Recent research has suggested that the visual span in stimulus identification can be enlarged through perceptual learning. Since both English and music reading involve left-to-right sequential symbol ...processing, music-reading experience may enhance symbol identification through perceptual learning particularly in the right visual field (RVF). In contrast, as Chinese can be read in all directions, and components of Chinese characters do not consistently form a left-right structure, this hypothesized RVF enhancement effect may be limited in Chinese character identification. To test these hypotheses, here we recruited musicians and nonmusicians who read Chinese as their first language (L1) and English as their second language (L2) to identify music notes, English letters, Chinese characters, and novel symbols (Tibetan letters) presented at different eccentricities and visual field locations on the screen while maintaining central fixation. We found that in English letter identification, significantly more musicians achieved above-chance performance in the center-RVF locations than nonmusicians. This effect was not observed in Chinese character or novel symbol identification. We also found that in music note identification, musicians outperformed nonmusicians in accuracy in the center-RVF condition, consistent with the RVF enhancement effect in the visual span observed in English-letter identification. These results suggest that the modulation of music-reading experience on the visual span for stimulus identification depends on the similarities in the perceptual processes involved.
Hemispheric asymmetry in the processing of local and global features has been argued to originate from differences in frequency filtering in the two hemispheres, with little neurophysiological ...support. Here we test the hypothesis that this asymmetry takes place at an encoding stage beyond the sensory level, due to asymmetries in anatomical connections within each hemisphere. We use two simple encoding networks with differential connection structures as models of differential encoding in the two hemispheres based on a hypothesized generalization of neuroanatomical evidence from the auditory modality to the visual modality: The connection structure between columns is more distal in the language areas of the left hemisphere and more local in the homotopic regions in the right hemisphere. We show that both processing differences and differential frequency filtering can arise naturally in this neurocomputational model with neuroanatomically inspired differences in connection structures within the two model hemispheres, suggesting that hemispheric asymmetry in the processing of local and global features may be due to hemispheric asymmetry in connection structure rather than in frequency tuning.
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DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Through computational modeling, here we examine whether visual and task characteristics of writing systems alone can account for lateralization differences in visual word recognition between ...different languages without assuming influence from left hemisphere (LH) lateralized language processes. We apply a hemispheric processing model of face recognition to visual word recognition; the model implements a theory of hemispheric asymmetry in perception that posits low spatial frequency biases in the right hemisphere and high spatial frequency (HSF) biases in the LH. We show two factors that can influence lateralization: (a) Visual similarity among words: The more similar the words in the lexicon look visually, the more HSF/LH processing is required to distinguish them, and (b) Requirement to decompose words into graphemes for grapheme‐phoneme mapping: Alphabetic reading (involving grapheme‐phoneme conversion) requires more HSF/LH processing than logographic reading (no grapheme‐phoneme mapping). These factors may explain the difference in lateralization between English and Chinese orthographic processing.
Holistic processing (HP) has long been considered a characteristic of right hemisphere (RH) processing. Indeed, holistic face processing is typically associated with left visual field (LVF)/RH ...processing advantages. Nevertheless, expert Chinese character recognition involves reduced HP and increased RH lateralization, presenting a counterexample. Recent modeling research suggests that RH processing may be associated with an increase or decrease in HP, depending on whether spacing or component information was used respectively. Since expert Chinese character recognition involves increasing sensitivity to components while deemphasizing spacing information, RH processing in experts may be associated with weaker HP than novices. Consistent with this hypothesis, in a divided visual field paradigm, novices exhibited HP only in the LVF/RH, whereas experts showed no HP in either visual field. This result suggests that the RH may flexibly switch between part-based and holistic representations, consistent with recent fMRI findings. The RH’s advantage in global/low spatial frequency processing is suggested to be relative to the task relevant frequency range. Thus, its use of holistic and part-based representations may depend on how attention is allocated for task relevant information. This study provides the first behavioral evidence showing how type of information used for processing modulates perceptual representations in the RH.
We examined whether adding video and subtitles to an audio lesson facilitates its comprehension and whether the comprehension depends on participants' cognitive abilities, including working memory ...and executive functions, and where they looked during video viewing. Participants received lessons consisting of statements of facts under four conditions: audio-only, audio with verbatim subtitles, audio with relevant video, and audio with both subtitles and video. Comprehension was assessed as the accuracy in answering multiple-choice questions for content memory. We found that subtitles facilitated comprehension whereas video did not. In addition, comprehension of audio lessons with video depended on participants' cognitive abilities and eye movement pattern: a more centralized (looking mainly at the screen center) eye movement pattern predicted better comprehension as opposed to a distributed pattern (with distributed regions of interest). Thus, whether video facilitates comprehension of audio lessons depends on both learners’ cognitive abilities and where they look during video viewing.
•Verbatim subtitles facilitate comprehension of audio lessons whereas video did not.•Comprehension of audio lessons with video depended on learners' eye gaze pattern.•A more centralized eye movement pattern predicted better comprehension.
Left-side bias effects refer to a bias towards the left side of the stimulus/space in perceptual/visuospatial judgments, and are argued to reflect dominance of right hemisphere processing. It remains ...unclear whether reading direction can also account for the bias effect. Previous studies comparing readers of languages read from left to right with those read from right to left (e.g., French vs. Hebrew) have obtained inconsistent results. As a language that can be read from left to right or from right to left, Chinese provides a unique opportunity for a within-culture examination of reading direction effects. Chinese participants performed a perceptual judgment task (with both face and Chinese character stimuli; Experiment 1) and two visuospatial attention tasks (the greyscales and line bisection tasks; Experiment 2) once before and once after a reading task, in which they read Chinese passages either from left to right or from right to left for about 20 min. After reading from right to left, participants showed significantly reduced left-side bias in Chinese character perceptual judgments but not in the other three tasks. This effect suggests that the role of reading direction on different forms of left-side bias may differ, and its modulation may be stimulus-specific.
In research on word recognition, it has been shown that word beginnings have higher information content for word identification than word endings; this asymmetric information distribution within ...words has been argued to be due to the communicative pressure to allow words in speech to be recognized as early as possible. Through entropy analysis using two representative datasets from Wikifonia and the Essen folksong corpus, we show that musical segments also have higher information content (i.e., higher entropy) in segment beginnings than endings. Nevertheless, this asymmetry was not as dramatic as that found within words, and the highest information content was observed in the middle of the segments (i.e., an inverted U pattern). This effect may be because the first and last notes of a musical segment tend to be tonally stable, with more flexibility in the first note for providing the initial context. The asymmetric information distribution within words has been shown to be an important factor accounting for various asymmetric effects in word reading, such as the left-biased preferred viewing location and optimal viewing position effects. similarly, the asymmetric information distribution within musical segments is a potential factor that can modulate music reading behavior and should not be overlooked.
With the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT), there has been a proliferation of urban studies using big data. Yet, another type of urban research innovations that involve interdisciplinary ...thinking and methods remains underdeveloped. This paper represents an attempt to adopt a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) toolbox developed in Computer Science for the analysis of eye movement patterns in Psychology to answer urban mobility questions in Geography. The main idea is that both people’s eye movements and travel behavior follow the stop-travel-stop pattern, which can be summarized using HMM. Methodological challenges were addressed by adjusting the HMM to analyze territory-wide travel survey data in Hong Kong, China. By using the adjusted toolbox to identify the activity-travel patterns of working adults in Hong Kong, two distinctive groups of balanced (38.4%) and work-oriented (61.6%) lifestyles were identified. With some notable exceptions, working adults living in the urban core were having a more work-oriented lifestyle. Those with a balanced lifestyle were having a relatively compact zone of non-work activities around their homes but a relatively long commuting distance. Furthermore, working females tend to spend more time at home than their counterparts, regardless of their marital status and lifestyle. Overall, this interdisciplinary research demonstrates an attempt to integrate spatial, temporal, and sequential information for understanding people’s behavior in urban mobility research.
In English word recognition, the best recognition performance is usually obtained when the initial fixation is directed to the left of the center (optimal viewing position, OVP). This effect has been ...argued to involve an interplay of left hemisphere lateralization for language processing and the perceptual experience of fixating at word beginnings most often. While both factors predict a left-biased OVP in visual word recognition, in face recognition they predict contrasting biases: People prefer to fixate the left half-face, suggesting that the OVP should be to the left of the center; nevertheless, the right hemisphere lateralization in face processing suggests that the OVP should be to the right of the center in order to project most of the face to the right hemisphere. Here, we show that the OVP in face recognition was to the left of the center, suggesting greater influence from the perceptual experience than hemispheric asymmetry in central vision. In contrast, hemispheric lateralization effects emerged when faces were presented away from the center; there was an interaction between presented visual field and location (center vs. periphery), suggesting differential influence from perceptual experience and hemispheric asymmetry in central and peripheral vision.
Previous studies have shown a right-visual-field (RVF)/left-hemisphere (LH) advantage in Chinese phonetic compound pronunciation. Here, we contrast the processing of two phonetic compound types: a ...dominant structure in which a semantic component appears on the left and a phonetic component on the right (SP characters), and a minority structure with the opposite arrangement (PS characters). We show that this RVF/LH advantage was observed only in SP character pronunciation, but not in PS character pronunciation. This result suggests that SP character processing is more LH lateralized than is PS character processing and is consistent with corresponding ERP N170 data. This effect may be due to the dominance of SP characters in the lexicon, which makes readers opt to obtain phonological information from the right of the characters. This study thus shows that the overall information distribution of word components in the lexicon may influence how written words are processed in the brain. Supplemental materials for this article may be downloaded from http://cabn .psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.
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