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Institute
Children’s physical fitness development and related moderating effects of age and sex are well documented, especially boys’ and girls’ divergence during puberty. The situation might be different during prepuberty. As girls mature approximately two years earlier than boys, we tested a possible convergence of performance with five tests representing four components of physical fitness in a large sample of 108,295 eight-year old third-graders. Within this single prepubertal year of life and irrespective of the test, performance increased linearly with chronological age, and boys outperformed girls to a larger extent in tests requiring muscle mass for successful performance. Tests differed in the magnitude of age effects (gains), but there was no evidence for an interaction between age and sex. Moreover, “physical fitness” of schools correlated at r = 0.48 with their age effect which might imply that "fit schools” promote larger gains; expected secular trends from 2011 to 2019 were replicated.
The optical density of human macular pigment was measured for 50 observers ranging in age from 10 to 90 years. The psychophysical method required adjusting the radiance of a 1°, monochromatic light (400–550 nm) to minimize flicker (15 Hz) when presented in counterphase with a 460 nm standard. This test stimulus was presented superimposed on a broad-band, short-wave background. Macular pigment density was determined by comparing sensitivity under these conditions for the fovea, where macular pigment is maximal, and 5° temporally. This difference spectrum, measured for 12 observers, matched Wyszecki and Stiles's standard density spectrum for macular pigment. To study variation in macular pigment density for a larger group of observers, measurements were made at only selected spectral points (460, 500 and 550 nm). The mean optical density at 460 nm for the complete sample of 50 subjects was 0.39. Substantial individual differences in density were found (ca. 0.10–0.80), but this variation was not systematically related to age.
Basic psychological needs theory postulates that a social environment that satisfies individuals’ three basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness leads to optimal growth and well-being. On the other hand, the frustration of these needs is associated with ill-being and depressive symptoms foremost investigated in non-clinical samples; yet, there is a paucity of research on need frustration in clinical samples. Survey data were compared between adult individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD; n = 115; 48.69% female; 38.46 years, SD = 10.46) with those of a non-depressed comparison sample (n = 201; 53.23% female; 30.16 years, SD = 12.81). Need profiles were examined with a linear mixed model (LMM). Individuals with depression reported higher levels of frustration and lower levels of satisfaction in relation to the three basic psychological needs when compared to non-depressed adults. The difference between depressed and non-depressed groups was significantly larger for frustration than satisfaction regarding the needs for relatedness and competence. LMM correlation parameters confirmed the expected positive correlation between the three needs. This is the first study showing substantial differences in need-based experiences between depressed and non-depressed adults. The results confirm basic assumptions of the self-determination theory and have preliminary implications in tailoring therapy for depression.
Linguistic and psycholinguistic accounts based on the study of English may prove unreliable as guides to sentence processing in even closely related languages. The present study illustrates this claim in a test of sentence interpretation by German-, Italian-, and English-speaking adults. Subjects were presented with simple transitive sentences in which contrasts of (1) word order, (2) agreement, (3) animacy, and (4) stress were systematically varied. For each sentence, subjects were asked to state which of the two nouns was the actor. The results indicated that Americans relied overwhelming on word order, using a first-noun strategy in NVN and a second-noun strategy in VNN and NNV sentences. Germans relied on both agreement and animacy. Italians showed extreme reliance on agreement cues. In both German and Italian, stress played a role in terms of complex interactions with word order and agreement. The findings were interpreted in terms of the “competition model” of Bates and MacWhinney (in H. Winitz (Ed.), Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences Conference on Native and Foreign Language Acquisition. New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1982) in which cue validity is considered to be the primary determinant of cue strength. According to this model, cues are said to be high in validity when they are also high in applicability and reliability.
The development of phonetic codes in memory of 141 pairs of normal and disabled readers from 7.8 to 16.8 years of age was tested with a task adapted from L. S. Mark, D. Shankweiler, I. Y. Liberman, and C. A. Fowler (Memory & Cognition, 1977, 5, 623–629) that measured false-positive errors in recognition memory for foil words which rhymed with words in the memory list versus foil words that did not rhyme. Our younger subjects replicated Mark et al., showing a larger difference between rhyming and nonrhyming false-positive errors for the normal readers. The older disabled readers' phonetic effect was comparable to that of the younger normal readers, suggesting a developmental lag in their use of phonetic coding in memory. Surprisingly, the normal readers' phonetic effect declined with age in the recognition task, but they maintained a significant advantage across age in the auditory WISC-R digit span recall test, and a test of phonological nonword decoding. The normals' decline with age in rhyming confusion may be due to an increase in the precision of their phonetic codes.
Microsaccades are very small, involuntary flicks in eye position that occur on average once or twice per second during attempted visual fixation. Microsaccades give rise to EMG eye muscle spikes that can distort the spectrum of the scalp EEG and mimic increases in gamma band power. Here we demonstrate that microsaccades are also accompanied by genuine and sizeable cortical activity, manifested in the EEG. In three experiments, high-resolution eye movements were corecorded with the EEG: during sustained fixation of checkerboard and face stimuli and in a standard visual oddball task that required the counting of target stimuli. Results show that microsaccades as small as 0.15° generate a field potential over occipital cortex and midcentral scalp sites 100 –140 ms after movement onset, which resembles the visual lambda response evoked by larger voluntary saccades. This challenges the standard assumption of human brain imaging studies that saccade-related brain activity is precluded by fixation, even when fully complied with. Instead, additional cortical potentials from microsaccades were present in 86% of the oddball task trials and of similar amplitude as the visual response to stimulus onset. Furthermore, microsaccade probability varied systematically according to the proportion of target stimuli in the oddball task, causing modulations of late stimulus-locked event-related potential (ERP) components. Microsaccades present an unrecognized source of visual brain signal that is of interest for vision research and may have influenced the data of many ERP and neuroimaging studies.
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.
It has recently been demonstrated that the presentation of a rare target in a visual oddball paradigm induces a prolonged inhibition of microsaccades. In the field of electrophysiology, the amplitude of the P300 component in event-related potentials (ERP) has been shown to be sensitive to the stimulus category (target vs. non target) of the eliciting stimulus, its overall probability, and the preceding stimulus sequence. In the present study we further specify the functional underpinnings of the prolonged microsaccadic inhibition in the visual oddball task, showing that the stimulus category, the frequency of a stimulus and the preceding stimulus sequence influence microsaccade rate. Furthermore, by co-recording ERPs and eye-movements, we were able to demonstrate that, despite being largely sensitive to the same experimental manipulation, the amplitude of P300 and the microsaccadic inhibition predict each other very weakly, and thus constitute two independent measures of the brain’s response to rare targets in the visual oddball paradigm.
Parafoveal Load of Word N+1 Modulates Preprocessing Effectivenessof Word N+2 in Chinese Reading
(2010)
Preview benefits (PBs) from two words to the right of the fixated one (i.e., word N+2)and associated parafoveal-on-foveal effects are critical for proposals of distributed lexical processing during reading. This experiment examined parafoveal processing during reading of Chinese sentences, using a boundary manipulation of N+2-word preview with low- and high-frequency words N+1. The main findings were (a) an identity PB for word N+2 that was (b) primarily observed when word N+1 was of high frequency (i.e., an interaction between frequency of word N+1 and PB for word N+2), and (c) a parafoveal-on-foveal frequency effect of word N+1 for fixation durations on word N. We discuss implications for theories of serial attention shifts and parallel distributed processing of words during reading.
The boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) with a novel preview manipulation was used to examine the extent of parafoveal processing of words to the right of fixation. Words n+1 and n+2 had either correct or incorrect previews prior to fixation (prior to crossing the boundary location). In addition, the manipulation utilized either a high or low frequency word in word n+1 location on the assumption that it would be more likely that n+2 preview effects could be obtained when word n+1 was high frequency. The primary findings were that there was no evidence for a preview benefit for word n+2 and no evidence for parafoveal-on-foveal effects when word n+1 is at least four letters long. We discuss implications for models of eye-movement control in reading.
Eye fixation durations during normal reading correlate with processing difficulty but the specific cognitive mechanisms reflected in these measures are not well understood. This study finds support in German readers’ eyefixations for two distinct difficulty metrics: surprisal, which reflects the change in probabilities across syntactic analyses as new words are integrated, and retrieval, which quantifies comprehension difficulty in terms of working memory constraints. We examine the predictions of both metrics using a family of dependency parsers indexed by an upper limit on the number of candidate syntactic analyses they retain at successive words. Surprisal models all fixation measures and regression probability. By contrast, retrieval does not model any measure in serial processing. As more candidate analyses are considered in parallel at each word, retrieval can account for the same measures as surprisal. This pattern suggests an important role for ranked parallelism in theories of sentence comprehension.
Parsing costs as predictors of reading difficulty: An evaluation using the Potsdam Sentence Corpus
(2008)
The surprisal of a word on a probabilistic grammar constitutes a promising complexity metric for human sentence comprehension difficulty. Using two different grammar types, surprisal is shown to have an effect on fixation durations and regression probabilities in a sample of German readers’ eye movements, the Potsdam Sentence Corpus. A linear mixed-effects model was used to quantify the effect of surprisal while taking into account unigram and bigram frequency, word length, and empirically-derived word predictability; the so-called “early” and “late” measures of processing difficulty both showed an effect of surprisal. Surprisal is also shown to have a small but statistically non-significant effect on empirically-derived predictability itself. This work thus demonstrates the importance of including parsing costs as a predictor of comprehension difficulty in models of reading, and suggests that a simple identification of syntactic parsing costs with early measures and late measures with durations of post-syntactic events may be difficult to uphold.
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 spectral efficiency of blackness induction was measured in three normal trichromatic observers and in one deuteranomalous observer. The psychophysical task was to adjust the radiance of a monochromatic 60–120′ annulus until a 45′ central broadband field just turned black and its contour became indiscriminable from a dark surrounding gap that separated it from the annulus. The reciprocal of the radiance required to induce blackness with annulus wavelengths between 420 and 680 nm was used to define a spectral-efficiency function for the blackness component of the achromatic process. For each observer, the shape of this blackness-sensitivity function agreed with the spectral-efficiency function based on heterochromatic flicker photometry when measured with the same 60–120′ annulus. Both of these functions matched the Commission Internationale de l'Eclairage Vλ function except at short wavelengths. Ancillary measurements showed that the latter difference in sensitivity can be ascribed to nonuniformities of preretinal absorption, since the annular field excluded the central 60′ of the fovea. Thus our evidence indicates that, at least to a good first approximation, induced blackness is inversely related to the spectral-luminosity function. These findings are consistent with a model that separates the achromatic and the chromatic pathways.