Emotional Face Processing in Autism Spectrum Condition: A Study of Attentional Orienting and Inhibitory Control.

A core feature of Autistic Spectrum Condition (ASC) is the presence of difficulties in social interactions. This can be explained by an atypical attentional processing of social information: individuals with ASC may show problems with orienting attention to socially relevant stimuli and/or inhibiting their attentional responses to irrelevant ones. To shed light on this issue, we examined attentional orienting and inhibitory control to emotional stimuli (angry, happy, and neutral faces). An antisaccade task (with both prosaccade and antisacade blocks) was applied to a final sample of 29 children with ASC and 27 children with typical development (TD). Whereas children with ASC committed more antisaccade errors when seeing angry faces than happy or neutral ones, TD children committed more antisaccade errors when encountering happy faces than neutral faces. Furthermore, latencies in the prosaccade and antisaccade blocks were longer in children with ASC and they were associated with the severity of ASC symptoms. Thus, children with ASC showed an impaired inhibitory control when angry faces were presented. This bias to negative high-arousal information is congruent with affective information-processing theories on ASC, suggesting that threatening stimuli induce an overwhelming response in ASC. Therapeutic strategies where train the shift attention to emotional stimuli (i.e. faces) may improve ASC symptomatology and their socials functioning.

Print and digital reading habits and comprehension in children with and without special education needs.

BACKGROUND: Text comprehension is a major obstacle for many Primary school students with special education needs (SEN). Reading episodes bring students opportunities to be exposed to new vocabulary and knowledge, potentially boosting their development of text comprehension skills. AIMS: Our study seeks to understand how reading frequency (leisure and academic) and reading medium (print and digital) contribute to the development of text comprehension during Primary school in students with and without SEN. METHODS AND PROCEDURES: We tested 2289 Spanish students from fourth to sixth grade, from which 212 had an official decision of SEN. Students self-reported their reading frequency (as a measure of their reading habits) and completed a standardized text comprehension test. We employed multiple regression models with a robust maximum likelihood estimator to test associations between reading frequency and comprehension. OUTCOMES AND RESULTS: Students' comprehension was positively associated with their leisure print reading habits, and negatively associated with their frequency of academic digital reading. Those associations were independent of SEN status. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS: Results highlight the importance of promoting leisure reading in print to all students, regardless of SEN status. In addition, caution is advised when encouraging Primary school children to use digital texts when the emphasis is on comprehending texts for acquiring knowledge.

Relation between digital tool practices in the language arts classroom and reading comprehension scores.

Concerns about the negative effects of digitalization on students' reading comprehension, empirically backed by recent meta-analyses, question the efficacy of digital tools in the language arts classroom. By analyzing data from 4 and 8th grade US students from NAEP 2017, we aimed to test the generalization of the negative association between screens use and reading comprehension test scores within language arts classrooms, and to identify teachers' practices to support comprehension, which could reduce such a negative relationship. We used data from 149,400 4th grade and 144,900 8th grade students to predict their reading comprehension scores based on their frequency of use of digital devices in the language arts class, as well as on the specific learning activities performed with such devices. Results revealed that amount of daily use of digital devices was negatively related to scores on a reading comprehension test. In addition, teachers' uses of digital tools to support students' reading comprehension showed positive relations for student use of digital devices for reading projects, and negative relations for activities addressing specific reading skills, such as building and practicing vocabulary. We discuss these results in light of our current understanding of the effects of digitalization on reading.

Public stigma profile toward mental disorders across different university degrees in the University of Valencia (Spain).

Background: A large proportion of studies carried out in recent years in different populations have shown that stigma toward mental disorders is highly prevalent. In the present study we conducted a comprehensive assessment of stigma to describe and compare stigma toward mental disorders in students enrolled in five different university degrees. Methods: Three hundred and twenty-five students from the University of Valencia (Spain), attending the second term of their first-degree courses in the faculties of medicine, psychology, teaching, economics, and data science participated in this cross-sectional study. Stigma was measured using: the Reported and Intended Behavior Scale (RIBS), the Scale of Community Attitudes toward Mental Illness (CAMI), the Attribution Questionnaire (AQ-27), and the Knowledge about Mental Illness test (KMI). Results: We found different patterns of stigma according to gender, the fact of knowing or living with a person with mental disorders and the university degree studied. Overall, women show fewer stigmatizing attitudes than men but similar stereotypes and prejudice toward people with mental disorders. However, the pattern of results across degrees is more complex. Overall, students of medicine, psychology and teaching showed fewer stigmatizing attitudes than students of economics and data science but differences between degrees were more subtle in stereotypes and prejudice toward people with mental disorders. Conclusion: Our study suggests the existence of different profiles of stigma in relation to mental disorders in university students. These profiles varied in relation with the degree being studied, gender and already knowing or living with a person with mental disorders.

Video-blogs and linguistic simplification for students with intellectual disability.

BACKGROUND: The Internet provides individuals with intellectual disability with access to information and participation in a broader society, but it also presents risks when content is difficult to comprehend. This study aimed to test whether students with intellectual disability enhanced their comprehension of online blogs as a function of the format (text vs. video) and linguistic simplification. METHOD: Young students with intellectual disability read or watched text and video-blog posts about environment, health, society, and technology in their original version or a linguistically simplified/easy-to-read version. Then, they completed tests that assessed their reading processing (e.g., calibration) and comprehension of blog content. RESULTS: Participants predicted that they would correctly answer 80% of the comprehension questions, but their average comprehension of the blog posts was 55%, regardless of the condition. Previous levels of students' reading comprehension skills predicted their blog comprehension scores and interacted with format and simplification. Those participants with higher reading comprehension skills learned more from non-simplified than from simplified blog posts while those with lower levels of reading comprehension skills did not benefit from linguistic simplification nor video-blog format although the difference with regard to higher comprehenders was lower in the video and simplified conditions. CONCLUSIONS: Improving reading comprehension abilities of students with intellectual disability is essential to prevent the digital divide while linguistic simplification is not a useful accommodation and even counterproductive for higher reading comprehenders.

Attentional engagement and inhibitory control according to positive and negative symptoms in schizophrenia: An emotional antisaccade task.

Despite schizophrenia (SZ) is characterized by a high psychopathological heterogeneity, the underlying psychological mechanisms that result in different clinical profiles are unclear. This study examined the cognitive processing of emotional faces (angry, happy, neutral, and sad) by means of assessing inhibitory control (antisaccade task) and attentional engagement (prosaccade task) with the eye-tracking paradigm. Firstly, two clinical SZ subgroups classified according to the predominance of positive (PSZ; n = 20) or negative symptoms (NSZ; n = 34) and a control group of 32 individuals were compared. Secondly, the association between prosaccade and antisaccade measurements and the severity of positive and negative symptoms were analyzed. The PSZ group showed slower antisaccades when angry faces were displayed, and higher positive symptoms were associated with slower prosaccade latencies to ones. Conversely, the NSZ group made overall slower prosaccades with an emotional advantage for angry faces, and higher negative symptoms were associated with faster antisaccade latencies to ones. Hence, whereas positive SZ profile is related to a lack of attentional engagement and an impaired inhibitory control to threatening information; negative SZ profile is linked to a lack of attentional engagement to faces, mainly with non-threat ones, and with an advantage to ignore distracting threatening stimuli. These findings support affective information-processing theories suggesting a hypersensitivity to threat for positive SZ profiles, and a desensitization to socio-emotional information for negative ones. Consequently, characterizing psychological mechanisms of SZ may allow improving current treatments to threat management when positive symptoms are predominant, or emotion sensitization when negative symptoms prevail.

Integrating digital documents by means of concept maps: testing an intervention program with eye-movements modelling examples.

When using the Internet to learn about a curricular topic students face the challenge of not only understanding each single document, but also of integrating the ideas in a combined representation. Several intervention studies have tested instructional methods, such as building concept maps, aimed at teaching integration of multiple documents to Secondary education and older students. However, building a concept map may be demanding for learners and requires competencies to build maps in an appropriate way. In the current study we explore the extent to which such integration processes relying a concept map mapping instruction can be efficiently taught to 6th grade students. Specifically, we tested a program which included eye-movement modeling examples (EMMEs) and self-explanation prompts on comprehension and concept mapping in a natural educational setting. An active control group received a similar instruction without EMMEs. Students were randomly assigned to the intervention (n = 34) or active control (n = 32) groups, and participated in 1-h sessions during four consecutive days. Results indicated that EMME group learnt better than the control group the phases to construct a concept map, as measured in a questionnaire. However, from pre to post test, the EMME group didn't improve comprehension as measured by open-ended reading comprehension questions or in a delayed summary. We conclude that EMMEs can be used to foster literacy strategy instruction of primary school students.

The inattentive on-screen reading: Reading medium affects attention and reading comprehension under time pressure.

This study explored the influence of reading media and reading time-frame on readers' on-task attention, metacognitive calibration, and reading comprehension. One hundred and forty undergraduates were allocated to one of four experimental conditions varying on the reading medium (in print vs. on screen) and on the reading time-frame (free vs. pressured time). Readers' mindwandering while reading, prediction of performance on a comprehension test, and their text comprehension were measured. In-print readers, but not on-screen readers, mindwandered less on the pressured than in the free time condition, indicating higher task adaptation in print. Accordingly, on-screen readers in the pressured condition comprehended less than the other three groups. Mindwandering and text comprehension were similar under free reading time regardless of medium. Lastly, there were no differences in readers' metacognitive calibration. The results support the hypothesis of shallow information processing when reading on screen under time constraints.

Training young adults with intellectual disability to read critically on the internet.

BACKGROUND: Young people with intellectual disability (ID) are becoming frequent Internet users, but they present difficulties selecting reliable Internet sources. METHODS: The present authors tested an instructional programme aimed at increasing skills to evaluate information from the Internet of 33 young adult students with intellectual disability enrolled in special needs education (19.4 years). The programme was composed of different web pages that provided conflicting views on a controversial topic. Students participated in small group discussions supported with Wh-question graphic organizers and contrasting cases during seven sessions. RESULTS: Differences between pre- and post-tests indicated that the programme is effective in increasing students' ability to select trustworthy web pages, and to use source characteristics to justify such selection by means of supervised instruction. CONCLUSION: Promoting Internet use in a safe way might increase the opportunities of young people with intellectual disability to make choices and self-determined decisions about their life (Handbook of research-based practices for educating students with intellectual disability, 2016, New York, NY: Taylor & Francis).

WebLEC: a test to assess adolescents' Internet reading literacy skills / WebLEC: una prueba para evaluar la competencia lectora en Internet de los adolescentes

BACKGROUND: Reading on the Internet requires specific skills (e.g., navigation), apart from comprehension abilities, but there is no test in Spanish to assess these skills in adolescents. The goal of this study is to fill this gap with a test called WebLEC, inspired by the PISA framework. METHOD: WebLEC was validated with secondary education students (n = 941). It includes 28 items of three types (access & retrieve, integrate & interpret, and reflect & evaluate) applied to four reading scenarios (e.g., web portal, search engines, Internet forums, and Wikipedia). WebLEC provides a general reading literacy index, plus two navigation indices. RESULTS: The validity and reliability of WebLEC was confirmed, and a scale to diagnose reading literacy skills is provided. CONCLUSIONS: WebLEC assesses adolescents' Internet reading literacy skills. Given the growing importance of the Internet in daily life and learning situations, assessing these skills is the first step in implementing instructional interventions to foster Internet reading

ANTECEDENTES: leer en Internet requiere habilidades específicas (e.g., navegación) aparte de habilidades de comprensión. No existe en español un test para evaluar estas habilidades en población adolescente. El propósito de este trabajo es cubrir esta laguna con el test WebLEC, desarrollado a partir del marco de PISA. MÉTODO: WebLEC fue validado con estudiantes de Educación Secundaria Obligatoria (ESO) (n = 941). Incluye 28 ítems o tareas de tres tipos (acceso y recuperación, integrar e interpretar, y reflexionar y evaluar) aplicadas a 4 escenarios de lectura (portal web, buscador, foro de internet y Wikipedia). WebLEC proporciona un índice general de competencia lectora y dos índices de navegación. RESULTADOS: se confirma la validez y fiabilidad de WebLEC, y se proporciona un baremo para los diferentes cursos de ESO. CONCLUSIONES: WebLEC sirve para evaluar la competencia lectora en Internet de estudiantes de ESO. Dada la creciente importancia de Internet para la vida ordinaria y el aprendizaje, evaluar estas habilidades es el primer paso para implementar intervenciones para la mejora de la competencia lectora en Internet

WebLEC: a test to assess adolescents' Internet reading literacy skills.

BACKGROUND: Reading on the Internet requires specific skills (e.g., navigation), apart from comprehension abilities, but there is no test in Spanish to assess these skills in adolescents. The goal of this study is to fill this gap with a test called WebLEC, inspired by the PISA framework. METHOD: WebLEC was validated with secondary education students (n = 941). It includes 28 items of three types (access & retrieve, integrate & interpret, and reflect & evaluate) applied to four reading scenarios (e.g., web portal, search engines, Internet forums, and Wikipedia). WebLEC provides a general reading literacy index, plus two navigation indices. RESULTS: The validity and reliability of WebLEC was confirmed, and a scale to diagnose reading literacy skills is provided. CONCLUSIONS: WebLEC assesses adolescents’ Internet reading literacy skills. Given the growing importance of the Internet in daily life and learning situations, assessing these skills is the first step in implementing instructional interventions to foster Internet reading.

Inhibitory Control for Emotional and Neutral Scenes in Competition: An Eye-Tracking Study in Bipolar Disorder.

This study examined the inhibitory control of attention to social scenes in manic, depressive, and euthymic episodes of bipolar disorder (BD). Two scenes were simultaneously presented (happy/threatening/neutral [target] versus control). Participants were asked either to look at the emotional pictures (i.e., attend-to-emotional block) or to avoid looking at the emotional pictures (i.e., attend-to-neutral block) while their eye movements were recorded. The initial orienting (latency and percentage of first fixation) and subsequent attentional engagement (gaze duration) were computed. Manic patients showed a higher percentage of initial fixations on happy scenes than on the other scenes, regardless of the instructions. However, in the attend-to-neutral block, their gaze durations were longest for threatening scenes. Inhibitory control was not modulated by the scene's emotional salience in the other groups. Thus, manic patients had difficulties voluntarily ignoring emotional information - this was characterized by a happy-related bias during initial orienting, but a threat-related bias during attentional engagement.

¿Son realmente tan buenos los nativos digitales? Relación entre las habilidades digitales y la lectura digital / Are really digital natives so good? Relationship between digital skills and digital reading

La competencia en la lectura digital consiste en la comprensión, uso, reflexión y disfrute de los textos escritos con el fin de conseguir nuestros objetivos, desarrollar nuestro conocimiento y potencial, y participar en nuestra sociedad. En la actualidad se considera que los "nativos digitales", aquellos estudiantes que desde la infancia han crecido rodeados de las tecnologías de la información, poseen las habilidades digitales básicas (usar el ratón, el navegador, …) necesarias para desarrollar la competencia en la lectura digital. En el presente estudio ponemos a prueba esta visión, a partir de un estudio en el que estudiantes de 5º de Primaria y 3º de Secundaria realizaron una serie de tareas de lectura digital. Los estudiantes completaron asimismo varias pruebas objetivas para medir sus habilidades digitales básicas, así como si nivel de competencia lectora en papel. Los resultados mostraron que los estudiantes no sólo presentaban dificultades en numerosas habilidades digitales básicas, si no que éstas estaban relacionadas directamente con el éxito en tareas de lectura digital. Para concluir, se reflexiona sobre la necesidad de considerar la instrucción en las habilidades digitales básicas como parte de los esfuerzos actuales por mejorar la competencia en la lectura digital

Digital reading literacy consists on the comprehension, use, reflection and enjoyment of written texts with the aim to fulfill our goals, to develop our knowledge and potential, and to participate in our society. Currently it is considered that "digital natives", i.e. those students that have been raised surrounded by information technologies, poses the basic digital skills (such as using the mouse, the browser, …) required to develop digital reading skills. The present study tested this assumption, by means of a study in which students of 5th level of primary education and 3rd level of secondary education performed a series of digital reading tasks. In addition, students completed several objective tasks to measure their basic reading skills, and their printed reading comprehension. The results revealed that the groups assessed had difficulties in several basic digital skills, and that those skills are directly related to success rate in digital reading tasks. A regression analysis revealed that this relationship was independent of students' printed reading skills, as well as of students‟ navigation during the digital reading tasks. To conclude, we reflected on the need to consider the instruction of basic reading skills as part of the current efforts to improve digital reading literacy

Strategic Decisions in Task-Oriented Reading.

Answering questions from texts are assessment and instructional activities that are frequently used in schools. Nevertheless, little is known about the strategic processes that students take while performing these tasks. We explored the amount and frequency that students initially read of a text before they answered questions pertaining to the material. In a procedure similar to the one used in the PISA (Program for International Students Assessment), one-hundred-seventy students between 7th and 9th grade read and answered several questions designed to assess task-oriented reading in three specific texts. We recorded on-line indexes that evaluated student behavior (e.g., the amount of text that students read before answering questions raised within a given text), performance, and comprehension skill. The results revealed that students skilled in comprehension initially read a high proportion of the texts, which in turn improved their overall performance in two of the three texts read (text 1: CI95%: 0.01 to 0.09; text 2: CI95%: -0.01 to 0.05; text 3: CI95%: 0.04 to 0.20). Therefore, we conclude that this strategic behavior should be considered during the assessment and instruction of reading literacy.

Attentional capture by emotional scenes across episodes in bipolar disorder: Evidence from a free-viewing task.

We examined whether the initial orienting, subsequent engagement, and overall allocation of attention are determined exogenously (i.e. by the affective valence of the stimulus) or endogenously (i.e. by the participant's mood) in the manic, depressive and euthymic episodes of bipolar disorder (BD). Participants were asked to compare the affective valence of two pictures (happy/threatening/neutral [emotional] vs. neutral [control]) while their eye movements were recorded in a free-viewing task. Results revealed that the initial orienting was exogenously captured by emotional images relative to control images. Importantly, engagement and overall allocation were endogenously captured by threatening images relative to neutral images in BD patients, regardless of their episode--this effect did not occur in a group of healthy controls. The threat-related bias in BD, which occurs even at the early stages of information processing (i.e. attentional engagement), may reflect a vulnerability marker.

Who do you refer to? How young students with mild intellectual disability confront anaphoric ambiguities in texts and sentences.

Along 2 experiments we tested the anaphoric pronoun resolution abilities of readers with intellectual disability in comparison with chronological and reading age-matched groups. In Experiment 1, the anaphor test of Elosúa, Carriedo, and García-Madruga (2009) confirmed that readers with intellectual disability (ID) are slower than control readers resolving clitic anaphoric pronouns, especially when the use of morphological cues (e.g. gender) is necessary. In order to test if the poor performance could be due to low levels of metacognitive skills during reading, an inconsistency detection task combined with eye tracking was designed in Experiment 2. Participants read short texts with an anaphoric pronoun in the fifth sentence, either morphologically (gender) consistent or not with the information provided in the second sentence. The scores in the anaphor comprehension questions presented after the text confirmed that readers with ID are affected by the gender inconsistency but they are unable to explicitly report it and recover from it, as the number of re-fixations after reading the critical sentence suggests. As their answers to the explicit detection questions showed, the adults control group did not show any preference for morphosyntax or semantics in spite of being aware of the inconsistency. In sum, both groups of readers with and without ID are affected by inconsistencies, but ID readers do not have appropriate metacognitive skills to explicitly identify the source of the inconsistency and fix it.

Strategic decisions in task-oriented reading

Answering questions from texts are assessment and instructional activities that are frequently used in schools. Nevertheless, little is known about the strategic processes that students take while performing these tasks. We explored the amount and frequency that students initially read of a text before they answered questions pertaining to the material. In a procedure similar to the one used in the PISA (Program for International Students Assessment), one-hundred-seventy students between 7th and 9th grade read and answered several questions designed to assess task-oriented reading in three specific texts. We recorded on-line indexes that evaluated student behavior (e.g., the amount of text that students read before answering questions raised within a given text), performance, and comprehension skill. The results revealed that students skilled in comprehension initially read a high proportion of the texts, which in turn improved their overall performance in two of the three texts read (text 1: CI95%: 0.01 to 0.09; text 2: CI95%: -0.01 to 0.05; text 3: CI95%: 0.04 to 0.20). Therefore, we conclude that this strategic behavior should be considered during the assessment and instruction of reading literacy (AU)

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Attentional biases toward emotional images in the different episodes of bipolar disorder: an eye-tracking study.

Attentional biases toward emotional information may represent vulnerability and maintenance factors in bipolar disorder (BD). The present experimental study examined the processing of emotional information in BD patients using the eye-tracking technology. Bipolar patients in their different states (euthymia, mania, depression) simultaneously viewed four pictures with different emotional valence (happy, neutral, sad, threatening) for 20s while their eye movements were monitored. A group of healthy individuals served as the control. The data revealed the following: (i) a decrease in attention to happy images in BD patients in their depressive episodes compared to healthy individuals, and (ii) an increase in attention to threatening images in BD patients (regardless of their episode) relative to the healthy controls. These biases appeared in the late stages of information processing and were sustained over the 20s interval. Thus, the present findings reveal that attentional biases toward emotional information can be a key feature of BD, in that: (i) an anhedonic lack of sensitivity to positive stimuli during the bipolar depressive episode may be considered a maintaining factor of this clinical state, and (ii) the trait-bias toward threat, even in asymptomatic patients, may reflect a marker of vulnerability in BD.

Attention orienting and inhibitory control across the different mood states in bipolar disorder: an emotional antisaccade task.

An antisaccade experiment, using happy, sad, and neutral faces, was conducted to examine the effect of mood-congruent information on inhibitory control (antisaccade task) and attentional orienting (prosaccade task) during the different episodes of bipolar disorder (BD) - manic (n=22), depressive (n=25), and euthymic (n=24). A group of 28 healthy controls was also included. Results revealed that symptomatic patients committed more antisaccade errors than healthy individuals, especially with mood-congruent faces. The manic group committed more antisaccade errors in response to happy faces, while the depressed group tended to commit more antisaccade errors in response to sad faces. Additionally, antisaccade latencies were slower in BD patients than in healthy individuals, whereas prosaccade latencies were slower in symptomatic patients. Taken together, these findings revealed the following: (a) slow inhibitory control in BD patients, regardless of their episode (i.e., a trait), and (b) impaired inhibitory control restricted to symptomatic patients (i.e., a state).