Eye Movement Abnormalities During the Gaze Perception Task in Individuals With Clinical High Risk for Psychosis: A Discriminant Analysis With Hidden Markov Models.

Objectives: Social cognitive impairments were well-documented in schizophrenia and individuals with clinical high risk for psychosis (CHR). While eye movement abnormalities during gaze perception in schizophrenia have been suggested, such understanding in individuals with CHR is limited.

Design, Settings And Participants: This study recruited 36 CHR individuals and 50 healthy controls (HC) to perform a gaze perception task with eye-tracking techniques analyzed with hidden Markov models for predictability and pattern recognition.

Differential mask effects on emotion recognition and eye movements in Psychotic-like experiences and autism: Insights from hidden Markov Modeling.

Background: Facial mask wearing may disrupt facial emotion recognition (FER). The impact of masks on FER and associated eye movement patterns among individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and those with psychotic-like experiences (PLEs) remained unclear.

Methods: 180 ethnic Chinese individuals completed the FER task with eye-tracking, including two separate samples: 37 PLEs with 53 matched controls, and 45 ASD with 45 matched controls.

Impact of mask use on facial emotion recognition in individuals with subclinical social anxiety: an eye-tracking study.

Previous studies suggested that social anxiety is associated with interpretation bias, theory of mind deficit, and eye gaze avoidance when identifying facial emotions. We tested the hypothesis that socially anxious individuals would be more affected by mask use during facial emotion recognition. 88 healthy undergraduates with various levels of social anxiety were invited.

Subclinically Depressed Individuals Showed Less Trust after a Night of Sleep Deprivation.

Insufficient sleep's impact on cognitive and emotional function is well-documented, but its effects on social functioning remain understudied. This research investigates the influence of depressive symptoms on the relationship between sleep deprivation (SD) and social decision-making. Forty-two young adults were randomly assigned to either the SD or sleep control (SC) group.

Understanding the Role of Eye Movement Pattern and Consistency in Isolated English Word Reading Through Hidden Markov Modeling.

In isolated English word reading, readers have the optimal performance when their initial eye fixation is directed to the area between the beginning and word center, that is, the optimal viewing position (OVP). Thus, how well readers voluntarily direct eye gaze to this OVP during isolated word reading may be associated with reading performance. Using Eye Movement analysis with Hidden Markov Models, we discovered two representative eye movement patterns during lexical decisions through clustering, which focused at the OVP and the word center, respectively.

Understanding Human Cognition Through Computational Modeling.

One important goal of cognitive science is to understand the mind in terms of its representational and computational capacities, where computational modeling plays an essential role in providing theoretical explanations and predictions of human behavior and mental phenomena. In my research, I have been using computational modeling, together with behavioral experiments and cognitive neuroscience methods, to investigate the information processing mechanisms underlying learning and visual cognition in terms of perceptual representation and attention strategy. In perceptual representation, I have used neural network models to understand how the split architecture in the human visual system influences visual cognition, and to examine perceptual representation development as the results of expertise.

Music reading experience modulates eye movement pattern in English reading but not in Chinese reading.

Here we tested the hypothesis that in Chinese-English bilinguals, music reading experience may modulate eye movement planning in reading English but not Chinese sentences due to the similarity in perceptual demands on processing sequential symbol strings separated by spaces between music notation and English sentence reading. Chinese-English bilingual musicians and non-musicians read legal, semantically incorrect, and syntactically (and semantically) incorrect sentences in both English and Chinese. In English reading, musicians showed more dispersed eye movement patterns in reading syntactically incorrect sentences than legal sentences, whereas non-musicians did not.

Non-monotonic developmental trend of holistic processing in visual expertise: the case of Chinese character recognition.

Holistic processing has been identified as an expertise marker of face and object recognition. By contrast, reduced holistic processing is purportedly an expertise marker in recognising orthographic characters in Chinese. Does holistic processing increase or decrease in expertise development? Is orthographic recognition a domain-specific exception to all other kinds of recognition (e.

Impact of mask use on face recognition: an eye-tracking study.

We examined how mask use affects performance and eye movements in face recognition and whether strategy change reflected in eye movements is associated with performance change. Eighty-eight participants performed face recognition with masked faces either during learning only, during recognition only, or during both learning and recognition. As compared with the baseline condition where faces were unmasked during both learning and recognition, participants had impaired performance in all three scenarios, with larger impairment when mask conditions during learning and recognition did not match.

Holistic but with reduced right-hemisphere involvement: The case of dyslexia in Chinese character recognition.

Recent research on visual object recognition has suggested that the right hemisphere can engage either holistic or part-based processing depending on whether the recognition relies on configural (exact distances among features) or featural information, respectively. Consistent with this finding, expert Chinese reading has been marked by a left-side bias (an indication of right-hemisphere lateralization) with decreased holistic processing (as assessed using the composite paradigm) due to its reliance on featural information. Here we examine two common perceptual expertise phenomena in object recognition - holistic processing and left-side bias - of Chinese characters in adolescents with developmental dyslexia and matched controls.

Using emotion regulation strategies after sleep deprivation: ERP and behavioral findings.

Sleep deprivation is suggested to impact emotion regulation, but few studies have directly examined it. This study investigated the influence of sleep deprivation on three commonly used emotion regulation strategies (distraction, reappraisal, suppression) in Gross's (1998) process model of emotion regulation. Young healthy adults were randomly assigned to a sleep deprivation group (SD; n = 26, 13 males, age = 20.

Music reading expertise modulates hemispheric lateralization in English word processing but not in Chinese character processing.

Music notation and English word reading both involve mapping horizontally arranged visual components to components in sound, in contrast to reading in logographic languages such as Chinese. Accordingly, music-reading expertise may influence English word processing more than Chinese character processing. Here we showed that musicians named English words significantly faster than non-musicians when words were presented in the left visual field/right hemisphere (RH) or the center position, suggesting an advantage of RH processing due to music reading experience.

Perceptual expertise: can sensorimotor experience change holistic processing and left-side bias?

Holistic processing and left-side bias are both behavioral markers of expert face recognition. By contrast, expert recognition of characters in Chinese orthography involves left-side bias but reduced holistic processing, although faces and Chinese characters share many visual properties. Here, we examined whether this reduction in holistic processing of Chinese characters can be better explained by writing experience than by reading experience.

Visual field differences in visual word recognition can emerge purely from perceptual learning: evidence from modeling Chinese character pronunciation.

In Chinese orthography, a dominant character structure exists in which a semantic radical appears on the left and a phonetic radical on the right (SP characters); a minority opposite arrangement also exists (PS characters). As the number of phonetic radical types is much greater than semantic radical types, in SP characters the information is skewed to the right, whereas in PS characters it is skewed to the left. Through training a computational model for SP and PS character recognition that takes into account of the locations in which the characters appear in the visual field during learning, but does not assume any fundamental hemispheric processing difference, we show that visual field differences can emerge as a consequence of the fundamental structural differences in information between SP and PS characters, as opposed to the fundamental processing differences between the two hemispheres.

NIMBLE: a kernel density model of saccade-based visual memory.

We present a Bayesian version of J. Lacroix, J. Murre, and E.

Two fixations suffice in face recognition.

It is well known that there exist preferred landing positions for eye fixations in visual word recognition. However, the existence of preferred landing positions in face recognition is less well established. It is also unknown how many fixations are required to recognize a face.

Convergence of the visual field split: hemispheric modeling of face and object recognition.

Anatomical evidence shows that our visual field is initially split along the vertical midline and contralaterally projected to different hemispheres. It remains unclear at which processing stage the split information converges. In the current study, we applied the Double Filtering by Frequency (DFF) theory (Ivry & Robertson, 1998) to modeling the visual field split; the theory assumes a right-hemisphere/low-frequency bias.

An examination of semantic radical combinability effects with lateralized cues in Chinese character recognition.

Auclair and Siéroff examined lateralized cuing effects in the identification of centrally presented letter strings and reported no cuing effects for short word stimuli. They argued for a redistribution of attention over the entire word for short familiar words. We explored cuing effects with Chinese phonetic compounds, which can be considered extreme examples of short words, in a character-level semantic judgment task.

Neural correlates of foveal splitting in reading: evidence from an ERP study of Chinese character recognition.

Recent research on foveal structure and reading suggests that the two halves of a centrally fixated word seem to be initially projected to, and processed in, different hemispheres. In the current study, we utilize two contrasting structures in Chinese orthography, "SP" (the semantic radical on the left and the phonetic radical on the right) and "PS" characters (the opposite structure), to examine foveal splitting effects in event-related potential (ERP) recordings. We showed that when participants silently named centrally presented characters, there was a significant interaction between character type and hemisphere in N1 amplitude: SP characters elicited larger N1 compared with PS characters in the left hemisphere, whereas the right hemisphere had the opposite pattern.

Analysis of a Chinese phonetic compound database: implications for orthographic processing.

The complexity of Chinese orthography has hindered the progress of research in Chinese to the same level of sophistication of that in alphabetic languages such as English. Also, there has been no publicly available resource concerning the decomposition of Chinese characters, which is essential in any attempt to model the cognitive processes of Chinese character recognition. Here we report our construction and analysis of a Chinese lexical database containing the most frequent phonetic compounds decomposed into semantic and phonetic radicals according to Chinese etymology.

A TMS examination of semantic radical combinability effects in Chinese character recognition.

The proposal of human foveal splitting assumes a vertical meridian split in the foveal representation and the consequent contralateral projection of information in the two hemifields to the two hemispheres and has been shown to have important implications for visual word recognition. According to this assumption, in Chinese character recognition, the two halves of a centrally fixated character may be initially projected to and processed in different hemispheres. Here, we describe a repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) investigation of hemispheric processing in Chinese character recognition, through examining semantic radical combinability effects in a character semantic judgment task.

Foveal splitting causes differential processing of Chinese orthography in the male and female brain.

Chinese characters contain separate phonetic and semantic radicals. A dominant character type exists in which the semantic radical is on the left and the phonetic radical on the right; an opposite, minority structure also exists, with the semantic radical on the right and the phonetic radical on the left. We show that, when asked to pronounce isolated tokens of these two character types, males responded significantly faster when the phonetic information was on the right, whereas females showed a non-significant tendency in the opposite direction.