@article{AdamGumbschButzetal.2021, author = {Adam, Maurits and Gumbsch, Christian and Butz, Martin V. and Elsner, Birgit}, title = {The impact of action effects on infants' predictive gaze shifts for a non-human grasping action at 7, 11, and 18 months}, series = {Frontiers in psychology}, volume = {12}, journal = {Frontiers in psychology}, publisher = {Frontiers Research Foundation}, address = {Lausanne}, issn = {1664-1078}, doi = {10.3389/fpsyg.2021.695550}, pages = {10}, year = {2021}, abstract = {During the observation of goal-directed actions, infants usually predict the goal at an earlier age when the agent is familiar (e.g., human hand) compared to unfamiliar (e.g., mechanical claw). These findings implicate a crucial role of the developing agentive self for infants' processing of others' action goals. Recent theoretical accounts suggest that predictive gaze behavior relies on an interplay between infants' agentive experience (top-down processes) and perceptual information about the agent and the action-event (bottom-up information; e.g., agency cues). The present study examined 7-, 11-, and 18-month-old infants' predictive gaze behavior for a grasping action performed by an unfamiliar tool, depending on infants' age-related action knowledge about tool-use and the display of the agency cue of producing a salient action effect. The results are in line with the notion of a systematic interplay between experience-based top-down processes and cue-based bottom-up information: Regardless of the salient action effect, predictive gaze shifts did not occur in the 7-month-olds (least experienced age group), but did occur in the 18-month-olds (most experienced age group). In the 11-month-olds, however, predictive gaze shifts occurred only when a salient action effect was presented. This sheds new light on how the developing agentive self, in interplay with available agency cues, supports infants' action-goal prediction also for observed tool-use actions.}, language = {en} } @article{PatilVasishthLewis2016, author = {Patil, Umesh and Vasishth, Shravan and Lewis, Richard L.}, title = {Retrieval Interference in Syntactic Processing: The Case of Reflexive Binding in English}, series = {Frontiers in psychology}, volume = {7}, journal = {Frontiers in psychology}, publisher = {Frontiers Research Foundation}, address = {Lausanne}, issn = {1664-1078}, doi = {10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00329}, pages = {18}, year = {2016}, abstract = {It has been proposed that in online sentence comprehension the dependency between a reflexive pronoun such as himself/herself and its antecedent is resolved using exclusively syntactic constraints. Under this strictly syntactic search account, Principle A of the binding theory—which requires that the antecedent c-command the reflexive within the same clause that the reflexive occurs in—constrains the parser's search for an antecedent. The parser thus ignores candidate antecedents that might match agreement features of the reflexive (e.g., gender) but are ineligible as potential antecedents because they are in structurally illicit positions. An alternative possibility accords no special status to structural constraints: in addition to using Principle A, the parser also uses non-structural cues such as gender to access the antecedent. According to cue-based retrieval theories of memory (e.g., Lewis and Vasishth, 2005), the use of non-structural cues should result in increased retrieval times and occasional errors when candidates partially match the cues, even if the candidates are in structurally illicit positions. In this paper, we first show how the retrieval processes that underlie the reflexive binding are naturally realized in the Lewis and Vasishth (2005) model. We present the predictions of the model under the assumption that both structural and non-structural cues are used during retrieval, and provide a critical analysis of previous empirical studies that failed to find evidence for the use of non-structural cues, suggesting that these failures may be Type II errors. We use this analysis and the results of further modeling to motivate a new empirical design that we use in an eye tracking study. The results of this study confirm the key predictions of the model concerning the use of non-structural cues, and are inconsistent with the strictly syntactic search account. These results present a challenge for theories advocating the infallibility of the human parser in the case of reflexive resolution, and provide support for the inclusion of agreement features such as gender in the set of retrieval cues.}, language = {en} } @article{VasishthKentner2015, author = {Vasishth, Shravan and Kentner, Gerrit}, title = {Prosodic focus marking in silent reading}, series = {Frontiers in psychology}, volume = {2016}, journal = {Frontiers in psychology}, number = {7}, editor = {Crocker, Matthew W.}, doi = {10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00319}, pages = {1 -- 19}, year = {2015}, abstract = {Understanding a sentence and integrating it into the discourse depends upon the identification of its focus, which, in spoken German, is marked by accentuation. In the case of written language, which lacks explicit cues to accent, readers have to draw on other kinds of information to determine the focus. We study the joint or interactive effects of two kinds of information that have no direct representation in print but have each been shown to be influential in the reader's text comprehension: (i) the (low-level)rhythmic-prosodic structure that is based on the distribution of lexically stressed syllables, and (ii) the (high-level) discourse context that is grounded in the memory of previous linguistic content. Systematically manipulating these factors, we examine the way readers resolve a syntactic ambiguity involving the scopally ambiguous focus operator auch (engl. "too") in both oral (Experiment 1) and silent reading (Experiment 2). The results of both experiments attest that discourse context and local linguistic rhythm conspire to guide the syntactic and, oncomitantly, the focus-structural analysis of ambiguous sentences. We argue that reading comprehension requires the (implicit) assignment of accents according to the focus structure and that, by establishing a prominence profile, the implicit prosodic rhythm directly affects accent assignment.}, language = {en} } @misc{DimigenSommerHohlfeldetal.2011, author = {Dimigen, Olaf and Sommer, Werner and Hohlfeld, Annette and Jacobs, Arthur M. and Kliegl, Reinhold}, title = {Coregistration of eye movements and EEG in natural reading analyses and review}, series = {Journal of experimental psychology : General}, volume = {140}, journal = {Journal of experimental psychology : General}, number = {4}, publisher = {American Psychological Association}, address = {Washington}, issn = {0096-3445}, doi = {10.1037/a0023885}, pages = {552 -- 572}, year = {2011}, abstract = {Brain-electric correlates of reading have traditionally been studied with word-by-word presentation, a condition that eliminates important aspects of the normal reading process and precludes direct comparisons between neural activity and oculomotor behavior. In the present study, we investigated effects of word predictability on eye movements (EM) and fixation-related brain potentials (FRPs) during natural sentence reading. Electroencephalogram (EEG) and EM (via video-based eye tracking) were recorded simultaneously while subjects read heterogeneous German sentences, moving their eyes freely over the text. FRPs were time-locked to first-pass reading fixations and analyzed according to the cloze probability of the currently fixated word. We replicated robust effects of word predictability on EMs and the N400 component in FRPs. The data were then used to model the relation among fixation duration, gaze duration, and N400 amplitude, and to trace the time course of EEG effects relative to effects in EM behavior. In an extended Methodological Discussion section, we review 4 technical and data-analytical problems that need to be addressed when FRPs are recorded in free-viewing situations (such as reading, visual search, or scene perception) and propose solutions. Results suggest that EEG recordings during normal vision are feasible and useful to consolidate findings from EEG and eye-tracking studies.}, language = {en} }