Comparable prediction of breast cancer risk from a glimpse or a first impression of a mammogram

Expert radiologists can discern normal from abnormal mammograms with above-chance accuracy after brief (e.g. 500 ms) exposure. They can even predict cancer risk viewing currently normal images (priors) from women who will later develop cancer. This involves a rapid, global, non-selective process called “gist extraction”. It is not yet known whether prolonged exposure can strengthen the gist signal, or if it is available solely in the early exposure. This is of particular interest for the priors that do not contain any localizable signal of abnormality. The current study compared performance with brief (500 ms) or unlimited exposure for four types of mammograms (normal, abnormal, contralateral, priors). Groups of expert radiologists and untrained observers were tested. As expected, radiologists outperformed naïve participants. Replicating prior work, they exceeded chance performance though the gist signal was weak. However, we found no consistent performance differences in radiologists or naïves between timing conditions. Exposure time neither increased nor decreased ability to identify the gist of abnormality or predict cancer risk. If gist signals are to have a place in cancer risk assessments, more efforts should be made to strengthen the signal.

Gestalts at threshold could reveal Gestalts as predictions

We review and revisit the predictive processing inspired “Gestalts as predictions” hypothesis. The study of Gestalt phenomena at and below threshold can help clarify the role of higher-order object selective areas and feedback connections in mid-level vision. In two psychophysical experiments assessing manipulations of contrast and configurality we showed that: (1) Gestalt phenomena are robust against saliency manipulations across the psychometric function even below threshold (with the accuracy gains and higher saliency associated with Gestalts being present even around chance performance); and (2) peak differences between Gestalt and control conditions happened around the time where responses to Gestalts are starting to saturate (mimicking the differential contrast response profile of striate vs. extra-striate visual neurons). In addition, Gestalts are associated with steeper psychometric functions in all experiments. We propose that these results reflect the differential engagement of object-selective areas in Gestalt phenomena and of information- or percept-based processing, as opposed to energy- or stimulus-based processing, more generally. In addition, the presence of nonlinearities in the psychometric functions suggest differential top-down modulation of the early visual cortex. We treat this as a proof of principle study, illustrating that classic psychophysics can help assess possible involvement of hierarchical predictive processing in Gestalt phenomena.

The Role of Underspecification in RC Attachment: Speed-accuracy tradeoff evidence

A number of studies have found evidence for the so-called ambiguity advantage, i.e., a speed-up in processing ambiguous sentences compared to their unambiguous counterparts. While a number of proposals regarding the mechanism underlying this phenomenon have been made, the empirical evidence so far is far from unequivocal. It is compatible with several theories, including strategic underspecification (Swets et al., 2008), race models (Van Gompel et al., 2000; Logacev and Vasishth, 2016), and a more recentcoactivation-based account (Dillon et al., 2019). While all three classes of theories make matching predictions for the average time to complete RC attachment in ambiguous compared to unambiguous sentences, their predictions diverge with regard to theminimum completion times. I used the speed-accuracy tradeoff procedure to test the predictions of all three classesof theories. According to a hierarchical Bayesian model, the speed-accuracy tradeoff functions (SATFs) for different RC attachment conditions (high, low or ambiguous) show an earlier departure from chance performance in the ambiguous condition than in either of the unambiguous conditions. The results further indicate increased asymptotic accuracy but no increase in processing rate in the ambiguous condition. Taken together, this pattern of results is compatible with the strategic underspecification model, and to a lesser degree with coactivation based accounts.

Canonicity Effect on Sentence Processing of Persian-Speaking Broca’s Patients

This research with the aim of scrutinizing fundamental notions of mapping hypothesis tries to investigate the comprehension of diverse complex syntactic structures in four age, education and gender matched Persian-speaking Broca’s patients and eight matched healthy controls via conducting two tasks of syntactic comprehension and grammaticality judgment in which subjects’ comprehension of diverse complex structures were put into scrutiny. The structures being tested included subject –agentive, agentive passive, object experience, subject experience, subject cleft and object cleft constructions. Our results, while corroborating the predictions of mapping hypothesis, showed that in structures in which linguistic elements were substituted and dislocated out of their canonical syntactic positions, namely, agentive passive, subject- experiencer, object -experiencer and object- cleft constructions, Broca’s problems escalated. In contrast, in those structures whose constituent concatenations were aligned with canonical syntactic structures, namely subject agentive and cleft structures, patients had above chance performance. Ultimately, theoretical and clinical implications of the study were discussed

Does Tuning Influence Aesthetic Judgments of Music? Investigating the Generalizability of Absolute Intonation Ability

Listening to music is an enjoyable activity for most individuals, yet the musical factors that relate to aesthetic experiences are not completely understood. In the present paper, we investigate whether the absolute tuning of music implicitly influences listener evaluations of music, as well as whether listeners can explicitly categorize musical sounds as “in tune” versus “out of tune” based on conventional tuning standards. In Experiment 1, participants rated unfamiliar musical excerpts, which were either tuned conventionally or unconventionally, in terms of liking, interest, and unusualness. In Experiment 2, participants were asked to explicitly judge whether several types of musical sounds (isolated notes, chords, scales, and short excerpts) were “in tune” or “out of tune.” The results suggest that the absolute tuning of music has no influence on listener evaluations of music (Experiment 1), and these null results are likely caused, in part, by an inability for listeners to explicitly differentiate in-tune from out-of-tune musical excerpts (Experiment 2). Interestingly, listeners in Experiment 2 showed robust above-chance performance in classifying musical sounds as “in tune” versus “out of tune” when the to-be-judged sounds did not contain relative pitch changes (i.e., isolated notes and chords), replicating prior work on absolute intonation for simple sounds. Taken together, the results suggest that most listeners possess some form of absolute intonation, but this ability has limited generalizability to more ecologically valid musical contexts and does not appear to influence aesthetic judgments of music.

Learning Repetition, but not Syllable Reversal

Reduplication is common, but analogous reversal processes are rare, even though reversal, which involves nested rather than crossed dependencies, is less complex on the Chomsky hierarchy. We hypothesize that the explanation is that repetitions can be recognized when they match and reactivate a stored trace in short-term memory, but recognizing a reversal requires rearranging the input in working memory before attempting to match it to the stored trace. Repetitions can thus be recognized, and repetition patterns learned, implicitly, whereas reversals require explicit, conscious awareness. To test these hypotheses, participants were trained to recognize either a reduplication or a syllable-reversal pattern, and then asked to state the rule. In two experiments, above-chance classification performance on the Reversal pattern was confined to Correct Staters, whereas above-chance performance on the Reduplication pattern was found with or without correct rule-stating. Final proportion correct was positively correlated with final response time for the Reversal Correct Staters but no other group. These results support the hypothesis that reversal, unlike reduplication, requires conscious, time-consuming computation.

‘Grandpa’ or ‘opera’? Production and perception of unstressed /a/ and /əʁ/ in German

In the description of German phonology, two distinct phonetic symbols are currently recommended for the transcription of the vowels [a] (a central low vowel, phonemically /a/) and [ɐ] (phonemically /əʁ/) in word-final, unstressed positions. The present study examines whether differences between these two vowels exist in production and perception of Standard German speakers from the north of Germany. In Experiment 1, six speakers produced a series of minimal pairs that were embedded in meaningful sentences and varied with respect to their accentuation and position within a prosodic phrase. In Experiment 2, the minimal pairs produced by the six speakers of the first experiment were extracted from their respective contexts and tested with 44 native German listeners in a forced-choice identification task. Perceptual results showed a better-than-chance performance for one male speaker of the corpus only. Phonetic analyses also confirmed that only this male speaker produced subtle, but consistent F2/F3 differences between [a] and [ɐ] while the contrast was completely neutralised in the rest of the corpus. We discuss the role of prosody in vowel neutralisation with a specific focus on unstressed vowels and make suggestions for phonetic and phonological accounts of Standard German.

Positional Inference in Rhesus Macaques

Understanding how organisms make transitive inferences is critical to understanding their general ability to learn serial relationships. In this context, transitive inference (TI) can be understood as a specific heuristic that applies broadly to many different serial learning tasks, which have been the focus of hundreds of studies involving dozens of species. In the present study, monkeys learned the order of 7-item lists of photographic stimuli by trial and error, and were then tested on “derived” lists. These derived lists combined stimuli from multiple training lists in ambiguous ways. We found that subjects displayed strong preferences when presented with novel test pairs. These preferences were helpful when test pairs had an ordering congruent with their ranks during training, but yielded consistently below-chance performance when pairs had an incongruent order relative to training. This behavior can be explained by the joint contributions of transitive inference and another heuristic that we refer to as “positional inference.” Positional inferences play a complementary role to transitive inferences in facilitating choices between novel pairs of stimuli. The theoretical framework that best explains both transitive and positional inferences is a spatial model that represents both the position and uncertainty of each stimulus. A computational implementation of this framework yields accurate predictions about both correct responses and errors for derived lists.

Learnability in the acquisition of the English tough construction by L1-Korean adult and child L2 learners

In the English tough construction (TC), knowledge of tough movement is necessary for target performance (the object-interpretation only; e.g. Johni is easy to see ei). The acquisition of the English TC raises a learnability problem for first-language (L1) Korean learners of English as a second language (L2): (1) Korean has no tough movement; (2) no input dictates that the ‘subject interpretation’ is disallowed in the English TC; and (3) no classroom instruction covers the English TC. According to the Fundamental Difference Hypothesis, L2 children – but not L2 adults – can overcome this learnability problem. L1-Korean adult ( n = 49) and child ( n = 30) L2 learners’ (L2ers’) knowledge of the English TC was assessed via a truth-value judgment task manipulating (1) verb transitivity to make the infinitival object gap more vs. less salient and (2) context to avoid vs. strengthen bias toward the (erroneous) subject interpretation. Notably, some high-proficiency adult L2ers showed significantly above-chance performance, despite the error-inducing manipulations, suggesting that adult L2ers can overcome the learnability problem.

Embedded WAIS-IV Detection Strategies and Feigned Cognitive Impairment: An Investigation of Malingered ADHD

Malingered attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) may be strongly motivated on college campuses by recreational use of ADHD medications and to obtain unwarranted academic accommodations. Rather than rely on face-valid (easily faked) ADHD checklists, the study focused on the more complex Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale–Fourth edition (WAIS-IV; Wechsler, 2008). However, the current literature has not yet investigated well-defined detection strategies for feigned WAIS-IV presentations. Using aprioristic standards, four different detection strategies from the feigning literature were adapted to certain WAIS-IV subscales. For example, significantly below-chance performance was applied to visual puzzles. Using a between-subjects simulation design, 74 undergraduate simulators were compared with archival data on 73 outpatients diagnosed with ADHD at a university psychology clinic. Very large effect sizes (Cohen’s ds from 1.66 to 1.90) differentiated between genuine and feigned ADHD. Two strategies (significantly below-chance performance and floor effect) showed strong promise if cross-validated for other feigning presentations. The study concluded with clinical considerations and future avenues for research.