Inhibition of return (IOR) is an attentional mechanism that previously has been reported to be either intact or blunted in subjects with schizophrenia (SCZ). In the present study, we explored the neural mechanism of IOR in SCZ by comparing the target-locked N1 and P1 activity evoked by valid-cued trials with that evoked by invalid-cued trials. Twenty-seven schizophrenia patients and nineteen he...

The pupillary light reflex (PLR) was used to track covert shifts of attention to items maintained in visual working memory (VWM). In three experiments, participants performed a change detection task in which rectangles appeared on either side of fixation and at test participants indicated if the cued rectangle changed its orientation. Prior to presentation or during the delay, participants were...

What limits the ability to attend several locations simultaneously? There are two possibilities: Either attention cannot be divided without incurring a cost, or spatial memory is limited and observers forget which locations to monitor. We compared motion discrimination when attention was directed to one or multiple locations by briefly presented central cues. The cues were matched for the amoun...

Two explanations for inhibition of return (IOR) have been proposed. The first is that IOR reflects inhibition of attentional processing at previously cued locations, resulting in altered sensory analysis. The second is that IOR reflects the inhibition of responses directed towards those previously cued locations. We used a variant of a double-saccade paradigm to dissociate these two proposed ef...

Most recent models conceptualize working memory (WM) as a continuous resource, divided up according to task demands. When an increasing number of items need to be remembered, each item receives a smaller chunk of the memory resource. These models predict that the allocation of attention to high-priority WM items during the retention interval should be a zero-sum game: improvements in rememberin...

the purpose of the present study is to develop appropriate scoring scales for each of the defined stages of the writing process, and also to determine to what extent these scoring scales can reliably and validly assess the performances of efl learners in an academic writing task. two hundred and two students’ writing samples were collected after a step-by-step process oriented essay writing ins...

We present a new cross-lingual task for SemEval concerning the translation of L1 fragments in an L2 context. The task is at the boundary of Cross-Lingual Word Sense Disambiguation and Machine Translation. It finds its application in the field of computer-assisted translation, particularly in the context of second language learning. Translating L1 fragments in an L2 context allows language learn...

When two targets are associated with the same response in a speeded task, the response time is facilitated when both targets are simultaneously presented compared to when only one target is presented. This redundant-signal effect can be mediated by probability summation (race model) or by signal integration (co-activation) over and above probability summation. Here we report that the redundant-...

The goal of the Automated Evaluation of Scientific Writing (AESW) Shared Task is to analyze the linguistic characteristics of scientific writing to promote the development of automated writing evaluation tools that can assist authors in writing scientific papers. The proposed task is to predict whether a given sentence requires editing to ensure its “fit” with the scientific writing genre. We d...