1,720,962 research outputs found
Cultural and biological factors modulate spatial biases over development
No full textIncreasing evidence supports the contribution of both biological and cultural factors to visuospatial processing. The present study adds to the literature by exploring the interplay of perceptual and linguistic mechanisms in determining visuospatial asymmetries in adults (Experiment 1) and children (Experiment 2). In particular, pre-schoolers (3 and 5 year-olds), school-aged children (8 year-old), and adult participants were required to bisect different types of stimuli, that is, lines, words, and figure strings. In accordance with the literature, results yielded a leftward bias for lines and words and a rightward bias for figure strings, in adult participants. More critically, different biases were found for lines, words, and figure strings in children as a function of age, reflecting the impact of both cultural and biological factors on the processing of different visuospatial materials. Specifically, an adult-like pattern of results emerged only in the older group of children (8 year-old), but not in pre-schoolers. Results are discussed in terms of literacy, reading habits exposure, and biological maturation
The Timing of Semantic Processing in the Parafovea: Evidence from a Rapid Parallel Visual Presentation Study
No full textIn the present investigation we adopted the Rapid Parallel Visual Presentation Paradigm with the aim of studying the timing of parafoveal semantic processing. The paradigm consisted in the simultaneous presentation of couple of words, one in fovea (W1) and one in parafovea (W2). In three experiments, we manipulated word frequency, semantic relatedness between the two words and the effect of stimulus duration (150, 100, 50 ms). Accuracy on W2 was higher when W1 and W2 were both of high-frequency and when they were semantically related. W1 reading times were faster when both words were highly-frequent but only when the two words were semantically related (150 ms); when W2 was highly frequent and semantically related to the foveal word (100 ms). When the stimuli were presented for 50 ms, the reading times were reduced when W1 was highly frequent and, crucially, in case of a semantic relation between the two words. Our results suggest that it is possible to extract semantic information from the parafovea very fast (within 100 ms) and in parallel to the processing of the foveal word, especially when the cognitive load required for the latter is reduced, as is the case for high-frequency words. We discuss the resulting data in terms of word recognition and eye movements’ models
The effects of crowding on eye movement patterns in reading
No full textCrowding is a phenomenon that characterizes normal periphery limiting letter identification when other letters
surround the signal. We investigated the nature of the reading limitation of crowding by analyzing eyemovement
patterns. The stimuli consisted of two items varying across trials for letter spacing (spaced, unspaced
and increased size), lexicality (words or pseudowords), number of letters (4, 6, 8), and reading modality (oral
and silent). In Experiments 1 and 2 (oral and silent reading, respectively) the results show that an increase in
letter spacing induced an increase in the number of fixations and in gaze duration, but a reduction in the first
fixation duration. More importantly, increasing letter size (Experiment 3) produced the same first fixation
duration advantage as empty spacing, indicating that, as predicted by crowding, only center-to-center letter
distance, and not spacing per se, matters. Moreover, when the letter size was enlarged the number of fixations
did not increase as much as in the previous experiments, suggesting that this measure depends on visual acuity
rather than on crowding. Finally, gaze duration, ameasure ofword recognition, did not changewith the letter size
enlargement. No qualitative differences were found between oral and silent reading experiments (1 and 2),
indicating that the articulatory process did not influence the outcome. Finally, a facilitatory effect of lexicality
was found in all conditions, indicating an interaction between perceptual and lexical processing. Overall, our
results indicate that crowding influences normal word reading bymeans of an increase in first fixation duration,
a measure of word encoding, which we interpret as a modulatory effect of attention on critical spacing
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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