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Recent research has suggested that reading involves the mental simulation of events and actions described in a text. It is possible however that previous findings did not tap into processes engaged during natural reading but rather those triggered by task demands. The present study examined whether readers spontaneously mentally simulate the actions described in simple narratives by using a memory...
Recent work on event perception suggests that perceptual processing increases when events change. An important question is how such changes influence the way other information is processed, particularly during dual-task performance. In this study, participants monitored a long series of distractor items for an occasional target as they simultaneously encoded unrelated background scenes. The appearance...
Communication, language and conceptual knowledge related to concrete objects may rely on the sensory–motor systems from which they emerge. How abstract concepts can emerge from these systems is however still unknown. Here we report a functional interaction between a specific meaningful finger movement, such as a finger grip closing, and a concept as abstract as numerical magnitude. Participants were...
How do people assign responsibility to individuals in a group context? Participants played a repeated trial experimental game with three computer players, in which they counted triangles presented in complex diagrams. Three between-subject conditions differed in how the group outcome was computed from the individual players’ answers. After each round, participants assigned responsibility for the outcome...
In this study, we attempted to clarify whether distractibility in ADHD might arise from increased sensory-driven interference or from inefficient top-down control. We employed an attentional filtering paradigm in which discrimination difficulty and distractor salience (amount of image “graying”) were parametrically manipulated. Increased discrimination difficulty should add to the load of top-down...
At near-threshold levels of stimulation, identical stimulus parameters can result in very different phenomenal experiences. Can we manipulate which stimuli reach consciousness? Here we show that consciousness of otherwise masked stimuli can be experimentally induced by sensory entrainment. We preceded a backward-masked stimulus with a series of rapid visual events presented at 12Hz for 800ms. Peaks...
The introduction of Talmy’s (1985, 2000) typology sparked significant interest in linguistic relativity in the arena of motion language. Through careful analysis of the conflation patterns evident in the language of motion events, Talmy noted that one class of languages, V-languages, tends to encode path along with the fact of motion in motion verbs, while a second class, S-languages, tends to encode...
Speech prosody has traditionally been considered solely in terms of its auditory features, yet correlated visual features exist, such as head and eyebrow movements. This study investigated the extent to which visual prosodic features are able to affect the perception of the auditory features. Participants were presented with videos of a speaker pronouncing two words, with visual features of emphasis...
The least supported phoneme refers to the phoneme position within a word with which the fewest phonological neighbors overlap. Recently, it has been argued that the number of neighbors coinciding with the least supported phoneme is a critical determinant of pronunciation latencies. The current research tested this claim by comparing naming latencies to words that differed in terms of the number of...
Research based on the Category Adjustment model concluded that the spatial distribution of target locations does not influence location estimation responses [Huttenlocher, J., Hedges, L., Corrigan, B., & Crawford, L. E. (2004). Spatial categories and the estimation of location. Cognition, 93, 75–97]. This conflicts with earlier results showing that location estimation is biased relative to the...
Many cognitive theories have described behavior as the summation of independent contributions from separate components. Contrasting views have emphasized the importance of multiplicative interactions and emergent structure. We describe a statistical approach to distinguishing additive and multiplicative processes and apply it to the dynamics of eye movements during classic visual cognitive tasks....
Studies from many languages consistently report that subject relative clauses (SR) are easier to process than object relatives (OR). However, Hsiao and Gibson (2003) report an OR preference for Chinese, a finding that has been contested. Here we report faster OR versus SR processing in Basque, an ergative, head-final language with pre-nominal relative clauses. A self-paced reading task was used in...
Current models in social neuroscience advance that eye contact may automatically recruit cognitive resources. Here, we directly tested this hypothesis by evaluating the distracting strength of eye contact on concurrent visual processing in the well-known Stroop’s paradigm. As expected, participants showed stronger Stroop interference under concomitant eye contact as compared to closed eyes. Two control...
Developmental dyscalculia (DD) is a pervasive difficulty affecting number processing and arithmetic. It is encountered in around 6% of school-aged children. While previous studies have mainly focused on general cognitive functions, the present paper aims to further investigate the hypothesis of a specific numerical deficit in dyscalculia. The performance of 10- and 11-year-old children with DD characterised...
Can simple motor actions affect how efficiently people retrieve emotional memories, and influence what they choose to remember? In Experiment 1, participants were prompted to retell autobiographical memories with either positive or negative valence, while moving marbles either upward or downward. They retrieved memories faster when the direction of movement was congruent with the valence of the memory...
A recent study by Apperly et al. (2006) found evidence that adults do not automatically infer false beliefs while watching videos that afford such inferences. This method was extended to examine true beliefs, which are sometimes thought to be ascribed by “default” (e.g., Leslie & Thaiss, 1992). Sequences of pictures were presented in which the location of an object and a character’s belief about...
Adults’ causal representations integrate information about predictive relations and the possibility of effective intervention; if one event reliably predicts another, adults can represent the possibility that acting to bring about the first event might generate the second. Here we show that although toddlers (mean age: 24months) readily learn predictive relationships between physically connected events,...
The present study examined the effect of perceived motion-in-depth on temporal interval perception. We required subjects to estimate the length of a short empty interval starting from the offset of a first marker and ending with the onset of a second marker. The size of the markers was manipulated so that the subjects perceived a visual object as approaching or receding. We demonstrated that the empty...
Recent neuroimaging research has shown that perceptual and conceptual processing share a common, modality-specific neural substrate, while work on modality switching costs suggests that they share some of the same attentional mechanisms. In three experiments, we employed a modality detection task that displayed modality-specific object properties (e.g., unimodal shrill, warm, crimson, or bimodal jagged,...
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