Geänderte Inhalte

Extending our understanding of the interplay between visual and cognitive processes during reading is essential to understand how reading develops and changes across the lifespan. Monitoring readers' eye movements provides a fine-grained online protocol of the reading process as it evolves over time, but until recently eye movements have rarely been collected for young developing and ageing people. Developmental eye-tracking constitutes an emerging and innovative field that addresses various theoretical questions related to changes in the process of reading across the lifespan and the mechanisms that drive intra-individual trajectories and create inter-individual differences among readers. The aim of this editorial is to briefly summarise the current state of the field and to outline which questions are currently being investigated and presented in this Special Issue. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)

We investigated lexical decision making in children and adults by analyzing spatiotemporal characteristics of responses involving a hand movement. Children’s and adults’ movement trajectories were assessed in three tasks: a lexical decision task (LDT), a pointing task that involved minimal cognitive processing, and a symbol task requiring a simple binary decision. Cognitive interference on motor performance was quantified by analyzing movement characteristics in the LDT and symbol task relative to the pointing task. Across age groups, movements in the LDT were less smooth, slower, and more strongly curved to the opposite response option, and these interference effects decreased steadily with age. Older children showed stronger interference effects than did adults, even though their reaction times were similar to adults’ performance. No comparable effects were found in the symbol task, indicating that task characteristics such as response mapping and decision selection alone are not able to explain the developmental differences observed in the LDT. Our results indicate substantial overlap between cognitive processing and motor execution in the LDT in children that is not captured by computational models of visual word recognition and cognitive development. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved)

Phonological and orthographic information has been shown to play an important role in parafoveal processing in skilled adult reading in English. In the present study, we investigated whether similar parafoveal effects can be found in children using the boundary eye tracking method. Children and adults read sentences in German with embedded target nouns which were presented in original, pseudohomophone (PsH), transposed-letter (TL), lower-case and control conditions to assess phonological and orthographic preview effects. We found evidence of PsH preview benefit effects for children. We also found TL preview benefit effects for adults, while children only showed these effects under specific conditions. Results are consistent with the developmental view that reading initially depends on phonological processes and that orthographic processes become increasingly important. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)

The question how agent and patient roles are assigned to causal participants has largely been neglected in the psychological literature on force dynamics. Based on the linguistic theory of Dowty (1991), we propose that agency is a prototype concept. We adapted Dowty's theory to account for scenarios showing physical interactions. In the standard Michotte launching scenario the ball entering the scene is usually assigned the agent role, whereas the ball that is being launched is viewed as the patient. We showed in two experiments that agency intuitions were moderated by manipulations of the context prior to the launching event. Altering features such as relative movement, sequence of visibility, and self-propelled motion tended to increase agency attributions to the patient relative to the standard scenario. We suspect that shifts in figure-ground perceptions, and intuitions about characteristics of interventions may be the overarching reason for the efficacy of the tested criteria.

Whereas the traditional normative benchmark for diagnostic reasoning from effects to causes is provided by purely statistical norms, we here approach the task from the perspective of rational causal inference. The core feature of the presented model is the assumption that diagnostic inferences are constrained by hypotheses about the causal texture of the domain. As a consequence, the model's predictions systematically deviate from classical, purely statistical norms of diagnostic inference. In particular, the analysis reveals that diagnostic judgments should not only be influenced by the probability of the cause given the effect, but also be systematically affected by the predictive relation between cause and effect. This prediction is tested in three studies. The obtained pattern of diagnostic reasoning is at variance with the traditional statistical norm but consistent with a model of rational causal inference.