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Objective: Childhood overweight is related to higher sensitivity for external food cues and less responsiveness towards internal satiety signals. Thus, cognitive psychological models assume an enhanced food attention bias underlying overeating behavior. Nevertheless, this question has only been sparsely investigated so far in younger children and it remains open whether restrained eating behavior plays a correlative role.
Methods: The present study investigated this specific information processing bias for food relevant stimuli in 34 overweight children between 6 and 10 years and 34 normal weight children matched for age, sex and socioeconomic status. Children completed a computerized Food Picture Interference task that assessed reaction time interference effects towards high and low calorie food pictures. Level of hunger and restrained eating were assessed via self-report.
Results: Results indicated that while finding no group difference in general processing speed or hunger level before the task, overweight children showed a higher attentional bias to food pictures than normal weight children. No effect of caloric density was found. However, surprisingly, the interference effect was negatively related to restrained eating in the overweight group only.
Conclusion: The found hypersensitivity for food cues independent of calorie content in overweight children appears to be related to dysfunctional eating, so that future research should consider strategies for attentional retraining.
Reading is a complex cognitive task based on the analyses of visual stimuli. Due to the physiology of the eye, only a small number of letters around the fixation position can be extracted with high visual acuity, while the visibility of words and letters outside this so-called foveal region quickly drops with increasing eccentricity. As a consequence, saccadic eye movements are needed to repeatedly shift the fovea to new words for visual word identification during reading. Moreover, even within a foveated word fixation positions near the word center are superior to other fixation positions for efficient word recognition (O’Regan, 1981; Brysbaert, Vitu, and Schroyens, 1996). Thus, most reading theories assume that readers aim specifically at word centers during reading (for a review see Reichle, Rayner, & Pollatsek, 2003). However, saccades’ landing positions within words during reading are in fact systematically modulated by the distance of the launch site from the word center (McConkie, Kerr, Reddix, & Zola, 1988). In general, it is largely unknown how readers identify the center of upcoming target words and there is no computational model of the sensorimotor translation of the decision for a target word into spatial word center coordinates. Here we present a series of three studies which aim at advancing the current knowledge about the computation of saccade target coordinates during saccade planning in reading. Based on a large corpus analyses, we firstly identified word skipping as a further factor beyond the launch-site distance with a likewise systematic and surprisingly large effect on within-word landing positions. Most importantly, we found that the end points of saccades after skipped word are shifted two and more letters to the left as compared to one-step saccades (i.e., from word N to word N+1) with equal launch-site distances. Then we present evidence from a single saccade experiment suggesting that the word-skipping effect results from highly automatic low-level perceptual processes, which are essentially based on the localization of blank spaces between words. Finally, in the third part, we present a Bayesian model of the computation of the word center from primary sensory measurements of inter-word spaces. We demonstrate that the model simultaneously accounts for launch-site and saccade-type contingent modulations of within-word landing positions in reading. Our results show that the spatial saccade target during reading is the result of complex estimations of the word center based on incomplete sensory information, which also leads to specific systematic deviations of saccades’ landing positions from the word center. Our results have important implications for current reading models and experimental reading research.
How distinct implicit and explicit motive systems differ has long been unclear. Schultheiss' (2001) information processing account of implicit motive arousal hypothesized that implicit motives respond to nonverbal stimuli to influence non-declarative measures of motivation and that explicit motives respond to verbal stimuli to influence declarative measures of motivation. Moreover, in individuals high in referential competence, i.e., with the ability to quickly translate non-verbal stimuli into a verbal representation, implicit motives are thought to respond to verbal stimuli and influence declarative measures of motivation and explicit motives are thought to respond to nonverbal stimuli and to influence non-declarative measures of motivation. The present study tested these hypotheses by assessing liking ratings as a declarative response format and an affective stroop task as a non-declarative response format using emotion words as verbal and emotional facial expressions as non-verbal stimuli. Individual power, affiliation, and achievement motive dispositions were assessed via the Picture Story Excercise for implicit motives and via questionnaires for explicit motives. Referential competence was assessed via a colour-naming/-reading task. I found that as expected explicit and implicit motives overall were not correlated across subjects. Moreover, implicit and explicit motives affected declarative and non-declarative responses for verbal and non-verbal stimuli. As predicted, however, implicit motives responded to verbal stimuli and influenced declarative responses more strongly for individuals high compared to those low in referential competence. Likewise, explicit motive effects were moderated by referential competence in some - but not all - of the predicted conditions. These results show that implicit and explicit motives can influence declarative and non-declarative responses to verbal and non-verbal stimuli. They support the hypothesis that referential processing is needed for implicit motives to respond to verbal stimuli and influence declarative response formats, and they partly support the hypothesis that referential processing plays a role for the influence of explicit motives. Results for explicit motives may suggest that new measures are needed to assess the referential competence to translate verbal stimuli into non-verbal representations. Overall, the findings provide support to the information processing account of implicit motive arousal by Schultheiss' (2001), suggesting that a non-verbal and non-declarative implicit motive system and a distinct verbal and declarative explicit motive system interact via referential processing, i.e., by translating information between representational formats.
It sometimes happens that we finish reading a passage of text just to realize that we have no idea what we just read. During these episodes of mindless reading our mind is elsewhere yet the eyes still move across the text. The phenomenon of mindless reading is common and seems to be widely recognized in lay psychology. However, the scientific investigation of mindless reading has long been underdeveloped. Recent progress in research on mindless reading has been based on self-report measures and on treating it as an all-or-none phenomenon (dichotomy-hypothesis). Here, we introduce the levels-of-inattention hypothesis proposing that mindless reading is graded and occurs at different levels of cognitive processing. Moreover, we introduce two new behavioral paradigms to study mindless reading at different levels in the eye-tracking laboratory. First (Chapter 2), we introduce shuffled text reading as a paradigm to approximate states of weak mindless reading experimentally and compare it to reading of normal text. Results from statistical analyses of eye movements that subjects perform in this task qualitatively support the ‘mindless’ hypothesis that cognitive influences on eye movements are reduced and the ‘foveal load’ hypothesis that the response of the zoom lens of attention to local text difficulty is enhanced when reading shuffled text. We introduce and validate an advanced version of the SWIFT model (SWIFT 3) incorporating the zoom lens of attention (Chapter 3) and use it to explain eye movements during shuffled text reading. Simulations of the SWIFT 3 model provide fully quantitative support for the ‘mindless’ and the ‘foveal load’ hypothesis. They moreover demonstrate that the zoom lens is an important concept to explain eye movements across reading and mindless reading tasks. Second (Chapter 4), we introduce the sustained attention to stimulus task (SAST) to catch episodes when external attention spontaneously lapses (i.e., attentional decoupling or mind wandering) via the overlooking of errors in the text and via signal detection analyses of error detection. Analyses of eye movements in the SAST revealed reduced influences from cognitive text processing during mindless reading. Based on these findings, we demonstrate that it is possible to predict states of mindless reading from eye movement recordings online. That cognition is not always needed to move the eyes supports autonomous mechanisms for saccade initiation. Results from analyses of error detection and eye movements provide support to our levels-of-inattention hypothesis that errors at different levels of the text assess different levels of decoupling. Analyses of pupil size in the SAST (Chapter 5) provide further support to the levels of inattention hypothesis and to the decoupling hypothesis that off-line thought is a distinct mode of cognitive functioning that demands cognitive resources and is associated with deep levels of decoupling. The present work demonstrates that the elusive phenomenon of mindless reading can be vigorously investigated in the cognitive laboratory and further incorporated in the theoretical framework of cognitive science.
We present an approach to generate (multivariate) twin surrogates (TS) based on recurrence properties. This technique generates surrogates which correspond to an independent copy of the underlying system, i. e. they induce a trajectory of the underlying system starting at different initial conditions. We show that these surrogates are well suited to test for complex synchronisation and exemplify this for the paradigmatic system of R¨ossler oscillators. The proposed test enables to assess the statistical relevance of a synchronisation analysis from passive experiments which are typical in natural systems.
Reading requires the orchestration of visual, attentional, language-related, and oculomotor processing constraints. This study replicates previous effects of frequency, predictability, and length of fixated words on fixation durations in natural reading and demonstrates new effects of these variables related to previous and next words. Results are based on fixation durations recorded from 222 persons, each reading 144 sentences. Such evidence for distributed processing of words across fixation durations challenges psycholinguistic immediacy-of-processing and eye-mind assumptions. Most of the time the mind processes several words in parallel at different perceptual and cognitive levels. Eye movements can help to unravel these processes.
We examined relations between eye movements (single-fixation durations) and RSVP-based event-related potentials (ERPs; N400’s) recorded during reading the same sentences in two independent experiments. Longer fixation durations correlated with larger N400 amplitudes. Word frequency and predictability of the fixated word as well as the predictability of the upcoming word accounted for this covariance in a path-analytic model. Moreover, larger N400 amplitudes entailed longer fixation durations on the next word, a relation accounted for by word frequency. This pattern offers a neurophysiological correlate for the lag-word frequency effect on fixation durations: Word processing is reliably expressed not only in fixation durations on currently fixated words, but also in those on subsequently fixated words.
Eye movements in reading are sensitive to foveal and parafoveal word features. Whereas the influence of orthographic or phonological parafoveal information on gaze control is undisputed, there has been no reliable evidence for early parafoveal extraction of semantic information in alphabetic script. Using a novel combination of the gaze-contingent fast-priming and boundary paradigms, we demonstrate semantic preview benefit when a semantically related parafoveal word was available during the initial 125 ms of a fixation on the pre-target word (Experiments 1 and 2). When the target location was made more salient, significant parafoveal semantic priming occurred only at 80 ms (Experiment 3). Finally, with short primes only (20, 40, 60 ms) effects were not significant but numerically in the expected direction for 40 and 60 ms (Experiment 4). In all experiments, fixation durations on the target word increased with prime durations under all conditions. The evidence for extraction of semantic information from the parafoveal word favors an explanation in terms of parallel word processing in reading.
Using the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm with the boundary placed after word n, we manipulated preview of word n+2 for fixations on word n. There was no preview benefit for first-pass reading on word n+2, replicating the results of Rayner, Juhasz, and Brown (2007), but there was a preview benefit on the three-letter word n+1, that is, after the boundary, but before word n+2. Additionally, both word n+1 and word n+2 exhibited parafoveal-on-foveal effects on word n. Thus, during a fixation on word n and given a short word n+1, some information is extracted from word n+2, supporting the hypothesis of distributed processing in the perceptual span.