The role of temporal properties on the detection of temporal violations: insights from pupillometry

Using network science to provide insights into the structure of event knowledge

The structure of event knowledge plays a critical role in prediction, reconstruction of memory for personal events, construction of possible future events, action, language usage, and social interactions. Despite numerous theoretical proposals such as scripts, schemas, and stories, the highly variable and rich nature of events and event knowledge have been formidable barriers to characterizing the structure of event knowledge in memory. We used network science to provide insights into the temporal structure of common events. Based on participants' production and ordering of the activities that make up events, we established empirical profiles for 80 common events to characterize the temporal structure of activities. We used the event networks to investigate multiple issues regarding the variability in the richness and complexity of people's knowledge of common events, including: the temporal structure of events; event prototypes that might emerge from learning across many experiential instances and be expressed by people; the degree to which scenes (communities) are present in various events; the degree to which people believe certain activities are central to an event; how centrality might be distributed across an event's activities; and similarities among events in terms of their content and their temporal structure. Thus, we provide novel insights into human event knowledge, and describe 18 predictions for future human studies.

Altered event processing in persons with Parkinson's disease

Persons with Parkinson's disease (PD) often show particular problems in seemingly simple routines despite relatively preserved cognitive function. We therefore investigated the processing of everyday events on behavioral and neurophysiological levels in a PD and control group. The participants had to indicate via button press whether three sequentially presented sub-events described a previously defined event (e.g., going grocery shopping). Sub-event sequences were either correct or included an event that did not belong to the event (content violation), or events were chronologically wrong (temporal violation). During task execution event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. Generally, the PD group showed less accurate performance independently from task conditions, and reaction times to temporal violations were particularly slow compared to the control group. Regarding ERP results, the control group showed a right lateralized N400 effect in response to content violations, which was absent in the PD group indicating altered content event processing. Concerning the reanalysis of content event violations, the expression of late positive components (LPCs) was similar between both groups. Upon temporal violations, both groups also showed a LPC with a tendentially earlier onset in the PD group, resembling positive components indicative of novelty processing. Together, these findings suggest poor event prediction in PD, which may originate from weak event representation or retrieval and possibly relate to prevalent behavioral dysfunctions in everyday life in PD.

The Effect of Word Predictability on Phonological Activation in Cantonese Reading: A Study of Eye-Fixations and Pupillary Response

This study aimed to investigate the effects of contextual predictability on orthographic and phonological activation during Chinese sentence reading by Cantonese-speaking readers using the error disruption paradigm. Participants' eye fixations and pupil sizes were recorded while they silently read Chinese sentences containing homophonic, orthographic, and unrelated errors. Sentences had varying amounts of contextual information leading up to target words such that some targets were more predictable than others. Results of the fixation time analysis indicated that orthographic effects were significant in first fixation and gaze duration, while phonological effects emerged later in total reading time. However, interactions between predictability and the homophonic condition were found in gaze duration. These results suggest that, while Cantonese readers activate word meanings primarily through orthography in early processing, early phonological activation can occur when facilitated by semantics in high-constraint sentence contexts. Analysis of pupillary response measurements revealed that participants' pupil sizes became larger when they read words containing orthographic errors, suggesting that orthographic error recovery processes significantly increase cognitive load.