The Unique Cost of Human Eye Gaze in Cognitive Control: Being Human-Specific and Body-Related?

This study investigated the eye gaze cost in cognitive control and whether it is human-specific and body-related. In Experiment 1, we explored whether there was a cost of human eye gaze in cognitive control and extended it by focusing on the role of emotion in the cost. Stroop effect was found to be larger in eye-gaze condition than vertical grating condition, and to be comparable across positive, negative, and neutral trials. In Experiment 2, we explored whether the eye gaze cost in cognitive control was limited to human eyes. No larger Stroop effect was found in feline eye-gaze condition, neither the modulating role of emotion. In Experiment 3, we explored whether the mouth could elicit a cost in Stroop effect. Stroop effect was not significantly larger in mouth condition compared to vertical grating condition, nor across positive, negative, and neutral conditions. The results suggest that: (1) There is a robust cost of eye gaze in cognitive control; (2) Such eye-gaze cost was specific to human eyes but not to animal eyes; (3) Only human eyes could have such eye-gaze costs but not human mouth. This study supported the notion that presentation of social cues, such as human eyes, could influence attentional processing, and provided preliminary evidence that the human eye plays an important role in cognitive processing

Exploiting Multiple Embeddings for Chinese Named Entity Recognition

Identifying the named entities mentioned in text would enrich many semantic applications at the downstream level. However, due to the predominant usage of colloquial language in microblogs, the named entity recognition (NER) in Chinese microblogs experience significant performance deterioration, compared with performing NER in formal Chinese corpus. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective neural framework to derive the character-level embeddings for NER in Chinese text, named ME-CNER. A character embedding is derived with rich semantic information harnessed at multiple granularities, ranging from radical, character to word levels. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves a large performance improvement on Weibo dataset and comparable performance on MSRA news dataset with lower computational cost against the existing state-of-the-art alternatives.Comment: accepted at CIKM 201

ERP Evidence for the Activation of Syntactic Structure During Comprehension of Lexical Idiom

The present study used event-related potentials to investigate whether the syntactic structure was activated in the comprehension of lexical idioms, and if so, whether it varied as a function of familiarity and semantic transparency. Participants were asked to passively read the &quot;1+2&quot; structural Chinese lexical idioms with each being presented following 3-5 contextual &quot;1+2&quot; (congruent-structure condition) or &quot;2+1&quot; structural Chinese phrases (incongruent-structure condition). The N400 ERP responses showed more positivity in congruent-structure condition relative to incongruent-structure condition in idioms with high familiarity and high semantic transparency, but less positivity in congruent-structure condition in idioms with high familiarity but low semantic transparency, idioms with low familiarity but high semantic transparency, and idioms with low familiarity and low semantic transparency. Our results suggest that syntactic structure, as the unnecessarity of lexical idiomatic words, was nevertheless activated, independent of familiarity and semantic transparency.</p

Neuroticism and depression: A moderated mediation model of secure peer attachment and blindness

Background: Prior studies have shown strong pairwise relationships between neuroticism, peer attachment, and depression but very little was found on the questions of how neuroticism is associated with depression through secure peer attachment, and what role individual difference played in these relations (i.e., the moderating mechanism of being visually impaired or not). Objective: The present study investigated the relationship between neuroticism and depression with secure peer attachment as the mediator and being visually impaired or not as the moderator among visually impaired and sighted adolescents.Methods: The sample consisted of 67 visually impaired adolescents from a special education school, and 160 sighted adolescents from an elementary school and a middle school in Guangzhou, China. All of the adolescents completed a battery of questionnaires that measured secure peer attachment, neuroticism, and depression. Results: The results suggested that neuroticism and depression were negatively associated with secure peer attachment. Moreover, it was found that secure peer attachment partially mediated the relationship between neuroticism and depression and that this link was stronger in visually impaired adolescents than in sighted adolescents.Conclusions: The findings highlighted the importance of secure peer attachment for visually impaired adolescents, and results were interpreted in terms of implications for future studies

Effects of Nb concentration and temperature on generalized stacking fault energy of Zr–Nb alloys by molecular dynamics simulations

The effects of Nb concentration and temperature on the generalized stacking fault energy (GSFE) of basal, prismatic I, pyramidal I and II plane for Zr-Nb alloys are investigated by molecular dynamics simulations (MD). The stable and unstable SFEs of different slip systems show no significant change with the increasing Nb concentration (0, 0.5, 1.0, 1.5, 2.0, and 2.5 at.%) in Zr-Nb alloys at 0 K. Basal, pyramidal I and II planes slip of Zr-Nb alloys prefer to deform by full dislocation with the temperature increases. Additionally, plastic deformation anisotropy of Zr-Nb alloy is improved with the increasing temperature using both embedded atom method (EAM) and angular-dependent potentials (ADP). The present work provides a theoretical basis for understanding enhanced plasticity of Zr-Nb alloys under finite temperature

What Directions Do We Look at Power from? Up-Down, Left-Right, and Front-Back.

Three experiments were carried out to investigate whether the the kinship concept had spatial representations along up-down (Experiment 1), left-right (Experiment 2), and front-back (Experiment 3) orientation. Participants identified the letter P or Q after judging whether kinship words were elder or junior terms. The results showed that participants responded faster to letters placed at the top, right side, and front following elder terms, and faster at the bottom, left side, and back following junior terms. The regression results further confirmed that these shifts of attention along up-down, right-left, and front-back dimensions in external space were uniquely attributed to the power construct embedded in the kinship concept, but not number or time. The results provide evidence for the multiple spatial representations in power, and can be explained by the theoretical construct of structural mapping

The roles of relative linguistic proficiency and modality switching in language switch cost : evidence from Chinese visual unimodal and bimodal bilinguals

The current study investigated the mechanism of language switching in unbalanced visual unimodal bilinguals as well as balanced and unbalanced bimodal bilinguals during a picture naming task. All three groups exhibited significant switch costs across two languages, with symmetrical switch cost in balanced bimodal bilinguals and asymmetrical switch cost in unbalanced unimodal bilinguals and bimodal bilinguals. Moreover, the relative proficiency of the two languages but not their absolute proficiency had an effect on language switch cost. For the bimodal bilinguals the language switch cost also arose from modality switching. These findings suggest that the language switch cost might originate from multiple sources from both outside (e.g., modality switching) and inside (e.g., the relative proficiency of the two languages) the linguistic lexicon

Mean latencies of correct responses (ms, upper panel) and accuracy (%, lower panel) for derivational words and compound words in each signing condition in deaf participants.

<p>Error bars show standard errors.</p