depression, anxiety, and stress were evaluated as primary study outcomes. Saliva cortisol samples were also collected from a subgroup of the treatment arm (n = 29). Using the mindfulness app for four weeks resulted in small reductions in stress (d = .16), and depression (d = .16). Attrition was 28.0%. Subjects who practiced more did not experience additional improvement in wellbeing. Mindfulness apps offer modest but clear benefits to users in terms of improved mental health. They present a promising supplement to traditional mental health services.

Behavioral Regulatory Problems Are Associated With a Lower Attentional Bias to Fearful Faces During Infancy.

To investigate the role of early regulatory problems (RP), such as problems in feeding, sleeping, and calming down during later development, the association between parent-reported RP at 3 months (no-RP, n = 110; RP, n = 66) and attention to emotional faces at 8 months was studied. Eight-month-old infants had a strong tendency to look at faces and to specifically fearful faces, and the individual variance in this tendency was assessed with eye tracking using a face-distractor paradigm. The early RPs were related to a lower attention bias to fearful faces compared to happy and neutral faces after controlling for temperamental negative affectivity. This suggests that early RPs are related to the processing of emotional information later during infancy.

The role of tonal information during spoken-word recognition in Chinese: Evidence from a printed-word eye-tracking study.

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the extent to which the lexical tone can affect spoken-word recognition in Chinese using a printed-word paradigm. Participants were presented with a visual display of four words-namely, a target word (e.g., , xiang4xian4, "quadrant"), a tone-consistent phonological competitor (e.g., , xiang4ce4, "photo album"), or a tone-inconsistent phonological competitor (e.g., , xiang1cai4, "coriander"), and two unrelated distractors. Simultaneously, they were asked to listen to a spoken target word presented in isolation (Experiment 1) or embedded in neutral/predictive sentence contexts (Experiment 2), and then click on the target word on the screen. Results showed significant phonological competitor effects (i.e., the fixation proportion on the phonological competitor was higher than that on the distractors) under both tone conditions. Specifically, a larger phonological competitor effect was observed in the tone-consistent condition than in the tone-inconsistent condition when the spoken word was presented in isolation and the neutral sentence contexts. This finding suggests a partial role of lexical tone in constraining spoken-word recognition. However, when embedded in a predictive sentence context, the phonological competitor effect was only observed in the tone-consistent condition and absent in the tone-inconsistent condition. This result indicates that the predictive sentence context can strengthen the role of lexical tone.

Incidental disgust does not cause moral condemnation of neutral actions.

Emotivism in moral psychology holds that making moral judgements is at least partly an affective process. Three emotivist hypotheses can be distinguished: the elicitation hypothesis (that moral transgressions elicit emotions); the amplification hypothesis (that disgust amplifies moral judgments); and the moralisation hypothesis (that affect moralises the non-moral). Even though the moralisation hypothesis is the strongest and most radical form of emotivism, it has not been systematically experimentally tested. Most previous studies have used as stimuli morally wrong actions, and thus they cannot answer whether disgust is sufficient to moralise an otherwise neutral action. In Experiment 1 (N = 87) we tested the effect of incidental disgust on morally neutral scenarios, and in Experiment 2 (N = 510) the differential effect of disgust on neutral and wrong scenarios. The results did not support either the moralisation or the amplification hypothesis. Instead, Bayesian analyses provided substantial evidence for the null hypothesis that incidental disgust does not affect moral ratings. The results are in line with a recent meta-analysis suggesting that disgust has no effect on moral ratings.

Maternal Depressive Symptoms During the Pre- and Postnatal Periods and Infant Attention to Emotional Faces.

We examined how infants' attentional disengagement from happy, fearful, neutral, and phase-scrambled faces at 8 months, as assessed by eye tracking, is associated with trajectories of maternal depressive symptoms from early pregnancy to 6 months postpartum (decreasing n = 48, increasing n = 34, and consistently low symptom levels n = 280). The sample (mother-infant dyads belonging to a larger FinnBrain Birth Cohort Study) was collected between 5/2013-6/2016. The overall disengagement probability from faces to distractors was not related to maternal depressive symptoms, but fear bias was heightened in infants whose mothers reported decreasing or increasing depressive symptoms. Exacerbated attention to fearful faces in infants of mothers with depressive symptoms may be independent of the timing of the symptoms in the pre- and postnatal stages.

Effectiveness of "rescue saccades" on the accuracy of tracking multiple moving targets: An eye-tracking study on the effects of target occlusions.

Occlusion is one of the main challenges in tracking multiple moving objects. In almost all real-world scenarios, a moving object or a stationary obstacle occludes targets partially or completely for a short or long time during their movement. A previous study (Zelinsky & Todor, 2010) reported that subjects make timely saccades toward the object in danger of being occluded. Observers make these so-called "rescue saccades" to prevent target swapping. In this study, we examined whether these saccades are helpful. To this aim, we used as the stimuli recorded videos from natural movement of zebrafish larvae swimming freely in a circular container. We considered two main types of occlusion: object-object occlusions that naturally exist in the videos, and object-occluder occlusions created by adding a stationary doughnut-shape occluder in some videos. Four different scenarios were studied: (1) no occlusions, (2) only object-object occlusions, (3) only object-occluder occlusion, or (4) both object-object and object-occluder occlusions. For each condition, two set sizes (two and four) were applied. Participants' eye movements were recorded during tracking, and rescue saccades were extracted afterward. The results showed that rescue saccades are helpful in handling object-object occlusions but had no reliable effect on tracking through object-occluder occlusions. The presence of occlusions generally increased visual sampling of the scenes; nevertheless, tracking accuracy declined due to occlusion.

Cortical Circuit for Binding Object Identity and Location During Multiple-Object Tracking.

Sustained multifocal attention for moving targets requires binding object identities with their locations. The brain mechanisms of identity-location binding during attentive tracking have remained unresolved. In 2 functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments, we measured participants' hemodynamic activity during attentive tracking of multiple objects with equivalent (multiple-object tracking) versus distinct (multiple identity tracking, MIT) identities. Task load was manipulated parametrically. Both tasks activated large frontoparietal circuits. MIT led to significantly increased activity in frontoparietal and temporal systems subserving object recognition and working memory. These effects were replicated when eye movements were prohibited. MIT was associated with significantly increased functional connectivity between lateral temporal and frontal and parietal regions. We propose that coordinated activity of this network subserves identity-location binding during attentive tracking.

Angry faces are tracked more easily than neutral faces during multiple identity tracking.

We investigated whether and how emotional facial expressions affect sustained attention in face tracking. In a multiple-identity and object tracking paradigm, participants tracked multiple target faces that continuously moved around together with several distractor faces, and subsequently reported where each target face had moved to. The emotional expression (angry, happy, and neutral) of the target and distractor faces was manipulated. Tracking performance was better when the target faces were angry rather than neutral, whereas angry distractor faces did not affect tracking. The effect persisted when the angry faces were presented upside-down and when surface features of the faces were irrelevant to the ongoing task. There was only suggestive and weak evidence for a facilitatory effect of happy targets and a distraction effect of happy distractors in comparison to neutral faces. The results show that angry expressions on the target faces can facilitate sustained attention on the targets via increased vigilance, yet this effect likely depends on both emotional information and visual features of the angry faces.

Timed written picture naming in 14 European languages.

We describe the Multilanguage Written Picture Naming Dataset. This gives trial-level data and time and agreement norms for written naming of the 260 pictures of everyday objects that compose the colorized Snodgrass and Vanderwart picture set (Rossion & Pourtois in Perception, 33, 217-236, 2004). Adult participants gave keyboarded responses in their first language under controlled experimental conditions (N = 1,274, with subsamples responding in Bulgarian, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish). We measured the time to initiate a response (RT) and interkeypress intervals, and calculated measures of name and spelling agreement. There was a tendency across all languages for quicker RTs to pictures with higher familiarity, image agreement, and name frequency, and with higher name agreement. Effects of spelling agreement and effects on output rates after writing onset were present in some, but not all, languages. Written naming therefore shows name retrieval effects that are similar to those found in speech, but our findings suggest the need for cross-language comparisons as we seek to understand the orthographic retrieval and/or assembly processes that are specific to written output.

The Interplay of Implicit Causality, Structural Heuristics, and Anaphor Type in Ambiguous Pronoun Resolution.

Two visual-world eye-tracking experiments investigating pronoun resolution in Finnish examined the time course of implicit causality information relative to both grammatical role and order-of-mention information. Experiment 1 showed an effect of implicit causality that appeared at the same time as the first-mention preference. Furthermore, when we counterbalanced the semantic roles of the verbs, we found no effect of grammatical role, suggesting the standard observed subject preference has a large semantic component. Experiment 2 showed that both the personal pronoun hän and the demonstrative tämä preferred the antecedent consistent with the implicit causality bias; tämä was not interpreted as referring to the semantically non-prominent entity. In contrast, structural prominence affected hän and tämä differently: we found a first-mention preference for hän, but a second-mention preference for tämä. The results suggest that semantic implicit causality information has an immediate effect on pronoun resolution and its use is not delayed relative to order-of-mention information. Furthermore, they show that order-of-mention differentially affects different types of anaphoric expressions, but semantic information has the same effect.

How facial attractiveness affects sustained attention.

The present study investigated whether and how facial attractiveness affects sustained attention. We adopted a multiple-identity tracking paradigm, using attractive and unattractive faces as stimuli. Participants were required to track moving target faces amid distractor faces and report the final location of each target. In Experiment 1, the attractive and unattractive faces differed in both the low-level properties (i.e., luminance, contrast, and color saturation) and high-level properties (i.e., physical beauty and age). The results showed that the attractiveness of both the target and distractor faces affected the tracking performance: The attractive target faces were tracked better than the unattractive target faces; when the targets and distractors were both unattractive male faces, the tracking performance was poorer than when they were of different attractiveness. In Experiment 2, the low-level properties of the facial images were equalized. The results showed that the attractive target faces were still tracked better than unattractive targets while the effects related to distractor attractiveness ceased to exist. Taken together, the results indicate that during attentional tracking the high-level properties related to the attractiveness of the target faces can be automatically processed, and then they can facilitate the sustained attention on the attractive targets, either with or without the supplement of low-level properties. On the other hand, only low-level properties of the distractor faces can be processed. When the distractors share similar low-level properties with the targets, they can be grouped together, so that it would be more difficult to sustain attention on the individual targets.

Synchronous brain activity across individuals underlies shared psychological perspectives.

For successful communication, we need to understand the external world consistently with others. This task requires sufficiently similar cognitive schemas or psychological perspectives that act as filters to guide the selection, interpretation and storage of sensory information, perceptual objects and events. Here we show that when individuals adopt a similar psychological perspective during natural viewing, their brain activity becomes synchronized in specific brain regions. We measured brain activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) from 33 healthy participants who viewed a 10-min movie twice, assuming once a 'social' (detective) and once a 'non-social' (interior decorator) perspective to the movie events. Pearson's correlation coefficient was used to derive multisubject voxelwise similarity measures (inter-subject correlations; ISCs) of functional MRI data. We used k-nearest-neighbor and support vector machine classifiers as well as a Mantel test on the ISC matrices to reveal brain areas wherein ISC predicted the participants' current perspective. ISC was stronger in several brain regions--most robustly in the parahippocampal gyrus, posterior parietal cortex and lateral occipital cortex--when the participants viewed the movie with similar rather than different perspectives. Synchronization was not explained by differences in visual sampling of the movies, as estimated by eye gaze. We propose that synchronous brain activity across individuals adopting similar psychological perspectives could be an important neural mechanism supporting shared understanding of the environment.

Task relevance induces momentary changes in the functional visual field during reading.

In the research reported here, we examined whether task demands can induce momentary tunnel vision during reading. More specifically, we examined whether the size of the functional visual field depends on task relevance. Forty participants read an expository text with a specific task in mind while their eye movements were recorded. A display-change paradigm with random-letter strings as preview masks was used to study the size of the functional visual field within sentences that contained task-relevant and task-irrelevant information. The results showed that orthographic parafoveal-on-foveal effects and preview benefits were observed for words within task-irrelevant but not task-relevant sentences. The results indicate that the size of the functional visual field is flexible and depends on the momentary processing demands of a reading task. The higher cognitive processing requirements experienced when reading task-relevant text rather than task-irrelevant text induce momentary tunnel vision, which narrows the functional visual field.

Gaze Behavior and Cognitive Performance on Tasks of Multiple Object Tracking and Multiple Identity Tracking by Handball Players and Non-Athletes.

Multiple object tracking (MOT) and multiple identity tracking (MIT) each measure the ability to track moving objects visually. While prior investigators have mainly compared athletes and non-athletes on MOT, MIT more closely resembles dynamic real-life environments. Here we compared the performance and gaze behavior of handball players with non-athletes on both MOT and MIT. Since previous researchers have shown that MOT and MIT engage different eye movement strategies, we had participants track 3-5 targets among 10 moving objects. In MOT, the objects were identical, while in MIT they differed in shape and color. Although we observed no group differences for tracking accuracy, the eye movements of athletes were more target-oriented than those of non-athletes. We concluded that tasks and stimuli intended by researchers to demonstrate that athletes' show better object tracking than non-athletes should be specific to the athletes' type of sport and should use more perception-action coupled measures. An implication of this conclusion is that the differences in object tracking skills between athletes and non-athletes is highly specific to the skills demanded by the athletes' sport.

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.

Lower maternal emotional availability is related to increased attention toward fearful faces during infancy.

It has been suggested that infants' age-typical attention biases for faces and facial expressions have an inherent connection with the parent-infant interaction. However, only a few previous studies have addressed this topic. To investigate the association between maternal caregiving behaviors and an infant's attention for emotional faces, 149 mother-infant dyads were assessed when the infants were 8 months. Caregiving behaviors were observed during free-play interactions and coded using the Emotional Availability Scales. The composite score of four parental dimensions, that are sensitivity, structuring, non-intrusiveness, and non-hostility, was used in the analyses. Attention disengagement from faces was measured using eye tracking and face-distractor paradigm with neutral, happy, and fearful faces and scrambled-face control pictures as stimuli. The main finding was that lower maternal emotional availability was related to an infant's higher attention to fearful faces (p = .042), when infant sex and maternal age, education, and concurrent depressive and anxiety symptoms were controlled. This finding indicates that low maternal emotional availability may sensitize infants' emotion processing system for the signals of fear at least during this specific age around 8 months. The significance of the increased attention toward fearful faces during infancy is an important topic for future research.

Exploring the comparative adequacy of a unimanual and a bimanual stimulus-response setup for use with three-alternative choice response time tasks.

Research often conceptualises complex social factors as being distinct binary categories (e.g., female vs male, feminine vs masculine). While this can be appropriate, the addition of an 'overlapping' category (e.g., non-binary, gender neutral) can contextualise the 'binary', both for participants (allowing more complex conceptualisations of the categories than the 'either/or' conceptualisation in binary tasks), and for the results (by providing a neutral baseline for comparison). However, it is not clear what the best response setup for such a task would be. In this study, we explore this topic through comparing a unimanual (N = 34) and a bimanual response setup (N = 32) for use with a three-alternative choice response time task. Crucially, one of the stimulus categories ('mixed') was composed of stimulus elements from the other two stimulus categories used in that task (Complex Task). A reference button task was included to isolate the motoric component of response registration (Simple Task). The results of the simple task indicated lower motoric costs for the unimanual compared to the bimanual setup. However, when statistically controlling for these motoric costs in the complex task, the bimanual setup had a lower error rate and faster response times than the unimanual setup. Further, in the complex task error rates and response times were higher for the mixed than the matched stimuli, indicating that responding to mixed stimuli is more challenging for encoding and/or decision making processes. This difference was more pronounced in the unimanual than the bimanual setup. Taken together these results indicate that the unimanual setup is more adequate for the reference button task, whereas the intricacy of overlapping categories in the complex task is better contained in the bimanual setup, i.e. when some response alternatives are allocated to one hand and other alternatives to the other hand.

Higher attention bias for fear at 8 months of age is associated with better socioemotional competencies during toddlerhood.

BACKGROUND: In previous studies, an attention bias for signals of fear and threat has been related to socioemotional problems, such as anxiety symptoms, and socioemotional competencies, such as altruistic behaviors in children, adolescents and adults. However, previous studies lack evidence about these relations among infants and toddlers. AIMS: Our aim was to study the association between the individual variance in attention bias for faces and, specifically, fearful faces during infancy and socioemotional problems and competencies during toddlerhood. STUDY DESIGN AND SUBJECTS: The study sample was comprised of 245 children (112 girls). We explored attentional face and fear biases at the age of 8 months using eye tracking and the face-distractor paradigm with neutral, happy and fearful faces and a scrambled-face control stimulus. Socioemotional problems and competencies were reported by parents with the Brief Infant and Toddler Social Emotional Assessment (BITSEA) when children were 24 months old. OUTCOME MEASURES AND RESULTS: A higher attentional fear bias at 8 months of age was related to higher levels of socioemotional competence at 24 months of age (ß = .18, p = .008), when infants' sex and temperamental affectivity, maternal age, education and depressive symptoms were controlled. We found no significant association between attentional face or fear bias and socioemotional problems. CONCLUSIONS: We found that the heightened attention bias for fearful faces was related to positive outcomes in early socioemotional development. Longitudinal study designs are needed to explore the changes in the relation between the attention bias for fear or threat and socioemotional development during early childhood.

Attention biases for emotional facial expressions during a free viewing task increase between 2.5 and 5 years of age.

The normative, developmental changes in affect-biased attention during the preschool years are largely unknown. To investigate the attention bias for emotional versus neutral faces, an eye-tracking measurement and free viewing of paired pictures of facial expressions (i.e., happy, fearful, sad, or angry faces) and nonface pictures with neutral faces were conducted with 367 children participating in a Finnish cohort study at the age of 2.5 years and with 477 children at the age of 5 years, 216 of which having follow-up measurements. We found an attention-orienting bias for happy and fearful faces versus neutral faces at both age points. An attention-orienting bias for sad faces emerged between 2.5 and 5 years. In addition, there were significant biases in sustained attention toward happy, fearful, sad, and angry faces versus neutral faces, with a bias in sustained attention for fearful faces being the strongest. All biases in sustained attention increased between 2.5 and 5 years of age. Moderate correlations in saccadic latencies were found between 2.5 and 5 years. In conclusion, attention biases for emotional facial expressions seem to be age-specific and specific for the attentional subcomponent. This implies that future studies on affect-biased attention during the preschool years should use small age ranges and cover multiple subcomponents of attention. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).