Groups of Grade 3 children were tested on measures of word-level literacy and undertook tasks that required the ability to associate sounds with letter sequences and that involved visual, auditory and phonological-processing skills. These groups came from different language backgrounds in which the language of instruction was Arabic, Chinese, English, Hungarian or Portuguese. Similar measures were used across the groups, with tests being adapted to be appropriate for the language of the children. Findings indicated that measures of decoding and phonological-processing skills were good predictors of word reading and spelling among Arabic- and English-speaking children, but were less able to predict variability in these same early literacy skills among Chinese- and Hungarian-speaking children, and were better at predicting variability in Portuguese word reading than spelling. Results were discussed with reference to the relative transparency of the script and issues of dyslexia assessment across languages. Overall, the findings argue for the need to take account of features of the orthography used to represent a language when developing assessment procedures for a particular language and that assessment of word-level literacy skills and a phonological perspective of dyslexia may not be universally applicable across all language contexts.
What are the neural mechanisms underlying beauty based on objective parameters and beauty based on subjective social construction? This study scanned participants with fMRI while they performed aesthetic judgments on concrete pictographs and abstract oracle bone scripts. Behavioral results showed both pictographs and oracle bone scripts were judged to be more beautiful when they referred to beautiful objects and positive social meanings, respectively. Imaging results revealed regions associated with perceptual, cognitive, emotional and reward processing were commonly activated both in beautiful judgments of pictographs and oracle bone scripts. Moreover, stronger activations of orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and motor-related areas were found in beautiful judgments of pictographs, whereas beautiful judgments of oracle bone scripts were associated with putamen activity, implying stronger aesthetic experience and embodied approaching for beauty were elicited by the pictographs. In contrast, only visual processing areas were activated in the judgments of ugly pictographs and negative oracle bone scripts. Results provide evidence that the sense of beauty is triggered by two processes: one based on the objective parameters of stimuli (embodied natural beauty) and the other based on the subjective social construction (social endowed beauty).
When people make decisions about sequentially presented items in psychophysical experiments, their decisions are always biased by their preceding decisions and the preceding items, either by assimilation (shift towards the decision or item) or contrast (shift away from the decision or item). Such sequential biases also occur in naturalistic and real-world judgments such as facial attractiveness judgments. In this article, we aimed to cast light on the causes of these sequential biases. We first found significant assimilative and contrastive effects in a visual face attractiveness judgment task and an auditory ringtone agreeableness judgment task, indicating that sequential effects are not limited to the visual modality. We then found that the provision of trial-by-trial feedback of the preceding stimulus value eliminated the contrastive effect, but only weakened the assimilative effect. When participants orally reported their judgments rather than indicated them via a keyboard button press, we found a significant diminished assimilative effect, suggesting that motor response repetition strengthened the assimilation bias. Finally, we found that when visual and auditory stimuli were alternated, there was no longer a contrastive effect from the immediately previous trial, but there was an assimilative effect both from the previous trial (cross-modal) and the 2-back trial (same stimulus modality). These findings suggested that the contrastive effect results from perceptual processing, while the assimilative effect results from anchoring of the previous judgment and is strengthened by response repetition and numerical priming.
Introduction Rambling natural landscapes or landscape gardens may invoke positive emotions. However, the manner in which people experience landscape gardens and the cortical differences in the appreciation of the naturalness and artificiality of landscapes remain unknown. Methods This study scanned participants with functional magnetic resonance imaging while they viewed photographs of natural landscapes and landscape gardens and performed scene type judgment task. Results As predicted, we identified brain regions that were associated with perceptual process, cognitive process, and rewarding experience when appreciating natural landscapes and landscape gardens without color preference. Meanwhile, the contrast between the appreciation of landscape gardens and natural landscapes was characterized by stronger activations of the inferior occipital lobe, the left superior parietal lobule (SPL), the right fusiform gyrus, the right cuneus, and the right hippocampus. Conclusions Responses in these regions indicate that the appreciation of landscape gardens and natural landscapes relies on common cortical regions, and suggest the possibility that the inferior occipital lobe, the SPL, the fusiform gyrus, and the cuneus may be specifically associated with the appreciation of landscape gardens.
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