The effects of domain knowledge and event structure on event processing.

Research suggests that domain knowledge facilitates memory for domain-specific information through two mechanisms: differentiation, which involves the ability to identify meaningful, fine-grained details within a sequence, and unitization, which involves binding individual components from a sequence into functional wholes. This study investigated the extent to which individuals engaged in differentiation and unitization when parsing continuous events into discrete, meaningful units (i.e., event segmentation) and recalling them. Participants watched and segmented basketball videos. They then rewatched the videos and provided descriptions afterward. Videos were coded for the presence of higher order goals (A2 actions) and the individual sub-actions that comprised them (A1 actions). Results suggested that event segmentation behavior for participants with less knowledge was more aligned with changes in basic actions (A1 actions) than for participants with greater knowledge. When describing events, participants with greater knowledge were more likely than participants with less knowledge to use statements that reflected unitization.

The effects of state anxiety on analogue peritraumatic encoding and event memory: introducing the stressful event segmentation paradigm.

Cognitive theories of PTSD argue that poor recall of trauma memories results from a stress-induced shift toward perceptual processing during encoding. The present study assessed the extent to which self-reported state anxiety affects event segmentation and its subsequent impact on memory performance (recall and recognition). Event segmentation is the cognitive process of condensing continuous streams of spatiotemporal information into discrete elements. In this study, undergraduates without PTSD used a computer programme to segment a stressful film and a non-stressful film and then they completed memory tasks for each film. For the stressful film, low memory performance was associated with high segmentation performance. A meditational analysis revealed high segmentation performance mediated a negative relationship between state anxiety and memory performance. Additionally, ad-hoc analyses suggest perceptual processing primarily drives segmentation of the stressful film and conceptual processing primarily drives segmentation of the non-stressful film.

The relative roles of visuospatial and linguistic working memory systems in generating inferences during visual narrative comprehension.

This study investigated the relative roles of visuospatial versus linguistic working memory (WM) systems in the online generation of bridging inferences while viewers comprehend visual narratives. We contrasted these relative roles in the visuospatial primacy hypothesis versus the shared (visuospatial & linguistic) systems hypothesis, and tested them in 3 experiments. Participants viewed picture stories containing multiple target episodes consisting of a beginning state, a bridging event, and an end state, respectively, and the presence of the bridging event was manipulated. When absent, viewers had to infer the bridging-event action to comprehend the end-state image. A pilot study showed that after viewing the end-state image, participants' think-aloud protocols contained more inferred actions when the bridging event was absent than when it was present. Likewise, Experiment 1 found longer viewing times for the end-state image when the bridging-event image was absent, consistent with viewing times revealing online inference generation processes. Experiment 2 showed that both linguistic and visuospatial WM loads attenuated the inference viewing time effect, consistent with the shared systems hypothesis. Importantly, however, Experiment 3 found that articulatory suppression did not attenuate the inference viewing time effect, indicating that (sub)vocalization did not support online inference generation during visual narrative comprehension. Thus, the results support a shared-systems hypothesis in which both visuospatial and linguistic WM systems support inference generation in visual narratives, with the linguistic WM system operating at a deeper level than (sub)vocalization.

Exploring Thresholds in the Foundational Skills for Reading and Comprehension Outcomes in the Context of Postsecondary Readers.

There is a range of reasons why college students may be underprepared to read, but one possibility is that some college students are below a threshold of proficiency in the component skills of reading. The presence of thresholds means that when students fall below that threshold, their proficiency in that component skill of reading is not sufficient for there to be a relationship with comprehension performance. The present study assessed (a) whether there were thresholds in proficiencies in foundational skills, (b) whether students falling below the thresholds were disproportionately in developmental literary programs (i.e., institutionally designated as underprepared), and (c) the implications of being below the thresholds on engaging in strategic processing during reading. College students were administered assessments of foundational literacy skills, text comprehension, and strategic processing of texts. The sample included students who were enrolled in developmental literacy programs and students who were not. Thresholds were found in the foundational skills associated with word-, sentence-, and discourse-level processing. Participants below these thresholds were represented disproportionately by students determined to be underprepared for college and assigned to developmental literacy programs. Finally, students falling below the thresholds demonstrated lower reading strategy scores than students above the threshold.

Relationships between task awareness, comprehension strategies, and literacy outcomes.

Reading is typically guided by a task or goal (e.g., studying for a test, writing a paper). A reader's task awareness arises from their mental representation of the task and plays an important role in guiding reading processes, ultimately influencing comprehension outcomes and task success. As such, a better understanding of how task awareness arises and how it affects comprehension is needed. The present study tested the Task Awareness Mediation Hypothesis. This hypothesis assumes that the strategies that support reading comprehension (e.g., paraphrasing, bridging, and elaborative strategies) also support a reader's task awareness while engaged in a literacy task. Further, it assumes that the reader's level of task awareness partially mediates the relationship between these comprehension strategies and a comprehension outcome. At two different time points in a semester, college students completed an assessment of their propensity to engage in comprehension strategies and a complex academic literacy task that provided a measure of comprehension outcomes and an assessment of task awareness. Indirect effects analyses provided evidence for the Task Awareness Mediation Hypothesis showing that the propensity to engage in paraphrasing and elaboration was positively predictive of task awareness, and that task awareness mediated the relationships between these comprehension strategies and performance on the complex academic literacy task. These results indicate that task awareness has complex relationships with comprehension strategies and performance on academic literacy tasks and warrants further consideration as a possible malleable factor to improve student success.

Computer-based assessment of student-constructed responses.

Student-constructed responses, such as essays, short-answer questions, and think-aloud protocols, provide a valuable opportunity to gauge student learning outcomes and comprehension strategies. However, given the challenges of grading student-constructed responses, instructors may be hesitant to use them. There have been major advances in the application of natural language processing of student-constructed responses. This literature review focuses on two dimensions that need to be considered when developing new systems. The first is type of response provided by the student-namely, meaning-making responses (e.g., think-aloud protocols, tutorial dialogue) and products of comprehension (e.g., essays, open-ended questions). The second corresponds to considerations of the type of natural language processing systems used and how they are applied to analyze the student responses. We argue that the appropriateness of the assessment protocols is, in part, constrained by the type of response and researchers should use hybrid systems that rely on multiple, convergent natural language algorithms.

Assessing the use of multiple sources in student essays.

The present study explored different approaches for automatically scoring student essays that were written on the basis of multiple texts. Specifically, these approaches were developed to classify whether or not important elements of the texts were present in the essays. The first was a simple pattern-matching approach called "multi-word" that allowed for flexible matching of words and phrases in the sentences. The second technique was latent semantic analysis (LSA), which was used to compare student sentences to original source sentences using its high-dimensional vector-based representation. Finally, the third was a machine-learning technique, support vector machines, which learned a classification scheme from the corpus. The results of the study suggested that the LSA-based system was superior for detecting the presence of explicit content from the texts, but the multi-word pattern-matching approach was better for detecting inferences outside or across texts. These results suggest that the best approach for analyzing essays of this nature should draw upon multiple natural language processing approaches.

Narrative Comprehension Guides Eye Movements in the Absence of Motion.

Viewers' attentional selection while looking at scenes is affected by both top-down and bottom-up factors. However, when watching film, viewers typically attend to the movie similarly irrespective of top-down factors-a phenomenon we call the tyranny of film. A key difference between still pictures and film is that film contains motion, which is a strong attractor of attention and highly predictive of gaze during film viewing. The goal of the present study was to test if the tyranny of film is driven by motion. To do this, we created a slideshow presentation of the opening scene of Touch of Evil. Context condition participants watched the full slideshow. No-context condition participants did not see the opening portion of the scene, which showed someone placing a time bomb into the trunk of a car. In prior research, we showed that despite producing very different understandings of the clip, this manipulation did not affect viewers' attention (i.e., the tyranny of film), as both context and no-context participants were equally likely to fixate on the car with the bomb when the scene was presented as a film. The current study found that when the scene was shown as a slideshow, the context manipulation produced differences in attentional selection (i.e., it attenuated attentional synchrony). We discuss these results in the context of the Scene Perception and Event Comprehension Theory, which specifies the relationship between event comprehension and attentional selection in the context of visual narratives.

Leveraging a multidimensional linguistic analysis of constructed responses produced by college readers.

The goal of this study was to assess the relationships between computational approaches to analyzing constructed responses made during reading and individual differences in the foundational skills of reading in college readers. We also explored if these relationships were consistent across texts and samples collected at different institutions and texts. The study made use of archival data that involved college participants who produced typed constructed responses under thinking aloud instructions reading history and science texts. They also took assessments of vocabulary knowledge and proficiency in comprehension. The protocols were analyzed to assess two different ways to determine their cohesion. One approach involved assessing how readers established connections with themselves (i.e., to other constructed responses they produced). The other approach involved assessing connections between the constructed responses and the texts that were read. Additionally, the comparisons were made by assessing both lexical (i.e., word matching) and semantic (i.e., high dimensional semantic spaces) comparisons. The result showed that both approaches for analyzing cohesion and making the comparisons were correlated with vocabulary knowledge and comprehension proficiency. The implications of the results for theory and practice are discussed.

Editors' Introduction and Review: Visual Narrative Research: An Emerging Field in Cognitive Science.

Drawn sequences of images are among our oldest records of human intelligence, appearing on cave paintings, wall carvings, and ancient pottery, and they pervade across cultures from instruction manuals to comics. They also appear prevalently as stimuli across Cognitive Science, for studies of temporal cognition, event structure, social cognition, discourse, and basic intelligence. Yet, despite this fundamental place in human expression and research on cognition, the study of visual narratives themselves has only recently gained traction in Cognitive Science. This work has suggested that visual narrative comprehension requires cultural exposure across a developmental trajectory and engages with domain-general processing mechanisms shared by visual perception, attention, event cognition, and language, among others. Here, we review the relevance of such research for the broader Cognitive Science community, and make the case for why researchers should join the scholarship of this ubiquitous but understudied aspect of human expression.

The Scene Perception & Event Comprehension Theory (SPECT) Applied to Visual Narratives.

Understanding how people comprehend visual narratives (including picture stories, comics, and film) requires the combination of traditionally separate theories that span the initial sensory and perceptual processing of complex visual scenes, the perception of events over time, and comprehension of narratives. Existing piecemeal approaches fail to capture the interplay between these levels of processing. Here, we propose the Scene Perception & Event Comprehension Theory (SPECT), as applied to visual narratives, which distinguishes between front-end and back-end cognitive processes. Front-end processes occur during single eye fixations and are comprised of attentional selection and information extraction. Back-end processes occur across multiple fixations and support the construction of event models, which reflect understanding of what is happening now in a narrative (stored in working memory) and over the course of the entire narrative (stored in long-term episodic memory). We describe relationships between front- and back-end processes, and medium-specific differences that likely produce variation in front-end and back-end processes across media (e.g., picture stories vs. film). We describe several novel research questions derived from SPECT that we have explored. By addressing these questions, we provide greater insight into how attention, information extraction, and event model processes are dynamically coordinated to perceive and understand complex naturalistic visual events in narratives and the real world.

The role of character goals and changes in body position in the processing of events in visual narratives.

BACKGROUND: A growing body of research is beginning to understand how people comprehend sequential visual narratives. However, previous work has used materials that primarily rely on visual information (i.e., they contain minimal language information). The current work seeks to address how visual and linguistic information streams are coordinated in sequential image comprehension. In experiment 1, participants viewed picture stories and engaged in an event segmentation task. The extent to which critical points in the narrative depicted situational continuity of character goals and continuity in bodily position was manipulated. The likelihood of perceiving an event boundary and viewing latencies at critical locations were measured. Experiment 1 was replicated in the second experiment, without the segmentation task. That is, participants read the picture stories without deciding where the event boundaries occurred. RESULTS: Experiment 1 indicated that changes in character goals were associated with an increased likelihood of segmenting at the critical point, but changes in bodily position were not. A follow-up analysis, however, revealed that over the course of the entire story, changes in body position were a significant predictor of event segmentation. Viewing time, however, was affected by both goal and body position shifts. Experiment 2 corroborated the finding that viewing time was affected by changes in goals and body positions. CONCLUSION: The current study shows that changes in body position influence a viewer's perception of event structure and event processing. This fits into a growing body of research that attempts to understand how consumers of multimodal media coordinate multiple information streams. The current study underscores the need for the systematic study of the visual, perceptual, and comprehension processes that occur during visual narrative understanding.

What do you want? How perceivers use cues to make goal inferences about others.

Variables influencing inferences about a stranger's goal during an unsolicited social interaction were explored. Experiment 1 developed a procedure for identifying cues. Experiments 2 and 3 assessed the relative importance of various cues (space, time, characteristics of oneself, characteristics of the stranger, and the stranger's behavior) for goal judgments. Results indicated that situational context cues informed goal judgments in ways that were consistent with diagnosticity ratings and typicality ratings of those cues. Stranger characteristics and stranger behaviors affected goal judgments more than would be expected from these quantitative measures of their informativeness. Nonetheless, the results are consistent with a mental model view that assumes perceivers monitor situational cues present during interactions and that goal inferences are guided by the informativeness of these cues.

Understanding Moment-to-Moment Processing of Visual Narratives.

What role do moment-to-moment comprehension processes play in visual attentional selection in picture stories? The current work uniquely tested the role of bridging inference generation processes on eye movements while participants viewed picture stories. Specific components of the Scene Perception and Event Comprehension Theory (SPECT) were tested. Bridging inference generation was induced by manipulating the presence of highly inferable actions embedded in picture stories. When inferable actions are missing, participants have increased viewing times for the immediately following critical image (Magliano, Larson, Higgs, & Loschky, ). This study used eye-tracking to test competing hypotheses about the increased viewing time: (a) Computational Load: inference generation processes increase overall computational load, producing longer fixation durations; (b) Visual Search: inference generation processes guide eye-movements to pick up inference-relevant information, producing more fixations. Participants had similar fixation durations, but they made more fixations while generating inferences, with that process starting from the fifth fixation. A follow-up hypothesis predicted that when generating inferences, participants fixate scene regions important for generating the inference. A separate group of participants rated the inferential-relevance of regions in the critical images, and results showed that these inferentially relevant regions predicted differences in other viewers' eye movements. Thus, viewers' event models in working memory affect visual attentional selection while viewing visual narratives.

What is the role of the film viewer? The effects of narrative comprehension and viewing task on gaze control in film.

Film is ubiquitous, but the processes that guide viewers' attention while viewing film narratives are poorly understood. In fact, many film theorists and practitioners disagree on whether the film stimulus (bottom-up) or the viewer (top-down) is more important in determining how we watch movies. Reading research has shown a strong connection between eye movements and comprehension, and scene perception studies have shown strong effects of viewing tasks on eye movements, but such idiosyncratic top-down control of gaze in film would be anathema to the universal control mainstream filmmakers typically aim for. Thus, in two experiments we tested whether the eye movements and comprehension relationship similarly held in a classic film example, the famous opening scene of Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (Welles & Zugsmith, Touch of Evil, 1958). Comprehension differences were compared with more volitionally controlled task-based effects on eye movements. To investigate the effects of comprehension on eye movements during film viewing, we manipulated viewers' comprehension by starting participants at different points in a film, and then tracked their eyes. Overall, the manipulation created large differences in comprehension, but only produced modest differences in eye movements. To amplify top-down effects on eye movements, a task manipulation was designed to prioritize peripheral scene features: a map task. This task manipulation created large differences in eye movements when compared to participants freely viewing the clip for comprehension. Thus, to allow for strong, volitional top-down control of eye movements in film, task manipulations need to make features that are important to narrative comprehension irrelevant to the viewing task. The evidence provided by this experimental case study suggests that filmmakers' belief in their ability to create systematic gaze behavior across viewers is confirmed, but that this does not indicate universally similar comprehension of the film narrative.

Registered Replication Report: Hart & Albarracín (2011).

Language can be viewed as a complex set of cues that shape people's mental representations of situations. For example, people think of behavior described using imperfective aspect (i.e., what a person was doing) as a dynamic, unfolding sequence of actions, whereas the same behavior described using perfective aspect (i.e., what a person did) is perceived as a completed whole. A recent study found that aspect can also influence how we think about a person's intentions (Hart & Albarracín, 2011). Participants judged actions described in imperfective as being more intentional (d between 0.67 and 0.77) and they imagined these actions in more detail (d = 0.73). The fact that this finding has implications for legal decision making, coupled with the absence of other direct replication attempts, motivated this registered replication report (RRR). Multiple laboratories carried out 12 direct replication studies, including one MTurk study. A meta-analysis of these studies provides a precise estimate of the size of this effect free from publication bias. This RRR did not find that grammatical aspect affects intentionality (d between 0 and -0.24) or imagery (d = -0.08). We discuss possible explanations for the discrepancy between these results and those of the original study.

Understanding How Grammatical Aspect Influences Legal Judgment.

Recent evidence suggests that grammatical aspect can bias how individuals perceive criminal intentionality during discourse comprehension. Given that criminal intentionality is a common criterion for legal definitions (e.g., first-degree murder), the present study explored whether grammatical aspect may also impact legal judgments. In a series of four experiments participants were provided with a legal definition and a description of a crime in which the grammatical aspect of provocation and murder events were manipulated. Participants were asked to make a decision (first- vs. second-degree murder) and then indicate factors that impacted their decision. Findings suggest that legal judgments can be affected by grammatical aspect but the most robust effects were limited to temporal dynamics (i.e., imperfective aspect results in more murder actions than perfective aspect), which may in turn influence other representational systems (i.e., number of murder actions positively predicts perceived intentionality). In addition, findings demonstrate that the influence of grammatical aspect on situation model construction and evaluation is dependent upon the larger linguistic and semantic context. Together, the results suggest grammatical aspect has indirect influences on legal judgments to the extent that variability in aspect changes the features of the situation model that align with criteria for making legal judgments.

What Would Jaws Do? The Tyranny of Film and the Relationship between Gaze and Higher-Level Narrative Film Comprehension.

What is the relationship between film viewers' eye movements and their film comprehension? Typical Hollywood movies induce strong attentional synchrony-most viewers look at the same things at the same time. Thus, we asked whether film viewers' eye movements would differ based on their understanding-the mental model hypothesis-or whether any such differences would be overwhelmed by viewers' attentional synchrony-the tyranny of film hypothesis. To investigate this question, we manipulated the presence/absence of prior film context and measured resulting differences in film comprehension and eye movements. Viewers watched a 12-second James Bond movie clip, ending just as a critical predictive inference should be drawn that Bond's nemesis, "Jaws," would fall from the sky onto a circus tent. The No-context condition saw only the 12-second clip, but the Context condition also saw the preceding 2.5 minutes of the movie before seeing the critical 12-second portion. Importantly, the Context condition viewers were more likely to draw the critical inference and were more likely to perceive coherence across the entire 6 shot sequence (as shown by event segmentation), indicating greater comprehension. Viewers' eye movements showed strong attentional synchrony in both conditions as compared to a chance level baseline, but smaller differences between conditions. Specifically, the Context condition viewers showed slightly, but significantly, greater attentional synchrony and lower cognitive load (as shown by fixation probability) during the critical first circus tent shot. Thus, overall, the results were more consistent with the tyranny of film hypothesis than the mental model hypothesis. These results suggest the need for a theory that encompasses processes from the perception to the comprehension of film.

Verb aspect and problem solving.

Verb aspect conveys the temporal flow of an action, such as whether it is on-going or complete. If language guides how situation models are to be constructed, then verb aspect could influence cognition that would use situation models, as in solving insight problems. In this study, verb aspect within the insight problem was manipulated to determine if the imperfective aspect (was accepting) or perfective aspect (accepted) influenced people's solution rates. Results revealed that solution rates for problems that depended on the way an action was being done within the problem were better when the imperfective aspect was used. For problems that did not focus on the action of the sentence, solution rates were better when the perfective aspect was used. The language used to convey problems can influence the ease which people are able to arrive at a solution.

Time flies faster if a person has a high working-memory capacity.

Attention affects the perception of time, and the ability to control attention is reflected in measures of working-memory capacity. Individuals with low working memory capacity have more difficulty maintaining focus on a task than high-capacity individuals, particularly when faced with contextual distracters. This experiment examined the effect of working-memory capacity on the perception of temporal duration while performing a cognitive task. We predicted that low-capacity participants would be more likely to direct attention away from the cognitive task and towards the contextual distraction of time, and consequently perceive temporal duration more accurately, and perform the cognitive task less accurately, than high-capacity participants. The results showed that when performing both tasks simultaneously, low-capacity participants were less accurate than high-capacity participants on the cognitive task, but were more accurate on the timing task. High-capacity participants, conversely, were more accurate in the non-temporal cognitive task at the cost of monitoring duration.