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Studying the typical development of reading is key to understanding the precise deficits that underlie reading disabilities. An important correlate of efficient reading is the speed of naming arrays of simple stimuli such as letters and pictures. In this cross-sectional study, we examined developmental changes in visual processing that occurs during letter and object naming from childhood to early adulthood in terms of behavioral task efficiency, associated articulation and eye movement parameters, and the coordination between them, as measured by eye-voice span in both the spatial and temporal domains. We used naming speed (NS) tasks, in which participants were required to name sets of letters or simple objects as quickly and as accurately as possible. Single stimulus manipulations were made to these tasks to make the stimuli either more visually and/or phonologically similar to one another in order to examine how these manipulations affected task performance and the coordination between speech and eye movements. Across development there was an increased efficiency in speech and eye movement performance and their coordination in both the spatial and temporal domains. Furthermore, manipulations to the phonological and visual similarity of specific letter and object stimuli revealed that orthographic processing played a greater role than phonological processing in performance, with the contribution of phonological processing diminishing across development. This comprehensive typical developmental trajectory provides a benchmark for clinical populations to elucidate the nature of the cognitive dysfunction underlying reading difficulties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies have shown that object observation can automatically evoke motor programs for specific actions; this is referred to as affordance. Recent studies have evidenced that individuals are sensitive to the difference between dangerous and neutral objects. This study explored the influence of irrelevant dangerous object on individuals' responses to the target object. In a priming task, participants were required to respond to a target object, which was preceded by a prime object. The object types varied between dangerous and neutral objects. The results revealed that the affordance of the neutral object only occurred when the orientation of the prime object corresponded to that of the target object. The affordance of dangerous object was modulated by a dangerous prime object. When the orientation of the prime object did not correspond to that of the target object, the affordance of the dangerous object was observed; whereas, when the orientation was in correspondence, the congruency effect was reversed. These findings suggest that object-action priming is modulated by the danger level of objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In two experiments (N= 60 each), we investigated the locus of backward crosstalk effects in dual tasking. Specifically, we embedded the typical flanker task within a dual-task paradigm by assigning stimulus-response (S-R) rules to the flankers. In Experiment 1, participants were instructed to first respond to the center letter and only respond to the flanker if the center was a no-go stimulus (i.e., prioritized processing paradigm). Mapping condition was varied between-subjects to be either matched (i.e., same S-R rule for flankers as for center letters), reversed (i.e., opposite S-R rule for flankers), or neutral (i.e., different letters for flankers with separate S-R rules). The results indicated that the backward crosstalk effect was mainly driven by a stimulus-based compatibility, as indicated by a significant S2−R1 compatibility effect in the matched and reversed conditions, with little change in this effect between the matched and reversed conditions. Experiment 2 replicated and extended these findings to a psychological refractory period paradigm. The present findings suggest that in the matched and reversed conditions, there was only one S-R rule active at a time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Stroop-matching task is a variation of the Stroop task in which participants have to compare a Stroop stimulus attribute (color or word) to a second stimulus. The Stroop-matching response conflict (SMRC) represents an interference related to the processes involved in selection/execution of manual responses. In the present study, we developed a variation of the Stroop-matching task in which the Stroop stimuli were matched to graspable objects (a cup) with intact or broken handles laterally oriented (Experiment 1) or to colored bars laterally presented (Experiment 2). It allowed testing the presence of the correspondence effect for lateralized handles and bars and its possible influence on SMRC. Two different intervals (100 and 800 ms) were also included to investigate time modulations in behavioral performance (reaction time and accuracy). Fifty-five volunteers participated in the study. In both experiments, significant SMRC was found, but no interaction occurred between SMRC and correspondence effect, supporting that the hypothesis of different and relatively independent psychological mechanisms is at the basis of each effect. Because significant facilitation for ipsilateral motor responses (correspondence effect) occurred for graspable objects but not for lateralized bars, the attentional shift/spatial-coding view was not able to completely explain our data, and therefore, the grasping affordance hypothesis remained as the most plausible explanation. The time course of facilitation observed in the first experiment and by others indicates the importance of further studies to better understand the time dynamic of facilitation/inhibition of motor responses induced by graspable objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Here, we report that the number of letters in number words influences the response time in numerical comparison tasks. In this experiment, a pair of single Korean number words consisting of two or three letters was simultaneously presented in an area of the same size, and the participants reported which was semantically larger. The conditions were categorized as congruent, neutral, and incongruent based on the congruency between the meaning indicated by the numeral (i.e., the size of the number or semantic size) and the number of letters in each number word. In the analysis, compared to the neutral (faster) and incongruent (slowest) conditions, the response time was the fastest under the congruent condition. Thus, the congruency effect is explained by the number of letters rather than continuous visual properties (occupied area and length). These results suggest that the semantic representation of number words is automatically influenced by the number of letters they contain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tucker and Ellis found that when participants made left/right button-presses to indicate whether objects were upright or inverted, responses were faster when the response hand aligned with the task-irrelevant handle orientation of the object. The effect of handle orientation on response times has been interpreted as evidence that individuals perceive grasp affordances when viewing briefly presented objects, which in turn activate grasp-related motor systems. Although the effect of handle alignment has since been replicated, there remains doubt regarding the extent to which the effect is indeed driven by affordance perception. Objects that feature in affordance-compatibility paradigms are asymmetrical and have laterally protruding handles (e.g., mugs) and thus confound spatial and affordance properties. Research has attempted to disentangle spatial compatibility and affordance effects with varying results. In this study, we present a novel paradigm with which to study affordance perception while sidestepping spatial confounds. We use the Bimanual Affordance Task (BMAT) to test whether object affordances in symmetrical objects facilitate response times. Participants (N = 36) used one of three (left unimanual/right unimanual/bimanual) responses to indicate the colour of presented objects. Objects afforded either a unimanual (e.g., handbag) or a bimanual (e.g., laundry hamper) grasp. Responses were faster when the afforded grasp corresponded with the response type (unimanual vs. bimanual), suggesting that affordance effects exist independent of spatial compatibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The handle-to-hand correspondence effect refers to faster and more accurate responses when the responding hand is aligned with the graspable part of an object tool, compared to when they lay on opposite sides. We performed four behavioral experiments to investigate whether this effect depends on the activation of grasping affordances (affordance activation account) or is to be traced back to a Simon effect, resulting from the spatial coding of stimuli and responses and from their dimensional overlap (location coding account). We manipulated the availability of a response alternative by requiring participants to perform either a unimanual go/no-go task (absence of a response alternative) or a joint go/no-go task (available response alternative) and the type of response required (button-press or grasping response). We found no handle-to-hand correspondence effect in the individual go/no-go task either when a button-press (Experiment 1A) or a grasping (Experiment 2A) response was required, whereas a significant effect emerged in the joint go/no-go task, irrespective of response modality (Experiments1B and 2B). These results do not support the idea that complex motor affordances are activated for meaningful objects, but are rather consistent with the more parsimonious location coding account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As one of the results in this article, I stated a connection between bulk causal structure and boundary entanglement in the AdS/CFT correspondence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]