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.

One more trip to Barcetona: on the special status of visual similarity effects in city names.

Previous research has shown that, unlike misspelled common words, misspelled brand names are sensitive to visual letter similarity effects (e.g., amazom is often recognized as a legitimate brand name, but not amazot). This pattern poses problems for those models that assume that word identification is exclusively based on abstract codes. Here, we investigated the role of visual letter similarity using another type of word often presented in a more homogenous format than common words: city names. We found a visual letter similarity effect for misspelled city names (e.g., Barcetona was often recognized as a word, but not Barcesona) for relatively short durations of the stimuli (200 ms; Experiment 2), but not when the stimuli were presented until response (Experiment 1). Notably, misspelled common words did not show a visual letter similarity effect for brief 200- and 150-ms durations (e.g., votume was not as often recognized as a word than vosume; Experiments 3-4). These findings provide further evidence that the consistency in the format of presentations may shape the representation of words in the mental lexicon, which may be more salient in scenarios where processing resources are limited (e.g., brief exposure presentations).

Examining Letter Detector Tolerance through Offset Letter Halves: Evidence from Lexical Decision.

Neurobiological models of reading assume that the specialized detectors at the letter level (e.g., the arrays of detectors for the letter 'n') possess a certain degree of tolerance (e.g., Local Combination Detectors model, Dehaene et al. 2005). In this study, we designed two lexical decision experiments that examined the limits of tolerance of letter detectors by introducing a novel manipulation involving shifting letter halves (e.g., in Experiment 1; in Experiment 2) relative to intact items. This manipulation alters the transition between upper and lower parts of the letters, adding junctions that do not exist in the intact letter forms. We included high- and low-frequency words in the stimulus list to investigate whether letter distortion affects processing beyond the letter level, reasoning that interactive effects would signal top-down lexical feedback. In Experiment 1, which employed a subtle letter shift, we observed a minimal cost of letter distortion that did not interact with word frequency. Experiment 2, employing a larger letter shift, revealed an overall greater reading cost that affected differentially high- and low-frequency words. Overall, these findings offer insights into the limits of resilience in letter detectors to distortion during word recognition and introduce a novel manipulation of letter distortion.

Misspelled logotypes: the hidden threat to brand identity.

Brand names are valuable company assets often accompanied by a unique graphical composition (i.e., as logotypes). Recent research has demonstrated that this uniqueness makes brand names and logotypes susceptible to counterfeiting through misspelling by transposition in tasks that require participants to identify correct spellings. However, our understanding of how brand names are incidentally processed when presented as logotypes is incomplete. To address this gap in knowledge, we conducted a virtual reality experiment to explore the transposed-letter confusability effect on brand name recognition. Participants were immersed in a virtual reality setting and incidentally exposed to logotypes that had correctly spelled brand names or included letter transpositions. Offline analyses revealed that participants were more accurate at recognizing brand names that had been presented with correct spellings than those that had been misspelled. Furthermore, participants exhibited false memories for misspelled logotypes, recalling them as if they had been spelled correctly. Thus, our findings revealed that the incidental processing of misspelled logotypes (e.g., SASMUNG) affects the accuracy of logotype identity recognition, thereby underscoring the challenges faced by individuals when identifying brand names and the elements that make counterfeits so effective.

Reading(,) with and without commas.

All major writing systems mandate the use of commas to separate clauses and list items. However, casual writers often omit mandatory commas. Little empirical or theoretical research has been done on the effect that omitting mandatory commas has on eye movement control during reading. We present an eye-tracking experiment in Spanish, a language with a clear standard as to mandatory comma use. Sentences were presented with or without mandatory commas while readers' eye movements were recorded. There was a local increase in the go-past time for the pre-comma region when commas were presented, which was balanced out by shorter first-pass and second-pass times on the subsequent regions. In global sentence reading time, there was no evidence for an advantage of presenting commas. These findings suggest that, even when commas are mandatory, their effect is primarily to shift when processing takes place rather than to facilitate processing overall.

Constraints on integration of orthographic information across multiple stimuli: effects of contiguity, eccentricity, and attentional span.

Five flanked lexical decision experiments investigated the integration of information across spatially distinct letter strings. Experiment 1 found no significant difference between quadrigram flankers (e.g., CKRO ROCK CKRO) and double bigram flankers (e.g., CK RO ROCK CK RO). Experiment 2 varied the eccentricity of single bigram flankers and found that closer flankers generated greater effects. A combined analysis of these experiments revealed that the double bigram condition (Experiment 1) was less effective than the close single bigram condition (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 tested one explanation for this pattern - that the outer bigrams in the double bigram condition interfered with processing the inner bigrams, and that spatial integration only operates across adjacent stimuli. In Experiment 3, outer bigrams were now a repeat of the inner bigram (e.g., RO RO ROCK CK CK), and this repeated bigram condition was still found to be significantly less effective than single bigrams. Experiments 4 and 5 tested an alternative explanation whereby the addition of spatially distinct flanking stimuli increases the spread of spatial attention, hence reducing the impact of proximal flankers. In line with this explanation, we found no significant difference between repeated bigram flankers and a condition where only the inner bigram was related to the target (e.g., CA RO ROCK CK SH). We conclude that spatial integration processes only operate across the central target and proximal flankers, and that these effects are diluted by the increased spread of spatial attention caused by additional spatially distinct flankers.

The effects of reward and frustration on the task performance of autistic children and adolescents.

BACKGROUND: Autistic individuals often exhibit social communication and socio-emotional styles that may interfere with achieving social and academic outcomes. At a more specific level, they may perform differently in various social and academic tasks due to different modes of processing rewards or unpleasant experiences (e.g., frustrating events). AIM: The present experiment examines how rewards and frustration affect the task performance of autistic children and adolescents METHODS AND PROCEDURES: An affective Posner task was applied to introduce rewards and induce frustration. Forty-four autistic children and adolescents and forty-four typically developing (TD) peers participated in this study OUTCOMES AND RESULTS: Results showed that presenting social and non-social rewards resulted in shorter reaction times and lower error rates in autistic participants, but not in their TD peers. While frustration increased error rates in both autistic and TD individuals, the effect was more pronounced in the autistic group. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS: Social and non-social rewards help the performance of autistic children and adolescents, whereas frustration (induced through unpredictable feedback) significantly interferes with their task performance. Therefore, receiving two types of rewards and providing predictable feedback may help to improve interventions designed to optimize task performance for autistic children and adolescents.

Breaking the boundaries: the power of ligatures in visual-word recognition.

Introduction: Current neurobiological-inspired models of visual-word recognition propose that letter detectors in the word recognition system can tolerate some variations in the visual form of the letters. However, it is unclear whether this tolerance extends to novel ligatures, which combine two letters into a single glyph. Methods: To investigate this, the present study utilized a masked priming experiment with a lexical decision task to examine whether primes containing novel ligatures are effective in activating their corresponding base word, relative to omitted-letter primes, in the initial stages of word processing. For each target word (e.g., VIRTUAL), were created an identity prime (virtual), a prime containing a novel ligature of two of the letters (e.g., virtual; "ir" in a single glyph), and an omitted-letter prime where one letter was removed (e.g., vrtual [omitted-vowel] in Experiment 1; vitual [omitted-consonant] in Experiment 2). Results: Results showed that the presence of a novel ligature in the prime resulted in faster lexical decision times compared to a prime with an omitted vowel (Experiment 1), but not with an omitted consonant (Experiment 2). Furthermore, the performance with the primes containing the novel ligature was not different from that of the identity primes. Discussion: These results suggest that the word recognition system can quickly enable separate letter detectors for novel ligatures. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the front-end of visual-word recognition.

TouchScope: A Passive-Haptic Device to Investigate Tactile Perception Using a Refreshable Braille Display.

The sense of touch is underrepresented in cognitive psychology research. One of the reasons is that controlling the timing of stimulus presentation, which is a hallmark of cognitive research, is significantly more difficult for tactile stimuli than visual or auditory stimuli. In the present work, we present a system to display tactile stimuli (braille cells) and collect response time with the capability for static and dynamic (passive haptic) stimuli prsentation that will contribute to the development of tactile research. While the system requires some construction, it can be put together with commercially available materials. Here, we present the step-by-step instructions for constructing the tool, the code used to control it, and some basic experiments to validate it. The data from the experiments show that the device can be used for a variety of tactile perception experiments.

A Letter is a Letter and its Co-Occurrences: Cracking the Emergence of Position-Invariance Processing.

Visual word recognition requires encoding letter identities and positions (orthographic processing). The present study focuses on the emergence of the mechanism responsible for encoding letter order in a word: position invariance. Reading experience leads to developing a flexible mechanism that encodes the information of the position of letters, explaining why jugde and judge are easily confused. Critically, orthographic regularities (e.g., frequent letter co-occurrences) modulate letter position encoding: the pseudoword mohter is extremely similar to mother because, in middle positions, the bigram TH is much more frequent than HT. Here, we tested whether position invariance emerges rapidly after the exposition to orthographic regularities-bigrams-in a novel script. To that end, we designed a study with two phases. In Phase 1, following Chetail (2017; Experiment 1b, Cognition, 163, 103-120), individuals were first exposed to a flow of artificial words for a few minutes, with four bigrams occurring frequently. Afterward, participants judged the strings with trained bigrams as more wordlike (i.e., readers quickly picked up subtle new orthographic regularities) than the strings with untrained bigrams, replicating Chetail (2017). In Phase 2, participants performed a same-different matching task in which they had to decide whether pairs of five-letter strings were the same or not. The critical comparison was between pairs with a transposition of letters in a frequent (trained) versus infrequent (untrained) bigram. Results showed that participants were more prone to make errors with frequent bigrams than with infrequent bigrams with a letter transposition. These findings reveal that position invariance emerges rapidly, after continuous exposure to orthographic regularities.

Rëâding wõrds wîth ornåmênts: is there a cost?

Introduction: Recent research has reported that adding non-existent diacritical marks to a word produces a minimal reading cost compared to the intact word. Here we examined whether this minimal reading cost is due to: (1) the resilience of letter detectors to the perceptual noise (i.e., the cost should be small and comparable for words and nonwords) or (2) top-down lexical processes that normalize the percept for words (i.e., the cost would be larger for nonwords). Methods: We designed a letter detection experiment in which a target stimulus (either a word or a nonword) was presented intact or with extra non-existent diacritics [e.g., amigo (friend) vs. ãmîgô; agimo vs. ãgîmô]. Participants had to decide which of two letters was in the stimulus (e.g., A vs. U). Results: Although the task involved lexical processing, with responses being faster and more accurate for words compared to nonwords, we found only a minimal advantage in error rates for intact stimuli versus those with non-existent diacritics. This advantage was similar for both words and nonwords. Discussion: The letter detectors in the word recognition system appear to be resilient to non-existent diacritics without the need for feedback from higher levels of processing.

Investigating the Role of Response Codes in Masked Priming Lexical Decision Tasks: The Case of Repeated Presentations.

The masked priming technique is considered a gold standard among experimental psychologists who specialize in the field of visual word recognition. Typically, this method entails a comparison between two or more critical conditions (e.g., the target word MOUSE being preceded by either the identity prime mouse or the unrelated prime fence). It is noteworthy that, unlike other masked priming tasks, prior experiments examining the properties of unrelated primes (e.g., their frequency as words [high or low] or their legality as nonwords [orthographically legal or illegal]) do not have an impact on the processing of the target item. However, two lexical decision studies reported faster responses to target words when the unrelated prime is a word rather than a nonword (i.e., a response congruency effect). One possible explanation for this discrepancy is a difference in methodology, as these two studies are the only ones to have used repeated presentation of stimuli, which could lead to the creation of an episodic memory trace that amplifies response congruency effects. To examine this hypothesis, we used a set of materials that did not show any congruency effect in a previous experiment with unique presentations, except that here we included repeated presentations. Results showed a response congruency effect, with participants responding faster to word targets when they were preceded by an unrelated word prime as opposed to an unrelated nonword prime. These findings suggest that the activation of response codes in masked priming is contingent upon the nature of cognitive resources required for processing the target stimuli.

Effects of alternating letter case on processing sequences of written words.

In three grammatical decision experiments, we examined the impact of alternating letter case on sentence reading to determine the locus of case-alternation effects. Experiments 1 and 2 compared grammatical decision responses ("Is this a grammatically correct sequence of words or not?") in three different conditions: (1) SAME CASE/same case; (2) alternating CASE between WORDS; and (3) aLterNaTing cAsE wItHin WoRdS. For the grammatically correct sequences, we observed significantly faster responses in the same-case conditions compared with the between-word case manipulation, as well as a significant advantage for the between-word condition compared with within-word alternating case. These results confirm that case-alternation deteriorates sentence reading, but more so at the level of single word processing (within-word alternation) than at the sentence level (between-word alternation). Experiment 3 demonstrated that between-word case-alternation facilitates sentence processing compared with an all-lowercase condition when betweenWORDspacesAREremoved. Therefore, in the absence of between-word spacing, case changes across words facilitate sentence processing, possibly by guiding readers' eyes to optimal locations for word identification.

Perceptual Contiguity Does Not Modulate Matched-Case Identity-Priming Effects in Lexical Decision.

In recent studies with the masked priming lexical decision task, matched-case identity-priming effects occur for nonwords but not for words (e.g., nonwords: ERTAR-ERTAR faster than ertar-ERTAR; words: ALTAR-ALTAR produces similar response times as altar-ALTAR). This dissociation is thought to result from lexical feedback influencing orthographic representations in word processing. As nonwords do not receive this feedback, bottom-up processing of prime-target integration leads to matched-case effects. However, the underlying mechanism of this effect in nonwords remains unclear. In this study, we added a color congruency manipulation across the prime and target in the matched-case identity-priming design. We aimed to determine whether the case effects originate at the early stages of prime-target perceptual integration or due to bottom-up activation of case-specific letter detectors. Results replicated the previous dissociation between words and nonwords regarding the matched-case identity effect. Additionally, we did not find any modulation of these effects by prime-target color congruency. These findings suggest that the locus of the matched-case identity effect is at an orthographic level of representation that encodes case information.

Just a mark: Diacritic function does not play a role in the early stages of visual word recognition.

A very common feature in most writing systems is the presence of diacritics: distinguishing marks that are added for various linguistic reasons. Most models of reading, however, have not yet captured the nature of these marks. Recent priming experiments in several languages have attempted to resolve how diacritical letters are represented in the visual word recognition system. Since the function and appearance of diacritics can change from one language to the other, it is hard to interpret the accumulated evidence. With this in mind, we conducted two masked priming lexical decision experiments in Hungarian, a transparent orthography with a wide use of diacritic vowels that allows for clear-cut manipulations. In the two experiments, we manipulated the presence or absence of the same diacritic (i.e., the acute accent) on two specific sets of letters that behave differently. In Experiment 1, the manipulation changed only the length of vowels, whereas in Experiment 2, it also changed the quality (e.g., a↝/ɒ/ vs. á↝/aː/). In both experiments, we found that primes with an omitted diacritic work just as good as the identity primes (nema→NÉMA = néma→NÉMA [mute]), whereas the addition of a diacritic comes with a cost (mése→MESE > mese→MESE [tale]). This asymmetry favors a purely perceptual account of the very early stages of word recognition, making it blind to the function of diacritics. We suggest that the linguistic functions of diacritics originate at later processing stages.

Do Diacritics Entail an Early Processing Cost in the Absence of Abstract Representations? Evidence from Masked Priming in English.

Using the masked priming technique, word recognition experiments in various languages have shown slower response times for a target word like NEVEU (nephew, in French) when preceded by a diacritical prime like néveu than by the identity prime neveu. The most common account of this effect is linguistic: diacritical and non-diacritical vowels (e.g., é and e) activate different letter representations (e.g., compare neveu /nə.vø/ vs. néveu /ne.vø/). However, another explanation is that the reduced effectiveness of the diacritical primes is merely due to the perceptual salience of accent marks in the first moments of word processing. Here, we designed a masked priming experiment that tested this perceptual salience account by comparing the effectiveness of diacritical versus non-diacritical primes in a language where diacritics have no linguistic value, namely, English (e.g., nórth-NORTH vs. north-NORTH). We found a small but reliable cost due to the diacritical primes, thus revealing that perceptual salience reduced the effectiveness of the primes. However, the effect sizes were substantially smaller than in the experiments in languages with diacritical marks, thus suggesting that the néveu-NEVEU versus neveu-NEVEU difference relies on both linguistic and perceptual sources.

Does online masked priming pass the test? The effects of prime exposure duration on masked identity priming.

Masked priming is one of the most important paradigms in the study of visual word recognition, but it is usually thought to require a laboratory setup with a known monitor and keyboard. To test if this technique can be safely used in an online setting, we conducted two online masked priming lexical decision task experiments using PsychoPy/PsychoJS (Peirce et al., 2019). Importantly, we also tested the role of prime exposure duration (33.3 vs. 50 ms in Experiment 1 and 16.7 vs. 33.3 ms in Experiment 2), thus allowing us to examine both across conditions and within-conditions effects. We found that our online data are indeed very similar to the masked priming data previously reported in the masked priming literature. Additionally, we found a clear effect of prime duration, with the priming effect (measured in terms of response time and accuracy) being stronger at 50 ms than 33.3 ms and no priming effect at 16.7 ms prime duration. From these results, we can conclude that modern online browser-based experimental psychophysics packages (e.g., PsychoPy) can present stimuli and collect responses on standard end user devices with enough precision. These findings provide us with confidence that masked priming can be used online, thus allowing us not only to run less time-consuming experiments, but also to reach populations that are difficult to test in a laboratory.

Reading about a RELO-VUTION.

Pseudowords created by transposing two letters of words (e.g., MOHTER; CHOLOCATE) are highly confusable with their base word; this is known as the transposed-letter similarity effect. In this work, we examined whether transposed-letter effects occur when words span more than one line (e.g., CHOLO- in one line and CATE in another line; note that the transposed letters L and C are in different lines). While this type of presentation is not the canonical format for reading in alphabetic languages, it is widely used in advertising, billboards, and street signs. Transposed-letter pseudowords and their replacement-letter controls were written in the standard one-line format versus a two-line format (Experiments 1-2) or a syllable-per-line format (Experiment 3). While results showed some decrease in the transposed-letter effect in the two-line and syllabic formats, the transposed-letter effect was still substantial in the accuracy of responses. These findings demonstrate that even when the letters being transposed are relatively far apart in space, the transposed-letter effect is still robust. Thus, a major component of letter position coding occurs at an abstract level.

Are goats chèvres, chévres, chevres, and chevres? Unveiling the orthographic code of diacritical vowels.

An often overlooked but fundamental issue for any comprehensive model of visual-word recognition is the representation of diacritical vowels: Do diacritical and nondiacritical vowels share their abstract letter representations? Recent research suggests that the answer is "yes" in languages where diacritics indicate suprasegmental information (e.g., lexical stress, as in cámara ['ka.ma.ɾa] camera; Spanish), but "no" in languages where diacritics indicate segmental information such as a different phoneme (e.g., the German vowels ä /ɛ/ and a /a/). Here we examined this issue in French, a language that contains a complex set of diacritical vowels (e.g., for the letter e: é, è, ê, and ë). In Experiment 1, using a semantic categorization task, we compared the word identification times to intact diacritical words (e.g., chèvre, goat in English) with a condition with omitted diacritics (chevre). Results showed that the two conditions behaved similarly. In Experiments 2-4, we compared the intact diacritical words with a condition containing a mismatching diacritic, either existing in French (e.g., chévre, chêvre) or not (the macron sign, as in chevre). We only found a reading cost when replacing the diacritic with an existing one. In Experiments 5-6, we compared the semantic categorization times to intact nondiacritical words (e.g., cheval, horse in English) versus a condition with an added diacritic, either existing (chèval) or not (cheval). We found a reading cost for the words with the added diacritical mark in both cases. We discuss how models of visual-word recognition can be modified to represent diacritical vowels. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The effect of transposed-character distance in Chinese reading.

Previous research in alphabetic languages has shown that both position (external, internal) and distance (adjacent, nonadjacent) modulate letter position encoding during reading. To examine the generality of this pattern for a comprehensive model of word recognition and reading, we examined these effects during Chinese reading (i.e., an unspaced logographic language). Participants in two experiments read intact sentences and sentences containing transposed-character nonwords while their eye movements were monitored. Experiment 1 manipulated the distance between the transposed characters (adjacent vs. nonadjacent) within three-character words. Reading times were longer when nonadjacent characters were transposed compared with adjacent characters. Also, for adjacent character transpositions, a word-beginning character transposition led to longer reading times than a word-ending character transposition. Experiment 2 manipulated orthogonally character transposition distance (adjacent vs. nonadjacent) and position within four-character words, including the beginning versus the last character. Reading times were longer when the transposition involves the first character than when involves the ending character. Fixation durations on the target regions in the nonadjacent character transposition condition were longer than those in the adjacent character transposition condition. Taken together, these results reveal robust effects of both the initial character position and transposed-character distance in Chinese reading. Thus, the privileged status of the initial character is intrinsically related to how we access lexical information. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).