Letter detection: A window to unitization and other cognitive processes in reading text

ABSTRACTWhile aiming and shooting, we make tiny eye movements called microsaccades that shift gaze between task-relevant objects within a small region. However, in the brief period before pressing trigger, microsaccades are suppressed. This might be due to the lack of the requirement to shift gaze as the retinal images of the two objects start overlapping on fovea. Or we might be actively suppressing microsaccades to prevent any disturbances in visual perception caused by microsaccades around the time of their occurrence and their subsequent effect on shooting performance.In this study we looked at microsaccade rate while participants performed a simulated shooting task under two conditions: normal viewing in which they moved their eyes freely and eccentric condition in which they maintained gaze on a fixed target while performing shooting task at 5° eccentricity. As expected, microsaccade rate dropped at the end of the task in the normal viewing condition. However, we found the same for the eccentric condition in which microsaccade did not shift gaze between the task objects.Microsaccades are also produced in response to shifts in covert attention. To test whether disengagement of covert attention from eccentric shooting location caused the drop in microsaccade rate, we monitored participant’s spatial attention location by employing a RSVP task simultaneously at a location opposite to the shooting task. Target letter detection at RSVP location did not improve during the drop in microsaccade rate, suggesting that covert attention was maintained at the shooting task location.We conclude that in addition to their usual gaze-shifting function, microsaccades during fine acuity tasks might be modulated by cognitive processes other than spatial attention.

What a Simple Letter-Detection Task Can Tell Us About Cognitive Processes in Reading

Current Directions in Psychological Science ◽

10.1177/0963721416661173 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 25 (6) ◽

pp. 417-424 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Raymond M. Klein ◽

Jean Saint-Aubin

Keyword(s):

Cognitive Processes ◽

Visual Presentation ◽

Detection Task ◽

Societal Implications ◽

Large Set ◽

Letter Detection ◽

Attentional Disengagement ◽

The Past ◽

Lexical Activation ◽

Current Article

Understanding reading is a central issue for psychology, with major societal implications. Over the past five decades, a simple letter-detection task has been used as a window on the psycholinguistic processes involved in reading. When readers are asked to read a text for comprehension while marking with a pencil all instances of a target letter, they miss some of the letters in a systematic way known as the missing-letter effect. In the current article, we review evidence from studies that have emphasized neuroimaging, eye movement, rapid serial visual presentation, and auditory passages. As we review, the missing-letter effect captures a wide variety of cognitive processes, including lexical activation, attention, and extraction of phrase structure. To account for the large set of findings generated by studies of the missing-letter effect, we advanced an attentional-disengagement model that is rooted in how attention is allocated to and disengaged from lexical items during reading, which we have recently shown applies equally to listening.

Cognitive processes in reading text

Cognition ◽

10.1016/0010-0277(81)90034-2 ◽

1981 ◽

Vol 10 (1-3) ◽

pp. 119-126 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

Alice F. Healy

Keyword(s):

Cognitive Processes ◽

Reading Text

Assessment of Students’ Higher-level Text Comprehension Skills in Basic School

New Trends and Issues Proceedings on Humanities and Social Sciences ◽

10.18844/prosoc.v2i5.1080 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 2 (5) ◽

Author(s):

Triinu Kärbla ◽

Krista Uibu

Keyword(s):

Cognitive Processes ◽

Cognitive Skills ◽

Text Comprehension ◽

Narrative Text ◽

Analysis And Evaluation ◽

Grade 5 ◽

Comprehension Skills ◽

Reading Text ◽

Basic School ◽

Better Than

Text comprehension is a sophisticated process that is influenced by the reader’s cognitive skills, prior knowledge and the type of texts. The aim of the present longitudinal study was to assess the students’ ability to analyse and evaluate the narrative text in Grades 4 and 5. A total of 831 Estonian students were tested in two consecutive years. The results indicated that fewer than half of the students succeeded in analysing and evaluating the contents of the text, while the students’ text comprehension skills in Grade 5 were significantly better than in Grade 4. Students had more difficulties answering the questions that examined their skill of evaluating the text, compared to their ability to analyse the text. This led to the conclusion that teachers should pay more attention to the students’ higher-level cognitive processes and support their text comprehension skills. Keywords: Analysis and evaluation skills; Basic school; Reading; Text comprehension

Elaborating the role of reflection and individual differences in the study of folk-economic beliefs

Behavioral and Brain Sciences ◽

10.1017/s0140525x18000274 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 41 ◽

Author(s):

Kevin Arceneaux

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Individual Differences ◽

Cognitive Processes ◽

Evolutionary History ◽

Behavioral Responses ◽

History Of ◽

Economic Beliefs

AbstractIntuitions guide decision-making, and looking to the evolutionary history of humans illuminates why some behavioral responses are more intuitive than others. Yet a place remains for cognitive processes to second-guess intuitive responses – that is, to be reflective – and individual differences abound in automatic, intuitive processing as well.

A cognitive approach to cumulative technological culture is useful and necessary but only if it also applies to other species

Behavioral and Brain Sciences ◽

10.1017/s0140525x2000014x ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 43 ◽

Author(s):

Thibaud Gruber

Keyword(s):

Social Learning ◽

Cognitive Processes ◽

Learning Processes ◽

Cognitive Approach ◽

Technological Culture ◽

Social Learning Processes

Abstract The debate on cumulative technological culture (CTC) is dominated by social-learning discussions, at the expense of other cognitive processes, leading to flawed circular arguments. I welcome the authors' approach to decouple CTC from social-learning processes without minimizing their impact. Yet, this model will only be informative to understand the evolution of CTC if tested in other cultural species.

Cognitive Processes Underlying Observational Learning of Motor Skills

The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section A ◽

10.1080/027249899390882 ◽

1999 ◽

Vol 52 (4) ◽

pp. 957-979 ◽

Cited By ~ 23

Author(s):

Yannick Blandin ◽

Lena Lhuisset ◽

Luc Proteau

Keyword(s):

Motor Skills ◽

Cognitive Processes ◽

Observational Learning

Reaction Time and Brain Waves in Omitted Stimulus Tasks

Journal of Psychophysiology ◽

10.1027/0269-8803/a000001 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 24 (1) ◽

pp. 1-6 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Oscar H. Hernández ◽

Muriel Vogel-Sprott

Keyword(s):

Reaction Time ◽

Cognitive Processes ◽

Young Male ◽

Event Related Potential ◽

Auditory Stimuli ◽

Motor Action ◽

Cognitive Component ◽

Sensory Modalities ◽

Two Measures ◽

Somatosensory Stimuli

A missing stimulus task requires an immediate response to the omission of a regular recurrent stimulus. The task evokes a subclass of event-related potential known as omitted stimulus potential (OSP), which reflects some cognitive processes such as expectancy. The behavioral response to a missing stimulus is referred to as omitted stimulus reaction time (RT). This total RT measure is known to include cognitive and motor components. The cognitive component (premotor RT) is measured by the time from the missing stimulus until the onset of motor action. The motor RT component is measured by the time from the onset of muscle action until the completion of the response. Previous research showed that RT is faster to auditory than to visual stimuli, and that the premotor of RT to a missing auditory stimulus is correlated with the duration of an OSP. Although this observation suggests that similar cognitive processes might underlie these two measures, no research has tested this possibility. If similar cognitive processes are involved in the premotor RT and OSP duration, these two measures should be correlated in visual and somatosensory modalities, and the premotor RT to missing auditory stimuli should be fastest. This hypothesis was tested in 17 young male volunteers who performed a missing stimulus task, who were presented with trains of auditory, visual, and somatosensory stimuli and the OSP and RT measures were recorded. The results showed that premotor RT and OSP duration were consistently related, and that both measures were shorter with respect to auditory stimuli than to visual or somatosensory stimuli. This provides the first evidence that the premotor RT is related to an attribute of the OSP in all three sensory modalities.

Do Event-Related Brain Potentials Reflect Mental (Cognitive) Operations?

Journal of Psychophysiology ◽

10.1027//0269-8803.16.3.129 ◽

2002 ◽

Vol 16 (3) ◽

pp. 129-149 ◽

Cited By ~ 13

Author(s):

Boris Kotchoubey

Keyword(s):

Cognitive Processes ◽

Point Of View ◽

Internal Variables ◽

Brain Potentials ◽

Cognitive Operations ◽

External Variables ◽

Series Of Experiments ◽

Mental Operations ◽

A Chain ◽

Processing Mechanisms

Abstract Most cognitive psychophysiological studies assume (1) that there is a chain of (partially overlapping) cognitive processes (processing stages, mechanisms, operators) leading from stimulus to response, and (2) that components of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) may be regarded as manifestations of these processing stages. What is usually discussed is which particular processing mechanisms are related to some particular component, but not whether such a relationship exists at all. Alternatively, from the point of view of noncognitive (e. g., “naturalistic”) theories of perception ERP components might be conceived of as correlates of extraction of the information from the experimental environment. In a series of experiments, the author attempted to separate these two accounts, i. e., internal variables like mental operations or cognitive parameters versus external variables like information content of stimulation. Whenever this separation could be performed, the latter factor proved to significantly affect ERP amplitudes, whereas the former did not. These data indicate that ERPs cannot be unequivocally linked to processing mechanisms postulated by cognitive models of perception. Therefore, they cannot be regarded as support for these models.

Inefficient Encoding as an Explanation for Age-Related Deficits in Recollection-Based Processing

Journal of Psychophysiology ◽

10.1027/0269-8803/a000122 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 28 (3) ◽

pp. 148-161 ◽

Cited By ~ 12

Author(s):

David Friedman ◽

Ray Johnson

Keyword(s):

Older Adults ◽

Young Adults ◽

Cognitive Processes ◽

Brain Activity ◽

Memory Performance ◽

Brain Regions ◽

Semantic Retrieval ◽

Age Related ◽

The Face ◽

Episodic Memories

A cardinal feature of aging is a decline in episodic memory (EM). Nevertheless, there is evidence that some older adults may be able to “compensate” for failures in recollection-based processing by recruiting brain regions and cognitive processes not normally recruited by the young. We review the evidence suggesting that age-related declines in EM performance and recollection-related brain activity (left-parietal EM effect; LPEM) are due to altered processing at encoding. We describe results from our laboratory on differences in encoding- and retrieval-related activity between young and older adults. We then show that, relative to the young, in older adults brain activity at encoding is reduced over a brain region believed to be crucial for successful semantic elaboration in a 400–1,400-ms interval (left inferior prefrontal cortex, LIPFC; Johnson, Nessler, & Friedman, 2013 ; Nessler, Friedman, Johnson, & Bersick, 2007 ; Nessler, Johnson, Bersick, & Friedman, 2006 ). This reduced brain activity is associated with diminished subsequent recognition-memory performance and the LPEM at retrieval. We provide evidence for this premise by demonstrating that disrupting encoding-related processes during this 400–1,400-ms interval in young adults affords causal support for the hypothesis that the reduction over LIPFC during encoding produces the hallmarks of an age-related EM deficit: normal semantic retrieval at encoding, reduced subsequent episodic recognition accuracy, free recall, and the LPEM. Finally, we show that the reduced LPEM in young adults is associated with “additional” brain activity over similar brain areas as those activated when older adults show deficient retrieval. Hence, rather than supporting the compensation hypothesis, these data are more consistent with the scaffolding hypothesis, in which the recruitment of additional cognitive processes is an adaptive response across the life span in the face of momentary increases in task demand due to poorly-encoded episodic memories.