Perceptual Identification Task Research Articles

The effects of prediction representations on implicit learning: evidence from sentence reading and perceptual identification

Predicting errors can facilitate implicit learning, but the long-term consequences of prediction errors are not yet fully understood. Especially when predictions are disconfirmed, it remains unclear whether initially correct prediction representations persist or are suppressed. In this study, participants first engaged in a sentence reading task and then performed a perceptual identification task after completing an N-back task or after a 24-hour delay. The perceptual identification task presented previously expected and unexpected words and previously predicted but not presented words to measure implicit memory for the critical items. This study aims to investigate the mechanisms underlying the persistence of prediction representations and the long-term effects of prediction errors on implicit learning. Our results indicate that prediction errors can promote implicit learning and can persist for more than 24 hours. Furthermore, originally correct but not seen in reality prediction representations persist to facilitate performance on the implicit memory task after 24 hours. This may reflect long-term changes in the internal representation probabilities of prediction representations.

A scene with an invisible wall - navigational experience shapes visual scene representation.

Human navigation heavily relies on visual information. Although many previous studies have investigated how navigational information is inferred from visual features of scenes, little is understood about the impact of navigational experience on visual scene representation. In this study, we examined how navigational experience influences both the behavioral and neural responses to a visual scene. During training, participants navigated in the virtual reality (VR) environments which we manipulated navigational experience while holding the visual properties of scenes constant. Half of the environments allowed free navigation (navigable), while the other half featured an 'invisible wall' preventing the participants to continue forward even though the scene was visually navigable (non-navigable). During testing, participants viewed scene images from the VR environment while completing either a behavioral perceptual identification task (Experimentl) or an fMRI scan (Experiment2). Behaviorally, we found that participants judged a scene pair to be significantly more visually different if their prior navigational experience varied, even after accounting for visual similarities between the scene pairs. Neurally, multi-voxel pattern of the parahippocampal place area (PPA) distinguished visual scenes based on prior navigational experience alone. These results suggest that the human visual scene cortex represents information about navigability obtained through prior experience, beyond those computable from the visual properties of the scene. Taken together, these results suggest that scene representation is modulated by prior navigational experience to help us construct a functionally meaningful visual environment.

Intelligibility of speech produced by sighted and blind adults.

PurposeIt is well known that speech uses both the auditory and visual modalities to convey information. In cases of congenital sensory deprivation, the feedback language learners have access to for mapping visible and invisible orofacial articulation is impoverished. Although the effects of blindness on the movements of the lips, jaw, and tongue have been documented in francophone adults, not much is known about their consequences for speech intelligibility. The objective of this study is to investigate the effects of congenital visual deprivation on vowel intelligibility in adult speakers of Canadian French.MethodTwenty adult listeners performed two perceptual identification tasks in which vowels produced by congenitally blind adults and sighted adults were used as stimuli. The vowels were presented in the auditory, visual, and audiovisual modalities (experiment 1) and at different signal-to-noise ratios in the audiovisual modality (experiment 2). Correct identification scores were calculated. Sequential information analyses were also conducted to assess the amount of information transmitted to the listeners along the three vowel features of height, place of articulation, and rounding.ResultsThe results showed that, although blind speakers did not differ from their sighted peers in the auditory modality, they had lower scores in the audiovisual and visual modalities. Some vowels produced by blind speakers are also less robust in noise than those produced by sighted speakers.ConclusionTogether, the results suggest that adult blind speakers have learned to adapt to their sensory loss so that they can successfully achieve intelligible vowel targets in non-noisy conditions but that they produce less intelligible speech in noisy conditions. Thus, the trade-off between visible (lips) and invisible (tongue) articulatory cues observed between vowels produced by blind and sighted speakers is not equivalent in terms of perceptual efficiency.

Phonetic Effects in the Perception of VOT in a Prevoicing Language.

Previous production studies have reported differential amounts of closure voicing in plosives depending on the location of the oral constriction (anterior vs. posterior), vocalic context (high vs. low vowels), and speaker sex. Such differences have been attributed to the aerodynamic factors related to the configuration of the cavity behind the oral constriction, with certain articulations and physiological characteristics of the speaker facilitating vocal fold vibration during closure. The current study used perceptual identification tasks to examine whether similar effects of consonantal posteriority, adjacent vowel height, and speaker sex exist in the perception of voicing. The language of investigation was Russian, a prevoicing language that uses negative VOT to signal the voicing contrast in plosives. The study used both original and resynthesized tokens for speaker sex, which allowed it to focus on the role of differences in VOT specifically. Results indicated that listeners’ judgments were significantly affected by consonantal place of articulation, with listeners accepting less voicing in velar plosives. Speaker sex showed only a marginally significant difference in the expected direction, and vowel height had no effect on perceptual responses. These findings suggest that certain phonetic factors can affect both the initial production and subsequent perception of closure voicing.

Repeated letters increase the ambiguity of strings: Evidence from identification, priming and same-different tasks

Letters are often repeated in words in many languages. The present work explored the mechanisms underlying processing of repeated and unique letters in strings across three experimental paradigms. In a 2AFC perceptual identification task, the insertion but not the deletion of a letter was harder to detect when it was repeated than when it was unique (Exp. 1). In a masked primed same-different task, deletion primes produced the same priming effect regardless of deletion type (repeated, unique; Exp. 2), but insertion primes were more effective when the additional inserted letter created a repetition than when it did not (Exp. 3). In a same-different perceptual identification task, foils created by modifying a repetition, by either repeating the wrong letter or substituting a repeated letter, were harder to reject than foils created by modifying unique letters (Exp. 4). Thus, repetition effects were task-dependent. Since considering representations alone would suggest repetition effects would always occur or never occur, this indicates the importance of modelling task-specific processes. The similarity calculations embedded in the Overlap Model (Gomez et al., 2008) appeared to always predict a repetition effect, but its decision rule for the task of Experiment 1 allowed it to predict the asymmetry between insertions and deletions. In the Letters in Time and Retinotopic Space (LTRS; Adelman, 2011) model, repetition effects arise only from briefly presented stimuli as their perception is incomplete. It was therefore consistent with Experiments 2–4 but required a task-specific response bias to account for the insertion-deletion asymmetry of Experiment 1.

The N400 ERP component reflects an error-based implicit learning signal during language comprehension.

The functional significance of the N400 evoked-response component is still actively debated. An increasing amount of theoretical and computational modelling work is built on the interpretation of the N400 as a prediction error. In neural network modelling work, it was proposed that the N400 component can be interpreted as the change in a probabilistic representation of meaning that drives the continuous adaptation of an internal model of the statistics of the environment. These results imply that increased N400 amplitudes should correspond to greater adaptation, which can be measured via implicit memory. To investigate this model derived hypothesis, the current study manipulated expectancy in a sentence reading task to influence N400 amplitudes and subsequently presented the previously expected vs. unexpected words in a perceptual identification task to measure implicit memory. As predicted, reaction times in the perceptual identification task were significantly faster for previously unexpected words that induced larger N400 amplitudes in the previous sentence reading task. Additionally, it could be demonstrated that this adaptation seems to specifically depend on the process underlying N400 amplitudes, as participants with larger N400 differences during sentence reading also exhibited a larger implicit memory benefit in the perceptual identification task. These findings support the interpretation of the N400 as an implicit learning signal driving adaptation in language processing.

Examining the Relationship Between Speech Perception, Production Distinctness, and Production Variability.

Several studies have demonstrated that individuals’ ability to perceive a speech sound contrast is related to the production of that contrast in their native language. The theoretical account for this relationship is that speech perception and production have a shared multimodal representation in relevant sensory spaces (e.g., auditory and somatosensory domains). This gives rise to a prediction that individuals with more narrowly defined targets will produce greater separation between contrasting sounds, as well as lower variability in the production of each sound. However, empirical studies that tested this hypothesis, particularly with regard to variability, have reported mixed outcomes. The current study investigates the relationship between perceptual ability and production ability, focusing on the auditory domain. We examined whether individuals’ categorical labeling consistency for the American English /ε/–/æ/ contrast, measured using a perceptual identification task, is related to distance between the centroids of vowel categories in acoustic space (i.e., vowel contrast distance) and to two measures of production variability: the overall distribution of repeated tokens for the vowels (i.e., area of the ellipse) and the proportional within-trial decrease in variability as defined as the magnitude of self-correction to the initial acoustic variation of each token (i.e., centering ratio). No significant associations were found between categorical labeling consistency and vowel contrast distance, between categorical labeling consistency and area of the ellipse, or between categorical labeling consistency and centering ratio. These null results suggest that the perception-production relation may not be as robust as suggested by a widely adopted theoretical framing in terms of the size of auditory target regions. However, the present results may also be attributable to choices in implementation (e.g., the use of model talkers instead of continua derived from the participants’ own productions) that should be subject to further investigation.

Folklinguistic perceptions of Global Englishes among German learners of English

Abstract While recent research on English language teaching (ELT) in Germany has called for a more comprehensive representation of the diversity of English worldwide, learners’ perceptions of Global Englishes are currently underresearched despite their importance for a successful implementation of this change in ELT. The present paper analyzes 166 German secondary school students’ perceptions of Global Englishes, underlying cultural associations, and stereotypes. To this end, a perceptual dialect identification task, keyword association, and direct open questions were combined in a folklinguistic study. The results show that the informants consider British and American English as general standards and primarily associate English-speaking countries with Inner Circle varieties: British, American, and Australian English. British English is regarded as the default school reference norm, while American English is associated with dynamism and casualness. Furthermore, the students identify Indian and African English(es) as important Global Englishes. Their perceptions of these varieties are, however, less positive and seem to be influenced by cultural stereotypes, which might prompt them to perceive these varieties as funny or unintelligent. We suggest that learners’ existing knowledge of Global Englishes and explicit metalinguistic discussions of variation can be used as starting points to counteract such stereotypes.

Perceptual identification task points to continuity between implicit memory and recall

Adopting a continuous identification task (CID-R) with embedded questions about prior occurrence, recent research has proposed that implicit and explicit memory are underpinned by a single memory system, since there is a systematic relationship between implicit memory (measured by identification) and explicit memory (measured by subjective report of recognition; for an example, see Berry, Shanks, & Henson, 2008). We were interested in whether this pattern would extend to recall of information from a study phase (Experiment 1) or recall from semantic memory (Experiment 2). We developed a degraded face identification version of the CID-R task using Gaussian blur. We reproduced previous results regarding the relationship between explicit responses on the recognition task (old/new) and stimuli identification, pointing to a continuity between explicit and implicit memory. Critically, we also found that the strength of the implicit effect (i.e., stimuli identification) was predicted by the accuracy in recall (retrieval of context in Experiment 1 and correct responses to general knowledge questions about the face in Experiment 2). Our results support the idea that memory is unidimensional and related to memory trace strength; both for recall and recognition, and interestingly, for semantic and episodic recall.

Precision of voicing perceptual identification is altered in association with voice-onset time production changes.

There is ample evidence that motor learning changes the function of perceptual systems. Previous studies examining the interactions between speech production and perception have shown that the discrimination of phonetic contrasts characterized by the difference in articulatory place features is altered following their production changes caused by the perturbation of auditory feedback. The present study focused on a voiced-voiceless contrast in stop consonants, which is characterized by a temporal articulatory parameter, voice-onset time (VOT). In the experiment, we manipulated the participants' motor functions concerning VOT using a cross-categorical auditory feedback (CAF) paradigm (Mitsuya et al. in J Acoust Soc Am 135:2986-2994, 2014), in which a pre-recorded syllable sound starting with a voiced stop consonant (/da/) was fed back simultaneously with the participant's utterance of a voiceless stop consonant (/ta/), and vice versa. The VOT difference between /da/ and /ta/ productions was increased by the CAF, which is consistent with the result of Mitsuya's study. In addition, we conducted perceptual identification tasks of /da/-/ta/ continuum stimuli varying in VOT before and after the CAF task, and found that the identification function became sharper after as compared to before the CAF task. A significant positive correlation between such production and perception changes was also found. On the basis of these results, we consider that the change in motor function concerning VOT affected voiced-voiceless perceptual processing. The present study is the first to show the involvement of the speech production system in the perception of phonetic contrasts characterized by articulatory temporal features.

An Investigation of Sex Differences, Implicit Memory, and Perceptual Identification in the Survival Memory Paradigm

Robust support has been found for a survival processing effect on memory when information is encoded for its fitness relevance (Nairne et al. J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn 33:263–273, 2007). However, support for this effect has been limited to forms of memory that require intentional, explicit retrieval processes. Thus far, the literature has failed to identify the effect in implicit, automatic memory using conceptual and perceptual production tasks (McBride et al. Mem Cogn 41:862–871, 2013; Tse and Altarriba Mem Cogn 38:1110–1121, 2010). In the current study, an alternative implicit memory test that employs different memory processes was employed in a further attempt to examine the survival processing effect in implicit memory. Participants rated a list of unrelated nouns according to their relevance to either a grassland survival or home-moving scenario in a within-subjects (Experiment 1a) or a between-subjects (Experiment 1b) design. A perceptual identification task was then completed in which accuracy and response times were recorded for the identification of occluded words previously rated in the survival context, moving context, or novel words. Overall, there was no response difference across participants in the implicit or explicit conditions. However, a significant interaction between rating scenario and sex was found in Experiment 1a, suggesting that males and females differentially identify occluded words studied from an evolutionarily relevant perspective. Implications of these results for the survival processing advantage are discussed.

The immediate benefits and long-term consequences of briefly presented masked primes on episodic recollection

Abstract Within-trial priming paradigms have been widely used to measure lexical retrieval and familiarity-based processes in speeded pronunciation, perceptual identification, lexical decision, lexical retrieval, and episodic recognition tasks. Here, we introduce a novel within-trial priming paradigm to examine cued recall, which is considered a more recollection-based task. In each experiment, participants initially studied a list of paired-associates (e.g., BADGE-gold). During each recall test trial, 500 ms after the onset of the stimulus cue (BADGE-??????), a pattern-masked prime was briefly presented for either 48 ms or 125 ms, with the task to recall the word (e.g., gold) paired with the cue (BADGE). Across seven experiments, the primes were identical (gold), semantically related (silver), orthographically related (good), or unrelated (chair) to the to-be-recalled response item (gold). The results consistently indicated that the masked identity primes benefited immediate recall at both the 48 ms and 125 ms durations. There was no benefit from the orthographically related prime condition, suggesting that participants were not using partial letter information as an additional cue for memory retrieval. Semantically related primes only produced a benefit in immediate recall at the 125 ms prime duration. Delayed cued recall performance indicated that the facilitatory priming effects observed in immediate recall were eliminated. In addition, results from conditional analyses suggest that the benefits of retrieval in an immediate recall condition are reversed in the delayed recall condition. We consider multiple interpretations of these delayed recall results and argue that the results are in part due to priming influencing an activation-based mechanism in the immediate recall task, which decreases the retrieval demands for the response item to the paired associate cue, and hence, decreases the long-term benefits of retrieval practice.

Combining the Post-Cue Task and the Perceptual Identification Task to Assess Parallel Activation and Mutual Facilitation of Related Primes and Targets.

Recent theories assume a mutual facilitation in case of semantic overlap for concepts being activated simultaneously. We provide evidence for this claim using a semantic priming paradigm. To test for mutual facilitation of related concepts, a perceptual identification task was employed, presenting prime-target pairs briefly and masked, with an SOA of 0ms (i.e., prime and target were presented concurrently, one above the other). Participants were instructed to identify the target. In Experiment 1, a cue defining the target was presented at stimulus onset, whereas in Experiment 2 the cue was not presented before the offset of stimuli. Accordingly, in Experiment 2, a post-cue task was merged with the perceptual identification task. We obtained significant semantic priming effects in both experiments. This result is compatible with the view that two concepts can both be activated in parallel and can mutually facilitate each other if they are related.

유사 외상 상황에 의한 지각적 점화: 외상자극과 일반위협자극의 비교

본 연구의 목적은 유사 외상 패러다임을 사용하여 지각적 점화효과를 검토하는 것이다. 또한 유사 외상을 경험한 사람들의 불안 반응이 외상과 관련된 자극에만 특징적으로 촉발되는지 위협자극에 일반화되어 촉발되는지 확인하였다. 참가자는 외상 후 스트레스 진단 척도(PDS) 점수가 10점 이하, Beck 우울 척도(BDI) 점수가 23점 이하인 대학생 103명이었다. 참가자들은 외상 사건을 유발하는 영상을 시청한후, 지각적 판단과제의 단어과제 또는 사진과제를 수행하였다. 본 연구의 결과를 요약하면 다음과 같다: 첫째, 일반위협자극보다 외상자극에 대한 반응시간이 유의하게 빠른 것으로 나타났다. 둘째, 단어과제와 달리, 사진과제에서는 일반위협자극보다 외상자극에 대한 반응시간이 유의하게 빠른 것으로 나타났다. 요약하면, 본 연구는 외상 생존자들이 외상과 관련된 지각적 속성에 노출될 시 외상자극에 대한 지각적 점화를 보인다는 것을 규명하였다. 본 연구의 결과는 외상 후 스트레스 증상을 경험하는 개인들에 대한 치료개입에서 외상 관련 자극에 대한 지각적 정보를 재구성하도록 해야 한다는 것을 제언한다. 마지막으로, 본 연구의 한계점과 후속연구를 위한 제언이 논의되었다.

Phonological-orthographic consistency for Japanese words and its impact on visual and auditory word recognition.

In most models of word processing, the degrees of consistency in the mappings between orthographic, phonological, and semantic representations are hypothesized to affect reading time. Following Hino, Miyamura, and Lupker's (2011) examination of the orthographic-phonological (O-P) and orthographic-semantic (O-S) consistency for 1,114 Japanese words (339 katakana and 775 kanji words), in the present research, we initially attempted to measure the phonological-orthographic (P-O) consistency for those same words. In contrast to the O-P and O-S consistencies, which were equivalent for kanji and katakana words, the P-O relationships were much more inconsistent for the kanji words than for the katakana words. The impact of kanji words' P-O consistency was then examined in both visual and auditory word recognition tasks. Although there was no effect of P-O consistency in the standard visual lexical-decision task, significant effects were detected in a lexical-decision task with auditory stimuli, in a perceptual identification task using masked visual stimuli, and in a lexical-decision task with degraded visual stimuli. The implications of these results are discussed in terms of the impact of P-O consistency in auditory and visual word recognition. (PsycINFO Database Record

The perception of language-specific phonetic categories does not guarantee accurate phonological representations in the lexicon of early bilinguals

ABSTRACTThis study examines the perception and processing of the Catalan /e/–/ɛ/ and /o/–/ɔ/ vowel contrasts by 60 Spanish–Catalan bilinguals in Majorca (Spain). Results from binary forced-choice identification, AX discrimination, and lexical decision tasks show that even though these early and highly proficient bilinguals demonstrate a high accuracy in perceptual identification and discrimination tasks, they have difficulties distinguishing between words and nonwords in a lexical decision task. Spanish dominants also exhibited higher error rates than Catalan dominants in the lexical decision task. These findings provide evidence that making explicit judgments regarding whether a certain sound belongs to a phonemic category (i.e., as accomplished via identification and discrimination tasks) does not entail that listeners have an appropriate representation at the lexical level.

A sociotonetic study of Lalo tone split in progress

Since Labov’s early work (e.g., 1963, 1966), sociolinguists have frequently examined change in progress on the segmental level, but much less is known about tone change in progress. The present study finds evidence of a tone split in progress in Lalo, a Tibeto-Burman language of China. While many of the world’s tone languages show historical evidence of tone splits, to our knowledge this is the first time that a tone split has been observed while it is occurring, making it possible to closely examine phonological, social, and perceptual factors. In this sociotonetic study of Lalo, 2,938 tone tokens were extracted from recordings of 38 speakers and analyzed in terms of age, sex, and educational level. Multifactorial analyses show that the temporal extent of voiced stops’ depression of Tone 1 F0 is increasing in apparent time, especially among women, while VOT of voiced stops is decreasing as educational levels improve, giving speakers more contact with Mandarin Chinese. The same 38 speakers were also given a perceptual identification task in which F0 was systematically adjusted. Mixed-effects modeling showed that listeners used multiple acoustic cues (consonant voicing, F0 onset, and F0 shape) to identify the voiced initial. These findings suggest that Lalo is undergoing a tone split that follows Beddor’s (2009) coarticulatory path to sound change.

Perceptual categorization of handling handshapes in British Sign Language

abstractSign languages like British Sign Language (BSL) include partially lexicalized constructions depicting object handling or manipulation – handling constructions. Object sizes gradiently vary, yet it is unclear whether handling handshapes depict handled objects categorically or gradiently. This study investigates the influence of sign language experience on perception of handling handshapes. Deaf signers and hearing non-signers completed perceptual handshape identification and discrimination tasks. We examined whether deaf BSL signers perceived handshape continua categorically or continuously compared with hearing non-signers, and whether reaction times were modulated by linguistic representations. The results revealed similar binary categorization of dynamically presented handling handshapes as deaf and hearing perceivers displayed higher discrimination accuracy on category boundaries, and lower, but above chance, within-category discrimination, suggesting that perceptual categorization was not uniquely mediated by linguistic experience. However, RTs revealed critical differences between groups in processing times; deaf signers’ RTs reflected stronger category bias and increased sensitivity to boundaries, suggesting underlying linguistic representations. Further, handshape variability within categories influenced deaf signers’ discrimination RTs in a manner that suggested graded category organization, with handshape prototype grounding the category. These findings provide an insight into the internal organization of handling handshapes and highlight the complex relationship between sign language, cognition, and gesture.

The influence of neighborhood density on the recognition of Spanish-accented words.

Foreign-accented speech is more difficult to recognize than the same words produced by a native speaker because the accented speech may activate many additional competitors, or it may strongly activate a single, but incorrect, word during lexical retrieval. Experiments 1 and 2 examined the recognition of native-produced and foreign-accented words varying in neighborhood density with auditory lexical decision and perceptual identification tasks, respectively. Experiment 1 found increased reaction times (RTs), especially for accented dense words. Analysis of misperceptions from Experiment 2 found that the mean number of phonologically distinct misperception tokens was higher for native than accented stimuli, suggesting that accented speech does not tend to activate more lexical candidates. Furthermore, a higher proportion of misperceptions in the accented condition (71%) compared with the native condition (58%) was accounted for by the most frequently reported misperception token, suggesting that accented speech instead tends to strongly activate 1 particular neighbor of the target word during lexical competition. Moreover, systematic phonemic substitutions in the misperceptions suggest that lawful acoustic-phonetic variations introduced by the accented speaker's L1 (native language) play a crucial role in determining which neighbor is activated as a strong competitor.

Introspection on uncertainty and judicious help-seeking during the preschool years.

Little is known about the mechanisms underlying a ubiquitous behavior in preschoolers, help-seeking. We tested the hypothesis that preschoolers' awareness of their own uncertainty is associated with help-seeking. Three-, 4-, and 5-year-olds (N = 125) completed a perceptual identification task twice: once independently and once when they could request help from a confederate whose competence level was manipulated. Consistent with our hypothesis, participants sought help more frequently on trials for which, when required to answer independently, they expressed lower confidence. Children in the bad-helper condition were slower to respond after receiving help than those in the good-helper condition. Finally, females and children with more advanced theory of mind were more likely to seek help, identifying additional factors that relate to help-seeking.