Looking for a word or for its meaning? The impact of induction tasks on adolescents' visual search for verbal material.

An eye-tracking experiment was conducted to examine whether the pre-activation of different word-processing pathways by means of semantic versus perceptual induction tasks could modify the way adults and 11- to 15-year-old adolescents searched for single target words within displays of nine words. The presence within the search displays of words either looking like the target word or semantically related to the target word was manipulated. The quality of participants' lexical representations was evaluated through three word-identification and vocabulary tests. Performing a semantic induction task rather than a perceptual one on the target word before searching for it increased search times by 15% in all age groups, reflecting an increase in both the number and duration of gazes directed to non-target words. Moreover, performing the semantic induction task increased the impact of distractor words that were semantically related to the target word on search efficiency. Participants' search efficiency increased with age because of a progressive increase in the quality of adolescents' lexical representations, which allowed participants to more quickly reject the distractors on which they fixated. Indeed, lexical quality scores explained 43% of the variance in search times independently of participants' age. In the simple visual search task used in this study, fostering semantic word processing through the semantic induction task slowed down visual search. However, the literature suggests that semantic induction tasks could, in contrast, help people find information more easily in more complex verbal environments where the meaning of words must be accessed to find task-relevant information.

Adolescents' Developing Sensitivity to Orthographic and Semantic Cues During Visual Search for Words.

Two eye-tracking experiments were conducted to assess the influence of words either looking like the target word (orthographic distractors) or semantically related to the target word (semantic distractors) on visual search for words within lists by adolescents of 11, 13, and 15 years of age. In Experiment 1 (literal search task), participants saw the target word before the search (e.g., "raven"), whereas in Experiment 2 (categorical task) the target word was only defined by its semantic category (e.g., "bird"). In both experiments, participants' search times decreased from fifth to ninth grade, both because older adolescents gazed less often at non-target words during the search and because they could reject non-target words more quickly once they were fixated. Progress in visual search efficiency was associated with a large increase in word identification skills, which were a strong determinant of average gaze durations and search times for the categorical task, but much less for the literal task. In the literal task, the presence of orthographic or semantic distractors in the list increased search times for all age groups. In the categorical task, the impact of semantic distractor words was stronger than in the literal task because participants needed to gaze at the semantic distractors longer than at the other words before rejecting them. Altogether, the data support the assumption that the progressive automation of word decoding up until the age of 12 and the better quality of older adolescents' lexical representations facilitate a flexible use of both the perceptual and semantic features of words for top-down guidance within the displays. In particular, older adolescents were better prepared to aim at or reject words without gazing at them directly. Finally, the overall similar progression of the maturation of single word visual search processes and that of more real-life information search within complex verbal documents suggests that the young adolescents' difficulties in searching the Web effectively could be due to their insufficiently developed lexical representations and word decoding abilities.

Relevance versus big numbers: Students' criteria for selecting scholarly references online.

This study examined the effect of the number of citations attributed to documents on third year psychology students' selection of bibliographical references. Our main assumption was that students would take high numbers of citations as accessible relevance cues and use them heuristically to facilitate decision making, potentially bypassing deeper relevance assessment based on semantic processing. Experiment 1 presented the students with a reference selection task while manipulating the number of citations attributed to references, and found that the number of citations had a strong impact on reference selection. Moreover, the effect was independent from topic familiarity and even from students' prior knowledge of what the number of citations meant. Experiment 2 used eye-tracking data to show that this "big number" effect was contingent upon the participants fixating the numbers of citations attributed to documents. Experiment 3 manipulated the semantic relevance of references to the search topic, and demonstrated that the less relevant references were 3 times more likely to be selected when they came with a high number of citations. Overall, the study shows that the number of citations significantly influences students' selections, competing with the semantic relevance of references. Implications for the teaching of online search skills are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Visual search for verbal material in patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

This study aimed at investigating attentional mechanisms in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) by analysing how visual search processes are modulated by normal and obsession-related distracting information in OCD patients and whether these modulations differ from those observed in healthy people. OCD patients were asked to search for a target word within distractor words that could be orthographically similar to the target, semantically related to the target, semantically related to the most typical obsessions/compulsions observed in OCD patients, or unrelated to the target. Patients' performance and eye movements were compared with those of individually matched healthy controls. In controls, the distractors that were visually similar to the target mostly captured attention. Conversely, patients' attention was captured equally by all kinds of distractor words, whatever their similarity with the target, except obsession-related distractors that attracted patients' attention less than the other distractors. OCD had a major impact on the mostly subliminal mechanisms that guide attention within the search display, but had much less impact on the distractor rejection processes that take place when a distractor is fixated. Hence, visual search in OCD is characterized by abnormal subliminal, but not supraliminal, processing of obsession-related information and by an impaired ability to inhibit task-irrelevant inputs.

Incidental mood state before dissonance induction affects attitude change.

The way that incidental affect impacts attitude change brought about by controlled processes has so far been examined when the incidental affective state is generated after dissonance state induction. We therefore investigated attitude change when the incidental mood occurs prior to dissonance state induction. We expected a negative mood to induce systematic processing, and a positive mood to induce heuristic processing. Given that both systematic processing and attitude change are cognitively costly, we expected participants who experienced the dissonance state in a negative mood to have insufficient resources to allocate to attitude change. In our experiment, after mood induction (negative, neutral or positive), participants were divided into low-dissonance and high-dissonance groups. They then wrote a counterattitudinal essay. Analysis of their attitudes towards the essay topic indicated that attitude change did not occur in the negative incidental mood condition. Moreover, written productivity-one indicator of cognitive resource allocation-varied according to the type of incidental mood, and only predicted attitude change in the high-dissonance group. Our results suggest that incidental mood before dissonance induction influences the style of information processing and, by so doing, affects the extent of attitude change.

Generating References in Naturalistic Face-to-Face and Phone-Mediated Dialog Settings.

During dialog, references are presented, accepted, and potentially reused (depending on their accessibility in memory). Two experiments were conducted to examine reuse in a naturalistic setting (a walk in a familiar environment). In Experiment 1, where the participants interacted face to face, self-presented references and references accepted through verbatim repetition were reused more. Such biases persisted after the end of the interaction. In Experiment 2, where the participants interacted over the phone, reference reuse mainly depended on whether the participant could see the landmarks being referred to, although this bias seemed to be only transient. Consistent with the memory-based approach to dialog, these results shed light on how differences in accessibility in memory (due to how these references were initially added to the common ground or the media used) affect the unfolding of the interaction.

Orthographic versus semantic matching in visual search for words within lists.

An eye-tracking experiment was performed to assess the influence of orthographic and semantic distractor words on visual search for words within lists. The target word (e.g., "raven") was either shown to participants before the search (literal search) or defined by its semantic category (e.g., "bird", categorical search). In both cases, the type of words included in the list affected visual search times and eye movement patterns. In the literal condition, the presence of orthographic distractors sharing initial and final letters with the target word strongly increased search times. Indeed, the orthographic distractors attracted participants' gaze and were fixated for longer times than other words in the list. The presence of semantic distractors related to the target word also increased search times, which suggests that significant automatic semantic processing of nontarget words took place. In the categorical condition, semantic distractors were expected to have a greater impact on the search task. As expected, the presence in the list of semantic associates of the target word led to target selection errors. However, semantic distractors did not significantly increase search times any more, whereas orthographic distractors still did. Hence, the visual characteristics of nontarget words can be strong predictors of the efficiency of visual search even when the exact target word is unknown. The respective impacts of orthographic and semantic distractors depended more on the characteristics of lists than on the nature of the search task.

Eye and pen: A new device for studying reading during writing.

We present a new method for studying reading during writing and the relationships between these two activities. The Eye and Pen device makes a synchronous recording of handwriting and eye movements during written composition. It complements existing online methods by providing a fine-grained description of the visual information fixated during pauses as well as during the actual writing act. This device can contribute to the exploration of several research issues, since it can be used to investigate the role of the text produced so far and the documentary sources displayed in the task environment. The study of the engagement of reading during writing should provide important information about the dynamics of writing processes based on visual information.