Discerning Temporal Expectancy Effects in Script Processing: Evidence from Pupillary and Eye Movement Recordings

This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.Accessing the temporal position of events (early or late in the event sequence) can influence the generation of predictions about upcoming events. However, it is unclear how the temporal position is processed strategically. To investigate this, we presented event pairs to 23 healthy volunteers manipulating temporal order (chronological, inverse) and temporal position (early, late). Pupil dilation, eye movements, and behavioral data, showed that chronological and early event pairs are processed with more ease than inverse and late event pairs. Indexed by the pupillary response late events and inversely presented event pairs elicited greater cognitive processing demands than early events and chronologically presented event pairs. Regarding eye movements, fixation duration was less sensitive to temporal position than to temporal order. Looking at each item of the event sequence only once was behaviorally more effective than looking multiple times at each event regardless of whether temporal position or temporal order was processed. These results emphasize that accessing temporal position and temporal order information results in dissociable behavioral patterns. While more cognitive resources are necessary for processing late and inverse items, change of information acquisition strategies turns out to be most effective when temporal order processing is required. (JINS, 2012, 18, 351–360)Peer Reviewe

Cooking from cold to hot: goal-directedness in simulation and language

The present study explores the processing of temporal information in event knowledge by focusing on the transition from an earlier, source state to a later, goal state. Participants were presented with an event verb followed by antonymous adjectives or adverbs denoting an earlier state and a later state. The states were presented either chronologically (to cook: cold – hot) or inversely (to cook: hot – cold) with regard to the denoted event. Participants were asked to identify either the earlier or the later state. We found that later states are identified faster and more accurately than earlier states. Later states presented chronologically were identified even more quickly than later states presented inversely. We attribute our results to the fact that directedness towards the goal state is a general principle of cognition which plays a fundamental role in language and in simulation, whereby language processing provides faster and more direct access to goals even than simulation.Peer Reviewe

Evaluation of a novel p-rated scale for selective mutism

Assessment of selective mutism (SM) is hampered by the lack of diagnostic measures. The Frankfurt Scale of Selective Mutism was developed for kindergarteners, schoolchildren, and adolescents, including the diagnostic scale (DS) and the severity scale (SS). The objective of this study was to evaluate this novel, parent-rated questionnaire among individuals aged 3 to 18 years (n = 334) with SM, social phobia, internalizing disorders, and a control group. Item analysis resulted in high item-total correlations, and internal consistency in both scales was excellent with Cronbach’s α = .90-.98. Exploratory factor analysis of the SS consistently yielded a one-factor solution. Mean sum scores of the DS differed significantly between the diagnostic groups, and the receiver operating characteristic analysis resulted in optimal cutoffs for distinguishing SM from all other groups with the area under the curves of 0.94-1.00. The SS sum scores correlated significantly with SM’s clinician-rated symptom severity

Supplemental_material_Table_1_and_2 – Supplemental material for Evaluation of a Novel Parent-Rated Scale for Selective Mutism

<p>Supplemental material, Supplemental_material_Table_1_and_2 for Evaluation of a Novel Parent-Rated Scale for Selective Mutism by Angelika Gensthaler, Julia Dieter, Susanne Raisig, Boris Hartmann, Marc Ligges, Michael Kaess, Christine M. Freitag and Christina Schwenck in Assessment</p