Judgment Task Research Articles

Investigating the Relationship between Balanced Composition and Aesthetic Judgment through Computational Aesthetics and Neuroaesthetic Approaches

Background: Symmetry is a special kind of balance. This study aims to systematically explore and apply the role of balanced composition in aesthetic judgments by focusing on balanced composition features and employing research methods from computational aesthetics and neuroaesthetics. Methods: First, experimental materials were classified by quantifying balanced composition using several indices, including symmetry, center of gravity, and negative space. An EEG experiment was conducted with 18 participants, who were asked to respond dichotomously to the same stimuli under different judgment tasks (balance and aesthetics), with both behavioral and EEG data being recorded and analyzed. Subsequently, participants’ data were combined with balanced composition indices to construct and analyze various SVM classification models. Results: Participants largely used balanced composition as a criterion for aesthetic evaluation. ERP data indicated that from 300–500 ms post-stimulus, brain activation was more significant in the aesthetic task, with unbeautiful and imbalanced stimuli eliciting larger frontal negative waves and occipital positive waves. From 600–1000 ms, beautiful stimuli caused smaller negative waves in the PZ channel. The results of the SVM models indicated that the model incorporating aesthetic subject data (ACC = 0.9989) outperforms the model using only balanced composition parameters of the aesthetic object (ACC = 0.7074). Conclusions: Balanced composition is a crucial indicator in aesthetics, with similar early processing stages in both balance and aesthetic judgments. Multi-modal data models validated the advantage of including human factors in aesthetic evaluation systems. This interdisciplinary approach not only enhances our understanding of the cognitive and emotional processes involved in aesthetic judgments but also enables the construction of more reasonable machine learning models to simulate and predict human aesthetic preferences.

The Impact of Explicit Metalinguistic Knowledge in L1 on the Usage of the Present Subjunctive in Relative Clauses in L3

This study aimed to investigate how learners from India, whose first language (L1) is Hindi, second language (L2) is English, and third language (L3) is Spanish, recognize and consciously utilize the cross-linguistic similarities and differences related to the present subjunctive mood in relative clauses. Notably, the subjunctive mood shows significant parallels between Hindi (L1) and Spanish (L3). The research involved 64 participants enrolled in the second year of Bachelor of Arts programs in Spanish at Jawaharlal Nehru University, representing different proficiency levels. An acceptability judgment task and a metalinguistic knowledge test were used to assess whether a high level of metalinguistic knowledge (MLK) and metalinguistic awareness (MLA) facilitated the transfer from L1 Hindi to L3 Spanish in acquiring the present subjunctive mood. Key findings from a mixed-effects model revealed varying levels of MLK among participants, but no statistically significant effect on overall performance was observed. These results suggest that, while MLK may vary, it does not necessarily translate into improved acquisition of the present subjunctive in L3 Spanish.

Chinese EFL learners' processing of English binomials: the role of interlexical and intralexical factors.

Binomials have been relatively understudied compared to other types of multiword expressions (MWEs) in second language research, such as collocations and idioms. This study investigated English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners' processing of English binomials and how it is influenced by interlexical factors (L1-L2 congruency and L1-lexicalization) and intralexical factors (word and binomial frequency, binomial reversibility, and binomial predictability). Forty Chinese EFL learners participated in a phrase acceptability judgment task of 64 target binomials (16 congruent L1-lexicalized, 16 congruent L1-nonlexicalized, and 32 incongruent) and 64 non-binomial controls. Results revealed that learners experienced difficulty judging the formulaicity of binomials. They processed binomial stimuli significantly faster than non-binomial baselines, demonstrating a binomial phrase effect. They also processed L1-L2 congruent items faster and more accurately than incongruent items, showing a robust congruency effect. The congruent items which are lexicalized in the L1 showed further processing advantage than the non-lexicalized items, indicating a graded congruency effect. Moreover, binomial reversibility and binomial predictability (measured with cloze probability) also showed significant effects. These findings highlight the need to distinguish and investigate different types of congruency, explore appropriate measures for MWE predictability, and to examine binomials focusing on their unique features.

EFL Learners' Pragmatic Tolerance of Quantity Maxim Violation

The current study embarks on investigating Iraqi EFL learners' pragmatic tolerance of quantity maxim violations. Additionally, it seeks to shed light on Iraqi EFL learners' pragmatic abilities in deriving pragmatic inferences from utterances that contain violations of quantity maxim. The experimental work in the current study utilized two types of sentence judgment tasks. Binary sentence judgment task for investigating learners' pragmatic tolerance, and ternary judgment task for investigating learners' pragmatic competence. The study included two groups of participants. The first group included 50 participants from 2nd-year students, and the second included 50 from 4th-year students at the Department of English for the academic year 2023-2024; both groups judged underinformative scalar implicature utterances. The results with binary task data indicate that Iraqi EFL learners exhibit tolerance toward quantity maxim violations. However, the ternary judgment task results indicate that Iraqi learners are not competent enough to derive a pragmatic inference. Hence, the current study attempts to provide a comprehensive understanding of EFL learners' pragmatic abilities to derive implied meanings.

Age differences in BOLD modulation to task difficulty as a function of amyloid burden.

Effective cognitive performance often requires the allocation of additional neural resources (i.e. blood-oxygen-level-dependent [BOLD] activation) as task demands increase, and this demand-related modulation is affected by amyloid-beta deposition and normal aging. The present study investigated these complex relationships between amyloid, modulation, and cognitive function (i.e. fluid ability). Participants from the Dallas Lifespan Brain Study (DLBS, n = 252, ages 50-89) completed a semantic judgment task during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) where the judgments differed in classification difficulty. Amyloid burden was assessed via positron emission tomography (PET) using 18F-florbetapir. A quadratic relationship between amyloid standardized value uptake ratios (SUVRs) and BOLD modulation was observed such that modulation was weaker in those with moderately elevated SUVRs (e.g. just reaching amyloid-positivity), whereas those with very high SUVRs (e.g. SUVR > 1.5) showed strong modulation. Greater modulation was related to better fluid ability, and this relationship was strongest in younger participants and those with lower amyloid burden. These results support the theory that effective demand-related modulation contributes to healthy cognitive aging, especially in the transition from middle age to older adulthood, whereas high modulation may be dysfunctional in those with substantial amyloid deposition.

In human–machine trust, humans rely on a simple averaging strategy

With the growing role of artificial intelligence (AI) in our lives, attention is increasingly turning to the way that humans and AI work together. A key aspect of human–AI collaboration is how people integrate judgements or recommendations from machine agents, when they differ from their own judgements. We investigated trust in human–machine teaming using a perceptual judgement task based on the judge–advisor system. Participants (n=89\\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \\usepackage{amsmath} \\usepackage{wasysym} \\usepackage{amsfonts} \\usepackage{amssymb} \\usepackage{amsbsy} \\usepackage{mathrsfs} \\usepackage{upgreek} \\setlength{\\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \\begin{document}$$n=89$$\\end{document}) estimated a perceptual quantity, then received a recommendation from a machine agent. The participants then made a second response which combined their first estimate and the machine’s recommendation. The degree to which participants shifted their second response in the direction of the recommendations provided a measure of their trust in the machine agent. We analysed the role of advice distance in people’s willingness to change their judgements. When a recommendation falls a long way from their initial judgement, do people come to doubt their own judgement, trusting the recommendation more, or do they doubt the machine agent, trusting the recommendation less? We found that although some participants exhibited these behaviours, the most common response was neither of these tendencies, and a simple model based on averaging accounted best for participants’ trust behaviour. We discuss implications for theories of trust, and human–machine teaming.

Ordinal processing differences between children with persistent dyscalculia and typically performing children.

Ordinal number processing skills are important for adults and children. Recent work demonstrates that children have difficulty with judging the ordinality of sequences that are in-order but do not match the typical count-list (i.e., in-order non-adjacent sequences, such as 2-4-6). Limited evidence in the literature suggests that dyscalculic children show a similar pattern of behavior. In the present study, we sought to explicitly test the hypothesis that children with developmental dyscalculia struggle primarily with extending notions of ordinality to sequences outside of the count-list. We test this hypothesis using a sample of children with persistent developmental dyscalculia, and a comparison group of typically performing children. Both groups completed an ordinality judgment task, in which triplet sequences were judged as being in-order (e.g., 3-4-5; 2-4-6) or in mixed-order (e.g., 3-5-4; 2-6-4). In line with our prediction, results demonstrate that children with persistent developmental dyscalculia make more errors, compared to typically performing children, but only on the in-order non-adjacent trials (e.g., 2-4-6). Broadly, this finding suggests that ordinality processing abilities are impaired in children with developmental dyscalculia, and that this characteristic appears primarily in extending notions of ordinality beyond adjacent sequences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

That-trace effects in Najdi Arabic L2 learners of English

Abstract The current study is a partial replication of Kim and Goodall (2024), who tested competing predictions of two prominent accounts of that-trace effects, which are argued to emerge due to either syntactic constraints or considerations of the production system. To tease apart these possibilities, Kim and Goodall examine L2 sensitivity to that-trace effects, as the two accounts implicitly have different expectations regarding L2 performance. Their results showed a non-native pattern of acceptability judgments for Korean and Spanish learners of English, whose L1s do not display that-trace effects, which are argued to support a production-based account. The current study extends their experiment to Nadji Arabic L2 learners of English, whose L1 critically exhibits that-trace effects, allowing us to probe whether previous findings can be accounted for by processing difficulties or L1 background. Our results indicated that despite L2 learners’ native-like sensitivity at the group level, lower proficiency was associated with non-native-like subject extraction effects, in line with Kim and Goodall’s results. Overall, findings from an acceptability judgment task suggest that L2 sensitivity to that-trace effects does not involve transfer of a syntactic constraint, but is something that develops with proficiency, more in line with a production-based account.

Emotional text messages affect the early processing of emoticons depending on their emotional congruence: evidence from the N170 and EPN event related potentials

Emoticons have been considered pragmatic cues that enhance emotional expressivity during computer-mediated communication. Yet, it is unclear how emoticons are processed in ambiguous text-based communication due to incongruences between the emoticon's emotional valence and its context. In this study, we investigated the electrophysiological correlates of contextual influence on the early emotional processing of emoticons, during an emotional congruence judgment task. Participants were instructed to judge the congruence between a text message expressing an emotional situation (positive or negative), and a subsequent emoticon expressing positive or negative emotions. We analyzed early event-related potentials elicited by emoticons related to face processing (N170) and emotional salience in visual perception processing (Early Posterior Negativity, EPN). Our results show that accuracy and Reaction Times depend on the interaction between the emotional valence of the context and the emoticon. Negative emoticons elicited a larger N170, suggesting that the emotional information of the emoticon is integrated at the early stages of the perceptual process. During emoticon processing, a valence effect was observed with enhanced EPN amplitudes in occipital areas for emoticons representing negative valences. Moreover, we observed a congruence effect in parieto-temporal sites within the same time-window, with larger amplitudes for the congruent condition. We conclude that, similar to face processing, emoticons are processed differently according to their emotional content and the context in which they are embedded. A congruent context might enhance the emotional salience of the emoticon (and therefore, its emotional expression) during the early stages of their processing.

Probability errors in children's judgements about the likelihood of social characteristics.

The studies reported here investigated mechanisms underlying children's tendency to commit the conjunction fallacy (judging that a conjunction of two events is more likely than one of the events in isolation) when judging people's characteristics. Study 1 investigated these errors in 4- and 5-year-olds (N = 58) using a newly developed social judgement task in which children judged whether a conjunction or one of its elements would apply to a protagonist. Children made conjunction fallacy errors at chance level. Study 2 (N = 71) replicated these findings using an adapted version of the task, in which children separately judged the likelihood of the conjunction and each of its events. Study 3 investigated age-related changes in conjunction fallacy errors in a sample of 148 children aged 4 to 11 years old and 130 adults. This study also investigated how providing background information on the protagonist influenced error rate. Unlike younger children, 10- and 11-year-olds committed the conjunction fallacy at chance level in the absence of background information, but providing information consistent with the likely component of the conjunction significantly increased their error rate. Adults' error rate also significantly increased after the introduction of background information. Across all three studies, conjunction fallacy errors were unrelated to cognitive and social-cognitive abilities, such as verbal ability, theory of mind, and inhibitory control (Studies 1 and 2), and prejudice and hindsight bias (Study 3). These findings suggest that it is only in the second decade of life that children use social information to inform their judgements about people and that social decision-making errors are not determined by core aspects of cognitive and social-cognitive development. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Declarative and Automatized Phonological Vocabulary Knowledge: Recognition, Recall, Lexicosemantic Judgment, and Listening‐Focused Employability of Second Language Words

AbstractThis study revisits the roles of different aspects of phonological vocabulary knowledge in second language (L2) listening. Japanese learners of English (n = 114) completed the TOEIC Listening test and three phonological vocabulary tests assessing (a) ability to recognize the meanings of aural forms (meaning recognition), (b) ability to recall the meanings of aural forms (meaning recall), and (c) ability to spontaneously judge the appropriate use of word meanings in sentential contexts (lexicosemantic judgment task [LJT]). Among the three measures, the LJT best predicted the participants’ ability to access the target words during real‐life L2 listening comprehension of monologues and conversations (measured via TOEIC). Structural equation modeling demonstrated that the LJT was distinct from both meaning recognition and recall and revealed their different associations with listening comprehension scores. In line with the skill acquisition theory, we propose that the LJT reflects automatized knowledge, whereas meaning recognition and recall represent declarative knowledge.

Altered Use of Context During Visual Perception in Psychotic Psychopathology: A Neurophysiological Investigation of Tuned and Untuned Suppression During Contrast Perception.

The human visual system streamlines visual processing by suppressing responses to textures that are similar to their surrounding context. Surround suppression is weaker in individuals with schizophrenia (ISZ); this altered use of visuospatial context may relate to the characteristic visual distortions they experience. To understand atypical surround suppression in psychotic psychopathology, we investigated neurophysiological responses in ISZ, healthy controls (HC), individuals with bipolar disorder (IBP), and first-degree relatives (ISZR/IBPR). Participants performed a contrast judgment task on a circular target with annular surrounds, with concurrent electroencephalography. Orientation-independent (untuned) suppression was estimated from responses to central targets with orthogonal surrounds; the orientation-dependence of suppression was estimated by fitting an exponential function to the increase in suppression as surrounds became more aligned with the center. ISZ exhibited weakened untuned suppression coupled with enhanced orientation-dependence of suppression. The N1 visual evoked potential was associated with the orientation-dependence of suppression, with ISZ and ISZR (but not IBP or IBPR) showing enhanced orientation-dependence of the N1. Collapsed across orientation conditions, the N1 for ISZ lacked asymmetry toward the right hemisphere; this reduction in N1 asymmetry was associated with reduced untuned suppression, real-world perceptual anomalies, and psychotic psychopathology. The overall amplitude of the N1 was reduced in ISZ and IBP. Key measures of symptomatology for ISZ are associated with reductions in untuned suppression. Increased sensitivity for ISZ to the relative orientation of suppressive surrounds is reflected in the N1 VEP, which is commonly associated with higher-level visual functions such as allocation of spatial attention or scene segmentation.

Speaker judgments alone cannot diagnose syllable structure

Abstract The ease and consistency with which speakers of many languages provide direct judgments about syllable structure has been taken by scholars as evidence that these judgments are accurate and sufficient argumentation for an analysis of syllable structure in descriptive works. This paper questions whether the results of direct elicitation tasks reliably indicate a prosodic domain that is meaningful in the language’s phonology and provides alternative forms of evidence for syllable structure from intonation. This is done through a case study of Budai Rukai, a Formosan language whose contact relationship with Sinitic languages affects how speakers respond to syllable judgment tasks.

Moral Injury and Its Consequences Among Combat Veterans: Preliminary Findings on the Role of Moral Judgment.

Exposure to potentially morally injurious events (PMIEs) among combat veterans has been acknowledged as a significant stressful combat event that may lead to various mental health problems, including depression and moral injury (MI), outcomes of shame and guilt. Recent studies have examined both risk and protective factors that can contribute to PMIEs and their consequences. However, while the general level of one's moral judgment is a logical contributor to moral injuries, it has yet to be examined empirically. In the current study, we examined the unique impact of moral judgment levels on the experience of PMIEs among combat veterans. We also examined the moderating role of moral judgment in the relationship between PMIEs and MI outcomes and depressive symptoms. A volunteer sample of 70 male Israeli combat veterans completed self-report questionnaires and a moral judgment task in a cross-sectional design study. Our findings indicate that moral judgment contributed to higher levels of perceiving others' actions as transgressive (PMIE-Other), above and beyond combat exposure. Moreover, we found that moral judgment has a moderating role in the link between PMIEs and their negative outcomes: Among veterans with higher levels of moral judgment, the association between PMIEs and their expressions was stronger than for those with lower levels of moral judgment. Our finding highlights the unique contribution of moral judgment level to PMIEs and their mental health consequences. It can be cautiously suggested that moral judgment should be viewed as a pre-recruitment risk factor that can help identify those at greater risk for mental health problems following exposure to PMIEs.

Learning Transfer and Universal Grammar: The Case of Arabic as a Foreign Language

This Arabic as a Foreign Language (AFL) is considered a parsimonious field in applied linguistics. Therefore, this article tries to highlight how language transfer influences American students in their Arabic learning process. Additionally, this work attempts to explore whether Arabic foreign learners rely on their pre-existing knowledge to learn Arabic and determine the role of transfer regarding language universals. The study employs a quantitative methodology based on a Grammaticality Judgment Task (GJT) to achieve its objective. According to the study's results, L2 Arabic learners initially transfer their L1 setting to L2. In other words, Universal Grammar (UG) exists, but learners only have indirect access to it via their L1. By studying and investigating the influence of language transfer on learning outcomes, experts' and educators’ interventions can be tailored to more effectively assist foreign students in overcoming errors connected to their first language and improving their proficiency in learning Arabic language.

How do linguistic illusions arise? Rational inference and good-enough processing as competing latent processes within individuals

ABSTRACT Non-literal interpretations of implausible sentences such as The mother gave the candle the daughter have been taken as evidence for a rational error-correction mechanism that reconstructs the intended utterance from the ill-formed input (…gave the daughter the candle). However, the good-enough processing framework offers an alternative explanation: readers sometimes miss problematic aspects of sentences because they are only processing them superficially, which leads to acceptability illusions. As a synthesis of these accounts, I propose that conscious rational inferences about errors on the one hand and good-enough processing on the other are competing latent processes that simultaneously occur within the same comprehender. In support of this view, I present data from a two-dimensional grammaticality/interpretability judgment task with different types of subtly ill-formed sentences. Both conscious rational inference and good-enough processing predict positive interpretability judgments for such sentences, but only good-enough processing also predicts positive grammaticality judgments. By fitting a lognormal race model jointly to judgments and response latencies, I show that conscious rational inference and good-enough processing, as well as purely grammar-driven processing, actively trade off with each other during reading. Furthermore, individual differences measures reveal that participant traits such as linguistic pedantry, interpretational charity, and analytic/intuitive cognitive styles contribute to variability in the processing patterns.

Scene construction processes in the anterior hippocampus during temporal episodic memory retrieval.

Although the hippocampus has been implicated in both the temporal organization of memories and association of scene elements, some theoretical accountsposit that the role of the hippocampus in episodic memory is largely atemporal. In this study, we set out to explore this discrepancy by identifying hippocampal activity patterns related to scene construction while participants performed a temporal order memory task. Participants in the fMRI scanner were shown a sequence of photographs, each consisting of a central object and a contextual background scene. On each retrieval trial, participants were shown a pair of the original photographs (FULL), objects from the scenes without the background (OBJ), or background contexts without the main foreground object (BACK). In the temporal order judgment (TOJ) task, participants judged the temporal order of the pair of scenes; in the Viewing trials, two identical scenes were shown without any task. First, we found that the anterior hippocampus-particularly the CA1 and subiculum-showed similar patterns of activation between the BACK and OBJ conditions, suggesting that scene construction occurred spontaneously during both TOJ and Viewing. Furthermore, neural markers of scene construction in the anterior hippocampus did not apply to incorrect trials, showing that successful temporal memory retrieval was functionally linked to scene construction. In the cortex, time-processing areas, such as the supplementary motor area and the precuneus, and scene-processing areas, such as the parahippocampal cortex, were activated and functionally connected with the hippocampus. Together, these results support the view that the hippocampus is concurrently involved in scene construction and temporal organization of memory and propose a model of hippocampal episodic memory that takes both processes into account.

Both mOTS-words and pOTS-words prefer emoji stimuli over text stimuli during a lexical judgment task.

The visual word form area in the occipitotemporal sulcus (here OTS-words) is crucial for reading and shows a preference for text stimuli. We hypothesized that this text preference may be driven by lexical processing. Hence, we performed three fMRI experiments (n = 15), systematically varying participants' task and stimulus, and separately evaluated middle mOTS-words and posterior pOTS-words. Experiment 1 contrasted text with other visual stimuli to identify both OTS-words subregions. Experiment 2 utilized an fMRI adaptation paradigm, presenting compound words as texts or emojis. In experiment 3, participants performed a lexical or color judgment task on compound words in text or emoji format. In experiment 2, pOTS-words, but not mOTS-words, showed fMRI adaptation for compound words in both formats. In experiment 3, both subregions showed higher responses to compound words in emoji format. Moreover, mOTS-words showed higher responses during the lexical judgment task and a task-stimulus interaction. Multivariate analyses revealed that distributed responses in pOTS-words encode stimulus and distributed responses in mOTS-words encode stimulus and task. Together, our findings suggest that the function of the OTS-words subregions goes beyond the specific visual processing of text and that these regions are flexibly recruited whenever semantic meaning needs to be assigned to visual input.

Modeling confidence in causal judgments.

Counterfactual theories propose that people's capacity for causal judgment depends on their ability to consider alternative possibilities: The lightning strike caused the forest fire because had it not struck, the forest fire would not have ensued. To accommodate a variety of psychological effects on causal judgment, a range of recent accounts have proposed that people probabilistically sample counterfactual alternatives from which they compute a graded measure of causal strength. While such models successfully describe the influence of the statistical normality (i.e., the base rate) of the candidate and alternate causes on causal judgments, we show that they make further untested predictions about how normality influences people's confidence in their causal judgments. In a large (N = 3,020) sample of participants in a causal judgment task, we found that normality indeed influences people's confidence in their causal judgments and that these influences were predicted by a counterfactual sampling model in which people are more confident in a causal relationship when the effect of the cause is less variable among imagined counterfactual possibilities. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

L2 Spanish clitics among Brazilian Portuguese-speaking learners: the predictive role of lexical knowledge

We examined the acquisition of third-person accusative clitics (e.g., lo, la, los, las) in L2 Spanish among Brazilian Portuguese (BP) speakers. In BP, the animacy of the referent is the main feature constraining accusative pronoun use while, in Spanish, animacy does not affect clitic realization. We tested Lardiere’s (2008; 2009) Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (FRH), Schwartz & Sprouse’s (1996) Full Transfer/Full Access hypothesis (FT/FA), and the suitability of productive vocabulary knowledge as a proxy for overall proficiency and its predictive power for the acquisition of clitics. 74 BP-speaking L2 Spanish learners and a comparison group of 23 native Spanish speakers completed a language background questionnaire, a vocabulary test (Prueba Léxica de Español y Portugués/Prova Léxica de Espanhol e Português, PLEP), an elicited production task, and an acceptability judgment task. Only the L2 Spanish participants completed the tasks in both languages. Our findings are consistent with the FRH, showing that the participants successfully disassemble animacy features from their L1 when acquiring the non-animacy-driven clitics in Spanish. However, animacy effects were found in the L2 production data but not in their receptive grammatical knowledge. Furthermore, animacy effects were not dependent on proficiency as no interactions between these factors were found, thus rejecting the existence of a full transfer stage.