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In the last decade, reading research has seen a paradigmatic shift. A new wave of computational models of orthographic processing that offer various forms of noisy position or context-sensitive coding have revolutionized the field of visual word recognition. The influx of such models stems mainly from consistent findings, coming mostly from European languages, regarding an apparent insensitivity of skilled readers to letter order. Underlying the current revolution is the theoretical assumption that the insensitivity of readers to letter order reflects the special way in which the human brain encodes the position of letters in printed words. The present article discusses the theoretical shortcomings and misconceptions of this approach to visual word recognition. A systematic review of data obtained from a variety of languages demonstrates that letter-order insensitivity is neither a general property of the cognitive system nor a property of the brain in encoding letters. Rather, it is a variant and idiosyncratic characteristic of some languages, mostly European, reflecting a strategy of optimizing encoding resources, given the specific structure of words. Since the main goal of reading research is to develop theories that describe the fundamental and invariant phenomena of reading across orthographies, an alternative approach to model visual word recognition is offered. The dimensions of a possible universal model of reading, which outlines the common cognitive operations involved in orthographic processing in all writing systems, are discussed.

People make sense of objects and events around them by classifying them into identifiable categories. The extent to which language affects this process has been the focus of a long-standing debate: Do different languages cause their speakers to behave differently? Here, we show that fluent German-English bilinguals categorize motion events according to the grammatical constraints of the language in which they operate. First, as predicted from cross-linguistic differences in motion encoding, bilingual participants functioning in a German testing context prefer to match events on the basis of motion completion to a greater extent than do bilingual participants in an English context. Second, when bilingual participants experience verbal interference in English, their categorization behavior is congruent with that predicted for German; when bilingual participants experience verbal interference in German, their categorization becomes congruent with that predicted for English. These findings show that language effects on cognition are context-bound and transient, revealing unprecedented levels of malleability in human cognition.

Given that utterance fluency in a second language (L2) is associated with not only L2 cognitive fluency but also utterance fluency in the first language (L1), the study examined to what extent different measures of L2 utterance fluency can be explained by L2-specific cognitive fluency and/or the corresponding L1 utterance fluency measures. Utterance fluency measures on speed, breakdown, and repair phenomena and cognitive fluency measures including speed of lexical retrieval, syntactic encoding, and articulation were collected in the L1 and the L2 from 44 Chinese learners of English. The results show that most L2 utterance fluency measures are accounted for by the combination of L2-specific cognitive fluency measures and the equivalent L1 utterance fluency measure, whereas the number of mid-clause silent pauses and corrections, and mean syllable duration are largely explained by L2-specific cognitive measures, suggesting that they reflect L2-specific knowledge and cognitive skills. In contrast, mean silent pause duration and the number of filled pauses are mainly explained by the corresponding L1 utterance fluency measures.

Comparisons of cognitive processing in monolinguals and bilinguals have revealed a bilingual advantage in inhibitory control. Recent studies have demonstrated advantages associated with exposure to two languages in infancy. However, the domain specificity and scope of the infant bilingual advantage in infancy remains unclear. In the present study, 114 monolingual and bilingual infants were compared in a very basic task of information processing—visual habituation—at 6 months of age. Bilingual infants demonstrated greater efficiency in stimulus encoding as well as in improved recognition memory for familiar stimuli as compared to monolinguals. Findings reveal a generalized cognitive advantage in bilingual infants that is broad in scope, early to emerge, and not specific to language.

Maturation of auditory cortex neural encoding processes was assessed in children with typical development (TD) and autism. Children 6–9 years old were enrolled at Time 1 (T1), with follow-up data obtained ~ 18 months later at Time 2 (T2), and ~ 36 months later at Time 3 (T3). Findings suggested an initial period of rapid auditory cortex maturation in autism, earlier than TD (prior to and surrounding the T1 exam), followed by a period of faster maturation in TD than autism (T1-T3). As a result of group maturation differences, post-stimulus group differences were observed at T1 but not T3. In contrast, stronger pre-stimulus activity in autism than TD was found at all time points, indicating this brain measure is stable across time.

Attention and memory are fundamental cognitive processes that closely interact. In the attentional boost effect (ABE), the stimuli that co-occur with targets are remembered better than those that co-occur with distractors in target detection tasks performed during memory encoding. In target detection tasks performed during retrieval, the stimuli that co-occur with targets are recognized as ‘old’ more easily than the stimuli that co-occur with distractors. This study mainly explored the internal mechanism of the effect of target detection on recognition. In Experiment 1 , the full attention (FA; where participants performed only the memory task) condition was used to compare with divided attention (DA; where participants performed target detection while performing memory retrieval) condition to explore the impact of target detection and distraction inhibition on recognition. In Experiment 2 , the proportion of old and new words in the retrieval stage was adjusted to 1:1 to eliminate the possible reaction tendency caused by the high proportion of old words. In Experiment 3 , the presentation time of words was extended to 1.5 s and 3 s to eliminate the possible impact of rapid processing. The results indicated that the effect of target detection on recognition was attributed to both target detection and distraction rejection and is not affected by the ratio of old and new words and the word presentation time. The effect of target detection on recognition may be owing to temporal yoking of the dual tasks, which is different from the effect of target detection on memory encoding.

Pupil dilation provides a window into recognition memory processes. During a recognition test, the pupil dilates more in response to a recognized studied item than to a correctly rejected new item. Various explanations for this pupil old/new effect have been offered. By a retrieval effort account, the pupil's response on a recognition test reflects the cognitive effort needed to retrieve items from memory. By a memory strength account, pupil dilation reflects the strength of the subjective memory experience elicited by items at test. To compare these accounts, we varied levels of processing (LOP) at study, then measured pupil dilation on a delayed recognition test during which participants made recollection/familiarity judgements. Pupil dilation at test was similar whether test items had been studied in a deep or shallow LOP task, but was greater when deep, shallow, and new test items were experienced as recollected rather than as familiar. This pattern supports the memory strength account rather than the retrieval effort account of pupil dilation during a recognition test. La dilatation de la pupille offre une fenêtre sur les processus de mémoire de reconnaissance. Pendant un test de reconnaissance, la pupille se dilate davantage en réponse à un item étudié reconnu qu'à un nouvel item correctement rejeté. Diverses explications de cet effet « ancien/nouveau » de la pupille ont été proposées. Selon l'hypothèse de l'effort de récupération, la réponse de la pupille lors d'un test de reconnaissance reflète l'effort cognitif nécessaire pour récupérer les items en mémoire. Selon l'hypothèse de la force de la mémoire, la dilatation de la pupille reflète la force de l'expérience subjective de la mémoire provoquée par les items faisant l'objet du test. Pour comparer ces deux hypothèses, nous avons fait varier les niveaux de traitement (LOP) lors de l'étude, puis nous avons mesuré la dilatation de la pupille lors d'un test de reconnaissance différé au cours duquel les participants devaient porter un jugement sur le souvenir ou la familiarité. La dilatation de la pupille au moment du test était similaire, que les éléments du test aient été étudiés dans le cadre d'une tâche de LOP profonde ou superficielle, mais elle était plus importante lorsque les items du test, qu'ils soient profonds, superficiels ou nouveaux, étaient vécus comme des souvenirs plutôt que comme des items familiers. Ce modèle soutient l'hypothèse de la force de la mémoire plutôt que celle de l'effort de récupération de la dilatation de la pupille pendant un test de reconnaissance. Public Significance Statement Pupil dilation is a noninvasive tool for studying cognitive processes. Recently, it has been used to investigate recognition memory. Our study reports that pupil dilation during a recognition test reflected the strength of the subjective memory experience elicited by an item, rather than the mental effort used to try to remember it.

The speed with which information from vision is transformed into working memory (WM) representations that resist interference from ongoing perception and cognition is the subject of conflicting results. Using distinct paradigms, researchers have arrived at estimates of the consolidation time course ranging from 25 ms to 1 s - a range of more than an order of magnitude. However, comparisons of consolidation duration across very different estimation paradigms rely on the implicit assumption that WM consolidation speed is a stable, structural constraint of the WM system. The extremely large variation in WM consolidation speed estimates across measurement approaches motivated the current work's goal of determining whether consolidation speed truly is a stable structural constraint of WM encoding, or instead might be under strategic control as suggested by some accounts. By manipulating the relative task priority of WM encoding and a subsequent sensorimotor decision in a dual-task paradigm, the current experiments demonstrate that the long duration of WM consolidation does not change as a result of task-specific strategies. These results allow comparison of WM consolidation across estimation approaches, are consistent with recent multi-phase WM consolidation models, and are consistent with consolidation duration being an inflexible structural limit.

PurposeIn line with the cognitive viewpoint on the phenomenon of information, the constructivist tradition based on Maturana and Varela's theory of knowing, and some aspects of Shannon's theory of communication, the purpose of this paper is to shed more light on the role of information, data, and knowledge in the cognitive system (domain) of the observer.Design/methodology/approachIn addition to the literature review, a proposed description of the communication and knowledge acquisition processes within the observer's cognitive system/domain is elaborated.FindingsThe paper recognizes communication and knowledge acquisition as separate processes based on two roles of information within the observer's cognitive system, which are emphasized. The first role is connected with the appropriate communication aspects of Shannon's theory related to encoding cognitive entities in the cognitive domain as data representations for calculating their informativeness. The second role involves establishing relations between cognitive entities encoded as data representations through the knowledge acquisition process in the observer's cognitive domain.Originality/valueIn this way, according to the cognitive viewpoint, communication and knowledge acquisition processes are recognized as important aspects of the cognitive process as a whole. In line with such a theoretical approach, the paper seeks to provide an extension of Shannon's original idea, intending to involve the observer's knowledge structure as an important framework for the deepening of information theory.

Recall deals with the encoding, storage, and retrieval of information. Bilinguals have greater flexibility for recall as the person will have multiple language choices to come out with the target word. In other words, a bilingual will have more lexical choices to retrieve the target word. The current study investigates cross-language recall abilities in balanced bilinguals. A cohort group of participants were divided into three subgroups. The first sub-group of participants was asked to recall in second language while the stimuli/ target words were presented in the first language. The second group of participants was asked to recall in their first language while the stimuli/target words were presented in the second language. The third group of participants was allowed to carry out a free recall task. The descriptive analysis backed by statistical analysis revealed no significant difference between three groups suggesting that balanced bilinguals would have greater cognitive flexibility resulting in superior cross-language recall abilities in this population.