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Background
The centrality of an event indicates the extent to which it becomes a core part of identity and life story. Event centrality (EC) has been shown to have a strong relationship with PTSD symptoms, which seems to be indirectly influenced by negative posttraumatic cognitions (PTC). However, research on this potential mediation and its causal links particularly with clinical samples is limited and essential to derive treatment implications.
Methods
Pre- and posttreatment data of 103 day-unit patients with PTSD was examined using mediation analyses and structural equation modeling.
Results
Negative PTC mediated the relationship between EC and PTSD symptoms, partially pre- and completely posttreatment. Within extended longitudinal analyses causal directions of the mediation pathways were not adequately interpretable due to unexpected suppression effects.
Conclusions
The results suggest that EC may only have an indirect effect on PTSD symptoms through negative PTC. Thus, decreasing negative PTC which are connected to centralized events might be a key element for PTSD treatment. Thereby, transforming the cognitions' valence to more positive and constructive forms could be crucial rather than mere decentralization. Although suppression effects limited causal inferences, they do not contradict the mediation and further indicate potential interactional terms and a transformation of EC.
Saccades to single targets in peripheral vision are typically characterized by an undershoot bias. Putting this bias to a test, Kapoula [1] used a paradigm in which observers were presented with two different sets of target eccentricities that partially overlapped each other. Her data were suggestive of a saccadic range effect (SRE): There was a tendency for saccades to overshoot close targets and undershoot far targets in a block, suggesting that there was a response bias towards the center of eccentricities in a given block. Our Experiment 1 was a close replication of the original study by Kapoula [1]. In addition, we tested whether the SRE is sensitive to top-down requirements associated with the task, and we also varied the target presentation duration. In Experiments 1 and 2, we expected to replicate the SRE for a visual discrimination task. The simple visual saccade-targeting task in Experiment 3, entailing minimal top-down influence, was expected to elicit a weaker SRE. Voluntary saccades to remembered target locations in Experiment 3 were expected to elicit the strongest SRE. Contrary to these predictions, we did not observe a SRE in any of the tasks. Our findings complement the results reported by Gillen et al. [2] who failed to find the effect in a saccade-targeting task with a very brief target presentation. Together, these results suggest that unlike arm movements, saccadic eye movements are not biased towards making saccades of a constant, optimal amplitude for the task.
In this paper we apply symbolic transformations as a visualisation technique for analysing rhythm production. It is shown that qualitative information can be extracted from the experimental data. This approach may provide new insights into the organisation of temporal order by the brain on different levels of description. A simple phenomenological model for the explanation of the observed phenomena is proposed.
Humans typically read at incredibly fast rates, because they predict likely occurring words from a given context. Here, we used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to track the ultra-rapid hemodynamic responses of words presented every 280 ms in a naturally paced sentence context. We found a lower occipital deoxygenation to unpredictable than to predictable words. The greater hemodynamic responses to unexpected words suggest that the visual features of expected words have been pre-activated previous to stimulus presentation. Second, we tested opposing theoretical proposals about the role of the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC): Either OFC may respond to the breach of expectation; or OFC is activated when the present stimulus matches the prediction. A significant interaction between word frequency and predictability indicated OFC responses to breaches of expectation for low- but not for high-frequency words: OFC is sensitive to both, bottom-up processing as mediated by word frequency, as well as top-down predictions. Particularly, when a rare word is unpredictable, OFC becomes active. Finally, we discuss how a high temporal resolution can help future studies to disentangle the hemodynamic responses of single trials in such an ultra-rapid event succession as naturally paced reading. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
On the ambiguity of interaction and nonlinear main effects in a regime of dependent covariates
(2017)
The analysis of large experimental datasets frequently reveals significant interactions that are difficult to interpret within the theoretical framework guiding the research. Some of these interactions actually arise from the presence of unspecified nonlinear main effects and statistically dependent covariates in the statistical model. Importantly, such nonlinear main effects may be compatible (or, at least, not incompatible) with the current theoretical framework. In the present literature, this issue has only been studied in terms of correlated (linearly dependent) covariates. Here we generalize to nonlinear main effects (i.e., main effects of arbitrary shape) and dependent covariates. We propose a novel nonparametric method to test for ambiguous interactions where present parametric methods fail. We illustrate the method with a set of simulations and with reanalyses (a) of effects of parental education on their children’s educational expectations and (b) of effects of word properties on fixation locations during reading of natural sentences, specifically of effects of length and morphological complexity of the word to be fixated next. The resolution of such ambiguities facilitates theoretical progress.
Previous studies (Hyona, Yan, & Vainio, 2018; Yan et al., 2014) have demonstrated that in morphologically rich languages a word's morphological status is processed parafoveally to be used in modulating saccadic programming in reading. In the present parafoveal preview study conducted in Finnish, we examined the exact nature of this effect by comparing reading of morphologically complex words (a stem + two suffixes) to that of monomorphemic words. In the preview-change condition, the final 3-4 letters were replaced with other letters making the target word a pseudoword; for suffixed words, the word stem remained intact but the suffix information was unavailable; for monomorphemic words, only part of the stem was parafoveally available. Three alternative predictions were put forth. According to the first alternative, the morphological effect in initial fixation location is due to parafoveally perceiving the suffix as a highly frequent letter cluster and then adjusting the saccade program to land closer to the word beginning for suffixed than monomorphemic words. The second alternative, the processing difficulty hypothesis, assumes a morphological complexity effect: suffixed words are more complex than monomorphemic words. Therefore, the attentional window is narrower and the saccade is shorter. The third alternative posits that the effect reflects parafoveal access to the word's stem. The results for the initial fixation location and fixation durations were consistent with the parafoveal stem-access view.
Parafoveal load of word N+1 modulates preprocessing effectiveness of word N+2 in chinese reading
(2010)
Dyslexic children are known to be slower than normal readers in rapid automatized naming (RAN). This suggests that dyslexics encounter local processing difficulties, which presumably induce a narrower perceptual span. Consequently, dyslexics should suffer less than normal readers from removing parafoveal preview. Here we used a gaze-contingent moving window paradigm in a RAN task to experimentally test this prediction. Results indicate that dyslexics extract less parafoveal information than control children. We propose that more attentional resources are recruited to the foveal processing because of dyslexics' less automatized translation of visual symbols into phonological output, thereby causing a reduction of the perceptual span. This in turn leads to less efficient preactivation of parafoveal information and, hence, more difficulty in processing the next foveal item.