M.A.(Clinical Social Work) / In South Africa, trauma is a vivid reality for many children. Unfortunately due to a lack of resources and knowledge, many children in early childhood who experience trauma symptoms are left untreated. Children in this developmental phase of early childhood, have a limited vocabulary, which adds to the challenge of effectively treating trauma through alternative talk therapies. Neurotherapies like Eye Movement Integration Therapy (EMI), which does not rely on the verbal ability of the child, has therefore gained a lot of interest. The goal of this study was to explore whether EMI can be a useful intervention in treating trauma in early childhood. The objectives included to, i) determine whether or not a change in trauma symptoms was evident from pre- to post-EMI intervention, using the Trauma Symptom Checklist for Young Children (TSCYC); ii) explore the perceptions of parents/caregivers regarding EMI’s effectiveness in the reduction of trauma symptoms; and iii) formulate conclusions and recommendations regarding EMI’s implementation as a trauma intervention with children in early childhood. The researcher followed an exploratory design. The one-group pre-test/post-test design was utilised for conducting the study. The study made use of the Trauma Symptoms Checklist for Young Children (TSCYC), a parent/caregiver report that measures the prevalence and intensity of trauma symptoms like anger, anxiety, dissociation, post-traumatic stress intrusion, post-traumatic stress avoidance, post-traumatic stress arousal, post-traumatic stress total and sexual concerns, in order to determine if a single EMI session could produce a change in trauma symptoms. The group was measured prior to the administration of one EMI session, which according to Beaulieu (2004) is sufficient to result in a measurable change in trauma symptoms. Two weeks later the group’s symptoms were re-measured, using the same instrument. The prescribed EMI protocol was followed. Although the findings from studies of EMI with adults and teenagers appear promising, the usefulness of EMI with young children has not been explored. The results from the study indicated that all of the symptoms as measured by the TSCYC reduced significantly (p<.05) after a single EMI session. It would therefore appear as if EMI might be a useful intervention strategy to treat trauma experienced during early childhood.

We have a strong intuition that people's eyes are unique, socially informative stimuli. As such, it is reasonable to propose that humans have developed a fundamental tendency to preferentially attend to eyes in the environment. The empirical evidence to support this intuition is, however, remarkably thin. Over the course of eight chapters, the present thesis considers the area of social attention, and what special role (if any) the selection of eyes has in it. Chapters 2 and 3 demonstrate that when observers are shown complex natural scenes, they look at the eyes more frequently than any other region. This selection preference is enhanced when the social content and activity in the scene is high, and when the task is to report on the attentional states in the scene. Chapters 4 and 5 establish that the bias to select eyes extends to a variety of tasks, suggesting that it may be fundamental to human social attention. In addition, Chapter 5 shows that observers who are told that they will have to remember the scenes look more often at the eyes than observers who are unaware of the forthcoming memory test; moreover this difference between groups persists to scene recognition. Chapter 6 examines whether the preference for eyes can be explained by visual saliency. It cannot. Chapter 7 compares the selection of eyes to another socially communicative cue, the arrow. The results shed light on a recent controversy in the social attention field, and indicate again that there is a fundamental bias to select the eyes. Collectively the data suggest that for typically developing adults, eyes are rich, socially communicative stimuli that are preferentially attended to relative to other stimuli in the environment. / Arts, Faculty of / Psychology, Department of / Graduate

No description available.

This study aimed to examine how variable exposure to language statistical patterns affects reading behaviour, specifically, eye-movements during reading. The statistical patterns of language affect how individuals store, produce and comprehend language. When reading, individuals with greater linguistic proficiency typically have been shown to rely less on language statistical information compared to less proficient readers. Based on the Lexical Quality Hypothesis, however, it was hypothesized that spelling bias, a print-specific probabilistic cue, may only be utilized for representations with sufficient strengths of representation - through increased exposure to print in individuals, or through higher frequency of occurrence for individual words, since these individuals, and these words, would be expected to have representations of high quality in the reader’s mental lexicon. Undergraduate students with varying amounts of reading experience were presented with sentences containing English noun-noun compound words that varied in spelling bias, i.e. the probability of occurring in text either as spaced (window sill) or concatenated (windowsill). Linear mixed effect multiple regression models were fitted to the eye-movement data and demonstrated that compound words presented in their more supported format - i.e. the format with the highest bias, were read faster, but that this effect was modulated by reading experience, as measured by a test of exposure to print, as well as by word frequency. Only individuals with the most reading experience, and words with the highest frequencies benefited from this facilitatory effect of bias. This distributional property can thus be used during reading, but only when individuals' lexical representations are of sufficiently high quality. The results of this study thus suggest that future research considering the relationship between linguistic properties and reading must consider individual differences in reading skill and exposure. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc)

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Yes / Purpose: Even during steady fixation, people make small eye movements such as microsaccades, whose rate is altered by presentation of salient stimuli. Our goal was to develop a practical method for objectively and robustly estimating contrast sensitivity from microsaccade rates in a diverse population. Methods: Participants, recruited to cover a range of contrast sensitivities, were visually normal (n = 19), amblyopic (n = 10), or had cataract (n = 9). Monocular contrast sensitivity was estimated behaviorally while binocular eye movements were recorded during interleaved passive trials. A probabilistic inference approach was used to establish the likelihood of observed microsaccade rates given the presence or absence of a salient stimulus. Contrast sensitivity was estimated from a function fitted to the scaled log-likelihood ratio of the observed microsaccades in the presence or absence of a salient stimulus across a range of contrasts. Results: Microsaccade rate signature shapes were heterogeneous; nevertheless, estimates of contrast sensitivity could be obtained in all participants. Microsaccade-estimated contrast sensitivity was unbiased compared to behavioral estimates (1.2% mean), with which they were strongly correlated (Spearman's ρ 0.74, P < 0.001, median absolute difference 7.6%). Measurement precision of microsaccade-based contrast sensitivity estimates was worse than that of behavioral estimates, requiring more than 20 times as many presentations to equate precision. Conclusions: Microsaccade rate signatures are heterogeneous in shape when measured across populations with a broad range of contrast sensitivities. Contrast sensitivity can be robustly estimated from rate signatures by probabilistic inference, but more stimulus presentations are currently required to achieve similarly precise estimates to behavioral techniques. / Supported by a Confidence in Concept grant from the Medical Research Council, a Fight for Sight Project Grant (5059/5060) and a Wellcome Trust Research Fellowship to NWR (WT097387).

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No / Past research tells us that individuals can infer information about a target’s emotional state and intentions from their facial expressions (Frith & Frith, 2012), a process known as mentalising. This extends to inferring the events that caused the facial reaction (e.g. Pillai, Sheppard, & Mitchell, 2012; Pillai et al., 2014), an ability known as retrodictive mindreading. Here, we enter new territory by investigating whether or not people (perceivers) can guess a target’s social context by observing their response to stimuli. In Experiment 1, perceivers viewed targets’ responses and were able to determine whether these targets were alone or observed by another person. In Experiment 2, another group of perceivers, without any knowledge of the social context or what the targets were watching, judged whether targets were hiding or exaggerating their facial expressions; and their judgments discriminated between conditions in which targets were observed and alone. Experiment 3 established that another group of perceivers’ judgments of social context were associated with estimations of target expressivity to some degree. In Experiments 1 and 2, the eye movements of perceivers also varied between conditions in which targets were observed and alone. Perceivers were thus able to infer a target’s social context from their visible response. The results demonstrate an ability to use other minds as a window onto a social context that could not be seen directly.

Eye movements during picture description were used to investigate the time course for structuring embedded clauses. According to the frame-based model of language production (e.g., Garrett, 1975; Ferreira, 2000) speakers make decisions about syntactic structure using structural frames corresponding to clauses or verb phrases. On-line theories allow structure to be built piecemeal corresponding to individual words and phrases (e.g., Kempen & Hoenkamp, 1987). These predictions were tested in two studies where speakers answered questions based on scenes that depicted someone communicating or thinking about an embedded event, eliciting descriptions like A woman is thinking about (a man being chased by a bear/a bear chasing a man). Based on previous eye movement studies (e.g., Meyer & Van Der Meulen, 2000), gaze shifts between agents (bear) and patients (man) were expected to occur less often after hearing biased questions, which provided multiple structural cues, than after unbiased ones. The timing of a difference in gaze shifts would then reflect when speakers considered order of mention and committed to an active or passive structure. Study 1 partially supports a frame-based theory of the syntactic planning while study 2 did not provide evidence for either model. Results are discussed in terms of models of language production and reiterate the need for experimental paradigms that use on-line methods in the investigation of the time-course structuring spoken utterances.

The production or comprehension of linguistic information is often not an isolated task decoupled from the visual environment. Rather, people refer to objects or listen to other people describing objects around them. Previous studies have shown that in such situations people either fixate these objects, often multiple times (Cooper, 1974), or they attend to the objects much longer than is required for mere identification (Meyer, Sleiderink, & Levelt, 1998). Most interestingly, during comprehension people also attend to the location of objects even when those objects were removed (Altmann, 2004). The main focus of this thesis was to investigate the role of the spatial location of objects during language processing. The first part of the thesis tested whether attention to objects’ former locations facilitates language production and comprehension processes (Experiments 1-­‐5). In two initial eye-­‐tracking experiments, participants were instructed to name objects that either changed their positions (Experiment 1) or were withdrawn from the computer screen (Experiment 2) during language production. Production was impaired when speakers did not attend to the original position of the objects. Most interestingly, fixating an empty region in which an object was located resulted in faster articulation and initiation times. During the language comprehension tasks, participants were instructed to evaluate facts presented by talking heads appearing in different positions on the computer screen. During evaluation, the talking heads changed position (Experiment 3) or were withdrawn from the screen (Experiments 4-­‐5). People showed a strong tendency to gaze at the centre of the screen and only moved towards the head’s former locations if the screen was empty and if evaluation was not preceded by an intervening task as tested in Experiment 5. Fixating the former location resulted in faster response time but not in better accuracy of evaluation. The second part of this thesis investigated the role of spatial location representations in reading (Experiments 6-­‐7). Specifically, I examined to what extent people reading garden-­‐path sentences regress to specific target words in order to reanalyse the sentences. The results of two eye-­‐tracking experiments showed that readers do not target very precisely. A spatial representation is used, but it appears to be fairly coarse (i.e., only represents whether information is to the left or to the right of fixation). The findings from this thesis give us a clearer understanding of the influence of spatial location information on language processing. In language production particularly, it appears that spatial location is an integral part of the cognitive model and strongly connected with linguistic and visual representations.