Session Detail

^{As an idiosyncractic and indispensable part of language, idioms/idiomatic expressions have gained increasing attention. Traditionally, idioms are defined as multi-word units for which the semantic interpretation is not a compositional function of their composing units. The idea of schematicity in idiomatically combining expressions have a different status across linguistic theories. Usage-based accounts (incl. construction grammar, pattern grammar, emergentist and alike) have reasonably shown that idiomatic expressions as pairings of form and meaning are entrenched in a speaker’s mind (Croft and Cruse, 2004; Croft, 2012), and the defining properties of them singling them out from other MWEs are their conventionality and metaphoricity. In this paper, we focus on a special type of idiomatic expressions of even length called Quadrasyllabic Idiomatic Expressions (QIEs) in Chinese, and explain their variations with reference to the interaction of construction semantics and exploited ontological knowledge. We select QIEs with symmetric numbers within the construction, which is estimated that they are the most frequent and productive ones, and divide them into idiom-QIE (’chengyu’) and prefabs-QIE. 96 Idiom-QIEs and 96 prefabs-QIEs are selected based on the required language resources tailored for Chinese QIEs with suggested lowest level of frequency. We create corresponding pseudo-idiom/prefabs-QIEs with character replacements of different semantic distances to measure the effect on comprehensibility. Corpus evidence and human ratings suggest that the comprehension and processing of nonce QIEs emerges from the interaction of construction and lexical semantics. The result of behavioral experiment shows that semantic distance affects the speed of comprehension with the construction entrenchment. However, for those QIEs with idiomaticity, semantic distance leads to no major effect. We show that Chinese QIEs provide an ideal testing ground for the empirical investigation of the functional linguistic notion of entrenchment in processing multi-morphemic strings. A Pilot study on fMRI experiment also shows some interesting findings.}

 

Language acquisition is a challenging issue for late second language learners (L2ers), and it is debatable whether the L2ers could have native-like representations and grammars (Jiang, 2011 vs. Foote, 2011). Very rare research investigates L2ers’ real time processing of implicitly acquired knowledge using natural languages. Based on Cheng & Sybesma (1998), the classifier-adjective (Cl-Adj) order is an implicit syntactic cue for the mass/count classifiers in Mandarin. Previous off-line studies (Barner, et al., 2008, 2010, 2012) found that different classifiers can be used to generate mass/count interpretations by native Mandarin speakers. However, it remains unclear whether the Cl-Adj order also contributes to the mass/count distinction, and how native speakers and L2ers make use of this implicit syntactic cue to process NPs in real time. The current study used the Visual World Paradigm (VWP) to look into how native Mandarin speakers and late Dutch-Mandarin learners interpret mass/count NPs with neutral classifiers online, manipulating the Cl-Adj order, and comparing nouns which were judged by native Mandarin speakers as typical count nouns (e.g., spoon) and typical mass nouns (e.g., pebble). The results show that native speakers make rapid use of the Cl-Adj order to generate a ‘massified’ interpretation and that late L2ers have also acquired and make use of this implicit syntactic cue. Even though late Dutch-Mandarin learners could use the Cl-Adj order as a syntactic cue for ‘massified’ interpretations, it took them slightly longer than native speakers. Also, L2ers were not sensitive to the semantic difference between different classifiers, or the connections between classifiers and their associated nouns. In general, the current study found that late L2ers have acquired the syntactic cues for mass/count interpretations through implicit learning. However, L2ers require more time and/or information to make use of these cues and are more sensitive to the lexical meanings.

 

This paper presents an investigation of the nexus between ageing and spatial cognition by examining the use of spatial frames of reference in Taiwanese populations. Existing cognitive neuroscience research typically did not test for possible age factors in preferential reference frame use (Klencklen et al., 2012). It has been suggested that allocentric frames may be more difficult to retrieve from spatial memory subject to normal ageing than egocentric frames based on the results found in European languages (Antonova et al., 2009; Lithfous et al., 2013; Ruggiero et al., 2016). The test languages exhibit distinct features in spatial reference in small-scale space: TSM speakers shows an allocentric preference, using cardinal directions or external landmarks, while MC speakers show an egocentric preference, projecting the viewer’s perspective onto the object. The current study extended the research design of Bohnemeyer et al (2015) to explore the age effect in the use of spatial reference across monolingual and bilingual populations. The research methods comprised a discourse study in a referential communication task and a recall memory experiment (Levinson & Schmitt, 1993). The sample was divided into young (18-30 yrs), middle-aged (31-60 yrs) and senior (61yrs and above) groups. Regression analyses indicated that all three age groups were significantly different from one another in the discourse study and that the senior group and monolingual group had an interaction effect in the recall memory study. This finding suggests that the preferential reference frame is population-specific and advocates the need to examine the language experience of a given population. These studies make valuable contributions to the documentation of variation in spatial cognition in a multilingual context and to understanding the factors driving such variation. By investigating changes in preferred strategies across the lifespan, they also lay crucial groundwork for the study of neural networks involved.

 

The purpose of this study was to compare the effects of top-down task demands on low-level information processing in sighted and braille reading. The reading task either required a shallow or deep reading of the text and the aim of the study was to quantify the impact of differential task demands on information pick-up in two radically different reading modalities: sight and touch. Previous studies of sighted reading had shown a dynamic interplay between eye movement control and top-down demands (Radach, Huestegge, & Reilly, 2008). It was an open question whether a similar degree of interactivity held for braille. To study braille readers’ behaviour we designed a finger-tracking system utilising affordable components, yet providing high temporal and spatial resolution finger position data (Aranyanak & Reilly, 2012). An SR Research EyeLink 1000 eye tracking system was used to track eye movement in sight readers. The results reveal similar top-down effects on different modalities. Word-viewing times as measured by a range of metrics were significantly shorter for simple verification questions, as opposed to responding to the complex comprehension questions. The more demanding task of answering comprehension questions caused a consistent elevation in the tendency to reread in both tactile and visual reading. Because of the apparent “noisy” nature of hand movements, there is some debate as to the detectabilty of lexical or supra-lexical effects in the finger movements of braille readers (Hughes, Van Gemmert, & Stelmach, 2011). The results described here support the view that braille readers respond dynamically to the demands of the reading task and that these responses are readily detectable by a suitable tracking device. Another of our studies has also shown a similar responsiveness to lexical factors such as word frequency (see Aranyanak & Reilly, 2013).

 

This study aimed to examine (1) the acquisition of count-classifiers and mass-classifiers by learners who have limited hearing and verbal comprehension abilities, and (2) whether the acquisition of the two types of classifiers is influenced by the learners’ vocabulary size and working memory capacity. A count-classifier (e.g., 朵 /duo3/ in 一朵花 /yi1 duo3 hua1/, a flower) must be used with a noun, which makes vocabulary of nouns a prerequisite for learning the semantic and syntactic characteristics of a count-classifier. A mass-classifier (e.g., 盒 /he2/ in 一盒花 /yi1 he2 hua1/, a box of flowers) is typically a name of an object and can be used without other nouns. However, it takes extra cognitive effort to recognize that the object name can also be used to denote the quantity of the entity named by a noun. Therefore, it was hypothesized that acquisition of count-classifiers is mainly predicted by a learner’s noun vocabulary while acquisition of mass-classifiers is affected by not only a learner’s vocabulary size but also the learner’s working memory capacity. The participants consisted of 40 hearing-impaired preschoolers. They have joined a rehabilitation program adopting auditory-verbal approach, and the number of count-classifiers, mass-classifiers and ordinary nouns that each participant has acquired was calculated. Moreover, the participants were equally divided into two groups according to their working memory spans (high-span vs. low-span). Regression analyses showed that the size of noun vocabulary accounted for acquisition of count-classifiers in both groups of participants (high-span: p < .05; low-span: p < .05). However, the size of noun vocabulary accounted for acquisition of mass-classifiers in the high-span group (p < .01) but not in the low-span group (p > .10). The results support the hypothesis and its implications for language acquisition of children with hearing impairment will be discussed at the conference.

 

Kurumada & Jaeger (2015) claimed that speakers hold comprehension consideration in the expense of their production cost. Using Japanese transitive sentences in a spoken-recall paradigm, they demonstrated that Japanese speakers were more likely to attach case markers to animate objects than to inanimate objects (Exp’t 1), in order to make it clear that the second nouns are patients rather than agents. However, we failed to replicate the animacy effect in a written-recall paradigm with Korean. Instead, we found that speakers’ production preferences were remarkably influenced by the distributional patterns associated with case markers and word orders. First, we conducted the written-recall production experiment in which word order, the animacy of direct objects, and the ellipsis of object case markers. Second, using the Korean spoken corpus, we computed the degree of surprisal to encounter sentences corresponding to our manipulation. Our key findings were as follows. 1) Overall, Korean speakers strongly preferred to produce case markers and to rearrange non-canonical OSV to canonical SOV word orders. 2) Korean speakers did not show particular preference due to animacy. 3) We observed that surprisal was significantly proportional to speakers’ behaviors for the use of object case markers and the use of SOV order. Of interest, the degree of surprisal based on OSV sentences strongly predicted speakers’ bias to attach case markers increasingly, whereas it predicted speakers’ willingness not to change word orders. On the other hand, the degree of surprisal based on sentences with null case markers strongly predicted speakers’ bias to change word orders from OSVs to SOVs, instead of attaching case markers. Our findings showed that speakers diligently exploited the distributional information, attempting to achieve a trade-off between production ease and comprehension goal.

 

In developing the fifth core knowledge about social partners, race is an important factor biasing children to form social affiliations. The present study explored the development of the race-based social preferences in 3- to 8-year-old Taiwanese children. In Experiment 1, twenty-three 3-4 year-old children viewed three simultaneously presented video clips modeled by a Taiwanese (own race, in-group, high social status), a Southeast Asian (near race, out-group, low social status) and a Caucasian (other race, out-group, high social status) young female smiling at them. Children were instructed to give a toy to their most preferred and their second preferred individuals. Results showed that children preferred to give toys to the Taiwanese actress the most (50%), and there is no difference among the three ethnicities for the least preference. In Experiment 2, twenty-two 5-6 year-old children viewed the same videos and were instructed to choose their most preferred and their second preferred persons as friends. The 5-6 year-olds preferred the Taiwanese actress the most (69%), while both the Caucasian (54%) and the Southeast Asian actresses (43%) were the least preferred. In Experiment 3, twenty-one 7-8 year-old children performed the same task as in Exp.2 and they preferred to choose the Caucasian actress (57%) as friend the most, followed by the Taiwanese actress (38%), and the Southeast Asian actress was the least preferred choice. Combining the results across the three experiments, we found that children preferred the Taiwanese actress the most (53%) and the Southeast Asian actress the least (13%). In sum, our findings suggest that a rudimentary race-based social preference (or prejudice) seems to emerge in the later part of preschool years. These results provide a cross-cultural exploration of when and how Taiwanese children’s social judgments may be influenced by race.

 

The author has been researching narrative generation, especially design and development of an “Integrated Narrative Generation System (INGS)”, which generate story, representation and the other narrative structures. This research is based on the concept of “multiple narrative structures”, which treats narrative generation as the synthesis of micro and macro levels. The INGS is for the micro or personal generation. The macro level is performed through a “Geino Information System (GIS)” by the author. The “geino” means performing arts that includes traditional genres such as kabuki in addition to contemporary genres. The GIS has several INGS systems to circularly produce various types of narratives including scenarios, actual performances and life histories of performers. An important idea is that the GIS multiply stores diverse narrative knowledge to generate diverse narratives dependent on their combinatorial or multiple uses. For example, many narrative stories are created by a kind of inter-textual combination of other stories and episodes. Although the INGS is implemented in an organized system, the GIS is the stage of conceptual design. A current object is to design and develop the GIS. An approach relies on studying kabuki, which is a synthesized drama that incorporates a variety of geino genres, such as dance, noh-kyogen, and ningyo-joururi, into a rich form. The author has analyzed the multiple structures of kabuki regarding fifteen elements including person and story. Knowledge on the analyzed multiplicity in kabuki will be introduced into the INGS and GIS. In this paper, the author analyzes the multiple structures of a “story” using kabuki works based on Inumaru (2005), who is a kabuki researcher, in the framework of the GIS including the INGSs. In particular, the author analyzes a kabuki story based on the relationship with other stories, genres and characters to design the multiple narrative generation mechanism using the systems.

 

An “Integrated Narrative Generation System (INGS)” by the authors synthesizes various mechanisms and knowledge to generate narrative conceptual structures and representations. A basic unit of the narrative conceptual structures is a case structure for an event that has a verb concept and noun concepts provided by the conceptual dictionaries. Various levels of concepts, such as difficult and easy concepts to understand, are mixed in a semantic category in the dictionaries. Therefore, the various levels are frequently mixed in an event through a story generation process. Although a method to solve it is to revise and detail the categorization, this is a difficult semantic problem. The authors presented another method using appearance frequency and co-occurrence of concepts to control the selection in event generation. In a previous research, the authors confirmed that the number of appearance frequency and the degree of comprehensibility are basically proportion. Further, the authors controlled the narrative easiness by the frequency and get concepts having a same degree of comprehensibility. These mechanisms were partially incorporated into the INGS. In addition, each concept uses a corresponding word description in the narrative representation phase. However, diversity of word notation is provided by the word notation dictionaries. On the other hand, the study of narrative generation from a haiku is a recent issue of the authors. This paper conversely aims to generate haikus using the appearance frequency and co-occurrence of concepts and words. A haiku has three parts. This method basically adjusts selecting a concept in each part using the appearance frequency and deciding a concept sequence from a concept to the next concept according to the co-occurrence. For example, using low frequency and co-occurrence may results in the generation of difficult haikus to understand. This study also shows an evaluation for the diverse combinatorial haiku generation.

 

This paper analyzes the relationship between participation and learning represented in ethnographic case studies of ten informants aged 23-59 participating in a common-based peer production site, the FabLab Kamakura community. Digital-based personal fabrication is a new wave culture of mavens, who are devoted to alternatives to mass production, and are on a mission “to make (almost) anything”. FabLab Kamakura is a valuable venue for exchanging information about, for example, digital tools, Arduino, crafts, textiles, and so on. First we frame this work as an effort to think about their participation and learning using the concept of “wildfire activity theory” (Engeström, 2009) and “legitimate peripheral participation (LPP)” from Lave and Wenger (1991). Then we argue an overview of FabLab culture in Japan and at FabLab Kamakura. Using SCAT methodology (Otani, 2011), we group our findings in two different categories: (1) learning through participation in FabLab Kamakura, (2) the visualization of weak ties and mobility through participation in wildfire activities. We conclude that participants at FabLab Kamakura are producing and designing available artifacts for their lives and works, and in doing so, what they are designing is the physical manifestation of their very thoughts.

 

Whether it is sentencing in the courtroom or our moral judgments toward personal behaviors, research has suggested that the intention of the agent is a critical factor. Most of us do not need to, and do not feel that there is a need to argue why unintended harm is more forgivable than deliberate harm, or why attempted murder deserves more severe punishment than unforeseen accidental deaths. The central role of intention, however, was established solely based on evidence from the harm and care domain, and has recently been questioned whether it is as critical in other moral domains. For example, Young & Saxe (2011) found that when it comes to the purity domain (e.g., sexual behaviors), outcome trumps intention in predicting participants’ moral judgments. Here we used a similar set of moral judgment questionnaires on Taiwanese participants to investigate whether there might be a cultural variation in the way people make moral judgments in the harm and purity domains. Our data showed a main effect of intention and outcome, as well as an interaction between moral domain and intention, where intention weighs more heavily in the harm than the purity domain. However, we did not observe an interaction between outcome and moral domain, therefore outcome was not a particularly powerful predictor over intention in the making of purity-related moral judgments in our Taiwanese sample. Together, our results suggest a similarly-weighted role of intention across two cultures, and a cultural distinction in the relationship between outcome and purity-violation events. Implications on the disgust-hypothesis of moral judgment will also be discussed.

 

The trolley dilemma and its many variations have been used as a tool for investigating people’s moral judgment. People are usually willing to pull the switch and sacrifice one person’s life in order to save five others, but such inclination decreases dramatically when the one person has to be physically pushed down the bridge by the main character (i.e., personal force) in order to stop the train (i.e., victim’s body as a means). This combination between personal force and means-to-an-end has been reported to evoke more “immoral” judgments than when each factor is presented alone, an interaction effect to which Greene and colleagues (2009) suggest is necessary in triggering people’s moral alarm. To test this claim, here we used multiple scenarios that have equally dissociable elements of personal force and means-to-an-end in 300 participants. Our results do not support the notion of a magic interaction between personal force and means-to-an-end. Rather, our data strongly support a central role for intention in formulating moral judgments, which is consistent with many previous studies (Mikhail, 2000., Cushman et al., 2006; Hauser et al., 2007). The effect of personal force, on the other hand, varies across scenarios and therefore likely plays a less dominant role than intention. We did not observe an interaction between the two. Together, we conclude that intention alone is self-sufficient in triggering the moral alarm, whereas other moral factors such as personal force may be more context-dependent between scenarios or even cultures.

 

Recently, “programing learning” is considered to be very effective to understand causal relations and problem structures and they have the possibility to generate various learning/education outcomes. This study aimed to inspect effects of the programming learning inserted into the context of science education curriculum for elementary school students. 24 children in the 6th grade participated the programing learning exercises to simulate planetary motion as an advanced program in learning an astronomical body and a constellation. Comparison between the results of pre/post questionnaire surveys made clear the followings: (i) the programming learning was effective in the understanding of the solar system, (ii) the number of children who think the programming to be seemed useful increased after the programming learning, and (iii) the children who had a negative attitude to the programming improved their attitude after they had experience of the programming learning exercise. It was found that the programming learning is a methodology that brings effective learning/educative effects even for the elementary school students.

 

This paper analyzes the relationship between agencies and artifacts represented in ethnographic case studies of ten female informants aged 20-25 participating in the cosplay community. Cosplay is a female-dominated niche subculture of extreme fans and mavens, who are devoted to dressing up as characters from manga, games, and anime. “Cosplayers” are highly conscious of quality standards for costumes, makeup, and accessories. Cosplay events and dedicated SNSs for cosplayers are a valuable venue for exchanging information about costume making. First we frame this work as an effort to think about their agencies using the concept of hybrid collective and activity theory. Then we share an overview of cosplay culture in Japan and our methodologies based on interviews and fieldwork. Using SCAT (Otani, 2011) methodology, we group our findings in two different categories: (1) Cosplayers’ agencies and relationships with others mediated by usage of particular artifacts, (2) Cosplayers agencies visualized through socio-artificial scaffolding and collective achievement. We conclude that cosplayers are producing and standardizing available artifacts for their cosplay objects, and in doing so, they are designing their agencies. We consider that the activities like them are one appearance we can observe in the other our mundane communities not apply only to cosplay one. Not only to cosplay, however we consider that these kinds of activities apply to other mundane communities.

 

In many advanced countries, housing is a property that passed down from generation to generation. However, the average life span of house in Japan is about 30 years, which is shorter than the other countries. Most of houses have no big problem and trouble. 　Since 2009, the spread in long-term high-quality housing is promoted in Japan. The technical development about the structure and equipment is remarkable on the construction field. On the other hand, the housing that have no big problem on structure and equipment is demolished usually in Japan. A building is not always recognized as better long-term assets than a piece of land. In the long run, it is not invested in maintenance in housing sufficiently. Even if housing has a high level technical structure and equipment, the resident of next generation may dislike them, they are destroyed in the near future. The study analyzed about the element of charm in a housing is important to support longevity of housing. 　The purpose of this study is to reveal the physical and psychological element of house that continue to be attractive for a long period of time. We selected NAGANO City for a target place of research, residential area had house built at various age. 　For those who studies architecture, the older houses (traditional housing) are preferred. On the other hand, regardless of the major, the older houses were estimated important and valuable. They are invaluable to maintain something of value at NAGANO City. 　Needless to say, new housing that has a high level technical structure and equipment should be built. We should grasp traditional housing in an area to pass down from generation to generation. Finally, we had better understand the value of area, and attempt to maintain the elements of traditional housing.

 

Understanding how language is acquired by infants has remained to be a challenging task. Previous attempts have all achieved remarkable results that shed light on future directions in the research of infant language acquisition. However, the dynamics of infant language acquisition is a complex process. This process requires the understanding of innate learning mechanisms within infants (which may be responsible for the actions of imitation and social interaction with their surroundings) and the support for development of consciousness. Following Gao et al. (2013; 2008)’s statements of levels of consciousness for language development as theoretical guidelines, our study examines the mechanisms that generate behaviors at different levels of consciousness and their relations to prominent transitions in infant development. The objective of our study is to apply agent-based modeling (Holland, 1995) in exploring the topic of language development in early infants. The theoretical framework of agent-based model (ABM) proposed by Holland (1995) creates a flexible abstraction of the real world and provides an approach in the general study of complex adaptive systems (CAS). ABMs consist of basic computer algorithm units (agents) which are the central modeling focus points. These agents can be either modular or self-contained. An agent is an identifiable, discrete individual with a set of characteristics or attributes, behaviors, and decision-making capability. In this paper, our emphasis and discussions are on the process of language acquisition for infants under the first level of consciousness, and on the expansions of subsequent agent-based models. Results from simulations show that our approach on using agent-based modeling is fair in reflecting the development of pre-linguistic capabilities for infants with minimal consciousness.

 

Infants typically start to produce words that can be perceived as “meaningful” (for instance “ma” or “mama”) at the 12th month period from birth. This feature of “meaningful first words” is seen as a significant phenomenon in infant language acquisition. This shows that an infant has managed a transition from the first level of consciousness (LoC 1, Minimal Consciousness) to the second level of consciousness (LoC 2, Recursive Consciousness). Most importantly, it also signifies that the infant has thorough development within LoC 2. At this level of consciounsess, infants have developed the capacity to engage informational contents within their memory. Nearing to the 12th month period, infants come about speaking their first words. This emergence of first words is a significant achievement in infant development as this implies that an infant has a thorough development through the stage of LoC 2. Furthermore, this phenomenon sets the basis for infants in learning language. In this paper, we follow Gao et al. (2013; 2008)’s statements of levels of consciousness for language development in discussing the behavioral process and mechanism that could be crucial within LoC 2. In this paper, we aim to focus on the underlying mechanisms within LoC 2 that could allow an infant to make sense of information, whereby leading them to speak their first words.

 

The question of whether children with reading problems have deficits in processing musical rhythms has remained unanswered. However, speech prosody may be one of the most important indicators predicting perception of speech phonemes and the sensitivity of the musical rhythm could contribute to the perception of speech prosody. Also, language and music might share brain mechanisms that could be related to basic auditory processing functions. Even though the debate on the association between music and reading is still controversial, interestingly, the relationship between rhythmic signals and phonological cues might be a factor affecting individual’s reading abilities through processing of linguistic prosody. 16 typically developmental children and 16 children with developmental dyslexia were recruited with informed consent in this magnetoencephalographic (MEG) study. Oddball paradigm was adapted for testing the brain responses that were activated by the omissions of the strong or weak beats in the regular rhythmic patterns. The result showed that mismatch negativity (MMNm) and P3a(m) were generated via the irregular patterns of omitted strong beats; however, this effect was only found in the typically reading group but not in the dyslexic group. For between group comparison, there was no significant differential effect in regular rhythms (without omissions), rhythm violations by omitting weak beats, or control rhythms, but there was a significant group effect in irregular patterns produced by omitting strong beats. The results showed that the brain responses to detect irregular rhythmic pattern were larger in typically developing children than in dyslexic children. This study emphasizes the relationship between language and music perception that is in line with the previous studies. Furthermore, at the level of event-related fields, dyslexic children did not differentiate the different rhythmic patterns from each other. This study has showed that dyslexic children have differential neural processing of rhythms that could be one of the underlying factors in dysfluent in reading development.

 

Cognitive development is a trajectory shaped by interactivity between architectural constraints and environmental experience of the developing brain (Westermann et al. 2007). In the domain of language processing, early experience has a long-term impact on later processing. One example of this cognitive footprint is the well-documented phenomenon of age of acquisition (AoA). In lexical processing, early-learned words tend to be processed more quickly and accurately relative to later-learned words (e.g. Juhasz, 2005). Two theoretical explanations emphasising different aspects of developmental changes have been proposed. The representation theory (e.g., Brysbaert & Ghyselinck, 2006) argues that the AoA effect could originate from differences in semantic representations where early-learned words have richer semantic representations. Alternatively, the mapping theory (e.g., Ellis & Lambon Ralph, 2000) proposes that gradual reduction in plasticity for learning mappings between representations over the time course of learning is the key to accounting for the AoA effect. Recently, an emerging view has considered that the two theories may both contribute to the AoA effect. However, the relative contribution of representations and of mapping remains unclear. To explore this, we developed a triangle model of reading including a realistic, cumulative exposure to words during learning to read (Monaghan & Ellis, 2010). Regression analyses on the model’s reading comprehension performance showed that AoA was a reliable predictor. There was a significant interaction between AoA and concreteness, suggesting that AoA operates differentially on concrete and abstract words. Additional analyses of the locus of the effects in the model revealed that the concreteness effect was related to semantic properties of representations, but that AoA was related more to the mappings than to the representations. The model supports the view that changes in both plasticity and representation contribute to the emergence of the AoA effect.

 

Speech sound acquisition is fundamental to spoken language acquisition and is a subject of theoretical debates. The traditional perspectives (e.g., behaviorist theories, scaffolding theory, connectionist view, and dynamic systems theory) suggest that simple input is more important for speech sound acquisition, whereas complexity-based linguistic theories postulate that complex input (Gierut et al., 1987; Gierut et al., 1996) plays a more important role. In the current study, we test these competing sets of theories by comparing the effects of training based on simple and complex stimuli. Complexity is defined by the markedness hierarchy. In our training, the more marked pre-voiced dental-retroflex sounds were considered complex whereas the less marked voiceless dental-retroflex sounds were considered simple. Cantonese-speaking adult subjects were trained for five consecutive sessions on a pseudoword-picture identification task. In order to evaluate their improvement (on trained sounds) and generalization (to untrained sounds), subjects were tested on an AX discrimination task before and after the training. We found that the subjects who were trained on complex sounds (n=15) significantly improved on the perception of both complex and simple stimuli. On the other hand, subjects who were trained on simple sounds (n=15) only improved on perception of simple sounds and did not generalize to the untrained complex sounds. The current findings reveal that complex input induces system-wide changes in the phonological system while simple input leads to limited changes in the phonological system. Overall, our findings suggest that complex input plays a more important role in speech sound acquisition relative to simple input.

 

Human language understanding is conceived to consist of successive stages of lexical, syntactic and semantic processes. Pragmatic and common sense reasoning are then applied to get to the speaker's intended meaning. Rhetorical devices can be considered as a set of tools at the speaker's disposal to guide the latter pragmatic and common sense reasoning of the hearers. Structural inversion is often employed as a rhetorical device to produce a critical punchline with humorous effects when interpreting a text. Paul Krugman once wrote a paper, which concludes with a sentence: This paper is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics. The word 'opposite' triggers structural inversion to produce as implication a critical and humorous message. We present an analysis of structural inversion in terms of situation parsing, inversion and allusion.

 

Horn (2014) cites Hintikka's (1962) ambiguity of negating a 'know' clause between factive presupposition [p & ∼Kap] and non-factive (NF) [∼Kap], adding the NF nonveridical question example like ‘Do you know that he is reliable?’ in English. In contrast, we present a rather unexplored case of the two alternant uses of factive and NF in the positive verb al- 'know' in Korean (K). and similarly bil- in Turkish (T) and tudjia in Hungarian (H). The factive vs. NF distinction is crucially made by the different complement cases of factive ACC vs. NF oblique case (–uro) in K and factive ACC (i) vs. Reportative (diye) in T and similarly definite anaphor vs. oblique anaphor before 'know' in H. Japanese, however, has no NF 'know,' although it has the factive complement case of ACC. The NF (–uro) al- verb is different from other weaker epistemic verbs meaning ‘believe’/‘think’ in that even the NF one tends to require some piece of evidence for JTB (justified, true belief as defined in epistemology), as in T and H. But the evidential justification may turn out to fall short of knowledge, not being true. We conducted experiments to clearly show that the NF (–uro) al- has the relation of neg-raising between the high neg S and the low (complement) neg S, which are truthconditionally equivalent. It implies that this NF verb (–uro) al- is identical in neg-raisability with other weaker epistemic verbs meaning ‘believe’ and ‘think’ in Korean. T and H also reveal neg-raising, as hypothesized. An excerpt from Sejong Corpus indicates that the NF ‘know’ in Korean typically accompanies some piece of evidence that led the speaker to hold a firmer belief than other epistemic verbs meaning ‘believe’/‘think’ in Korean, which can be used with no such evidential justification. T and H also support this characterization of NF 'know' vs. other weaker epistemic attitude verbs. However, the newly discovered commonality of neg-raising between the NF 'know' and the belief type epistemic verbs in all these three languages is the most exciting result we arrived at.

 

In any linguistic context, the two languages of bilingual listeners are active and interact, such that lexical representations in both languages are activated by the spoken input with which they are compatible. Whereas words that overlap segmentally in the two languages compete for activation, it remains unclear whether suprasegmental information further modulates this cross-language competition. This study investigates the effect of stress placement on the processing of English-Spanish cognates by native Spanish speakers with some knowledge of English (in Spain) and intermediate-to-advanced English-speaking second-language learners of Spanish (in the US) using a visual-world eye-tracking experiment in Spanish. In each trial, participants saw a target (asado), one of two competitors (stress match: asados; stress mismatch: asador), and two unrelated distracters, and they heard the target word. Importantly, the experiment included a non-cognate condition (asado-asados-asador) and a cognate condition, where the stress pattern of the English word corresponding to the Spanish competitor in the stress-mismatch condition (inventor) instead matched that of the Spanish target (invento). Second-language proficiency and vocabulary, and inhibitory control were measured. Growth-curve analyses on competitor fixations reveal cognate-status and stress-mismatch effects for native Spanish speakers, indicating that stress constrains lexical access for these participants, similarly for both cognate conditions. For the Spanish learners, results show a greater effect of stress match in the non-cognate condition than in the cognate condition, and a very early advantage for cognate words in the stress match condition (and to less degree in the stress mismatch condition). Results of this study provide further support on the simultaneous activation of the two languages in the bilingual brain. There is clear evidence showing lexical stress can modulate the degree of cross-language activation that bilingual listeners experience.

 

Does the language we speak affect the way we think? This question has been discussed for a long time from different aspects. In this article, the issue is examined with an experiment on how speakers of different languages tend to do different sequencing when it comes to sizes of general objects. An essential difference between the usage of English and Mandarin is the way we sequence the sizes of places or objects. In English, when describing the location of something we may say, for example, ”The pen is inside the trashcan next to the tree at the park.” In Mandarin, however, we would say, “The pen is at the park next to the tree inside the trashcan.” It’s clear that generally English use the sequence from small to big while Mandarin the opposite. Therefore, the experiment is conducted to test if the difference of the languages affects the speakers’ ability to do the two different sequencing. Within the experiment, three nouns were showed as a group to the subjects. Before they saw the nouns, they would first get an instruction of “big to small”, “small to big”, or “repeat”. Therefore, the subjects had to sequence the following group of nouns as the instruction they get or simply repeat the nouns. After completing every sequencing and repetition in their minds, they push a button as reaction. As the result, the experiment shows that English native speakers react more quickly to the sequencing of “small to big”; on the other hand, Mandarin native speakers react more quickly to the sequence “big to small”. To conclude, this study may be of importance as a support of language relativism that the language we speak do shape the way we think.

 

Min is a common local substrate language in Taiwan that substantially molds the phonology of the official language Mandarin. Although many of the Min-affected phonetic variants are of fairly high frequency, our previous research shows that lexical retrieval is more efficient when words are presented in its canonical than its variant form, which directly contradicts the frequency effect commonly found in processing studies. As talker information and visual modes are found to be readily incorporated in speech perception, this study intends to investigate the effect of visual talker information on the perception and representation of some Min-dependent Mandarin phonetic variants in Taiwan, in particular, the deretroflexion rule of /tʂ tʂʰ ʂ/→[ts tsʰ s] and the nasal merger of /in/→[iŋ]. Participants will be first presented with face photographs prototypical of Min and non-Min speakers, and will later be asked to perform a lexical decision task on auditory targets phonetically congruent or incongruent with the facial information. It is hypothesized that lexical retrieval will be facilitated when auditory targets of phonetic forms that are congruent with the facial information is presented.

 

Recent statistical learning studies of English adults and infants suggest the plausibility of cross-situational word learning in much more complex situations with many words, many possible referents, highly ambiguous individual learning trials, and the statistical resolution of the ambiguities only through the accumulation and evaluation of information over many words-referents pairings and many trials. Our study aims to answer the questions: When can Chinese infants learn new words under uncertainty via cross-situational statistics? Does the strength of words-referents association influence on cross-situational word learning? In the study, during the training phase, on each trial, two word forms and two potential referents were presented with no information about which word went with which referent. Although words-referents pairings were ambiguous within individual trials, they were certain across trials. After training, infants were presented with a single word and two potential referents, the cross-trial correct referent and a foil. The longest looking difference (LLD) means the difference of longest looking time between the correct referent and the foil. If infants have calculated the statistics appropriately, LLD should be above 0 significantly after naming (naming effect). In experiment 1, 18 20-month-olds were taught 4 word-referent pairs. There were 12 trials for training. The strength of words-referents association was 6:2 (co-occurrence times of word-referent: co-occurrence times of word-foil)(low). There was no naming effect found. In experiment 2, 17 20-month-olds were taught 5 word-referent pairs. There were 20 trials for training. The strength of words-referents association was 8:2 (high). The naming effects were found. In experiment 3, 15 16-month-olds learned word-referent with the high strength of association. There was no naming effect. The results indicated that: 1) the strength of association of words-referents affects Chinese infants’ cross-situational word learning; 2) only 20-month-old Chinese infants can learn words via the high strength of association (8:2).

 

This research is related to an “Integrated Narrative Generation System (INGS)” by the authors, which automatically generates narrative conceptual structures (story and plot) and the representations. The INGS uses the knowledge of event sequences for generating a story. The authors call this type of event sequence a script. A script means a semantically organized events used for detailing an episode and extending a scene in a story by the corresponding story technique in the INGS. In the previous development, scripts have been stored by hand. However, the INGS currently needs many scripts for diverse and flexible story generation. Firstly, a semi-automatic script composition tool has been presented to easily define and store in the script knowledge base in the INGS. Using this tool, the authors define and store 760 scripts, which include events from 3 to 10, based on the description of event sequences inputted by users. The next method experimented by the author is script acquisition from many novels. In the first step, pairs of two verbs were automatically extracted using bigram. For each verb in the pairs, the authors define a case structure referring to an original sentence, in which the verb is included, using the semi-automatic script composition tool. In this paper, the authors aim to automatically insert the values into the case structures for the acquired verbs to effectively prepare scripts. In particular, the method analyzes the grammatical structure of a sentence in which the extracted verb is included and the elements are inserted into the corresponding place in the case structure. Because the completely correct insertion may be difficult to implement, relatively adequate data will be used actually. Further, the authors show that the acquired and constructed scripts can be effectively utilized in the story generation process in the INGS.

 

The subject of intransitive verbs can have different thematic roles. For example, in “the boy fell”, “the boy” takes a patient role, while in “the boy smiled”, “the boy” takes an agent role. To preserve a consistent mapping between thematic roles and syntactic position (subject in this case), linguists propose that the subject of some intransitive verbs is underlyingly a syntactic object (the Unaccusative Hypothesis, UH). This generates the prediction that the subject of an unaccusative must be mentally reactivated in its original postverbal position. Previous psycholinguistic studies have reported evidence of reactivation (Friedmann et al 2008, Koring et al 2012). However, these studies did not equate the unaccusative and unergative stimuli for imageability, animacy of the subjects, or sentential context, or visual stimuli, resulting in confounds which jeopardize their conclusions. We reexamined UH with two Visual World Paradigm experiments carefully controlled for all the factors above. On each trial, participants (n=40; n=60) saw 4 black-and-white drawings and heard a sentence. In the test condition, but not the control condition, one image was semantically related to subject of the sentence. We measured the proportion of looks to the target image at three time regions after the verb onset and found a robust match-effect (p’s<.05) but no differences between the unaccusative and unergative conditions (i.e. no difference in reactivation). By comparing our analyses with the previous analysis, we found that the effect in the previous studies are not stable due to their choice of statistics. We reconsider the prior experimental findings and conclude that the effects in the previous studies are due to the artifacts of confounds or noise in the data. From a methodological point of view, we show that the growth curve model with no transformation of the distribution is not appropriate for analyzing eye-tracking data.

 

Startling auditory stimulus (SAS, > 120dB) has been considered as a reliable trigger to a rapid release of prepared responses, including upper limb movements (Valls-Solé et al., 1999; Carlsen et al., 2012) and English consonant-vowel syllable production (Stevenson et al., 2014). The reaction time of the SAS-induced response is argued to be too short to involve feedback correction, suggesting that the rapid release is the result of a prepared program being executed with only limited afferent feedback. Chiu and Gick (2014) extended this startle paradigm to Mandarin syllable production, showing that while startle-elicited responses are released at shorter latencies, phonemic tonal contour and formant profiles are preserved. Both English and Mandarin results reveal that pitch height is elevated in startle-induced responses. However, such pitch elevation is less observed in pitch-trained speakers’ responses than in general Mandarin speakers’ responses (Chiu, 2017). In order to maintain a required target pitch level, the responses in Chiu (2017) were pre-specified longer than a syllable duration in connected speech. It is not clear whether a SAS may elicit similar effects to responses of different durations. The current study uses the startle paradigm to tackle this question by comparing general Mandarin speakers and Mandarin speakers with pitch training. Participants were instructed to produce a CV syllable of either 0.5, 1, or 3 seconds. Preliminary results show that with pre-specified duration, SAS-induced responses are not triggered at a latency as short as those in syllable responses with no duration specification. Such absence of rapid release is more robust for speakers with pitch training background. Results suggest that responses with specifically long durations may require additional online adjustment and thus may not be elicited as rapidly. A more general implication is that such prosodic information may not necessarily be specified in the speech plan prior to the production.

 

In a conversation, code-switching (CS) is often observed in bilinguals with the same language backgrounds. CS is the phenomenon of bilinguals alternating between two languages in conversations; this unique phenomenon was investigated by observing CS during behavioral experiments. Two sessions were conducted, assessing ten native Japanese subjects with high English proficiency; they performed deliberate CS conversational tasks using Japanese and English. All subjects were Japanese native speakers who were exposed to English after twelve years of age. They are currently using English in their professions. The first session was the task to name the pictures in either language that was the language used for the question. The other session the subjects had to name the pictures that were not the language used for the question. Both Japanese and English question sentences were timed and equalized for length. Pictures were presented immediately after the question sentences and the subjects’ response times were analyzed. Additionally, the subjects’ answers were analyzed if they were making language errors. The main finding was that their responses in Japanese were more delayed than those delivered in English. This suggests that the subjects’ attention to the second language is so cautious and aimed that they slowed down replying in Japanese as though they neglected to pay attention to their native language. Considering BIA+ model (Dijkstra & van Heuven, 2002) and L2 episodic hypothesis (e.g., Witzel & Forster, 2012), a putative model of late bilingual with high L2 proficiency was attempted to be proposed for CS production.

 

Teacher cognition has its origins in psychology, in the cognitive studies, but soon it was affecting, and being affected by the research developed in other areas. This influence helped the field become multidisciplinary which included studies on linguistics, anthropology, neuroscience, among others. In simple terms, teacher cognition relates to everything that is in the mind of the teachers, such as their beliefs, attitudes, knowledge, thoughts, and decision making. In the last 25 years, educational research has given meaningful attention to teacher cognition, especially in the teacher education spheres. However, a common question emerges in the literature of the field: the clear identification of the constructs of teacher cognition. They have been usually studied in relation to other constructs and such association help the conceptualization of new meanings which add to the general idea of teacher cognition. Therefore, the understanding of teacher cognition becomes more inclusive and constantly renewed. The research about teacher cognition which grounds this oral presentation follows the socio-cultural theories of Vygotsky and the educational principles of Freire. This research also applies core aspects of narrative enquiry and elements of discourse analysis in order to explore main teacher cognition construct. Having as a basis the model of narrativised teacher cognition, such as decision making, the audience is invited to analyze excerpts of teachers' narratives to find specific constructs and the potential relations between them. In the final discussion, it is expected that the audience find similar ways to the identification of some constructs, as well as their complex interrelations in the teachers' narratives.

 

Typical online video learning materials such as MOOCs (massive open online courses) often include teachers’ motion images concurrently with learning contents such as teachers’ speeches and PowerPoint visual slides. Although the teachers’ motion images seem to disrupt learning attitude because of depriving learners’ attention from the learning contents, why are the images used in many learning videos? We consider teachers’ nonverbal signs informed the images essential to learn even in asynchronous online learning as human learning is intrinsically not information-to-learner communication but teacher-to-learner, that is, human-to-human communication. As the first step of verifying the hypothesis, we investigated whether teachers’ motion images would divide learners’ attention from visual slide contents by eye-tracking. Three types of 4-minute video materials were prepared: motion image, still image, and no image. The typical video learning materials were motion images, which consisted of a visual slide, a teacher’s motion image and speech. In the still image materials, the motion images were replaced with the still images of the teacher. In the no image materials, the motion or still images were removed. We requested twelve university students to watch the materials naturally while evaluating their eye-fixations on the images and the slide areas with an eye tracker (Tobii X2-60). The findings show that in the motion image condition the average ratio of fixation frequency on the teacher’s image to the visual slide was 23% to 77%, and the ratio on the teacher’s image was significantly higher than that in the still image condition (10%). The ratio of total fixation time revealed the same pattern. These results suggest that learners watch teachers’ motion images while learning and acquire some information from them to learn effectively and deeply. Our further research aims to verify learning processes from video materials with teachers’ images.

 

We are fond of beautiful scenery, but not all types of scenery are equally preferred. Scene types have an enormous effect on the preferences for landscape in Western adult participants. A recent study using visual signal computational model to predict landscape preference discovered that Taiwanese young adults showed a higher preference for natural scenes (coasts, forests, countrysides, mountains views) than urban scenes (highways, tall buildings, streets, inner cities) (Ho et al., 2015). The present study aimed to explore the landscape preference in Taiwanese school-aged children using the same image database. Forty 5- to 12-year-old Taiwanese children participated the study. Each participant received 80 pictures containing four natural scene types (coasts, forests, countrysides, mountains) and four urban scene types (highways, tall buildings, streets, and inner cities), 10 for each type. There were six different sets of 80 pictures from the 480-picture image database. Each picture was displayed one by one on a touch screen notebook (Asus S551L). The participants were asked to drag each picture to one of the five folders based on their preference: 1) strongly disliked, 2) slightly disliked, 3) neither, 4) slightly liked, and 5) strongly liked. We found that Taiwanese children showed a higher preference for natural scenes (3.812) than urban scenes (3.159, p < .001), and their preference of the coast scenes (4.127) was the highest among all types. We also found that, compared to the adults’ rating scores in Ho et al. (2015), children tended to rate higher for both natural and urban scenes. In sum, the present study revealed that, like adults, Taiwanese children exhibited a stronger preference for natural scenes than urban scenes, which supports the prospect-refuge theory that natural scenes simultaneously provide abundance and a sense of security to meet human needs.

 

We have implemented three outline tools in an academic writing course for the first-year students at a university in Japan, where students learn how to write academic essays of 1500-2000 words length. First, mind map is introduced to help learners collect their own thoughts and pieces of reference information, and determine their opinion statements. Then, an outline map is introduced; using it learners extract materials that are relevant to their main statement and also explicitly classify the elements into opinion, evidence, and reason. Finally, our outlining scheme, called "detailed outline," is introduced to reorganize the resulting elements as a draft of text. The scheme of detailed outline is designed following the Rhetorical Structure Theory in linguistics (Mann and Thompson, 1988) aiming to facilitate thoroughly covering necessary elements and structurally organizing them to produce cohesive and coherent texts. To evaluate their effect on the learners, we conducted a questionnaire based on the scale for "feeling of difficulty" in writing composition (Kishi et al., 2012) in the beginning and the end of the semester. Paired t-test on the answers collected from 235 learners showed that the questions corresponding to the three factors, i.e., (a) text organization, (b) audience awareness, and (c) way of thinking factors, were answered significantly more positively in the end of semester. Since all of our outline tools visualize relations of elements, we speculate that introducing them helps learners produce and arrange their idea and consequently better understand the importance of cohesiveness and coherence in writing this length of texts.

 

In an academic writing course for the first-year students at a university in Japan, we have introduced outline tools along with a three-step text production process, assuming opinion statement texts of 1500-2000 word length. First, mind map is introduced to help learners collect their own thoughts and pieces of reference information, and determine their opinion statements. Then, an outline map is introduced; using it learners extract materials that are relevant to their main statement and also explicitly classify the elements into opinion, evidence, and reason. Finally, our outlining scheme, called "detailed outline," is introduced to reorganize the resulting elements as a draft of text. The scheme of detailed outline is designed following the Rhetorical Structure Theory in linguistics (Mann and Thompson, 1988) aiming to facilitate thoroughly covering necessary elements and structurally organizing them to produce cohesive and coherent texts. To help learners learn to produce such texts, in addition to the above three tools, we use four means for giving learners feedback: (a) reflection sheet, (b) peer reviewing, (c) rubric, and (d) personal instruction. A questionnaire was conducted after the semester that asked the usefulness of each of our seven means in a 7-point Likert scale. A principal factor analysis for the answers from 198 learners revealed clear distinction between two major factors: "process-aiding tools" and "way of feedback". A cluster analysis based on the factor scores resulted four learner clusters. One-way ANOVA showed that the factor scores of each cluster were significantly different, indicating that these two factors have sufficient power in discriminating the adaptability of learners to the examined means.

 

Recently, neuron-like software computational systems have been successfully demonstrated for applications such as computer vision, speech recognition, machine translation, robotics, medical image processing, etc. On the other hand, neuromorphic circuits attempt to mimic the operation and topology of biological cognitive systems in hardware. Neuromorphic circuits, or cognitive computing, will likely be adopted in the near future for these tasks due to the significantly better speed and power efficiency compared to software realization. Computer-aided-design is crucial for realizing neuromorphic systems in hardware due to its complexity. The simulation of neuromorphic circuits must take into account the basic semiconductor device’s behavior accurately. At the same time, it must also be carried out over thousands of training cycles in a system containing millions of neurons and synapses. Traditional SPICE circuit simulation tool models device behavior accurately but lacks the capability to handle large neural networks. On the other hand, simulation tools for digital logic is not suitable for neuromorphic systems, which uses analog computation when implemented most efficiently. We have developed NVMLearn, a computer-aided-design tool for neuromorphic circuits. NVMLearn is developed for neuromorphic circuits that utilize non-volatile memory as the basic “synapse” element, which stores information about the significance of each neuron-to-neuron connection. In order to accurately describe non-volatile memory semiconductor device, NVMLearn take in a Verilog-A compact model for the non-volatile memory as input. NVMLearn also takes inputs related to a specific neural network topology, such as how neurons are connected, mathematical functions that describes the propagation of neuron signals, and each neuron’s learning behavior. With the new tool, such neuromorphic circuits can be simulated in an efficient manner. It is also able to predict the speed and power consumption of the hardware when implemented.

 

The investigation of consciousness is one of the enigma facing the scientific perspective. There are many theories of what consciousness is. According to one of them, consciousness is defined as the having of perception, feelings and thoughts of the internal and the external world which can be verbal expressed. Multimodal verbal and nonverbal interactions are joined with emotions in a continuous dynamic neuronal complex that constitutes consciousness. Combined cognitive neuroscience and engineering knowledge, we have used a perception-action scenario to analyse conscious processes in association with emotion and oral language in neurotypical children aged 6 and 9 years old. The actor was always a child; the perceiver was a human or a robot. Unconscious emotional expression reflected in physiological data, i.e., heart rate, as well as conscious process mirrored on behavioral data, i.e., number of words and reported feelings, were considered. The results showed that 1) the heart rate was higher for children aged 6 years old than for children aged 9 years old when the InterActor was the robot; 2) the number of words expressed by both age groups was higher when the InterActor was the human. Contrary to children with ASD (Giannopulu et al., 2016), neurotypical children would prefer verbally to interact with humans, as human complex nonverbal and verbal behavior does not constitute an obstacle for them in communication. The present findings would be associated with the development of un/consciousness. Nonverbal behavior expressed by heart rate is an unconscious automatic activity which, in our case, depends on the InterActor Robot. Verbal behavior given by the words pronounced by the children is a conscious activity which depends on Human InterActor. Unconscious and conscious processes would not only depend on natural environments, i.e., humans, but also on artificial environments, i.e., robots.

 

“Automatic Narrative Generation Game (ANGG)” by the authors generates stories through the interaction between two mechanisms: “Game Master (GM)” and “Player (PL)”. The main elements of the story are “world setting”and “scene sequence”. The former includes characters, objects, locations, times and restricts that define possible ranges in their elements. The main element in each scene is an “event”. The story generation is performed using an “Integrated Narrative Generation System (INGS)”developed by the authors. A current focus of this system is to introduce the emotion of “surprise”to propose a function for making more interesting stories to the ANGG. According to Descartes, “surprise” means a strong and temporary emotion with the sudden appearance of an unexpected event. The authors considered that the incremental change by the GM and the PL (in many case, PLs) is partially driven by the PL’s function that gives surprise to the GM through the story’s change beyond the GM’s expectation. For incorporating the function of surprise into the ANGG, the authors developed a simple story generation mechanism using the INGS, which incrementally changes a story using semantic gap between a first story and a changed story. Further, the authors have confirmed a correspondence relation between the gap and the degree of surprise, and the degree of surprise can adjusted according to the gap. In this paper, the authors present a set of story techniques to make gap and surprise, from a first story by the GM and develop a method for control the use of their story techniques. Surprise based on gap is produced through various types of change of a story regarding a verb, an event, a part of a story and an entire story. Further, the effectiveness of the above two mechanisms will be evaluated by real subjects.

 

The purpose of this research is to base on theoretical views of Metalogy to analyze the important concepts of the Grit and Mindset theory. This research employs literature analysis from many empirical papers and books about the Grit and Mindset theory. Computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software Nvivo 10 is applied to process and analyze three phases of data. There are three major findings for this research. Firstly, the fixed and growth mindset and the gritty characteristics all conform the Janusian thinking of Metalogy theory. Secondly, the gritty people always not only have bright and growth mindset to success, but creative thinking and meta-thinking of Metalogy maybe the key mediator variables. Thirdly, the three main theoretical views of Metalogy could be explain how the people with the growth mindset and grit to achieve their respective objective.

 

Some significant recent work in philosophy of mind attempts to wrestle anew with what Susanna Schellenberg calls the hallucination question-- how do we explain the phenomenology of hallucinatory experience? Apart from negative disjunctivism, three general approaches have been pursued with a view to answering this question. According to the classical view, in undergoing a hallucinatory experience, a subject S is aware of some kind of particular, mind-dependent mental item or relatum, such as sense data or qualia (Chalmers, Robinson). According to the relational view, S is aware of some kind of extra-mental, mind-independent item or relatum. Candidate examples include external world properties or universals, states of affairs, propositions, or Meinongian objects (Byrne, Dretske, Smith, Tye). Finally, the no-awareness view denies that S stands in an awareness relation to any item or relatum, regardless of whether that item is construed as a mind-independent entity or property or some kind of mental item (Pautz, Schellenberg). I argue against the no-awareness view, offering considerations based on the nature of phenomenal-perceptual judgment for the conclusion that hallucinatory experience does involve an awareness relation to some kind of existing entity. Along the way, I criticize the arguments advanced by Pautz and Schellenberg for the no-awareness view. Then I argue, against the relational view, that the items we are aware of in hallucinatory experience cannot be explained by appeal to mind-independent universals, states of affairs, propositions, or mere intentional objects. In developing this line of thought, I criticize arguments against the relational view set forth by Pautz and Schellenberg, but I go on to argue that the view is nevertheless implausible on phenomenological grounds. This sets the stage for a defense of a particular version of the classical view-- the phenomenology of hallucinatory experience is best explained in terms of one’s awareness of phenomenal qualia.

 

Selecting suitable stimuli for investigations into cognitive processes in memory and language is an important process, given the natural variability for words and pictures on many psycholinguistic dimensions (e.g., name agreement, age of acquisition). Normative databases are vitally important and help maintain the necessary level of control over psycholinguistic dimensions when selecting stimuli for experimental purposes. Although norms have been obtained for several different languages, none are currently available for Thai. In the present study, 584 Thai university students provided norms for the 480-item Bank of Standardized Stimuli (BOSS; Brodeur, Dionne-Dostie, Montreuil, & Lepage, 2010), a picture set containing high resolution colour photographic images of common objects. Norms were obtained on seven psycholinguistic dimensions: name agreement, category agreement, image agreement, visual complexity, object familiarity, age of acquisition, and two types of manipulability (ease of grasping & ease of miming). Object naming latencies were also obtained from a separate group of participants (n = 32) on 332 items, after excluding items for low name agreement. The effects of the normative variables on object naming latencies were considered using multiple regression analyses and revealed that age of acquisition, object familiarity, name agreement, and category agreement were the major determinants of object naming speed in Thai, accounting for around 40% of the variance in naming latency. Age of acquisition and name agreement have also been shown to be robust predictors of picture naming speed in other languages (e.g., Alario et al., 2004; Bakhtiar et al., 2013; Bonin et al., 2004). The interpretation of the observed effects is discussed both cross-culturally and in relation to theories of lexical access during speech production. It is anticipated that the Thai psycholinguistic database, containing both normative data and object naming latencies, will be of interest to researchers working in the fields of cognition, psycholinguistics, and neuropsychology.  

 

Objectives. Most knowledge regarding the anatomical organization of multilingualism is based on aphasiology and functional imaging studies. However, the results have still to be validated by the gold standard approach, namely electrical stimulation mapping (ESM) during awake neurosurgical procedures. In this ESM study we describe language representation in a highly specific group of 13 multilinguals, focusing on how age of acquisition may influence the cortical organization of language. Methods. Thirteen highly proficient multilingual patients harboring lesions within the dominant, left hemisphere underwent ESM while being operated on under awake conditions. Demographic and language data were recorded in relation to age of acquisition (native language/early/late acquired languages), neuropsychological pre/postoperative language tests, number and location of language sites, and overlapping distribution in terms of language acquisition time. Analysis included lesion growth pattern/histopathology, location, and size. Results The functional language-related sites were distributed in the frontal (55%), temporal (29%), and parietal lobes (16%). Of these sites, 38% were located outside the areas predicted by classical models. The total number of native language sites was 47. Early acquired languages (including native) were represented in 97 sites (55 overlapped) and late acquired languages in 70 sites (45 overlapped). The overlapping distribution was 20% for early-early, 71% for early-late, and 9% for late-late acquired languages. Average lesion size was 3.3 cm, comprising five fast and seven slow growing lesions. Conclusions. Cortical language distribution in multilingual patients is not homogeneous, and it is influenced by age of acquisition. Early acquired languages are represented across a larger anatomical region than are those acquired later. The prevalent early acquired languages are largely represented within classical areas. Late acquired languages are less represented and mostly overlapped with the former. A large percentage of cortical, functional language sites are located away from the theoretical anatomical location and are not overlapped.

 

Psycholinguistic studies that examine the effect of bilingual proficiency have largely focused on the lexical, semantic and syntactic processing whereas those at the text level have received relatively little attention). We conducted an event-related potentials (EPRs) study to examine the proficiency effect on the bilingual processing of text comprehension. Four-eight English as the second language learners (L2/ESL: high vs. low proficiency, 24 each), read two-sentences passages in English where the “referent-matching” relation of the target word (“The explosion..”), to the text matches with the three levels of text representation[1]: A surface-level match as in “…exploded... The explosion…”; a textbase match as in “…blew up... The explosion…”; and a situation-model match as in “…bomb…dropped. The explosion…”. Additionally, a non-sensible baseline “…bomb was stored safely… The explosion…” was used to compare the ease of integration processing among conditions. We analyzed the N400 (250-500ms post-target onset) and late positivity component (LPC, 500-700ms) to assess the proficiency effect on the semantic integration [2] and the mental-model construction processes [3,4] respectively. The results indicate robust proficiency effect when processing textbase match: the amplitude of both N400 and LPC was reduced for high-proficient L2/ESL while enhanced for low-proficient L2/ESL. No reliable proficiency effect was observed when integrating the target word with the text relied on a surface-match and a demanding conceptual processing (i.e., inference-drawing when processing the situation match): both groups showed reduced N400 while enhanced LPC effect. The results, overall, underline the importance of the L2 semantic/conceptual processing in modulating the ease of both meaning integration and mental-model construction processes during L2 text comprehension; and also suggest the high resource constraints in bilinguals’ mental-model construction processes due to their non-native lexico-semantic processing (as compared to monolinguals [3,5]). References: [1] Kintsch (1998), CambUnivPress; [2] Kutas&Hillyard (1980), Science; [3] Burkhardt (2007), NeuroReport; [4] Brouwer et al. (2012), BrainResearch; [5] Yang et al. (2007), JEP: LMC.

 

It has been proposed that the domain of the explanandum (e.g., artifact, animate being) which is specified by the subject of sentence, is the main factor that determines which type of explanation people prefer, mechanistic or teleological. In our previous study (Yoo & Do, 2016), we proposed that the predicate of sentence, i.e., verb type, which describes explanandum’s action or state, have greater effect on people’s explanation type preference. To examine our hypothesis, we asked participants to generate an explanation after they read a sentence describing either the action of an actor/artifact or the state of an actor/artifact. The domain of the objects to be explained and the properties to be explained (verb type) were factorially combined. Most of the explanations generated for the state verbs were mechanistic explanations, whereas the two types of explanation were about equally generated for the action verbs. The effect of the domain was not significant. However, the social relations of arguments were not controlled in the previous study. Through reanalysis of our 2016 data, we found the possibility that social relations of arguments in the sentence with action verb can yield different patterns of explanation type preference. In the current research, we will propose a new hypothesis that can explain how the social relations of arguments work as the factor which modulates the explanation type preference of action verb.

 

Grapheme-color synesthetes perceive unusual color perception when seeing colorless letters or digits. Previous studies of grapheme-color synesthesia used mostly alphabetic languages, and found certain rule-based linguistic mechanisms related to the perceived synesthetic color. However, whether similar mechanisms exist in logographic languages such as Chinese remain largely unknown. We examined whether meaning and shared radical of Chinese characters influence color mapping of Taiwanese grapheme-color synesthetes. Seven synesthetes with grapheme-color synesthesia of Chinese characters passed the synesthesia consistency test and were included in this study. Three sets of Chinese characters were used to clarify the role of meaning and radical on the color perception of Chinese grapheme-color synesthesia. The first set contained binding words (e.g., "蝴蝶 butterfly”, the two characters always appear together), and characters in these binding words tended to have similar colors in all synesthetes. Because the two characters of binding words usually have the same meaning and share common radicals, we further tested the color perception of the synesthetes using the second character sets in which their semantic relationships were defined by semantic association (strong, weak) or categorical relatedness (high, low). However, no clear mapping of semantic and perceived color was found across synesthetes. We then used the third sets of characters, including characters pairs that shared same radicals but with either a transparent or opaque radical in terms of conveying the meaning to the whole character. We found that hue difference was smaller when the two characters had same radicals and the radicals were both transparent, compared to when one character had a transparent radical and the other had an opaque radical. Taken together, our results indicated that both meaning and radical in Chinese characters affect the perceived color of Taiwanese grapheme color synethetes.

 

The human brain atlas plays a central role in neuroscience and clinical practice, and is a prerequisite for studying brain networks and cognitive functions at the macroscale. Using non-invasive multimodal neuroimaging techniques, we have designed a connectivity-based parcellation framework to build the human Brainnetome Atlas, which identifies the subdivisions of the entire human brain, revealing the in vivo connectivity profiles. This new brain atlas has the following four features: (A) It establishes a fine-grained brain parcellation scheme for 210 cortical and 36 subcortical regions with a coherent pattern of anatomical connections; (B) It supplies a detailed map of anatomical and functional connections; (C) it decodes brain functions using a meta-analytical approach; and (D) It will be an open resource for researchers to use for the analysis of whole brain parcellations, connections, and functions. The human Brainnetome Atlas could constitute a major breakthrough in the study of human brain atlas and provides the basis for new lines of inquiry about the brain organization and functions. It could be regarded as a start point, which will enable the generation of future brain atlases that are more finely, defined and that will advance from single anatomical descriptions to an integrated atlas that includes structure, function, and connectivity, along with other potential sources of information. Therefore, with human Brainnetome atlas, we could get some entirely new knowledge on how the brain works. Firstly, we defined a convergent posterior anatomical border for Wernicke’s area and indicated that the brain’s functional subregions can be identified on the basis of its specific structural and functional connectivity patterns. Secondly, we revealed a detailed parcellation of Broca’s region on the basis of heterogeneity in intrinsic brain activity, and investigated cross-cultural consistency and diversity in intrinsic functional organization of Broca’s Region.

 

Humans constantly process highly dynamic, fleeting information, such as in speech and music, in order to understand its meaning. We conducted a series of studies employing EEG and psychophysical techniques to study the neural mechanisms underlying dynamic auditory information processing. The first study presented identical tones in rhythmic versus arrhythmic sequences; occasionally, one tone was replaced by a target tone with modified pitch. We aimed to investigate how pre-target neural oscillatory activity predictively determines post-target perceptual processes. The results showed that the pre-target oscillatory power in beta band (15 – 25 Hz) entrains to the rhythm of the tone sequence, and that the size of this entrainment attenuates the post-target perceptual novelty response and improves behavioural discriminative sensitivity. These results indicate that beta entrainment reflects the prediction of both the pitch and timing of the upcoming tone, leading to improved perceptual processing. In the second study, given that beta oscillation has been viewed as reflecting an auditory-motor cortical communication channel, we further investigated whether the motor system is required for dynamic auditory processing. We recruited typically developing (TD) children and children with motor deficit (probable Developmental Coordination Disorder, pDCD). We hypothesized that children with pDCD should have larger thresholds for auditory temporal discrimination than TD children if the motor system is required for dynamic auditory processing. Children with pDCD did have larger thresholds, confirming this hypothesis. Preliminary ERP results on mismatch negativity (MMN), a neural response reflecting preattentive perceptual encoding of auditory temporal deviation, showed that MMN was only observed among TD children but those with pDCD, suggesting that the motor system is required to processing dynamic auditory information at a preattentive processing stage. Together, our studies show that neural activity reflecting auditory-motor communication predictively facilitates dynamic auditory information processing, and that the motor system is necessary for this process.

 

This research investigated whether the perception of fundamental frequency (F0) contours of Mandarin Chinese tones is associated with the superior temporal gyrus (STG) and the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) when tones were input from the right ear. The issue was explored with a delayed-match-to-sample paradigm, in which adult native speakers of Mandarin Chinese discriminated between pair-wise tone tokens, and judged whether they were the same or not. In this study two types of auditory stimuli were used: sinewave pitches (SW) and lexical tones (LX). LX refers to tones with, and SW, tones without, vocalic information. We collected the subjects’ fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) brain images by using a 3 T MRI scanner, while they performed the auditory discrimination task. fMRI results reveal that LX perception, compared with SW perception, had additional activations at the LIFG and more noticeable activations at the RIFG. The additional activations at the L-IFG imply association with the perception of vocalic information of LX. Despite the differences, SW and LX perception had overlaps of activations at the LSTG and the RIFG. Since SW and LX shared F0 contours, the overlaps indicate that the perception of F0 contours of Mandarin tones is involved with the LSTG and the RIFG in the neural network. The involvement of the LSTG supports the phonemic feature of Mandarin tones. However, solely the left hemisphere of the brain cannot achieve the processing of Mandarin tones.

 

The Revised Hierarchical Model (Kroll & Stewart, 1994) assumes asymmetric lexical links between first language (L1) and second language (L2) (i.e., stronger links from L2 to L1 than those from L1 to L2). Previous behavioral studies supported the model showing significant masked priming effects when the target was L2 and the prime was L1, but not when the prime was L2 and the target was L1 (e.g., Jiang, 1999). However, recent ERP studies provided controversial evidence for either supporting (e.g., Hoshino et al., 2010) or countering (e.g., Midgley et al., 2009) the model. In addition, a previous study showed that cross-language morphological priming effect was found exclusively for cognate words in Spanish-English bilinguals (Duñabeitia et al., 2013). The current study examined if the pattern of cross-language translation priming is consistent with the asymmetric links between L1 and L2 and if it occurs via morphological decomposition, using event-related potentials (ERPs) and a masked priming lexical decision paradigm with unbalanced Korean-English bilinguals. In Experiment 1, targets were Korean (L1) compound word (e.g., 꿀벌, ²kkwupel,² honeybee), and primes were English (L2) words, either 1) translated whole word (honeybee), 2) translated morphemic constituent (bee), or 3) an unrelated word (e.g., ear). Experiment 2 was the same as Experiment 1, except that the targets were in English (L2) and the primes were in Korean (L1). In behavioral results, the translation priming effect and the morphological priming effect were significant only for L1-L2 (Experiment 2), but not for L2-L1 (Experiment 1). In ERP results, the translation priming effect was found only for L1-L2 on the N150, N250, and reduced N400. The morphological priming effect was found both for L1-L2 and L2-L1 on the reduced N400. Taken together, the results suggest that both cross-language translation priming and morphological priming occurs even between different scripts (between noncognate words), and the effects are stronger when L1 primed L2 as compared to when L2 primed L1. In addition, different time-course between translation priming and morphological priming suggests that cross-language morphological decomposition occurs after translation in bilingual readers.

 

Given the hard problem of consciousness (Chalmers 1995) there are no brain left temporal electrophysiological correlates of the subjective experience (the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field, the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothball, bodily sensations from pains to orgasms, mental images that are conjured up internally, the felt quality of emotion, the experience of a stream of conscious thought). However, there are brain left temporal electrophysiological correlates of the subjective experience (Pereira 2015). Notwithstanding, as evoked signal, the change in ERPs phase (frequency is the change in phase over time) is instantaneous, that is, the frequency will transiently be infinite: a transient peak in frequency (positive or negative), if any, is instantaneous in EEG averaging or filtering that the ERPs required and the underlying structure of the ERPs in the frequency domain cannot be accounted, for example, by the Wavelet Transform (WT) or the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) analysis, because they require that frequency is derived by convolution (frequency are pre-defined and constant over time) rather than by differentiation (without predefining frequency and accounted that frequency may vary over time). However, as I show in the current original research report, one suitable method for analyse the instantaneous change in event-related brain potentials (ERPs) phase and accounted for a transient peak in frequency (positive or negative), if any, in the underlying structure of the ERPs is the Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) with post processing (Xie et al. 2014) Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (postEEMD).

 

Other-race effect (ORE) refers to the observation that people are better at recognizing or memorizing own-race faces than other-race faces. Although the ORE has been reliably demonstrated across ethnicity, biracial faces are rarely explored. In a recent study utilizing Black, White, and biracial ambiguous faces, 4- to 9-year-old White children with non-essentialist thinking could better memorize ambiguous faces than those who employed essentialist thinking. The present study aimed to explore the effect of essentialist thinking on race categorization in Taiwanese children and adults. Sixty 3- to 6- year-old children and thirty adults (mean age= 38 years) performed categorization of biracial-face photos taken from biracial individuals. Two mixed-race conditions were included, Asian (own-race)/White (other-race) biracial faces and Black/White (both other-race) biracial faces. In each mixed-race condition, the child participants performed three tasks: the on-line Categorization Task for 12 racially ambiguous faces, the Crayon Task (to color the skin tone of 4 biracial faces), and the Constancy Task (to determine whether the child employed essentialist thinking or not). The adults performed the on-line Categorization Task only. We found that among the sixty children, about one-third of them employed essentialist thinking on race. For the Asian/White condition, adults and the children with essentialist thinking (N=22) tended to categorize the ambiguous faces as White (other race) (p< .001 in adults, p=.045 in children), whereas the children with non-essentialist thinking (N=38) categorized the ambiguous faces to White and Asian evenly (p=.38). This observation is consistent with the previous study with Caucasian children living in the U.S.. For the Black/White condition, adults and children with essentialist thinking and non-essentialist thinking tended to categorize the Black/White ambiguous faces as White. This is a novel finding. In sum, the present study provided cross-cultural evidence exploring the effect of essentialist thinking on children’s categorization of racially ambiguous faces.

 

Children with Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) may demonstrate deficits in multiple neuropsychological functions. However, the majority of previous studies relied on single task and mainly focused on school-aged children. The present research recruited 230 preschool children (aged 4–6 years) of whom 83 were at risk for ADHD/ODD and utilized flanker task, day–night Stroop task and K-CPT to measure their responses. We further employed structure equation modeling (SEM) to extract the latent variables among the aforementioned tasks to construct more reliable variables. The results revealed that response inhibition was non-significant between the ADHD risk group and the control group. In contrast, reaction time (RT) and reaction time variability (RTSD) were higher in the ADHD risk group compared to the control. Furthermore, RT and RTSD latent variables were only positively related to inattention behavior; neither was related to impulsivity/hyperactivity behavior, nor ODD. The current study suggests that RT and RTSD might represent core neuropsychological function deficits in preschool children with ADHD and might be useful indexes for the detection of those at risk for ADHD.

 

Multiple factors such as lifetime experience, lifestyle, culture, and history have effects on cognitive aging. It is articulated that we are to maintain or improve our cognitive abilities with sufficient exposure to environments rich in intellectual and social stimuli from the perspectives of the life-span developmental psychology. Reminiscence defined as an evidence-based intervention for the secondary aging could be considered intellectual and social stimuli. The current study investigated effects of group reminiscence session on cognition and memory in later life to test the hypothesis whether exposure to cognitive and social stimuli could ward off the symptoms of cognitive impairment. Community dwellers in the northeastern city of Japan, aged from 63 to 95 participated in the study. Half of the participants were assigned to receive the intensive intervention, 5 series of bi-weekly group reminiscence session during 10 weeks. After having completed the 10-week group reminiscence session, the group kept on participating in the intermittent reminiscence session. All the participants took cognitive tests including Logical Memory and Verbal Paired Associates from WMS-R, MMSE, and SF-36 before, after, and one year after the intensive reminiscence intervention. The reminiscence group significantly associated more pairs in the subtest from WMS-R in the post-test (M = 21.69, SD = 3.42) than the pre-test (M = 16.63, SD = 4.67) and even maintained their performance in the follow-up test (M = 21.25, SD = 2.49). Moreover, they associated the pairs in fewer trial in the post-test (M = 2.06, SD = 1.29) compared to the pre-test (M = 4.25, SD = 1.69) and even maintained their performance in the follow-up test (M = 2.91, SD = 1.59). The results suggest that the intensive intervention by group reminiscence drew drastic improvement in performance on the memory test while the intermittent intervention contributed to maintaining the improved performance.

 

Language is fundamental to humans and provides us with powers that outstrip all other systems of animal communication. We can use it to give instructions or orders, to share information, to speak to ourselves, and to chat about the weather. Philosophers, however, have long been interested in the underlying primary function of Language, one that explains what it is and where it came from. An ongoing debate splits thinkers between the view that Language exists to improve our thinking capacities and the view it exists as a primarily communicative tool. In this paper, I continue this philosophical venture through the lens of cognitive science and defend the view that Language’s primary function is indeed communication. Evolutionary theory best explains the existence and primary functions of natural phenomena, and there are two approaches that attempt to explain the existence of Language: as (a) the product or biological evolution and natural selection, or (b) the product of cultural evolution and generational transmission. A rich tradition, known as generative linguistics favours (a), claiming that the syntax of Language is a universal and biological phenomenon. This view, however, argues that communication is only a secondary function of Language. Natural selection tells us that a mutation that promoted the systematic use of symbols would have been selected so that an individual could out-compete —not cooperate with— other individuals. Thus it makes more sense to claim Language was selected a improve our thinking capacities. I argue, however, that there are fundamental intuitions of (b) that generative linguists largely ignore. Humans own further biological traits, such as intention-reading capacities, that appear to make us fundamentally social creatures. I will show that a biological syntax has a vital role in maintaining cooperation, and thus was biologically selected for it's communicative, rather than cognitive, function.

 

A key goal for participants in language communication is to bring about a mutually shared experience of ideas, event narratives, and emotional responses. This goal is achieved not only through the exchange of lexical meaning, but also through interactive signaling to coordinate information status, expressed in both verbal and nonverbal forms. This study presents our results on prosodic interactive alignment in spoken dialogues, drawing from extended conversational data in both English and Chinese. Because of the multidimensional goals at work in language, alignment is approached as both building social interactional harmony, and also reflecting informational, organizational and expressive processes in conversations. Our results show that synchrony and dissynchrony in prosody occur at both local inter-phrase level pitch level changes, as well as over dialogue sections extending globally across topics and subtopics. The pattern found for our data is that prosodic synchrony is arrived at gradually, with an initial probing stage where topic is negotiated, followed by mixed synchrony and dissynchrony as options are explored or overturned, until speakers arrive at a mutually fulfilling topic theme, where synchrony is frequent. Near conversation end, participants converge in a descending pitch pattern in a shared recognition of the coming conclusion. Detailed analysis of our data further indicates that participant feedback responses are a critical component of cooperative adaptation to new information, and that the complementary distribution of feedback responses helps to bring about the synchronous prosodic patterns associated with convergent speaker states. Our analysis suggests that prosodic synchrony phenomena occur as a mirror of topically and emotionally synchronized participant states and that these convergent and divergent phenomena are not only strategies to encourage rapport, but also act as organizational indicators providing key information on the degree of understanding, on emotional synchrony, and on the perceived status of a mutually fulfilling topic flow.

 

Ever since the finding of mirror neuron (Rizzolatti & Craighero, 2004), the activation of sensorimotor system in action observation is pretty much known. Recently, there were studies that proves the activation of sensorimotor system even in viewing art. (Sbriscia-Fioretti, Berchio, Freedberg, Gallese, & Umiltà, 2013; Umilta, Berchio, Sestito, Freedberg, & Gallese, 2012). They thought of the artwork as the visible trace of goal directed movement and showed the activation of sensorimotor system. However, both studies were done with the western artwork and it was necessary to examine the result with the oriental painting. This study aimed to investigate the involvement of the sensorimotor system in oriental painting. The oriental paintings are much influenced by the material characteristic that depends on the amount of water in the brush and dryness of the mulberry paper. Therefore, the final results would be the harmonization between the goal directed movement and the spreadity of the medium. The present study investigated whether the oriental painting would evoke the motor resonance in spite of their material characteristic. Statistical analysis on mu rhythm suppression showed no significant in both original art works and control stimuli. This result assured the weakened artist’s creative gesture due to the medium effect influenced on the observer’s perception.

 

Pupil size, as a component of orienting, changes rapidly in response to local salient events in the environment. A growing body of evidence suggests that the midbrain superior colliculus (SC) encodes stimuli based upon saliency to coordinate the orienting response. Although the SC is causally involved in the initiation of saccadic eye movements and shifts of attention, its role in coordinating other components of orienting is less understood. Here, we examined how pupil dynamics are modulated by the SC and stimulus saliency. While requiring subjects to maintain central fixation, we presented a salient visual, auditory, or audiovisual stimulus. Transient pupil dilation was elicited after presentation of salient stimuli, and the timing and magnitude of evoked pupillary responses were modulated by stimulus contrast, with significantly faster and larger pupillary responses observed for more salient stimuli. Furthermore, the pupillary responses elicited by audiovisual stimuli were well predicted by a linear summation of each modality response. To establish the role of the SC on this behavior, we electrically stimulated the intermediate SC layers varying stimulation parameters in monkeys trained to perform oculomotor tasks. Transient pupil dilation was elicited by SC microstimulation, and this dilation was qualitatively similar to that evoked after presentation of salient stimuli. If the orienting responses of saccade and pupil size are coordinated through the SC, these two responses should be highly correlated. Varying stimulation parameters systematically modulated evoked saccadic as well as pupillary responses, with trial-by-trial correlation between two responses. Together, our results demonstrated 1) the saliency modulation of pupillary responses, and 2) the SC coordinates pupillary responses and saccades. Because the SC receives convergent signals from multisensory, arousal, cognitive areas, the SC-pupil pathway provides a novel neural substrate underlying not only pupil orienting responses, but also the pupillary modulation by cognitive and arousal processes.

 

Detecting imminent collision is essential for survival. Recent studies revealed subcortical circuits responding to looming stimulus in rodents. Little is known about how human subcortical visual pathways process collision information. Using fMRI, we studied how the superior colliculus (SC) and pulvinar of thalamus respond to potential collision information. Visual stimuli depicting an incoming ball towards the subject were presented with 3D LED monitors. The incoming ball appeared in one of the four quadrants of visual field. Within each quadrant, the trajectory of incoming ball varied slightly to either hit the center of face, hit the eye, near-miss or miss the head of observers. subjects responded whether the ball was on a collision course with their head or not. Behavioral results show that subjects performed slightly better detecting collision (hit vs. miss) for stimuli in the upper visual field than in the lower visual field. FMRI data showed that the superficial layers of the SC were sensitive to the looming information from the contralateral visual field, especially when the looming object came from the upper visual field and was on a collision course leading to a direct hit at the center of the subject head. A sub-region in the ventral Pulvinar was also sensitive to the incoming object on a collision course from the contralateral side, showing the strongest response when the incoming object would hit the subjects’ contralateral eye (on the same side of the incoming object). These results suggest that human SC and Pulvinar are closely involved in processing incoming objects potentially on a collision course.

 

Abstract: The response inhibition function related neural signals have arrived from inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and pre-supplementary motor (preSMA). Response inhibition-related neuronal signals are widespread in the human brain, and there is no specific way to detect their association with other brain regions. Consequently, due to the lack of functional and structural networks across the different brain areas during response inhibition mechanism. We developed a human brain neural network during response inhibition with joint visual and auditory stimuli. The visual and auditory modalities work together to help the identification of a right sources of the events in some circumstances, such as car driving, walking, sport, and shooting. Therefore, to measure the human brain activities changes with visual and auditory modalities in laboratory settings, we performed an auditory stop signal presentation followed by left- and right-hand response inhibition controls. However, the inter-trial coherence (ITC) method was used to evaluate the effect of an auditory modality information processing on visual modality by cortical phase synchrony at frontal, temporal and occipital brain areas. Our results revealed significant phase synchronization in the frequency range of delta (1-4Hz) and theta (4-8Hz) bands at the temporal brain area. Therefore, we suggest this may be a brain signatures of visual event-related response in auditory cortex during left and right-hand response inhibition functions. In addition, strong activation and synchronization were shown in delta (1-4Hz), theta (4-8Hz) and alpha (8-13Hz) bands in the occipital cortex with the visual stimuli. Moreover, in human brain network, highest EEG coherence values were perceived in frontal lobe (F3-F4) compare to other cortices. The higher EEG activation in frontal cortex may be related to response inhibition function. These results delivered new perceptions during the inhibition function of multisensory brain regions with visual and auditory modalities information processing, respectively.

 

Twenty adults (10 males and 10 females, age ranged from 19 to 29) with normal or corrected normal vision and reported no abnormal neurological history participated. In the study, faces of seven basic emotions were tested in separate blocks and presented in pairs. The participants were asked to judge if the two faces in each trial were identical as in the same emotion or as from the same person. The results found that the brain activation of identity task were higher than those of the emotion task. The activation of the second faces were higher than those of the first faces. We found a difference in early processes between the emotion and identity tasks. It was found differences in viewing male and female stimuli at 60-83 ms and at BA7, BA18, BA31, BA37, BA10, and Right Cerebrum. The results of 300-500 found higher activation in processing male faces in identity task than in emotion task in BA13 at insular cortex. The findings of the present study suggests an early perception of emotion information which is implemented in phylogenetically ancient brain structures of subcortical nuclei(Tamietto & de Gelder, 2010). The brain activity found primarily in emotion-related area such as insular might be a result of processing emotional components facial expressions.

 

Individuals in the early-stage of the relationship are generally deeply committed to their partners without active self-control. This 'addictive' state in the early-stage, which is supported by the reward system in the brain (Aron et al., 2005), is believed to be suitable for maintenance of such a new relationship (for a review, Fisher et al., 2016). This observation naturally leads to the idea that the prefrontal executive control, which plays a crucial role in maintenance of a monogamous relationship, is less required in individuals in the early-stage of the relationship than those in the long-term lasting relationship. To test this hypothesis, we asked male participants in a romantic relationship to perform go/no-go task during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning, which is a well-validated task to measure right VLPFC activity implicated in executive control. Subsequently, they were engaged in a date-rating task in which they rated how much they wanted to date unfamiliar females. We found that individuals with higher right VLPFC activity regulated the interest for dates with females better. Importantly, this relationship was found only in the individuals with a long-term partner. Our findings extend previous findings of executive control in maintenance of the monogamous relationship by highlighting the role of VLPFC which varies according to the stage of the romantic relationship.

 

Diagrammatic representations carry meaning at multiple levels. While individual elements of a diagram carry meanings in specific ways, groups of these elements can comprise perceptual patterns that carry higher-order meaning. For example, while individual bars in a bar chart may express the prices of a metal in individual months, consecutive bars that make up the shape of a downward staircase as a group, express a general downward trend of the price (Pinker 1990). Extensive studies have been conducted on the psychological mechanism for the comprehension of such higher-order information expressed in a diagrams (E.g., Ratwani et al. 2008, Gattis and Holyoak 1996). As psychological studies, however, they do not focus on the very phenomenon of higher-order meaning in diagrams. Why does a particular perceptual pattern in a diagram carry a particular meaning rather than other meanings? This question is distinct from the question of what particular meaning people actually read off the given perceptual pattern. In this presentation, we will show that addressing this fundamental question from the perspective of logic can illuminate the psychological mechanisms for global reading. Using our approach, the meaning relation that supports a higher-order meaning is seen to be a logical consequence of more basic meanings relations that support low-order meanings. Syntactic rules on the choice and arrangements of diagrammatic elements make an important link in this chain of logical consequence relation, and this accounts for the fact that diagrams can be designed (1) to generate higher-order meanings, (2) to help the viewer to learn novel conceptual patterns, and even (3) to mislead the viewer to read off non-present higher-order meanings. Thus, our model points to a systematic understanding of how people process higher-order information in diagrams.

 

To examine whether age-related declines in multisensory integration already occur in the middle-aged, we compared the perception of audiovisual simultaneity among healthy young (YA), middle-aged (MA), and older adults (OA) (N=35, 32, and 35, respectively; aged 21-34, 55-64, and 65-80 years, respectively). All subjects underwent an audiovisual simultaneity judgment experiment, in which a visual flash stimulus was presented from a computer monitor and an auditory beep stimulus was presented from two speakers on either side of the monitor. The stimuli were presented at 11 stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs, ±600 ms, ±400 ms, ±300 ms, ±200 ms, ±100 ms, and 0 ms), with 20 trials for each SOA. Positive SOA indicated visual stimuli being presented earlier, and vice versa. Subjects had to judge whether the visual and auditory stimuli were presented simultaneously in each trial. Fitting the data using the model developed by García-Pérez & Alcalá-Quintana (2012), we compared the mean proportion of simultaneous responses across the 11 SOAs, the point of subjective simultaneity (PSS), and the width of the simultaneity window (δ) across the three groups. An Age x SOA interaction effect was found for the proportion of simultaneous responses across the 11 SOA (p< 0.05). The post-hoc tests revealed that compared to young adults, OA presented higher proportions of simultaneous responses at all SOAs (p< 0.05) except at -100 and 0 ms and MA presented higher proportions of simultaneous responses at -200, +200, +300, +400 ms, and +600 (p< 0.05). Both MA and OA groups also presented greater positive PSS and wider δ values than YA (p <0.05), suggesting that they had more asymmetrical audiovisual simultaneity window toward the visual-leading side and had greater uncertainty in determining audiovisual simultaneity. This study shows that declines in the perception of audiovisual simultaneity already exist in the healthy MA. Funding: NSC102-2410-H-002-213-MY2

 

Poorer dual-task gait performance is known as important risk factor for falls in the older population. Here, we investigated whether the perception of audiovisual simultaneity independently contributed to single- and dual-task gait performance in the aging population. Sixty-seven healthy middle-aged and older adults (aged 55-80 years) participated in this study. All participants underwent an audiovisual simultaneity judgment experiment, in which a visual flash stimulus was presented from a computer monitor and an auditory beep stimulus was presented from two speakers on either side of the monitor. The stimuli were presented at 11 stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs, ±600 ms, ±400 ms, ±300 ms, ±200 ms, ±100 ms, and 0 ms), with 20 trials for each SOA. Positive SOA indicated visual stimuli being presented earlier, and vice versa. Subjects had to judge whether the visual and auditory stimuli were presented simultaneously in each trial. Fitting the data using the model developed by García-Pérez & Alcalá-Quintana (2012), we used the width of the simultaneity window (δ) to indicate how well the subjects judged the stimuli simultaneity, with a larger δ indicating poor judgement. All subjects also underwent gait assessment under single-task, motor dual-task (carrying a cup of water while walking), and cognitive dual-task (performing serial-7 subtraction while walking). Regression analyses showed that for motor dual-task and cognitive dual-task gait performance, but not for single-task gait performance, δ independently contributed to double support time variability of gait, after controlling for age, sex, body height, body weight, vision, cognition, and lower extremity strength (adjusted R2 of the entire models= 0.162 and 0.358, respectively, p< 0.05 for both). This is the first study showing that declines in the perception of audiovisual simultaneity independently contribute to dual-task gait variability in the older population.

 

Virtual reality (VR) technology has been studied for entertainment and education, and training methods based on VR technology are being developed in other fields, such as medical care and advertising. The head-mounted display (HMD) has been released to consumers very recently, and it is expected that individuals will use HMDs for various types of VR training. This study explored the possibility of improving creativity using VR technology. Both physical and psychological embodiment of metaphors, which thinking about a problem “on one hand” and then “on the other hand, for creativity promoted convergent thinking and divergent thinking in problem solving (Leung, et al., 2012). We examined whether creative skill improves by “extending one’s field of vision”. Participants engaged in a creative task while they watched scenes with a HMD taken from a viewpoint higher than a normal gaze and then taken at the height of a normal gaze. The results showed that when participants watched the movie taken from a higher viewpoint than usual, creativity measured by the Unusual Uses Test increased, as compared to when they viewed the movie at normal height, suggesting that potential for creativity improved while using VR equipment.

 

The role of adverbs is to add information onto other words (c.f., Hoye, 1997; Simon-Vandenbergen & Aijmer, 2007, Suzuki, 2011). This paper explores the use of adverbials *ly that modify adjectives in the British National Corpus (BNC). Several sets of adverbials were selected – strongly vs. weakly; positively vs. negatively; lightly vs. heavily; and actively vs. passively. Interestingly, it was observed that, many a time, the comparatively positive adverbs (strongly, positively, lightly) modify negative words, and vice versa. This can be observed from the top collocates, for instance, strongly opposed vs. weakly positive, positively dangerous, lightly armed, etc. We also removed the *ly ending and investigated these words when they become adjectives, namely strong/weak; positive/negative; light/heavy; and active/passive. It was discovered that as adjectives themselves, they are mostly modified by adverbs of degree (particularly, relatively, merely, etc.). This study showed how a positive adverb can tone down the negative meaning of the adjective that follows; and how a negative adverb weakens the positive meaning of some adjectives. This observation reminds us how complicated our communication system is – why one bothers to say weakly positive than negative; and positively dangerous than just dangerous. The adverbs serve more than just adding information, it could be ideological or just a token of indirectness. More functions are yet to be discussed. References Hoye, L. F. (1997). Adverbs and modality in English. London: Longman Simon-Vandenbergen, A. and K. Aijmer. (2007). The Semantic Field of Modal Certainty: A Corpus-Based Study of English Adverbs. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Suzuki, D. (2011). A Functional Approach to the Modal Adverbs Certainly, Surely and Definitely , in C. Cummins, C. Elder, T. Godard, M. Macleod, E. Schmidt and G. Walkden (eds.) Proceedings of the Sixth Cambridge Postgraduate Conference in Language Research, 185–194. Cambridge: Cambridge Institute of Language Research.

 

It can be posited that any study of emerging world Englishes is embedded in cognitive linguistics—a move beyond the structural approach to languages to a functional paradigm in explaining their evolution. Today’s globalized necessity is to be able to use English competently, rather than like a “native” speaker, an elusive label given that second and third language speakers of English today far outnumber first language speakers. Moreover, new users of English are reshaping what is considered acceptable English, and they are doing so beyond the reality of different accents and other phonological variations. Systematic lexical, morphological, and syntactic changes are also occurring and being documented as the new users of English construct meaning in this globalized language. This study explores one emerging world English, Taiwan East Asian Standard(izing) English (TEASE) and proposes its veracity within the framework of semantics and lexical pragmatics, two subsets of cognitive linguistics. This framework is particularly useful given that the literature’s guidelines demarcating a specific world English’s features and outright errors are indistinct. Moreover, notwithstanding the embryonic stage of a TEASE glossary, then dictionary and widespread acceptance, this study focuses on the classroom implications of encouraging Taiwanese educators and students to assume ownership of their brand of English, even within Taiwan’s extant test culture. One research question exists: What are emerging in the public domain and in communicative acts that can be considered as stable semantic and pragmatic TEASE features? The methodology is qualitative, using content analysis of ex post facto student and public data. Thus far, five features are identified as distinct in TEASE, though not necessarily exclusive, and are recommended for further study. One classroom implication for Taiwanese students is in motivating them for more effective English learning through exposure to the reality of different world Englishes and TEASE’s place amongst them.

 

This study aims to theoretically predict the production of adjectival expressions by means of application of the Analytic Hierarchy Process, introduces by Saaty (1990, 1994, 2008, etc.), to the semantic structure of (scalar) adjectives. Among the components of adjective meaning are "norm," "objects for comparison," and "background/foreground scales," all of which greatly affect the use of those expressions, or work to decide whether an evaluative judgment is true or not (i.e., P or ¬P). In the linguistic domain, however, it has not been revealed how those elements are interrelated with each other to make such a judgment, and how we can make a theoretical prediction about the judgment based on that. The AHP is seen as an effective tool for dealing with complex decision making, which make it possible to calculate the value of each option. We apply this tool to the theory of adjective expressions in the following manners. First, the decision matrix analysis is introduced to think about how multiple sub-scales can be synthesized into a scale, where “ranks” of the alternatives are computed by multiplying each value of the alternatives by the importance of the criterion. Second, multiple pairwise comparisons are adopted to measure “weights” of background scales and objects for comparison: each of them are compared with one another in the round-robin system (rating 1 to 9), and then calculate a “priority vector.” As a result of those, it gets much easier to predict the generation of adjectives that are quite subjective, variable according to situation, and inconsistent among individuals. For example, the following case can be taken into account; you say “that dog is cute” in the condition where you would think of your pet dog as the most preferential alternative and consider shortness of limbs as the most important sub-scale, etc.

 

Partington, Duguid and Taylor (2013:84), citing Louw (2000) and Morley and Partington (2009), said that end up means that “whenever we have ended up being or doing was not according to the original plan but has gone off programme in some way, and is no longer subject to our cognitive control.” Because of this, end up is often used to refer to “negative outcomes”. This paper collected 499 news articles from Proquest most request news that contained the keyword END UP in all grammatical forms. A total of 570 instances of END UP were collected and among these, END UP IN has 95 instances; END UP BEING has 65; END UP WITH has 62; END UP ON has 34; and END UP AT has 25, all of which constitute about 50% of the total instances of END UP in all the news articles. We then analyzed the connotation of these combinations in the news articles (redundant results were removed manually). These are some examples for analysis. It was found that end up requires analysis at the discourse level because it involves an assumption that is often in conflict with the outcomes. Positive “I'm a little disappointed. This might have been the best shot we had. But it might end up being a blessing in disguise,” said Jim Jess, a Marietta tea party organizer. Negative A Hollywood smile signals success, and the social pressure to have perfect teeth has led to a booming cosmetic dentistry industry. Yet as Otto illustrates in this fascinating book, millions of Americans lack access to basic dental care, and many end up in the emergency room with dental problems. Neutral Because we get to choose who we follow, we may end up with different facts. We can actually create a constant supply of thoughts and statements from others who agree with everything we believe in, further reinforcing our values. in being with on at paying neutral 21 18 21 8 19 4 negative 59 15 16 16 3 9 positive 15 32 11 0 0 0

 

Predictive Processing is promoted by philosophers and neuroscientists as an emerging neural and cognitive architecture (Clark, 2016; Allen and Friston, 2016; Gallagher and Allen, 2016) and was shown to answer the systematicity argument (Kato, 2017). The framework tries to explain cognitive phenomena as emerging from the mechanism of hierarchical prediction error minimization in the brain, and implies the massively context dependent view of cognition in which presumably every part of cognition is influenced by prior knowledge to some extent. This process is shown to be captured as Bayesian inference. Humans do not just recognize patterns or acquire knowledge, but also create an abstract causal model (structure) of it. This structure is employed to make later learning in the domain much faster and easier. This phenomenon, called ‘learning to learn,’ have been modeled via Hierarchical Bayesian Models (HBM) in several learning domains (Griffith et al., 2010; Kemp et al., 2007). HBM use a hierarchical setting of parameters to categorize data and acquire abstract knowledge. We propose that creative aspects of humans seen in human culture including science and arts can also be formalized using this framework. By creative process, we refer to one in that people recognize familiar structures in data and analyze them using abstract knowledge they already have. Creative process specified as above is similar to that of ‘learning to learn,’ but two are slightly different in that ‘creative process’ requires the use of knowledge to not just categorize but to analyze the data and one’s own knowledge. This suggests that underlying computational principle of ‘learning to learn’ and ‘creativity’ is essentially the same. The hierarchical setting is crucial, since ‘learning to learn’ includes meta-cognitive and meta-learning processes, and human culture has been built through cumulative creation processes where novel structures are constructed based on existing cultural structures.

 

There's no one who wants their cognitive skill declined in old age. However, it can't be avoided. Cognitive problems often encountered by elder, this problems such easy to forget, lack quality of sleep, and so on. Cognitive problems will have an impact on almost all aspects in their daily life. Of course, these issues certainly need to be found an intervention. This research method using a systematic review and compared several intervention. Finding the intervention for these problems is necessary to be comprehensively discussed. This study aimed to compare the several interventions that already examined in those researches. Furthermore, we construct an combination preventive intervention that feasible to be applied for primary caregiver among the elder.

 

Keywords: embodiment simulation, iconicity, figure/ground, metaphor, metonymy, translation Translation is a vital activity for many English/Chinese bilingual individuals. However, there is an apparent paucity in the research of cognitive motivations in Chinese/English (C/E) translation, although in the last forty years, cognitive linguistics has grown from its daring nascence to a sophisticated enterprise. The advances are marked by, to list just a very incomplete few: Lakoff and Johnson’s metaphors we live by (1980), Langacker’s cognitive grammar (1987), Talmy’s cognitive semantics (2000), the discovery of mirror neurons at the University of Parma (Iacoboni, 2009), Pinker’s language as a window into human thought (2007), Bergen’s embodied simulation hypothesis (2012), and Barsalou and others’ study of abstract concepts (2013). All these pioneering and monumental explorations have opened up systematic and insightful theoretical perspectives that not only have transformed our understanding of the relationship between language and thought, but also have handed us the torch of enlightening light that can guide our way to re-examine issues in C/E translation. In fact, many motivational issues in C/E translation can be addressed by theories in cognitive linguistics, such as conceptual metaphors and metonyms, iconicity, figure/ground, and embodied simulation. While this presentation qualitatively examines translation evidence of these areas, all the discussion will lead to the argument that the essence of translation is embodied simulation, a theoretical framework that contains the such key points as: • Most likely we understand language by simulating in our minds what it would be like to experience the things that the language describes. • Simulation is the creation of mental experiences of perception and action in the absence of their external manifestation. We use our brains to simulate percepts and actions without actually perceiving or acting (Bergen, 2012). • We understand the mental states of others by simulating them in our brain, and we achieve this effect through mirror neurons (Iacobon, 2009:34). • A mirror neuron is one that is activated when a person performs a certain action or has a certain experience and also when the person observes someone else performing the same action or having the same experience (Coleman, 2009). Through a renewed and detailed analysis of the two contrastive English translations of a well-know Chinese poem天净沙•秋思, it is argued that the embodied simulation principles can persuasively govern the mental operations in translation. On the one hand, a translator derives mental simulation from the source language and culture, and such simulation is conditioned by his linguistic competence in the source language and his overall knowledge of the source culture, both of which are individualized by one's life experiences (cf. Schnelle, 2010: 25-6). On the other hand, the translator represents the simulations he has constructed from the source language into the target language and culture. The representation process and the final products, in turn, are constrained by the translator’s linguistic and cultural competences in the target language and culture. Like language understanding, translation is a complex human engagement that cannot go far without embodied simulation. The observations gained from this research widen the emergent cognitive perspective in translation studies, a new approach that can be well-informed and solidly supported by progresses in cognitive linguistics and neural science. Selected References Bergan, B. (2012). Louder than words: the new science of how the mind makes meaning. New York: Basic Books. Colman, A. M. (2009). A dictionary of psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dancygier, B., & Sweetser, E. (2014). Figurative language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Iacoboni, M. (2009). Mirroring people: The science of empathy and how we connect with others. New York, N.Y: Picador. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Langacker, R. W. (1987). Foundations of cognitive grammar. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press. Pinker, S. (2007). The stuff of thought: Language as a window into human nature. New York: Viking. Talmy, L. (2000). Toward a cognitive semantics: Volume I. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Pinker, S. (2007). The stuff of thought: Language as a window into human nature. New York: Viking. Schnelle, H. (2010). Language in the brain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilson-Mendenhall C.D., Simmons W.K., Martin A., & Barsalou L.W. (2013) Contextual processing of abstract concepts reveals neural representations of nonlinguistic semantic content. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. 25(6 ): 920-35

 

One of the central findings in dialogue research is that interlocutors rapidly converge on referring expressions which become progressively systematized and abstract (Clark, 1996). This occurs for a wide range of referents, e.g. when referring to spatial locations (Garrod and Doherty, 1994), music (Healey, 2002), confidence (Fusaroli et al., 2012), and temporal sequences (Mills, 2011). Cumulatively, these findings suggest that interaction places important constraints on the semantics of referring expressions. However, there is currently no consensus on which interactive mechanisms underpin convergence. The Interactive alignment model of Pickering and Garrod (2004) favours alignment processes, the Grounding model (Clark , 1996) emphasizes the role of positive feedback, while Healey (2002) demonstrates the importance of miscommunication. To investigate in closer detail the development of referential coordination, we report a variant of the “maze task” (Pickering and Garrod, 2004). Participants communicate with each other via an experimental chat tool (Healey and Mills, 2006), which selectively transforms participants' private turn-revisions into public self-repairs that are made visible to the other participant. For example, if a participant, A types: A: "On the top square" and then before sending, revises the turn to: A: "On the top row" The server automatically detects the revision and transforms it into a public self-repair, e.g. A: "On the top square umm I meant row" Participants who received these transformed turns used more abstract and systematized referring expressions, but performed worse at the task. We argue that this is due to two opposite effects: The artificial self-repairs have the beneficial effect of enhancing problem detection and recovery from error by amplifying naturally occurring miscommunication (cf. Healey et al, 2013). On the other hand, once these coordination problems are resolved, the public self-repairs have an opposite, deleterious effect by decreasing participants' confidence in the referring conventions established during the task.

 

The co-presence of bodies in intersubjective situations can give rise to processes of kinesthetic empathy and physiological synchronisation, especially in the contexts of dance: the body and attention of the spectators are oriented towards the dancers. We investigate the processes of “bodymind’s states” contagion between dancers and spectators and its relation to subjective measures of attention. In the Labodanse project we worked closely with the French choreographer Myriam Gourfink who develops a unique movement based on slower breathing of the dancers, generating an extremely slow movement without rhythmic ruptures. Phenomenological studies of her work report changes in temporal perception (TP), and changes in bodily attentional states. In order to quantify this change in TP we had 12 spectators perform two TP protocols (Spontaneous Tempo Production - STP - and Apparent Motion effect - AM - tasks) Before and after a 40-min live performance. We performed a control experiment with a choreography of a distinctly different quality of movement (14 subjects). Subjective reports were collected at the end of the performance. Physiological data was recorded during the performance. Post-performance, we observed a significant slowing down of STP, while AM was reported with longer temporal intervals. Neither of these effects was observed in the control condition. Correlations with subjective reports show a link between paying attention to the breath of the dancer and the change in the perception of AM. Correlations with physiological data are analyzed. The results suggest an expansion of the “specious present” (Wittmann). The absence of similar results in the control condition argues that 1) these effects were due to the specificity of Gourfink’s choreography; 2) changes in TP is a working proxy to study contagion of body-mind states; 3) the role of conscious attention to the breathing of the other enhances intersubjective processes as "body-mind" contagion.

 

Eye-tracking technology is used to infer cognitive processes in many reading studies. Eye movement analyses using garden path sentences have been instrumental in illuminating the online syntactic aspects of the reading process. The purpose of this study is to examine readers’ eye movements during the reading of Thai garden path constructions, and to compare reading patterns between junior and senior Thai readers. Thai writing system is theoretically appealing as it generally has no spaces between words and rarely uses punctuation. Therefore, word segmentation must be based on linguistic cues and, consequently, can be a source of ambiguity for the reader. The experiment described here uses compound nouns to construct garden path sentences based on word segmentation ambiguity. Data from a sample of Thai junior and senior high school students indicate that, despite profound differences between writing systems, the overall impact of sentence level ambiguity is similar to that found for English. The unspaced nature of Thai, however, gives rise to a distinctive pattern of regressive eye movements.

 

With a sentence ‘Tom respects Linda’, Linda is regarded as the cause of the situation because of the implicit causality of interpersonal verb respect. However, with a sentence ‘The teacher respects the student.’ we do not judge the student as the cause of the situation, because respecting someone old seems more natural than respecting some one young. The two examples show that implicit causality of a verb and relationships between people can affect how we make causal attribution. In this research, we tried to investigate how the implicit causality of interpersonal verb (implicit cxausality) and the relation between participants of a situation (social relation) affect the causal attribution in two experiments.. In experiment 1, participants read one sentence like “The teacher respects the student”, and made causal attribution. Causal attribution depends on the causality congruency of the two factors . When causality of the social relation is different from that of the implicit causality (incongruent condition), causal attribution that accords the implicit causality decreased. People also read the verb of a sentence longer in the incongruent condition. However, the implicit causality influence causal judgment more than social context. In experiment 2, participants read two sentences, the sentence used in Exp 1 as the first sentence and second sentence starting with one of the two participants of the first sentence. Participants rated the second sentence having subject consistent on implicit causality more appropriate than the sentence having inconsistent subject. These findings implied that interpersonal verb and social context all have impact on causal judgments, but implicit causality of interpersonal verb have more impacts on causality.

 

Expectations of pain significantly bias the experience of pain in humans and different emotional states potentially influence this cognitive process. However, how pleasant and unpleasant moods affect pain expectations at the behavioral level remains unknown. Here, we aim to clarify if different emotional states bias effects of expectation on pain at behavioral level. In the current study, we manipulated the expectation of participants towards the upcoming painful stimuli and induced different emotional conditions by using the International Affective Picture System. In preliminary results, we found that both painful sensation and effect of expectation on pain were significantly modulated by picture-evoked emotions. Results obtained from this research will enhance our knowledge on how expectation interacts with emotion to shape human responses to pain.

 

Beginners in art appreciation generally have “reality constraints,” in that they show a strong tendency to insist on identifying the depicted object in the artwork with its realistic expression. This tendency was observed in the appreciation of not only representative painting, but also abstract painting. In the case of the appreciation of representative painting, the reality constraints could be relaxed by reading the commentaries about the formal aspect of the paintings. In this study, we examined whether the style of abstract paintings and reading commentaries on them would influence art beginners’ responses to abstract paintings. Twenty-four pairs of college students participated in the experiment. In the first session (learning phase), participants appreciated two representative paintings with the help of any of the following three methods: reading the commentaries on the objects depicted in each painting, reading the commentaries on the formal aspect of the painting, and reading no commentary. In the second session (transfer phase), the participants viewed one of the two abstract paintings that had no commentary. The abstract paintings viewed were Kandinsky‘s “Composition VII,” which had a number of small elements of ambiguous shapes and various colors, and Mondrian’s “Composition with Large Red Plane, Yellow, Black, Gray and Blue,” which was constructed using rectangles of various sizes and colors, and bold black lines. In each session, the participants freely talked to one another while viewing the painting for five minutes. The results revealed that the commentaries were not effective in changing the verbal response to the abstract paintings. On viewing Kandinsky, the participants insisted on interpreting the details as concrete objects like vegetables, animals, etc. On the contrary, in the case of Mondrian, the participants tended to focus more on the formal aspect of the painting, especially to identify the colors referred to in the title.

 

We use various information sources for learning in everyday life. Among these, television plays an important role, and social media is gaining influence. We noticed that some television programs are beginning to incorporate social-media texts, such as Twitter. Incorporation of social-media messages may influence our learning from these television programs in two ways. First, incorporating social-media messages can cause split attention effects (Sweller and Chandler, 1994). Thus, the retention of viewers will be decreased since they are required to pay attention to both the program contents and social-media messages. Second, if the cognitive process is harmed as mentioned above, the attitude change and appropriate judgement will be inhibited. The viewers cannot process important information fluently enough to change their attitude and judge critically. To explore these effects of incorporation of social-media messages, we conducted two experiments with participants from different academic backgrounds: humanities or information sciences. A fake television program arguing about a pseudo-scientific topic was made for the experiments. In both experiments, thirty participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: with and without social-media messages screened during the program. We investigated content retention, changes in attitude, and judgement of persuasiveness in different situations concerning the topic. Results indicated that, although there was a difference in the strength of the effects, common tendencies were found in both experiments. As expected, the participants in the without-social-media-messages condition performed better on a retention test and showed less positive attitude toward the pseudo-science. However, contrary to our prediction, participants who received social-media messages tended more to appropriately judged that the pseudo-scientific proposal was not very persuasive. Based on these results, the cognitive and emotional effects of the social-media messages are discussed.

 

Touching commodities during shopping facilitates purchase decisions. However, commodities are not always available to touch prior to purchase (e.g., online shopping). As an alternative strategy, just imagining touching an object and thinking about how it feels like (i.e., haptic imagery) has been found to facilitate psychological ownership. Our previous study revealed that haptic imagery increased psychological ownership via perceived control, regardless of the price of the imagined objects. In the present study, we investigated whether haptic imagery and effectance motivation could promote willingness to pay (i.e., WTP) through increased psychological ownership. Effectance motivation affects the feeling of efficacy and competence. When individuals associate ownership with control, they come to believe and expect that possessions provide control to their owner, and thereby serve as a source of effectance and competence related satisfactions. We used a 2 (imagery: haptic imagery vs. no imagery) × 2 (effectance motivation: high vs. low) between-participants design. Our results showed that haptic imagery directly promotes WTP, and this effect is fully mediated by psychological ownership. Further, effectance motivation also affects WTP. In the high effectance motivation condition, participants in the haptic imagery condition scored higher on WTP than did those in the no imagery condition. However, in the no imagery condition, participants with low effectance motivation scored higher on WTP than did participants with high effectance motivation. These results indicated that haptic imagery is one of the useful ways to satisfy the desire for control elicited by effectance motivation. The present study suggests that the simple cognitive practice of imaging touching elicits a strong and consistent effect on willingness to pay. To our knowledge, ours is the first study to demonstrate that manipulated effectance motivation, rather than individual differences, affects psychological ownership and WTP. Haptic imagery and effectance motivation are identified as innovative strategies for marketing.

 

The current study examined the stimulus-response compatibility effects between physically and psychologically “warm-cold” visual stimuli and physical temperatures of participants’ hand. Before the experimental sessions, participants were asked to immerse one hand in warm water and the other hand in cold water. In Experiment 1, either a warm or cold landscape picture (e.g., fire or snow) was presented in each trial. Participants were instructed to respond by pressing designated keys, with a warm hand for warm landscape pictures and with a cold hand for cold landscape pictures (consistent trials), or with a cold hand for warm landscape pictures and with a warm hand for cold landscape pictures (inconsistent trials). Results showed that the averaged response time in consistent trials was shorter than in inconsistent trials. In Experiment 2, either happy or sad face (suggesting psychological warmth and cold, respectively) was presented in each trial, and other procedures were similar to those in Experiment 1. As results, the averaged response time in consistent trials was shorter than in inconsistent trials only for happy faces. Therefore, our results suggested that information regarding physically and psychologically warmness-coldness are influenced each other (Williams & Bargh, 2008) and are shared between perceptual/cognitive and motor production systems.

 

Attentional orienting is sensitive to types of cues and task demands. A target at the periphery cued location (valid) usually attracts attention, nevertheless, if the cue to target onset asynchrony (SOA) is longer than 300 ms, the inhibition of return (IOR) is observed. Changing detection tasks to discrimination tasks would induce a smaller IOR in a later time course. The goal of this study is to examine whether IOR generated in a discrimination task by gaze cues. Gaze direction is a central cue but is shown to induce IOR at 2400 ms SOA in a localization task. Therefore in this study we introduced 4 levels of SOA (2000, 2400, 2800, and 3200 ms) to test whether discrimination tasks can generate IOR. Thirty participants (mean 26.64 years old) were recruited. The discrimination task requested participants to distinguish the direction of a triangle (upward or downward). We use 10 photographs of real faces to introduce gaze cues. The validity of the cue was set to be uninformative. The IOR was significant at 2400 ms SOA (6 ms) and 2800 ms SOA (7 ms). Our data suggested that the central cue, gaze direction, can also induce IOR in a discrimination task. Therefore gaze cues shifts attentional focus in a similar manner with periphery cues though in a different time course.

 

In this study, we examined hemodynamic changes related to the motor concept in associative relations among words. Subjects were 10 healthy young adults. All subjects were right-handed and Japanese. Before measurement, the subjects were provided with written informed consent after receiving a full explanation of the study. For the experiments, we used a multi-channel Near-infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS) device. NIRS-imaging is an optical method which allows non-invasive measurements of changes in the concentration of oxy- and deoxy-hemoglobin in cerebral vessels. The measurement point intervals were 9mm and the probes were placed on bilateral areas covered from BA45 to posterior of BA22. The experiments’ stimuli were selected from pairs of stimulus words and associated words in the Associated Concept Dictionary (ACD) and presented in the form of a visual stimulation to the subjects. The ACD is a Japanese dictionary with a hierarchical structure of words associated by human subjects based on seven semantic relations (hypernym, hyponym, part/material, attribute, synonym, action and situation). All the subjects have participated in association experiments for ACD and understand the associative concepts and their functions. In this study, we used action relation pairs, which is the stimulus words are nouns and the associated words are action verbs. During the action concept task, deoxygenation of hemoglobin occurred in left BA22, while oxygenation occurred in left posterior of BA41. Deoxygenation also occurred in right posterior of BA45 to 44. Thus, it suggests that this response is related to the motor concept processing. This study clarified that it is possible to correlate brain activation to the associative relations among concepts using NIRS-imaging.

 

The individual difference in perception is revealed by the photo of #TheDress. With the same photo, some observers perceive a dress as blue-and-black dress and the others perceive it as white-and-gold. The current study hypothesize that the individual difference in perceiving spatial context contributes to the phenomenon. The estimation of illumination is affected by spatial context and therefore the perception of the color of a target surface is influenced. The hypothesis is tested with a dual-masked paradigm assessing the spatial context effect on the visual performance to a target. In the task, the participants were to detect a 4 cy/deg vertical Gabor target superimposed on a vertical pedestal (contrast ranged from 0-40%) in the presence of collinear and iso-oriented Gabor flankers (50% contrast). Among 53 participants, 38% reported seeing a blue-and-black dress (BB) and 57% reported seeing white-and-gold (WG). At low pedestal contrasts, the presence of flankers produced a greater target threshold reduction in the BB group. At high pedestal contrasts, no consistent difference in the flanker effect was found between groups. These flanker effects were fit to our sensitivity modulation model, which suggests the effects are multiplicative terms applied to both the excitatory and inhibitory terms of a divisive inhibition response function. The model parameters revealed that the greater flanker facilitation observed in BB group resulted from increment in flanker excitation rather than reduced flanker inhibition. The findings are in support of the notion that estimation of the global features of a scene, in turn, the perceived reflectance or color of a target surface is under the influence of sensitivity to context.

 

Visual crowding refers to a phenomenon that conscious identification of a peripheral object is severely impaired when it is surrounded by flankers. Evidence from our previous behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) studies indicates that semantic priming can occur even when the prime word was crowded and unrecognizable (Yeh et al., 2012; Zhou et al., 2016), suggesting that semantic information survives visual crowding. The present study used Magnetoencephalography (MEG) to investigate the time course of brain activation when an isolated or a crowded prime word preceded a single target word, and the prime was either semantically related or unrelated to the target. Results showed that the contrast between related and unrelated isolated primes activated the left middle temporal gyrus (MTG) during 400-600ms after the onset of the subsequent target. For the contrast between related and unrelated crowded primes, however, activation was shown in the middle frontal gyrus (MFG), inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), and postcentral gyrus during 400-600ms. These results suggest that, while both isolated prime and crowded prime lead to semantic activation so as to affect target processing, when the target is preceded by a crowded prime it requires more spread processing in the semantic network than when preceded by an isolated prime.

 

Kurumada & Jaeger (2015) claimed that speakers hold comprehension consideration in the expense of their production cost. Using Japanese transitive sentences in a spoken-recall paradigm, they demonstrated that Japanese speakers were more likely to attach case markers to animate objects than to inanimate objects (Exp’t 1), in order to make it clear that the second nouns are patients rather than agents. However, we failed to replicate the animacy effect in a written-recall paradigm with Korean. Instead, we found that speakers’ production preferences were remarkably influenced by the distributional patterns associated with case markers and word orders. First, we conducted the written-recall production experiment in which word order, the animacy of direct objects, and the ellipsis of object case markers. Second, using the Korean spoken corpus, we computed the degree of surprisal to encounter sentences corresponding to our manipulation. Our key findings were as follows. 1) Overall, Korean speakers strongly preferred to produce case markers and to rearrange non-canonical OSV to canonical SOV word orders. 2) Korean speakers did not show particular preference due to animacy. 3) We observed that surprisal was significantly proportional to speakers’ behaviors for the use of object case markers and the use of SOV order. Of interest, the degree of surprisal based on OSV sentences strongly predicted speakers’ bias to attach case markers increasingly, whereas it predicted speakers’ willingness not to change word orders. On the other hand, the degree of surprisal based on sentences with null case markers strongly predicted speakers’ bias to change word orders from OSVs to SOVs, instead of attaching case markers. Our findings showed that speakers diligently exploited the distributional information, attempting to achieve a trade-off between production ease and comprehension goal.

 

One of critical issues in executive control is how the nervous system can exert the flexibility to inhibit a prepotent response to meet the sudden change of the environment. Many studies employed the stop signal task with measurements of response times and also with a variety of devices such as EEG, EMG and dynamometers for investigating the point of no return and its locus in the neural system during the stopping processes. The present study aims to elucidate the mechanisms of the inhibitory control by using EEG, EMG and detailed response force measurements. We measured the response force, response speed, peak force and rising rate to peak force in Go trials, Stop trials and also partial response trials in the Stop condition. The results showed that the reaction time was slower and the peak force was stronger in Go trials than in erroneous Stop trials (non-cancelled stop trials). This replicated previous findings (e.g.: De Jong et al., 1990; Ko et al., 2012). Importantly, we found that the peak force increased as a function of the stop signal delay but did not reach to the peak force exerted in the Go trials. This peak force increase may indicate that the inhibitory system is still in effect even after a response is well on its way suggesting that the point of no return, if any, is dependent only on the brain processing speed and the time it takes for the signal to be transmitted to the point of interest. Moreover, the latency from pinch-response to peak force was longer in Go trials than in non-cancelled (Stop-respond) trials, indicating that the inhibition system has an active role even when our motor behavior seems to already be committed. We also calculated the peak force in the non-cancelled responses and found that the peak force in most of the non-cancelled trials (61%) were much smaller than the peak force of Go trials (2SD below the mean). These patterns of results indicate that participants could partially inhibit their responses despite that they could not fully stop their prepotent action which suggesting the point of no return could occur in both central and peripheral nervous systems.

 

The endowment effect – a tendency to value a good more when owning it – has been attributed to aversion to loss caused by change in reference point. Köszegi and Rabin proposed an expectation-based reference-dependent model in which the reference point is stochastic. The model makes unique predictions on the endowment effect on risk that have received mixed empirical support thus far. In this study, we investigated whether the inconsistent findings are due to the effectiveness of the endowment manipulation. Methods. Each subject carried out 72 trials for the experiment. On each trial, the subjects were first endowed with a lottery. Following the presentation of the endowed lottery, a new lottery was presented. The new lottery generated based on the endowment with reward probability difference (±15%, ±10%, ±5%) and the expected value difference (0, ±2 coins). Subjects can decide whether to keep the endowed lottery or switch to the new lottery. In either case, the lottery she/he eventually chose became the endowment on the next choice. Results. 30 subjects participated in the experiment. First, our results show subjects tended to keep the lottery endowed by their own choice but not the endowment initially given to the subjects. Second, consistent with the theoretical prediction, the endowment effect (the frequency of keeping the endowed lottery) was affected by the probability of reward associated with the endowed lottery. Third, this effect was mediated by the difference in probability of reward between the lotteries. That is, subjects became more risk averse/seeking when endowment had a higher/smaller reward probability. Together, these results indicate that probability difference mediated the reference-dependent preference and that the effect of stochastic reference point on risk attitudes was larger under greater sense of ownership.

 

Under our social network, easily observed phenomena about social interaction that a person would depend on significant other's opinion to make the decision. However, little research focuses on how romantic relationship affects on shopping behavior among young couples. In this study, we explore the interaction of young couples over one year and expect the areas responsible for theory of mind (TOM, especially temporal-parietal junction, or TPJ) would be especially activated when considering others. The behavioral results showed clearly the modulation of the romantic relationship on one’s own buying decision: compared to one along make the decision, people tend to change their original buying ratio in the preference of other's ratings. The neural activity at the time of buying decision revealed the strongly activated regions in the TPJ, anterior insula, and superior temporal sulcus associated with TOM. Next, the psychophysiological interaction (PPI) analysis was used to estimate the functional connectivity in the rTPJ as a seed region in the conflict and consensus conditions, the results show that caudate, insula, anterior cingulate and the medial prefrontal area had increased connectivity while considering the other's rank. In our task, the evaluation of shopping network is explored from the significant other outside the scanner before the shopping decision (how the other likes the decision). The result implies that the significant other's attitudes did modulate the purchase decisions when couples face the conflict via real-time social interaction.

 

Metamemory – one’s knowledge and awareness about memory – is of vital importance to one’s development and contains three parts: knowledge about memory, control over memory and monitoring on memory. Among these three, monitoring is the most important which includes prospective monitory such as EOJ, JOL and FOK, and retrospective monitory – judgment of confidence (JOC). Although prospective monitory has been studied extensively, there is not enough research on retrospective monitory. Previous studies have found self-efficacy and positive and negative affect have impact on participants’ accuracy of JOC, yet there’s no evidence showing the relationship between anxiety and retrospective monitory since anxiety has been an ever-increasing problem for the society. Therefore, in the present study, we tend to explore the relationship between state anxiety and accuracy of JOC. We manipulated level of anxiety of participants by using continuous calculation task and structured interview respectively on experimental and control groups. Then we measured participants’ accuracy of JOC using a 10 questions questionnaire about a 5-min video they watched before. We found that participants in experimental group had a less accurate JOC compared to people in control group and that the more anxious one was, the less accurate his JOC would be. Although the interaction between group and gender was not significant, there was still a trend that male and female participants had different patterns. Meanwhile, types of learning – latent and overt learning – also seemed to have an impact on JOC accuracy.

 

Fearful faces attract our attention easily and they can also serve as distractors for a visual working memory (VWM) task. Event-related potentials (ERPs), and especially a component termed contralateral delay activity (CDA), have been used to index the VWM storage. Previous studies utilizing CDA have shown that storage of facial identities in VWM is affected by fearful faces as distractors. Distractor effects of other facial expressions have not been investigated. In addition, it is not clear if VWM for the face identity and its interference by facial emotions correlates with participant’s VWM capacity for neutral objects. In the present study, we first measured the participants’ VWM capacity for neutral objects, and then investigated their ability to store facial identities while recording ERPs. By using the CDA component to index VWM maintenance, we found that participants with high capacity for neutral objects were more accurate in face identity task than low-capacity participants. The CDA results showed different pattern for the high and low VWM capacity group suggesting that high VWM participants maintain the similar visual information across neutral, angry and happy two-target conditions while angry faces as targets boosted the VWM capacity for the low capacity group. In addition, different emotional distractors would have different effects on the VWM maintenance. The results suggested that when the VWM resources are sufficient, visual information can be maintained similarly for the different facial emotions, but when the VWM resources are limited, the maintenance of the threatening faces is preferred.

 

The interrogative word shenme ‘what’ plays a critical role in expressing questions (e.g., shenme shuiguo meiyou ren chi? ‘what fruit did nobody eat’), but few empirical studies have addressed the comprehension of its non-interrogative meaning in statements (e.g., shenme shuiguo Dou meiyou ren chi. ‘Nobody ate any fruit’). It is generally agreed that shenme ‘what’ expresses the (non-interrogative) universal interpretation when combined with Dou, as in the example above. In Mandarin Chinese, this characteristic is also shared by a negative polarity item renhe ‘any’, which is a synonym to shenme ‘what’ as in renhe shuiguo Dou meiyou ren chi ‘Nobody ate any fruit’. To compare the interpretations of shenme ‘what’ in the linguistic context with and without Dou with the interpretation of NPI renhe ‘any’ before Dou, we conducted four behavioral experiments in which we employed the Question-Statement Task developed by Zhou and Crain (2011) to examine the interpretations between spoken and written sentences by mature speakers of Mandarin. Different from ‘renhe+Dou’, which resulted in the universal interpretation consistently, ‘shenme+Dou’ depended on the presentation modality and the position of shenme ‘what’ in the sentences. The results showed that ‘shenme’ at subject position which combined with Dou (e.g., shenme ma Dou meiyou mai bingqilin ‘None of horses bought ice creams’) was more likely to be interpreted as an non-interrogative expression (62.5%) in written sentences than in spoken sentences (6.9%), while at object position (e.g., shenme shuiguo tuzi Dou meiyou chi ‘None of rabbits ate the fruit’), “shenme+Dou” was accepted as universal expression with higher possibility in written sentences (95.8%) than in auditory sentences (75%). The present findings identify that much attention should be taken into syntax/pragmatics interface to elucidate how they interact with each other.

 

Naturally occurring sounds are routinely periodic. The ability to phase-lock to such periodicity facilitates pitch perception and interaural time differences (ITDs) determination in binaural localization. We examined whether deficient pitch processing in individuals with congenital amusia (tone deafness) is accompanied by impaired ability to localize peripheral binaural musical pitch at the short-term memory level. If common mechanisms subserve processing of temporal-fine-structure based pitch and ITDs, then deficient processing of one feature should impair performance on the other. Thus, we measured ITD discrimination thresholds using an adaptive-tracking procedure for lateralizing musical tone pairs separated by different semitone intervals. ITD thresholds were unimpaired by concurrent pitch changes, even when pitch variations were increased to 5 semitones in congenital amusics. For short-term memory tasks, the amusic group performed significantly worse than matched controls in probed pitch recall, irrespective of the complexity level of concurrent variations along the ITD dimension of the melodic sequence. Interestingly, despite normal peripheral ITD thresholds, amusic individuals performed worse than controls in recalling probed locations of tones within a sequence of musical notes originating from different ITD-simulated locations. Our results suggest that individuals with congenital amusia are unimpaired in peripheral signal encoding to determine musical pitch and process binaural ITDs. The results further imply that musical pitch and binaural ITDs can be processed separately at the auditory short-term memory level. Consistent with studies proposing higher-order processing deficits in amusia, our findings demonstrate that pitch-specific deficits in amusia are unlikely to be due to temporal-fine-structure coding in the auditory periphery and provide further evidence of dissociated, but impaired, pitch and ITD encoding process at the auditory short-term memory level.

 

Associating written symbols to speech sounds are crucial for literacy acquisition. Here we investigate the long-term learning effect of orthographic–phonological associations with magnetoencephalography. Eleven native Chinese and thirteen Finnish participants were measured during an audio-visual experiment using Chinese characters in which auditory only (A), visual only (V), audio-visual congruent (AVC) and audio-visual incongruent (AVI) stimuli were presented randomly. To make sure the participants paid equal attention to both auditory and visual modality, there were testing trials occurring with 7.5% possibility in which the memory of character and/or sound one trial back were tested. Minimum-norm source estimate of the event-related fields were computed by combining freesurfer average brain template and MEG data. Permutation test with spatial-temporal clustering revealed a congruency effect (p=0.018) in the Chinese group but not in the Finnish group. This effect was mainly localized in the left auditory cortex (Heschl's gyrus) and showed stronger activation to incongruent audio-visual pairs in a late time window (465-875ms). Between group comparisons showed stronger brain activations to the auditory and audiovisual stimuli in the left and right superior and middle temporal cortex in the Chinese group compared with the Finnish group. The Chinese group also had stronger activations in the left motor, left and right fusiform cortices when presented with visual stimuli. In conclusion, learned associations between Chinese characters and speech sounds lead to stronger cortical response for incongruent audio-visual pairs in Heschl’s gyrus and larger activation in brain areas where visual and auditory information are processed and integrated.

 

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of commonality search training on creative idea generation. Our previous study found that searching the commonality between apparently unrelated objects helps one find original perspectives. Based on the results, we assumed that one could generate original ideas using commonality search as a strategy if s/he repeatedly practices it. Forty-six undergraduates were assigned to one of two conditions: commonality search and word association. While the participants in the commonality search condition listed the commonalities between the apparently unrelated objects (e.g. a strawberry and television), those in the word association condition listed as many words as they remembered from each object. Thereafter, the participants in both the conditions were asked to list their ideas about the unusual uses of wire hanger. Two independent evaluators scored the ideas generated by the participants on a 7-point scale in terms of feasibility, originality, and attractiveness. The results revealed no significant differences between the conditions with respect to the quantity and quality of ideas. The results also showed that the correlations between the number of ideas and the feasibility of ideas differed between conditions. Specifically, in the word association condition, there was a significant and negative correlation between them, indicating that the more the ideas were generated, the less feasible they were. On the other hand, in the commonality search condition, there was no significant correlation between them. Although the effects of the commonality search training were not seen in the quantity and quality of ideas, it was seen in the relationship between the quantity and quality of ideas. The results suggest that commonality search training may improve the process by which one generates ideas.

 

We investigated the effects of recalling bitter experiences on taste preference. There are many expressions for describing feelings using words referring to tastes, such as bitter or sweet, suggesting a close link between feeling and taste. We assumed that one tends to regulate his/her unpleasant feelings by consuming something with an opposite taste. Specifically, we hypothesized that one prefers something sweet when s/he has a "bitter" feeling. Sixty-nine undergraduates were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: bitter, sad, and neutral. Participants in the bitter and sad conditions described their experiences of failure and loss respectively, and rated the valence of their recalled experience. Those in the neutral condition described a place they had been to, recalling that experience from stimuli including tree, air, water, sun, and earth. All the participants scored their present emotion states. Finally the participants rated how much they were willing to eat each chocolate and chose a chocolate that they wanted to eat most out of four chocolates with sweet, bitter, salty, or sour tastes. The results revealed that the experience recalled by the participants in the bitter condition were more self-accusing than those in the sad condition. Further, the participants in both the bitter and sad conditions had more negative, less aroused, and more self-accusing feelings than those in the neutral condition. Finally, the participants in the bitter condition chose the sweet chocolate more than those in the sad condition, and those in the sad condition wanted to eat the sweet chocolate less than those in the neutral condition. We concluded that recalling bitter experiences enhances the preference for eating something sweet through the link between feeling and taste.

 

In this study, we compared college readers’ comprehension processes when reading texts with different perspectives presented in different orders. An authentic article discussing the issue of “Whether ADHD patients needed to take medicine?” was modified and manipulated the order of describing two opposing views on this topic: one version stating “for medicine use” information first then “against medicine use” information second, another version reversed the order of information. All information in individual section of “for medicine use” and “against medicine use” was the same across all conditions. Both versions of text also had an identical introduction section. Seventy mature readers participated in this study and they were randomly assigned into those two reading groups. Participants read texts sentence by sentence on computer and reading times were recorded. Their background knowledge on ADHD, free recall data, reading comprehension scores and reading spans were also collected. In addition, the simulation program of the Landscape Model of comprehension were employed to model readers’ performance following the standard procedures: First, we determined text reading cycles by sentence boundary. Next, we parsed major nodes for each sentence and identified the coherence relationships among these nodes. We then set the parameter values for these relationships as sources of activation which include direct retrieval, referential connections, causal inferences. Finally, an input matrix was formed from the above steps and was submitted to the program for simulation. A resulting activation matrix and a connection matrix were produced for each separate simulation representing predictions of the Landscape model. The results showed that the activation matrix information significantly correlates with reading time data and the connection matrix information accounts recall data significantly. The patterns indicate that the Landscape Model effectively simulate readers’ comprehension performance. Reading opposing view information in different order did not affect readers’ amount of recall and neither did it on readers’ attitudes toward prescribing medicine for ADHD patients.

 

Previous studies found mind wandering alter readers’ reading behaviors related with lexical properties of words (e.g. word frequency effect). However, how about syntactic properties? Does mind wandering also alter readers’ reading behaviors related with the syntactic structure of a sentence? The present study focused on to which extent the garden path sentences alter readers' frequencies of mind wandering and eye-movements. To further examine the mechanism the underlying mechanism, readers' working memory capacity (WMC) was also measured. The result revealed that readers with high WMC showed more task unrelated thoughts (TUTs) when reading the garden path sentences than the non-garden path ones. Whereas, readers showed equivalent amount of mind wandering when reading the garden path and non-garden path sentences. Furthermore, the eye-movement behaviors analyses revealed that readers with high WMC tended to show garden path effect (i.e. the difference of total reading time between garden path sentences and non-garden path sentences) on critical region (i.e. disambiguous region ) prior to TUT response. However, the garden path effect was attenuated for readers with low WMC. The comparison of attenuation of word frequency and garden path effects during mind wandering was discussed.

 

The existence of variability among people in their cognitive abilities is a well-known fact. There are a number of ways in which cognitive and neurophysiological measures have been consistently used to explain such variability. However, little has been done to explore how the sources of such variability in cognition are influenced by individual differences in personality traits. Dispositional mindfulness and anxiety are two reciprocally linked traits that have been independently attributed to a range of cognitive functions. Nonetheless, there are no studies which have considered how the interaction between these two traits influences executive function. The current study investigated the relationship between these two traits and measures of executive control. Two groups of healthy young adults (divided into high mindfulness, low anxiety and low mindfulness, high anxiety) performed an attentional network task, a color Stroop task, and a change detection paradigm of visual working memory capacity task. Results showed that high mindfulness, low anxiety individuals were more accurate than the low mindfulness, high anxiety individuals on Stroop and change detection tasks. Additionally, the former group was shown to be more sensitive in detecting change and exhibited higher working memory capacity than the latter group. The present research attempts to bridge the gap between the literatures those have investigated mindfulness and anxiety independently. It also offers a direction for future studies looking at interventional programs such as meditation or cognitive behavioral therapy and may also guide how to identify individuals who might benefit most from such interventions.

 

We investigated how long visual memory for moving stimuli could be retained. The stimuli consisted of a moving circle. There are two sessions in the experiment and the second session were conducted four weeks after the first session. In the first session, some stimuli appearing in the second session were presented two times each. The participants observed them under incidental condition. The second session consisted of a study phase and of a test phase. In the study phase, the participants observed stimuli in a manner similar the first session. Half of the stimuli had been presented in the first session, and the half of them were novel. Then, the participants were given a surprise recognition test. In this task, they had to decide whether the presented stimuli had appeared in the prior study phase or not. As a result, it was found that the presentation times of stimuli affected the performance of the recognition test, and the hit rate for the stimuli which had been presented in the first session was higher than that for the stimuli which had not. This indicates that visual memory for moving stimuli observed under the incidental condition can be remained for long-term.

 

Human visual system can estimate mean size of a set of items effectively; however, little is known about whether information on each visual field contributes equally to the mean size estimation. In this study, we examined whether a left-side bias (LSB)—perceptual judgment tends to depend more heavily on left visual field’s inputs—impacts mean size estimation. Participants were instructed to estimate the mean size of 16 spots. In half of the trials, the mean size of the spots on the left side was larger than that on the right side (the Left-larger condition) and vice versa (the Right-larger condition). Our results illustrated a LSB: a larger estimated mean size was found in the Left-larger condition than the Right-larger condition (Experiment 1), and the LSB vanished when participants’ attention was cued to the right side (Experiment 2). Furthermore, the magnitude of LSB increased with stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) when spots on the left side were presented earlier than the right side. In contrast, the LSB vanished and then induced a reversed effect with SOA when spots on the right side were presented earlier (Experiment 3). This study offers the first piece of evidence suggesting that the LSB does have a significant influence on mean size estimation of a group of items, which is induced by a leftward attentional bias that enhanced the prior entry effect on the left side.

 

Inhibitory functions are crucial for keeping our behaviors under control, and it is prone to the influence of aging. One way to categorize inhibition is based on how it corresponds to willful control. While controlled inhibition is prone to the influence of subjective will, automatic inhibition is less so. In the current study, we carried out two experiments to explore the impact of aging on implicit inhibition. In Experiment 1, we adopted a location negative priming (LNP) task where the participant responded to a pair of prime and probe stimuli (white circle) in every trial. We manipulated the duration between the response to prime and the probe onset (response–stimulus interval, RSI, between 389, 931, 1463, and 1995ms) to explore the evolution of NP effect across time and also compared age difference in the time course of NP. In Experiment 2, we combined Go/No-go task with the LNP task where the participant was instructed to withhold response upon seeing yellow circle in the prime, but respond otherwise. We found that for the young participants, the shape of NP effect function changed more gradually across time than the elder’s. Moreover, the NP effect at the 389 ms RSI is relatively large than the other RSIs. For the elderly participants, the time course of NP effect appears to be a inversed-V shape curve which peaked at the 931 ms RSI. For the second experiment, we found that for the young participants, NP effect of Go trials is much larger than No-go trials, yet for the elderly it did not differ. To summarize, we found that aging impacts how implicit function is manifested after it is triggered. Further exploration with neuroimaging techniques and theoretical accounts for the age-related of implicit inhibition will be discussed.

 

Many economic studies have demonstrated that the sources of income—whether earned through efforts or obtained based on luck—can influence people’s willingness to further redistribution of wealth. To investigate the underlying cognitive mechanisms for such behaviors, we examined whether the origin of social status, a variable that is strongly associated with income in the society, would modulate the satisfaction of monetary distribution by people with different social statuses that were either determined by efforts or by luck. Specifically, in the first stage of the experiment college students were labelled as winners or losers against an opponent based on pure luck (i.e., random drawing), a mixture of luck and efforts (i.e., performance in a math estimation task), and real efforts (i.e., a number-line dissection task). The winners in all experimental contexts received the same amount of monetary reward, while the losers received nothing. In the second stage of the experiment, all participants were asked to make satisfaction ratings on the distribution of an additional amount of monetary reward between themselves and the opponent. The results showed that in the second stage all participants preferred to receive more money than their opponent, but the preference was stronger when the social status in the first stage of the experiment was determined by real efforts than by pure luck. On the other hand, the social status per se (i.e., being a winner or a loser) did not modulate people’s satisfaction of reward distribution. Furthermore, people seemed to perceive their performance in the math estimation task being determined by luck rather than by efforts. In summary, we found that participants involved in the real effort task were more driven by self-interests, while participants involved in the pure luck task showed higher satisfaction with fair or self-less distribution. 

 

Match effects of object orientation in the sentence-picture verification task are consistently smaller than object shape, color, and size. We hypothesize that this may be due to the fact that the orientation objects are small and manipulable. This study asks the questions if object size constraints object orientation effects, such that effects for smaller, manipulable, items are smaller than for larger, nonmanipulable objects. Our pre-registered experiment manipulated two within-participant variables: object size (large, small) and matching of probe sentence and target picture (matched orientation, mismatched orientation); one between-participant variable: languages (English, Dutch, Chinese). Two predicted results were to be confirmed based on our pilot study: (1) the orientation effects for the large objects would be beyond those for the small objects; (2) the effects generalize across languages and that language will not be a significant moderator of the observed effects. The current results confirm the first prediction, but the extraordinary effects of Chinese reveal the moderator of languages to be explored. This talk will present the works of our pre-registered experiment and the coming exploratory study.

 

Statistical learning (SL) is the ability to detect regularities in the environment, and plays a critical role in survival of organisms. Previous literature suggests that SL is a general mechanism for learning and processing any type of sensory input that unfolds across time and space, as empirical evidence shows that adults and infants can readily pick up on regularities among adjacent elements. However, whether SL is also possible when the dependent elements are nonadjacent remains to be determined. To answer this question, we employed a visual statistical learning (VSL) task in which 24 relatively complex visual shapes were randomly organized for each participant to create eight nonadjacent triplets. In the sequential condition, the visual shapes in triplets appeared one after the other, with a fixation cross separating different triplets. In the simultaneous condition, the visual shapes in triplets appeared from left to right in the same frame. After a familiarization phase in which each triplet appeared 20 times, participants were asked to perform 32 trials of familiarity judgement and 32 trials of recognition. The results demonstrated that participants were capable of learning nonadjacent dependencies in sequential and simultaneous visual shapes with comparable accuracy. Moreover, significant correlation was detected between participants’ IQ scores (as measured by Block Design) and their implicit knowledge of the nonadjacent dependencies (as measured by the task of familiarity judgment), suggesting a common mechanism supporting SL for both sequential and simultaneous dependencies. On the other hand, participants’ working memory (as measured by Symmetry Span) was only significantly correlated with their explicit knowledge of the nonadjacent dependency in sequential but not in simultaneous visual shapes, implying that there might also be specific mechanisms supporting these two kinds of SL. Further research is needed to examine the relationship between SL of different kinds of dependencies and implicit/explicit learning capacities.

 

Facial expressions are not only salient signals to express one’s emotional state but also an ingratiating strategy for social interaction and communication. Embodied emotion, a model of emotion contagion, is proposed as a two-stage process, including automatic facial mimicry and muscular feedback. The present study aims at unraveling the underlying neural circuitry and its temporal scenario of embodied emotion by combining recordings of facial muscular activity, magnetoencephalographic signals, and self-report pleasantness rating. Forty subjects (mean age 25.4 ±4.3 years old; 20 males) were recruited in the study. Each subject was instructed to passively view or voluntarily imitate the displayed video clips (2 seconds each) of smiling with different strengths (0%, 50%, and 100%) and then to report his/her pleasantness level at the end of each block (20 clips in each block). The electromyography (EMG) of the bilateral zygomaticus major muscles and the whole-brain magnetoencephalography (MEG, Neuromag Vectorview system) were simultaneously recoded when they were exposed to smiling video clips. Spatiotemporal maps of brain activity for the event-related alpha-band MEG data were estimated using the beamforming method, followed by parametric analysis with flexible design (p<0.05, uncorrected; extended cluster size > 20) for each condition. Significant bilateral EMG activations and elevated pleasantness levels were found in both passive viewing and voluntarily imitating conditions. The temporal profile of brain responses was partitioned into three time windows: anticipation, information catching, and behavioral response periods. During information catching period, we found the inferior parietal lobule, precuneus, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, somatosensory association cortex, and inferior frontal gyrus under imitation instruction. The results of passive viewing showed the posterior insula, premotor, precuneus, supramarginal gyrus, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Instruction/intention is a strong top-down cognitive control and modulates the information process in the brain. Our findings demonstrated two distinct cortical pathways responding to smile expression: voluntary facial mimicry utilizes simulation for information catching, whereas spontaneous facial mimicry engages neural system of mentalizing. These suggest MEG as a potential tool for understanding temporal dynamics of neural networks in emotional information processing.

 

Inhibiting distractors is important for goal-directed behaviors. However, with the context changes, previous distractors that are detrimental for survival might become beneficial. Therefore, releasing the previous inhibition whenever the environment needs is also important for us to adapt to such dynamic world. The aim of the present study is to examine how cognitive resource and awareness of changing context influence the modulation of inhibitory control. We manipulated the probability of a prime correctly predicting the following target during three phases in a priming task. A prime would act as a distractor when the probability is low (25%), while act as a useful cue when the probability is high (75%). In addition, we also measured participants’ working memory capacity (WMC) as the index of cognitive resource and their awareness of the change of context contingency. The results showed that, regardless of WMC, only participants aware of changing context modulated inhibitory process corresponding to the present context contingency when the stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) is short (experiment 1). However, such effect of awareness disappeared when SOA became longer (experiment 2). Such finding revealed that awareness of context might have more impact on the modulation of inhibition than WMC and such influence might reduce with decreased task demand. This is the first study investigating how both WMC and awareness affected people’s ability to modulate inhibition with changing context. The implication about the impact of cognitive resource and implicit learning on inhibitory control was discussed.

 

Previous literature pointed out that aging does not affect the basic characteristics of the landing movement control during stair climbing. At the meantime, falling from stairs seems to be a common cause of physical injury among the elderly. We wonder if visual perception of and action on the same stair could dissociate somehow and bring potential conflicts in information when landing fails. Because landing movement is a three-dimensional and complex movement, in the current study we simplify the experiment and test participants on their accuracy in passive perceiving and active estimating a one-dimensional length. We tested twenty young and twenty elderly participants on their visual discrimination (perceptual) and limb emulation (motor) of one-dimensional length. The perceptual and motor tasks were carried out along three orthogonal axes in space, respectively, and the accuracies and precisions of responses were analyzed. The results indicated that accuracies of visual perception and manual estimation do not differ, but both differ from feet estimation. In addition, the elderly showed smaller standard deviation than the young group. Based on these results, we suggest that the elderly are more conservative in feet movements, and actually more stable in making length judgment than the young group. The current findings provide novel information regarding the characteristics in the input and output sides of the cognitive system.

 

Posture modulates impressions of a person. In daily life, we often try to improve our impressions by taking “good” postures particularly when others evaluate us (such as job interview and dating). However, it has not been empirically examined whether such attempts to modulate impressions are indeed effective and, if so, which impressions are modulated. Here we examined the above questions by having participants report first impressions from pictures where other persons took “good” or “bad” postures. We took pictures of 16 persons from 3 viewing angles (front, side, back) while they were standing in “good” and “bad” postures. They were free to define “good” or “bad” postures and no other instruction was given. In total, 96 posture stimuli (2 postures x 3 angles x 16 persons) were prepared. Thirty-five participants were separately recruited and asked to report how the person in each picture appeared attractive, trustworthy, and dominant by using a 5-point Likert scale. The attractiveness, trustworthiness, and dominance judgment tasks were performed in separate sessions. The order of stimulus presentation was randomized within each block. We found that: (1) The persons in “good” postures were generally rated more attractive and trustworthy but dominance did not change with postures. (2) The improvement of attractiveness and trustworthiness were observed with the all angles. (3) The changes in attractiveness and trustworthiness were larger and more variable with the side view than the front and back views. Evidently, by taking intuitively good postures, people can improve attractiveness and trustworthiness but the changes in impressions depend on the viewing angles. These findings imply that people naturally know how to improve attractiveness and trustworthiness by taking “good” postures in the front view (and perhaps consequently in the back view) but know less in the side view.

 

The influence of the first language (L1) on the acquisition of the second language (L2) is an issue of importance. A well-known example of negative transfer is that Japanese speakers who learn English as a L2 often have difficulty in hearing and producing /l/ and /r/ accurately. Such negative transfer Taiwan is an abundant environment with multiple languages coexisted. It provides a ground for investigating whether a L2 immersion environment can reverse the negative transfer from L1. Among other phonetic contrast, a salient mismatch between Mandarin and Taiwanese is on retroflexㄓ(zhi)、ㄔ(chi )、ㄕ(shi-) and nonretroflexㄗ(zi)、ㄘ(ci)、ㄙ(si). The retroflex is absent in Taiwanese. We investigate the issue mentioned above by examining negative transfer at speech perception in Taiwanese-Mandarin bilingual adults. The participants recruited were college students with proficiency in Mandarin. They were assigned to either Mandarin monolingual group (MMG) or Taiwanese-Mandarin bilingual group (TMG), according to a Taiwanese vocabulary test and a language experience questionnaire. All participants were asked to perform a phoneme discrimination task in which five phonetic contrasts (stop, fricative, affricate, nasal, retroflex) of Mandarin were included. The results revealed that comparing to MMG, participants in TMG show a selective difficulty in discriminating retroflex but not other phonetic contrasts. This evidence supports a negative transfer between Taiwanese and Mandarin happened along with the language development of individuals. Moreover, although an immersion environment can improve proficiency in L2, it failed to reverse the negative transfer on L2 speech perception.

 

Stereopsis vision proof that without 2D form cues, human eye can see 3D through binocular fusion cues only. What is the mechanism of binocular matching? The stereoscopic matching is a very interesting unconsciousness processes. We know it’s very fast as milliseconds. Will it be possible even in this short time, there is already have some kind of subconscious or conscious there? Purpose: The study try to manipulate different cognitive levels of 2D cues in stereoscopic 3D vision to see the influence of cognitive cues for 3D formation. Hope the results of this study can give some idea about if an unconscious process (binocular matching) have levels of consciousness involve. And through reaction time can we measure the different level of consciousness effect or not? Methods: First we manipulate the form cues: with 2D form and without 2D form. The 3D depth cues embedded in stereopsis vision, so the 2D and 3D cues might be same or different. The second manipulation of experiments is the instrument to present the stimulus. We use two ways to present the stimulus. One is the bare eyes projection, and the other goggle glasses. The former one left and right eye’s images are not superimposed. The later one two eye’s images superimposed in the same place, so might see a little form cues there. Results & Conclusion: We find out that binocular matching is a gradual process. When 2D cues and 3D cues are the same, then the fusion time to perceive the 3D is not much different of no form cue, geometric form cue, and meaningful word cue. But when 2D cues and 3D cues are inconsistent, then this inconsistent influence is bigger than three levels of 2D form cues. So with from cues will help the processing of 3D fusion and recognition. But binocular 3D fusion with-form or without-form is also possible through different processing channel, without-form situation direct access by the zero-crossing matching channel, and with-form case is a kind of step by step serial processing. Which means the reaction time will not be longer of no-form than with form in 3D vision. We also found two ways of presentation the stimulus (bare two eyes projection / goggle glasses) has only little difference.

 

In Japan, 20.5% of older adults use smartphones (MIC, 2016). The low utilization rate is thought to be the result of problems related to usability of smartphones and the few opportunities of learning how to use it. To improve the rate of smartphones utilization, it is necessary to clarify the problems associated with using smartphones and explore an optimal support for learning process. This study conducted a longitudinal usability test that required 16 older adults to use smartphones for 4 weeks. In addition, we examined the effect of learning by undertaking actual activities. The participants were divided into two groups: intervention (N = 9) and control (N = 7). All participants participated in the usability test twice (at first and last week). In the second week, the intervention group participated in the lesson that allowed them to take pictures in the garden; this was followed by printing the same and making a portfolio using these pictures in the second week. The control group only participated. The log data suggested that the large individual differences were recognized in the use time and the number of use, irrespective of the group. However, the intervention group tended to spend more time on the application used in lesson. Further, the results of the usability test indicated that the intervention group performed better than the control group. While analyzing the daybook, differences between the two groups were not observed in the various newly discovered functions. However, the text mining analysis revealed that the description of the function related to the photograph as being more frequent in the intervention group. In the future, it is necessary to examine factors that are contributing to individual differences in the learning process. Moreover, the learning opportunity provided through actual activities seemed to have an effect on promoting learning.

 

This study investigated gender differences in subjective impression evaluations of shapes of 3D products. As a typical example of 3D product design, we focused on the shape of liquid soap bottles. Since the relation between shapes and evaluations is nonlinear, clarifying exactly what components of shape designs females and males are evaluating is not easy. We developed an analytical framework to investigate these gender differences by using a combination of spherical harmonics (SPHARM) and conditional autoregressive (CAR) modeling. SPHARM is a parametric surface description that uses spherical harmonics as its basic function. To extract their major morphological features, we used SPHARM to convert 3D surface data on the shape of 22 liquid soap bottles into multivariate coefficients. Then, we performed a principal component analysis (PCA) of these coefficients. Extracted morphological features were related to the aspect ratio in the frontal plane, thickness, and roundness. Subsequently, participants rated their subjective impressions of bottle shapes on a semantic differential scale. We examined relations between bottles’ major morphological features (i.e., PC scores) and their subjective impressions based on the CAR model, which is one of the spatial statistical models, using RStan package. We assumed that the relatively smaller the spatial correlation along a PC, the more attention was paid to the component in impression evaluation. Estimation results of random effects suggest that components of interest in impression evaluation of shapes differ between males and females.

 

Spatial disorientation (SD) is a temporary condition resulting from flying into poor weather conditions with low or no visibility. Under these conditions, the pilot may be deprived of an external visual horizon, which is critical to maintaining a correct sense of up and down while flying. Spatial disorientation is a critical issue for pilots during the flight. However, few pilot performance assessment monitors the pilot cognition and his behavior, and few studies have shown the EEG dynamics during spatial disorientation. In this study, we investigated the pilot’s brain dynamics in a 3D simulated aviation environment to find out possible solutions of disorientation. By studying the EEG signals during the flight, we observed that there are no differences between subjects under normal condition. However, when entering clouds, pilots who eventually spatial disoriented and crashed in the flight simulator had a higher power of gamma band (31-50Hz) in frontal, parietal, sensorimotor cortex, and occipital. In addition, we found power desynchronization of gamma band in pilots without SD after entering clouds. On the contrary, we found power synchronization of gamma-band in pilots with SD after entering clouds. With our findings, we hope to provide good neurophysiological indicators, aim to provide better and safer flights.

 

One of the mechanisms of human creativity is the manipulation of structures (Arthor, 2009). Music is an example of the manifestation of such creativity. Music has developed through manipulation of existing structure, which has brought into new structures used to compose new works. A representative case is the invention of whole tone scale. Debussy invented a scale with less tonality by applying laras slendro, a Javanese scale, to the structure of tonal scale in European music. Asking if making new works through the structural manipulation can be realized by a machine leads us to inquire into the essence of human creativity. In this research, we take music as a testbed, since it is well known that pieces of music have structures at various levels such as musical forms, tonality, chord, rhythm, and we expect the structural extraction and manipulation can correspond to machine learning. Let us consider deep learning as the machine for structural extraction. Deep learning for image recognition produced a hierarchical structure of features extracted at each layer (Le et al., 2012). We can design a deep learning machine where various structures in musical works are extracted and divided into multiple layers, by corresponding “features” extracted here to “structure” in our consideration of cultural creativity. Structural manipulation can be expressed by combining or exchanging layers among machines learning the musical structures. All the processing described here can be formalized and finally can be represented by one machine (algorithm). This means that structural manipulation as the characteristic of human cultural activity can be realized by an algorithm using deep learning as its core mechanism. We will further be able to obtain some clues to understand the mechanism of creating new structures through manipulating existing structures by deeper investigation of the behavior of such algorithm.

 

Evidence has suggested potential cognitive skills training of extensive video-game playing, especially in eye-hand coordination and reaction time, spatial attention, divided visual attention, selective attention and attentional capacity, but the effective in multitasking ability is unclear. As the dramatic development of computer and internet, online-game playing has become a common entertainment in the current generation. Online-game players often do several tasks at the same time; often tasks interfere with each other and might increase mistakes. This study proposed to explore the relationships between online-game playing types and multitasking ability in a virtual environment, using Edinburgh Virtual Errands Test (EVET). In this study, 79 participants with mean aged from 20-30 years old were recruited. Chen’s Internet Addiction Scale (CIAS), internet use questionnaire, EVET, working memory tests and resting fMRI were given to each participant. The results showed a positively association between multitasking ability and working memory (WM). No significant difference of spent time between MOBA and OGPs, showing both groups could be expertise in online-game playing. Three groups with varied online-game playing, multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA), other online-game players (OGPs) and no-players (NGPs) were compared with their EVET performance, WM and time spent of online-game use. The MOBA players had better performance on EVET plan follow and total score, and spatial memory than did other two groups, indicating a benefit of MOBA on planning following and increase the efficiency of multitasking. Using Cohe-ReHo analysis of resting fMRI showed significant association between both sides of temporal lobe, caudate, occipital lobe, anterior cingulate cortex and parahippocampus and EVET. In conclusions, online-game playing may provide a role in training multitasking and helps to maintain the planning. Multiplayers online game genres may benefit in participants’ spatial memory. Several brain function activities were found, indicating collaboration among multiple brain areas involving in multitasking performance.

 

Both itch and pain are nociceptive sensations, but their interaction is unclear. In most literature, pain is suggested to inhibit itchy sensation, but it remains unclear whether the interaction between these two nociceptive sensations depends on the modality. To date, a few studies have documented this interaction but the majority of studies used different methods to evoke pain and itch. In the current study, we use electrical stimulation to elicit pain and itch and investigate their cognitive interaction. Our preliminary data showed that the degree of electrically induced itch did not differ under painful or non-painful stimulation, indicating that no significant interaction developed when both kinds of sensations were produced with the identical modality. Results obtained from this study will enhance our understanding about how human brain processes both kinds of nociceptive stimuli.

 

This study aims to investigate the characteristics of effective interaction between a therapist and his/her child client with autism spectrum disorder during a session of pediatric occupational therapy. Pediatric occupational therapy, particularly with a focus on sensory integration theory, has been created to treat children with developmental disorders. The findings from quantitative empirical research that investigates the child-therapist interaction in effective treatment could be applied to clinical practice, as well as to training programs for novice therapists. A session between a child and a therapist, who had abundant experience as an occupational therapist, was video-recorded and analyzed. The child with autism spectrum disorder in this study was not able to take part in everyday conversations. The previous study that analyzed child’s behaviors during the session reported that child’s active involvement and adaptive behaviors toward the therapist increased across time. The present study analyzed therapist’s nonverbal behaviors such as direction of eye gaze, facial expression and vocalization, in order to investigate the characteristics of therapist’s communication which supported occurrence of child’s proactive involvement and adaptive behaviors. The videos of the session was viewed using annotation software (ELAN). We discuss the implication of the use of nonverbal communication during pediatric occupational therapy.

 

Most previous studies on grapheme-color synesthesia have focused on reading and visual perception of letters. There is no study investigating writing motion of grapheme-color synesthetes. We carried out two experiments to examine the relationship between color perception and action with synesthetes.First, we asked grapheme-color synesthetes whether they experienced synesthetic colors when they were writing. However there was no subjective report saying that they experienced synesthetic colors.Next, we hypothesized that the character shape can be affected by the pen color that is incongruent with its synesthetic color when they are writing. We asked synesthetes to do a Stroop-like task, in which they wrote a Japanese character on a tablet repeatedly and rapidly with a particular pen color. To capture the effect of synesthetic color on writing, we utilized “a slip of the pen” phenomenon, an error in which a person writes some unintended characters when s/he wrote one character repeatedly and rapidly (Japanese characters are easy to slip). We compared conditions in which the pen color is congruent and incongruent with the characters’ synesthetic color, in addition to the condition with black pen color.The results showed a significant difference in the number of slips between the congruent and incongruent conditions with synesthetes while no such difference was observed with control participants without synesthesia, suggesting that the pen color affects the slips of the pen in synesthesia. According to ATS model that explains the mechanisms of skilled action and action slip by D. Norman, this result suggests that the color of the pen interferes with the writing motion of grapheme-color synesthetes. Furthermore it is possible that the influence of the strong grapheme-color ties in syneshetes extends not only within visual perception but also to motor control.

 

The meaning of a picture can be extracted rapidly, but the form-to-meaning relationship is less obvious for printed words. In contrast to English words that follow grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence rule, the iconic nature of Chinese words might predispose them to link their orthographic representations to semantic representations more directly. In our previous work, we examined whether Chinese readers access word meanings directly just like pictures when reading Chinese words, by the repetition blindness (RB) paradigm. RB refers to the phenomenon of lower accuracy of target identification when the target is preceded by a repeated/similar item than an unrepeated/dissimilar one, and the occurrence of RB indicates that two repeated items share the same representations (Kanwisher, 1987). Our previous work demonstrated a series of experiments where little or no RB was found for Chinese synonyms, while robust RB was found for identical Chinese characters, supporting the assertion that Chinese words do not access their semantic representations directly. In this presentation, we provide an additional experiment where an RB effect was manifested for two semantically related pictures. Taken together, two semantically related pictures look very similar so they can induce an RB effect, whereas two Chinese synonyms do not look similar enough to induce an RB effect. Given previous studies on English readers have already demonstrated a lack of RB effect for English synonyms, we conclude that Chinese words are not processed more like pictures than English words. Like their English counterparts, Chinese words do not activate their semantic representations as directly as pictures do.

 

Faces can be seen from different angles in the horizontal plane. While women usually look more attractive when showing the right side of the faces, the results were mixed for men: Some studies reported no lateral preference (Zaidel & Fitzgerald, 1994; Zaidel, Chen, & German, 1995) while others reported the left side preference (Dunstan and Lindell, 2012). The former used emotionally neutral faces or did not control emotional expressions while the latter used smiling faces. As the facilitative effect of smiling depends on relationship contexts (i.e., short- vs. long-term relationship), the present study manipulated emotional expressions and relationship contexts and investigated the lateral preferences for male facial attractiveness. Female participants rated attractiveness of male face photographs on a 7-point scale. Half of participants rated male facial attractiveness as a boyfriend going out on a date (short-term relationship) while the other half rated the attractiveness as a marriage partner (long-term relationship). We used a total of 80 photographs, defined by an orthogonal combination of posing orientation (showing the left vs. right side), 2 facial expressions (smiling vs. neutral) and 20 models. Differently from the previous studies, models were rated as more attractive when they showed the right side of the faces than the left side. The right side preference was observed for smiling faces but not for neutral faces. As smiling reduces masculinity and, thus, enhances femininity, it may enhance components of attractiveness, which are typically ascribed to feminized faces such as trustworthiness, warmth and cooperativeness. This would lead to the right side preferences, which are typically observed for female face attractiveness.

 

To recognize an emotional face is dependent on the degree of distinctiveness between emotions. Research shows that children often confuse facial expressions of disgust with anger. In the present study, we aimed to investigate whether the confusion between anger and disgust manifests in adults and why it would occur. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to judge emotional category and intensity of presented expression. We adopted affective priming paradigm in which the presented time of a prime was 33ms and manipulated prime types with various parts of facial expressions in Experiment 2, 3A, and 3B: whole face, upper-half, and lower- half, respectively. Results revealed adult participants were more likely to confuse disgust with anger compared to other emotions (Experiment 1). Angry prime would facilitate participants’ performance to judge the disgust target face (Experiment 2). The upper-half angry faces would also enhance participants’ performance (Experiment 3A). However, no such priming effect was found in lower-half condition (Experiment 3B). When we increased the presented time of a prime 33ms to 100ms, the priming effect was eliminate (Experiment 4). Collectively, our findings suggest there was confusion between anger and disgust, and that this confusion may be resulted from overlapping the facial features on upper-half faces.

 

Psycholinguistic research on the focus processing has rarely systematically compared effects of different kinds of focus in a single experiment (Lowder & Gordon, 2015). We addressed this issue by examining the real-time processing of different kinds of focus within a single experiment that can expose their relative prominence and real-time interaction, using event-related potentials (ERPs). We tested native Mandarin Chinese speakers in reading comprehension by manipulating the contextually focused information with question-answer pair sentences (Benatar & Clifton, 2014). The context question A (1a-4a) elicits expectancy for the focus status of the grammatical object in the target (answer) sentence B, with “Zhōubīng” to be the focused entity in 1b, the contrastive focus in 2b, the discourse-deemphasized (hence defocused) entity in 3b, and as neutral (wide focus (Cinque, 1993)) in 4b, respectively. Focus A. Context question B. Target sentence (“Zhōubīng” the target word) 1. Focused a. Guòqiáng dǎ-le shéi ? b. Guòqiáng dǎ-lé Zhōubīng, dànshì bú zhóng。 2. Contrastive a. Guòqiáng dǎ-le Zǐjiàn ? b. Guòqiáng dǎ-lé Zhōubīng, dànshì bú zhóng。 3. Defocused a. Shéi dǎ-le Zhōubīng ? b. Guòqiáng dǎ-lé Zhōubīng, dànshì bú zhóng。 4. Neutral a. Fāshēng-le shěnme shì ? b. Guòqiáng dǎ-lé Zhōubīng, dànshì bú zhóng。 The results, overall, demonstrated neurophysiological evidence (a broadly distributed sustained negative shift from 200 to 800ms) that corroborates the hypothesis that different focus types are associated with different underlying mechanisms (Benatar & Clifton, 2014), with the contrastive distributed over the central site (bi-lateralized and midline), the neutral negativity distributed over the anterior sites (bi-lateralized and midline), and the defocused negativity distributed over the midline sites. We will discuss the results in the context of the theories of informational status that draws a four-fold distinction among the types of informational categories in language processing. Benatar, A., & Clifton, C., Jr. (2014). Newness, givenness and discourse updating: Evidence from eye movements. Journal of Memory and Language, 71, 1–16. Cinque, G. (1993). A null theory of phrase and compound stress. Linguistic Inquiry, 18, 239–297. Lowder, M. W., & Gordon, P. C. (2015). Focus takes time: Structural effects on reading. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 22, 1733-1738.

 

Children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) usually have social problems, which might relate to their social-attention deficits. Previous studies showed that children with ADHD did not spontaneously pay attention to the directions of another person’s gaze. However, social attention continuously develops at school age in typically developed children. This study aimed to further explore how social attention varies with ages for children with ADHD. We measure the effect of gaze cues at age 6-8, 9–12 and 13–15 years old, each group 27 children with ADHD and 27 age-matched typical developed (TD) children. The cue-to-target onset asynchrony was 200 ms or 2400 ms in order to measure the cueing effect and the inhibition of return respectively. The results showed that in general, a cuing effect in 200 ms and inhibition of return in 2400 ms was observed for children with ADHD. Nevertheless, 6-8 years old TD children showed cueing effect in 2400 ms while children with ADHD did not. Our findings suggest that at short duration children with ADHD did not showed deficits in social attention. Nevertheless, at 6-8 years old children with ADHD lack of continues interests to other’s gaze as TD children. We argue that the impulsivity and easily distracted behavior of children of ADHD may abolished such prolonged interests to others’ gaze. Our study also provide evidence of the need of social interaction training for young children with ADHD..

 

This study examines the effects of scrambling either a subject or object associated with ‘floating’ numeral classifiers (FNCs) in Korean by using the event-related potentials (ERP) paradigm. The experimental materials consisted of 360 sets of 6 items, which vary in terms of three factors such as (i) the grammatical role ((S)ubject vs. (O)bject) that FNCs associate with, (ii) the type of Case/particle marker on FNCs (Case-less vs. (N)om/(A)cc Case-marked vs. (F)ocus-particle-marked), and (iii) the application/non-application of subject or object scrambling, as schematically represented below. i) S-related Case-less FNC: [park-in dog-Nom bread-Acc 2-FNC ate] I heard. ii) S-related N-marked FNC: [park-in dog-Nom bread-Acc 2-FNC-Nom ate] I heard. iii) S-related F-marked FNC: [park-in dog-Nom bread-Acc 2-FNC-Foc ate] I heard. iv) O-related Case-less FNC: [park-in bread-Acc dog-Nom 3-FNC ate] I heard. v) O-related A-marked FNC: [park-in bread-Acc dog-Nom 3-FNC-Acc ate] I heard. vi) O-related F-marked FNC: [park-in bread-Acc dog-Nom 3-FNC-Foc ate] I heard. Using the materials, we investigated the following three questions. First, is there a difference between effects of in-situ and scrambling options on FNCs? Second, is there a contrast between the in-situ and scrambled objects? Third, is there a distinction between the subjects in object-scrambling and object-in-situ sentences? We found that, first, the Caseless FNCs in sentences involving subject or object scrambling elicited P600 in comparison to the corresponding ones in sentences without such scrambling, whereas the Case-marked FNCs in the former case were ERP-wise not significantly different from the corresponding ones in the latter case. By contrast, the F(ocus-particle)-marked FNCs in sentences involving scrambling elicited P600 for subject or N400 for object in comparison to the corresponding ones in sentences without scrambling. We attribute the P600 effects here to a second-pass, revised integration process that now attempts to correctly link the Case-less/F-marked FNC to the relatively more ‘distant’ scrambled subject or object associated with it. Second, the scrambled objects induced reduced N400 effects relative to the in-situ ones. This result is unexpected, given that the canonical word order in Korean is SOV, predicting that scrambled objects will incur more processing loads. But one crucial feature of Korean is that this language allows pro drop or null subject argument for subjects. Thus, the object-initial sentences were not perceived by the Korean users as marked/exceptional in terms of word order. Third, the subjects after the scrambled objects were not differentiated from the ones before them in terms of ERP responses. Note that the former involve object scrambling, while the latter do not. Since the subjects do not involve scrambling in either type of sentences, no difference between them is an expected result. Overall, we take all the three results above to render neuroelectrophysiological evidence that our mind actively detects scrambling or permutation of word order in the course of sentence-processing FNC-associated scrambled subjects or objects.