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A package of five FORTRAN programs that provides for fast user-controlled analyses of reading eye fixations is described. The package requires the data to be in a fixation format and to be rescaled to screen dimensions. OLDEYE identifies six types of fixations and calculates descriptive statistics on each of them, on their associated saccades, and on their average pupil diameter. CONVRT represents the text as a string of words that can be coded according to experimentally relevant variables. PLTFIX prints fixation durations by letter position and sequence of occurrence. MODDAT is an interactive program for marking parts of the text in which the data quality is below acceptable standards. It also allows the correction of systematic errors due to calibration or drift. MATCH combines the outputs from OLDEYE, CONVRT, and MODDAT and calculates 11 dependent measures for every word. The output of MATCH is suitable for input to conventional multivariate statistical programs.
EMAN is an eye-movement analysis program that consists of four modules. The first module rescales eye positions to coordinates of the display. The second and third modules reduce data to a fixation format and identify areas of bad measurement by means of iterative passes over the data. In the fourth module iterative algorithms are employed for the identification of line numbers and for achieving congruence between fixations and display.
Content: 1 Introduction 2 Theoretical background - Expertise and Reserve Capacity - Testing-the-Limits and Research on Expertise - Cognitive Processes and Knowledge - Age Comparisons of Peak Performance - Advantages of Constructed Versus Naturally Acquired Expertise - Hypotheses Related to Aging and Expertise: Toward Magnification and Identification of Age Differences and Aging-Sensitive Components 3 Theory-guided synthesis of memory expertise - Theoretical Framework - Procedure - Subjects - Results 4 Adaptivity testing of expert memory - Increasing Task Difficulty Within an Extant System - Selective Componential Interference - Toward the Study of Compensatory Processes 5 Conclusions
There has been a substantial increase in the percentage for publications with co-authors located in departments from different countries in 12 major journals of psychology. The results are evidence for a remarkable internationalization of psychological research, starting in the mid 1970s and increasing in rate at the beginning of the 1990s. This growth occurs against a constant number of articles with authors from the same country; it is not due to a concomitant increase in the number of co-authors per article. Thus, international collaboration in psychology is obviously on the rise.
We question the assumption of serial attention shifts and the assumption that saccade programs are initiated or canceled only after stage one of word identification. Evidence: (1) Fixation durations prior to skipped words are not consistently higher compared to those prior to nonskipped words. (2) Attentional modulation of microsaccade rate might occur after early visual processing. Saccades are probably triggered by attentional selection.
A model for correct recall and intrusions in cued recall of word lists is introduced. Intrusions are false responses that were correct in an earlier list. The model assumes 3 exclusive states for memory traces after encoding: with a list tag (i.e., with information about list origin), without list tags, and missing. Across lists, a trace can lose its list tag or its content. For retrieval, an optimal strategy of response selection was assumed. Younger and older laboratory-trained mnemonists participated in 2 experiments in which recall of permutations of a single word list across a single set of cues was held constant with individually adjusted presentation times. With correct recall equated to younger adults, older adults were more susceptible to intrusions. Age differences were restricted to model parameters estimating the probability of generation of list tags. Alternative accounts of age differences in context memory are discussed.
We examined individual differences in masked repetition priming by re-analyzing item-level response-time (RT) data from three experiments. Using a linear mixed model (LMM) with subjects and items specified as crossed random factors, the originally reported priming and word-frequency effects were recovered. In the same LMM, we estimated parameters describing the distributions of these effects across subjects. Subjects’ frequency and priming effects correlated positively with each other and negatively with mean RT. These correlation estimates, however, emerged only with a reciprocal transformation of RT (i.e., -1/RT), justified on the basis of distributional analyses. Different correlations, some with opposite sign, were obtained (1) for untransformed or logarithmic RTs or (2) when correlations were computed using within-subject analyses. We discuss the relevance of the new results for accounts of masked priming, implications of applying RT transformations, and the use of LMMs as a tool for the joint analysis of experimental effects and associated individual differences.
One undisputed finding of cognitive aging research is that the two main clusters of intellectual abilities, fluid and crystallized abilities, exhibit differential age-related trends. Healthy older adults perform less well than young adults on almost any task that requires fast responses or taps the fluid or mechanical aspects of intelligence; they show much less of a decline, if any at all, in tasks requiring the access of their crystallized knowledge (Baltes, 1987; Horn, 1970). These age-differential trends are the prototype of what we will refer to as a process dissociation. We will show how process dissociations can be established within the domain of fluid intelligence that pass more stringent tests than is customary in experimental research on cognitive aging.
A paradigm for the determination of time-accuracy functions (TAFs) for individual participants is introduced for two pairs of tasks differing in cognitive complexity, that is, word scanning vs cued recognition and figural scanning vs figural reasoning. TAFs can be used to test dissociations of cognitive processes beyond scale-related ambiguities of ordinal interactions. The approach is applied to examine the cognitive-aging hypothesis that a single slowing factor can account for interactions between adult age and cognitive task complexity. Twenty young and 20 old adults participated in 17 sessions. Presentation times required for 75, 87.5, and 100% accuracies were determined for each task with a variant of the psychophysical method of limits. Accuracy was fit by negatively accelerated functions of presentation time. State-trace analyses showed that different slowing factors are required for high- and low-complexity tasks. Relations to speed-accuracy and performance-resource functions are discussed.
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.
Just and Carpenter (1980) presented a theory of reading based on eye fixations wherein their "psycholinguistic" variables accounted for 72% of the variance in word gaze durations. This comment raises some statistical and theoretical problems with their use of simultaneous regression analysis of gaze duration measures and with the resulting theory of reading. A major problem was the confounding of perceptual with psycholinguistic factors. New eye fixation data are presented to support these criticisms. Analysis of fixations within words revealed that most gaze duration variance was contributed by number of fixations rather than by fixation duration.
The present paper presents FORTRAN programs for reducing eye monitor output to fixations and for mapping these fixations to locations in the stimulus space. Flexible parameters of the fixations program allow for determination of the beginning and end of fixations under different resolution criteria and for indicating loss of accurate measurement. The calibration program is based on a rectangular 9-point fixation grid. Each fixation is rescaled within this grid by solving for a quadratic equation. The rescaled values are output in a flexibly determined rectangular coordinate system that is related to the stimulus space, such as character position on the screen. The programs were developed for the 60-Hz Applied Sciences corneal reflection eye monitor, but they may be used with a number of other systems.
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.
Covert shifts of attention are usually reflected in RT differences between responses to valid and invalid cues in the Posner spatial attention task. Such inferences about covert shifts of attention do not control for microsaccades in the cue target interval. We analyzed the effects of microsaccade orientation on RTs in four conditions, crossing peripheral visual and auditory cues with peripheral visual and auditory discrimination targets. Reaction time was generally faster on trials without microsaccades in the cue-target interval. If microsaccades occurred, the target-location congruency of the last microsaccade in the cuetarget interval interacted in a complex way with cue validity. For valid visual cues, irrespective of whether the discrimination target was visual or auditory, target-congruent microsaccades delayed RT. For invalid cues, target-incongruent microsaccades facilitated RTs for visual target discrimination, but delayed RT for auditory target discrimination. No reliable effects on RT were associated with auditory cues or with the first microsaccade in the cue-target interval. We discuss theoretical implications on the relation about spatial attention and oculomotor processes.
The focus of this study was on developmental reserve capacity in old age as revealed by testing-thelimits. We examined (a) the time course of training-related magnification of age differences in serial word recall and (b) predictability of training gains by pretest individual differences in cognitive abilities. In 20 sessions, young (n = 18) and old (n = 19) adults were taught to recall lists of 30 words using the Method of Loci. Age differences were magnified early in practice at long presentation times (20 s and 15 s per word) and later at 5 s per word. Regression of posttraining scores on various pretraining abilities revealed significant effects of digit symbol substitution. Also, consistent with the assumption of age-related decline in developmental reserve capacity, the unique variance in serial word recall associated with age group became more salient as the training unfolded.
Investigated the range and limits of cognitive reserve capacity as a general approach to the understanding of age differences in cognitive functioning. Testing-the-limits is proposed as a research strategy, Data are reported from 2 training studies involving old (65 to 83 years old) and young adults (19 to 29 years old). The training, designed to engineer an expertise in serial word recall, involved instruction and practice in the Method of Loci. Substantial plasticity was evident in pretest to posttest comparisons. Participants raised their serial word recall several times above that of pretest baseline. Age-differential limits in reserve capacity were evident in amount of training gain but not in responses to conditions of increased test difficulty (speeded stimulus presentation). Group differences were magnified by the training to such a degree that age distributions barely overlapped at posttests. Testing-the-limits offers promise in terms of understanding the extent and nature of cognitive plasticity.
This research has three interrelated foci: (i) engineering and testing a cognitive model of expert memory, (ii) the study of intellectual reserve capacity and (iii) the use of a testing-the-limits methodology to magnify and delineate age differences in limits of reserve capacity. The assumption is that age differences are magnified if studied at high levels of expertise or task difficulty. Results from age-comparative point training studies in expert memory are reported. Both young and elderly subjects reached high levels of skilled memory, confirming the model. However, despite this sizeable reserve capacity, when compared to IQ-eguivalent young adults, superior elderly showed decline in upper limits of function.
This article outlines a research strategy for investigating, in a laboratory setting, the acquisition and the "limits" of a cognitive skill. Expert digit memory is used as an illustration. Two participants with initial average digit- and word-span memory were trained to memorize and reproduce strings of 80 to 90 digits presented at 10- to 1-sec rates. The instruction and training program, based on a theory of skilled memory, focused on three components: (a) acquisition of a mnemonic system (i.e., recoding digits into historical dates or concrete nouns), (b) use of a long-term memory retrieval structure (i.e., instruction in the Method of Loci), and (c) improvement in processing speed. After 86 experimental sessions, one participant recalled 90 random digits presented at a 1-sec rate. The digits were, however, constrained to be compatible with the participant's historical knowledge. The second participant recalled 80 random digits presented at a 5-sec rate after 70 sessions. Speed of encoding and retrieval processing was the only component that required extensive practice for skilled digit-memory acquisition.