Session Detail

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..