Investigating Non-Visual Eye Movements Non-Intrusively: Comparing Manual and Automatic Annotation Styles.

Non-visual eye-movements (NVEMs) are eye movements that do not serve the provision of visual information. As of yet, their cognitive origins and meaning remain under-explored in eye-movement research. The first problem presenting itself in pursuit of their study is one of annotation: in virtue of their being non-visual, they are not necessarily bound to a specific surface or object of interest, rendering conventional eye-trackers nonideal for their study. This, however, makes it potentially viable to investigate them without requiring high resolution data. In this report, we present two approaches to annotating NVEM data - one of them grid-based, involving manual annotation in ELAN (18), the other one Cartesian coordinate-based, derived algorithmically through OpenFace (1). We evaluated a) the two approaches in themselves, e.g. in terms of consistency, as well as b) their compatibility, i.e. the possibilities of mapping one to the other. In the case of a), we found good overall consistency in both approaches, in the case of b), there is evidence for the eventual possibility of mapping the OpenFace gaze estimations onto the manual coding grid.

Preschool children's use of perceptual-motor knowledge and hierarchical representational skills for tool making.

Although other animals can make simple tools, the expanded and complex material culture of humans is unprecedented in the animal kingdom. Tool making is a slow and late-developing ability in humans, and preschool children find making tools to solve problems very challenging. This difficulty in tool making might be related to the lack of familiarity with the tools and may be overcome by children's long term perceptual-motor knowledge. Thus, in this study, the effect of tool familiarity on tool making was investigated with a task in which 5-to-6-year-old children (n = 75) were asked to remove a small bucket from a vertical tube. The results show that children are better at tool making if the tool and its relation to the task are familiar to them (e.g., soda straw). Moreover, we also replicated the finding that hierarchical complexity and tool making were significantly related. Results are discussed in light of the ideomotor approach.

The development of narrative skills in Turkish-speaking children: A complexity approach.

The present study examines the development of plot, evaluative and syntactic complexity in children's narratives and its relationship with gender, ToM, executive function and linguistic recursive ability. One hundred and five Turkish-speaking children distributed across 4 age groups (four-, five-, seven-eight-, and ten-eleven-year-olds) and 15 adults participated in (a) Elicitation of Narratives Task, (b) Emotional Stroop Task, (c) First- or Second-Order ToM Task (depending on their age), (d) Real-Apparent Emotion Task (four-year-olds), and (e) Comprehension of Complement Clauses Task. Among the three domains of complexity, only plot complexity was found to be related to gender and to develop significantly, in particular at 5 and 7 years of age. Evaluative complexity was low in children in all age groups and was not predicted by any factor. Syntactic complexity was predicted by executive function. These findings are discussed considering the cognitive, linguistic and sociocultural nature of narration.

Is There a Particular RC Attachment Preference in Turkish? Negotiating the Effects of Semantic Factors.

The goal of this study is to investigate whether or not Turkish has a particular preference in ambiguity resolution of relative clause attachment when two possible NPs are available as in "Someone shot [NP1 the servant] of [NP2 the actress] [RC who was on the balcony]Ë®. The relevant literature has showed that RC attachment preferences-whether NP1 or NP2-vary across languages, which results in contradictory evidence if some universal processing principle is assumed. Turkish differs typologically from English and other European languages in the construction of RC using complex "genitive-possessor" construction. In order to make a valid cross-linguistic comparison it is therefore of particular importance to carefully control potential extraneous factors which might obstruct true attachment preferences-if they exist. The present study, which controls various confounding factors, reveals that both syntactic and non-syntactic factors should be taken into consideration when constructing the stimulus sentences for testing attachment ambiguity resolution. Specifically, we propose that the semantic relations (e.g. part-whole relations) between the noun phrases of the genitive-possessive construction and the semantic associations with the proximal as well as with the distal predicate play a key role in the attachment preferences of monolingual Turkish native speakers in this type of ambiguous sentences. When these extraneous factors were controlled, no preference was observed.

Updating the dual systems model of temporal cognition: Reasoning with dynamic systems theory.

This commentary construes the relation between the two systems of temporal updating and temporal reasoning as a bifurcation and tracks it across three time scales: phylogeny, ontogeny, and microgeny. In taking a dynamic systems approach, flexibility, as mentioned by Hoerl & McCormack, is revealed as the key characteristic of human temporal cognition.

N1-P2: Neural markers of temporal expectation and response discrimination in interval timing.

Humans use temporal regularities in their daily life to act in accordance with future events in the most efficient way. To achieve this, humans build temporal expectations and determine a template action that is in line with those expectations. In this temporal trisection study, we aimed to study the neurophysiological counterparts of temporal expectation and response discrimination. We investigated amplitude variations of early event-related potentials (ERPs) while manipulating time intervals. We measured temporal expectation-related attenuation of neural activity and response discrimination processes in N1 and P2 ERP components. Results showed that the amplitude of the N1 component was attenuated for the predicted task-relevant temporal location of a response decision. The P2 amplitude, in contrast, was enhanced for a discriminated response in comparison to a template response. The present study supports a link between the different functional associations of the N1 and P2 components within the requirements of a timing task. N1-related amplitude modulation can determine a change in expectation level during timing. The amplitude regulation of the P2 component, in contrast, explains temporal discrimination in both expected and unexpected temporal locations. In addition to expectation­related modulation, our results suggest an additional regulation of the N1 amplitude that is linked to attention. The effect was observed in instances that included a prediction error of a task-relevant temporal location for a response decision. In conclusion, our study contributes to the growing neurocognitive literature on interval timing by capturing different aspects of a timing task; namely, N1-related expectation and P2-related response discrimination processes.

The cognitive ontogeny of tool making in children: The role of inhibition and hierarchical structuring.

During the last decade, the ontogeny of tool making has received growing attention in the literature on tool-related behaviors. However, the cognitive demands underlying tool making are still not clearly understood. In this cross-sectional study of 52 Turkish preschool children from 3 to 6 years of age, the roles of executive function (response inhibition), ability to form hierarchical representations (hierarchical structuring), and social learning were investigated with the hook task previously used with children and animals. In this task, children needed to bend a pipe cleaner to fetch a small bucket with a sticker out of a tall jar. This study replicated earlier findings that preschoolers have great difficulty in tool innovation. However, social learning facilitates tool making, especially after 5 years of age. Capacities to form hierarchical representations and to inhibit prepotent responses were significant positive predictors of tool making after social learning.

The cognitive bases of the development of past and future episodic cognition in preschoolers.

The aim of this study was to use a minimalist framework to examine the joint development of past and future episodic cognition and their underlying cognitive abilities in 3- to 5-year-old Turkish preschoolers. Participants engaged in two main tasks, a what-where-when (www) task to measure episodic memory and a future prediction task to measure episodic future thinking. Three additional tasks were used for predicting children's performance in the two main tasks: a temporal language task, an executive function task, and a spatial working memory task. Results indicated that past and future episodic tasks were significantly correlated with each other even after controlling for age. Hierarchical multiple regressions showed that, after controlling for age, the www task was predicted by executive functions, possibly supporting binding of episodic information and by linguistic abilities. The future prediction task was predicted by linguistic abilities alone, underlining the importance of language for episodic past and future thinking.

Syntactic Recursion Facilitates and Working Memory Predicts Recursive Theory of Mind.

In this study, we focus on the possible roles of second-order syntactic recursion and working memory in terms of simple and complex span tasks in the development of second-order false belief reasoning. We tested 89 Turkish children in two age groups, one younger (4;6-6;5 years) and one older (6;7-8;10 years). Although second-order syntactic recursion is significantly correlated with the second-order false belief task, results of ordinal logistic regressions revealed that the main predictor of second-order false belief reasoning is complex working memory span. Unlike simple working memory and second-order syntactic recursion tasks, the complex working memory task required processing information serially with additional reasoning demands that require complex working memory strategies. Based on our results, we propose that children's second-order theory of mind develops when they have efficient reasoning rules to process embedded beliefs serially, thus overcoming a possible serial processing bottleneck.

Prospective duration judgments: the role of temporality and executive demands of concurrent tasks.

It is known that concurrent non-temporal tasks shorten reproduced temporal durations in prospective duration judgments. Two experiments were carried out, one comparing a concurrent temporal task to a minimally demanding concurrent task (Experiment 1) and one comparing an executive concurrent (Simon) task with a less demanding non-executive concurrent task (Experiment 2). An effect of the concurrent task type on temporal reproductions was found. Furthermore, a duration length effect was found, where longer durations were underestimated more than shorter durations. This effect tended to be stronger for the experiments that included a concurrent task that demanded high attention.

Narrowing perceptual sensitivity to the native language in infancy: exogenous influences on developmental timing.

The infancy literature situates the perceptual narrowing of speech sounds at around 10 months of age, but little is known about the mechanisms that influence individual differences in this developmental milestone. We hypothesized that such differences might in part be explained by characteristics of mother-child interaction. Infant sensitivity to syllables from their native tongue was compared longitudinally to sensitivity to non-native phonemes, at 6 months and again at 10 months. We replicated previous findings that at the group level, both 6- and 10- month-olds were able to discriminate contrasts in their native language, but only 6-month-olds succeeded in discriminating contrasts in the non-native language. However, when discrimination was assessed for separate groups on the basis of mother-child interaction-a 'high contingency group' and a 'moderate contingency' group-the vast majority of infants in both groups showed the expected developmental pattern by 10 months, but only infants in the 'high contingency' group showed early specialization for their native phonemes by failing to discriminate non-native contrasts at 6-months. The findings suggest that the quality of mother-child interaction is one of the exogenous factors influencing the timing of infant specialization for speech processing.

Understanding goal-directed human actions and physical causality: the role of mother-infant interaction.

This study addresses the relation between early cognitive development and mother-infant interaction. Infants at the age of 6 and 10 months recruited from labs in three European countries--Germany, Great Britain, and France--were tested on two cognitive tasks: understanding of goal-directed human action and physical causality. Mother-infant interaction was assessed with the CARE-Index. In the goal-directed action task, the overall sample of the 6-month olds did not yet reliably discriminate between an object-change and a path-change trial while a subsample of infants of modestly controlling mothers did. All infants at 10 months of age showed discrimination. In the physical causality task, the overall sample of the 6-month olds did not yet reliably discriminate between an expected and an unexpected launching event. At 10 months of age, the overall sample showed discrimination, due to the major subsample of infants of highly sensitive mothers. Our findings support the view that exogenous factors influence cognitive development within a particular time window, in highly specific ways, depending on the age of the subjects, the cognitive domain, and the quality of mother-infant interaction.

The link between maternal interaction style and infant action understanding.

The present study investigates whether the maternal interaction style is related to 6-month-old infants' action interpretation. We tested 6-month-olds ability to interpret an unfamiliar human action as goal-directed using a modified version of the paradigm used by Woodward, A. L. (1999). Infant's ability to distinguish between purposeful and non-purposeful behaviours. Infant Behavior & Development, 22, 145-160 and Király, I., Jovanovic, B., Prinz, W., Aschersleben, G., & Gergely, G. (2003). The early origins of goal attribution in infancy. Consciousness & Cognition, 12, 732-751. Additionally, all infants and their mothers participated in a free play situation to assess maternal interaction styles as measured by the CARE-Index. According to mothers' distinct interaction styles, infants were divided into three groups. Results suggest that at 6 months of age infants of mothers with a modestly controlling interaction style are better at interpreting a human action as goal-directed than infants of sensitive and relative unresponsive mothers. The ability to understand human action as goal-directed might be a corollary of an adaptive strategy in infancy.