Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2021-12-26
Abstract： "
Peer Review Status:
Awaiting Review
Subjects: Psychology >> Applied Psychology submitted time 2020-11-18
Abstract： Attentional bias towards threat is a common phenomenon in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) individuals. A number of studies have investigated the processing characteristics and internal mechanisms of attentional bias by using eye-movement technology. Results are inconsistent about components of attentional bias, but still provide evidences for different models, such as vigilance-avoidance model and attentional maintenance model. Based on eye-movement patterns from different dimensions, the future studies should pay attention to the model building and integration while recording the eye movements of PTSD individuals. Furthermore, researchers could combine multiple technologies to investigate the threat attention bias mechanism of PTSD individuals from a multimodal perspective.
Peer Review Status:Awaiting Review
Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology Subjects: Psychology >> Developmental Psychology submitted time 2020-08-22
Abstract： " Global motion perception (GMP) is an important aspect of visual perception. Numerous studies have found that GMP of cognitively healthy elderly declines with aging and it cannot be explained by age differences in the visual system. The neural mechanism of aging on GMP remains unclear. Resting-state fMRI has been widely used to detect the internal spontaneous activity of the aging brain. Thus, whether the functional activity of brain regions related to the GMP for the elderly in the resting state is an effective indicator of their global motion sensitivity (GMS) still needs further investigation. To reveal the neural basis of GMP decline for the elderly, the relationships between the resting-state functional activities of GMP related brain areas (Regions of Interest, ROI: V1, V2, V3, and MT/V5) and individuals’ motion coherence threshold (MCT) were analyzed by using rs-fMRI technology. In this study, Random Dot Kinematogram (RDK) paradigm was used to evaluate an individual’s GMS with the MCT as the indicator. A higher threshold of the RDK task meant lower sensitivity. Meanwhile, the rs-fMRI data of 36 younger adults (M = 22.04 years old) and 31 older adults (M = 65.05 years old) were acquired using rapid echo-planar imaging (EPI) sequence from a 3T Siemens Prisma magnetic resonance scanner, with TR=2s, TE=30ms, Time points=240 (young) or 246 (old). Rs-fMRI data were preprocessed and processed using SPM (http://www. fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm) and DPABI (http://rfmri.org/dpabi) toolbox to obtain the functional activities of the ROIs, including ReHo, ALFF, voxel-wise FC, and ROI-wise FC. Then, the regional measures including three nodal centrality metrics (degree K, efficiency Enodal and betweenness b) and the global measures including small-world parameters (clustering coefficient Cp, characteristic path length Lp, normalized clustering coefficient γ, normalized characteristic path length λ, and small-worldness σ) and network efficiency (Global efficiency Eglob and Local efficiency Eloc) were calculated using GRETNA (http//www.nitrc.org/projects/gretna/) graph toolbox. To determine whether there were significant group differences in these functional properties, two-sample t-tests were performed on each metric. When significant between-group differences in any functional metrics were obtained, the Pearson correlation coefficients among these metrics and individuals’ MCT were further calculated to assess the relationship between changes in brain function and GMP aging. Results showed that 1) the ReHo values of right V3 and bilateral MT/V5 for older adults were significantly lower than that of younger adults, as well as the ALFF of bilateral MT/V5, and these functional metrics were significantly negatively correlated with individuals’ MCT; 2) The FCs between V2 and left primary motor cortex, V3 and left secondary visual cortex, MT/V5 and left premotor cortex, as well as the FCs between V1, V2, V3 and MT/V5 regions for the older adults were significantly stronger than that of younger adults, and these FCs were correlated with individuals’ MCT; 3) Older adults’ K, Enodal and b of most nodes in temporal lobe were significantly lower than younger adults, and the Enodal of the right temporal cortex were significantly negatively correlated with individuals’ MCT; 4) Older adults’ global network properties including small-world parameters (Cp, γ, Lp, λ, and σ) and network efficiency (Eglob and Eloc) were all significantly lower than younger adults’, with CP and Eloc significantly negatively correlated with their MCT. These findings suggested that the decline of GMS for the elderly was associated not only with functional changes in the dorsal visual pathway, especially in the MT/V5, but may also with functional changes in broader areas of the whole brain, which supported the theory of "dedifferentiation".
Peer Review Status:Awaiting Review
Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2020-05-08
Abstract： The ability to pre-process information from the parafovea, a hallmark component of skilled reading (Blythe, & Joseph, 2011), refers to the fact that readers visually and linguistically analyse upcoming words prior to their direct fixation. Previous findings regarding depth of pre-processing effects that are based on alphabetic language reading are mixed. One very important reason is that there is considerable variability in the length of target words in those studies conducted on alphabetic reading scripts. By contrast it is possible to conduct such studies in Chinese to allow for parafoveal processing of text to be operationalized over characters without length variability. Chinese is a language with characteristics that are optimal for investigating parafoveal processing. The present project will take advantage of Chinese text characteristics to examine three aspects of parafoveal processing by using the eye tracking technique: (1) the first study aims at exploring how parafoveal load affects the spatial extent of pre-processing, (2) the second study attempts to examine whether and how foveal load influences the spatial extent and depth of pre-processing; On the basis of the first two studies, (3) the third study will investigate how reading skill modulates the spatial and depth effects of parafoveal processing, and also how reading efficiency interacts with spatial extent and depth of pre-processing. The findings of the current project will seek to illuminate currently controversial issues on parafoveal processing, and will be beneficial for examining and extending the current reading models of eye movement control (e.g., E-Z reader model, SWIFT model)." "
Subjects: Psychology >> Educational Psychology submitted time 2020-05-07
Abstract： Statistical learning (SL), which was first addressed in the seminal study on speech segmentation of infants by Saffran et al. (1996), is a process of detecting the statistical regularities such as transitional probability in continuous flow of stimuli. Previous studies have proven the general existence of SL, and in recent years close attention has been placed on its specificity and its impact on other cognitive activities, especially revealing the cognitive neural mechanisms of SL and its interaction with language by exploring the process and the specificity of SL. According to the multimodal data from brain and behavior measures, future studies should seek more behavioral and neural indexes to evaluate the performance of SL, to explore the dynamic changes in neural activities of different types of SL and to construct the connection between neural correlates and behavioral performance, which will help to have an in-depth understanding of SL. Based on previous discoveries on the interaction between SL and language, future studies could determine whether SL is an effective intervention to improve language acquisition and how it works in the improvement, through exploring the effect of music SL training on second language learning of adult learners.
Peer Review Status:Awaiting Review
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