Bernhard Angele of Bournemouth University (UK) will present the following talk 12-1:20, in Tobin 521B on March 23. All are welcome!

They’re onto us! The phenomenon of participants detecting display
changes and what it can tell us about the reading process

In the boundary change paradigm (Rayner, 1975), when a reader’s eyes
cross an invisible boundary location, a preview word is replaced by a
target word. Readers are generally unaware of such changes due to
saccadic suppression. However, some readers detect changes on a few
trials and a small percentage of them detect many changes. I will
present three experiments which combined eye movement data with signal
detection analyses to investigate display change detection. On each
trial, readers had to indicate if they saw a display change in addition
to reading for meaning. On half the trials the display change occurred
during the saccade (immediate condition); on the other half, it was
slowed by 15–25 ms (delay condition) to increase the likelihood that a
change would be detected; we also manipulated the properties of the
parafoveal preview word. Using this new paradigm, we found that subjects
were (1) highly sensitive to display change delays, and (2) more
sensitive to display changes which involved a change of letter identity
(e.g. (e.g. jNxVa to gReEn) than to display changes which involved a
change of visual features, but kept letter identity constant (e.g. gReEn
to GrEeN). Finally, (3) subjects were significantly more sensitive to
display changes when the change was from a non-wordlike preview (xbtchp
to garden) than when the change was from a wordlike preview (puvtur to
garden), but the preview benefit effect on the target word was not
affected by whether the preview was wordlike or non-wordlike.
Additionally, we did not find any influence of pre-boundary word
frequency on display change detection performance. Our results suggest
that display change detection and lexical processing do not use the same
cognitive mechanisms. We propose that parafoveal processing takes place
in two stages: an early, orthography-based, pre-attentional stage, and a
late, attention-dependent lexical access stage.

Will Hopper will be presenting in the Cognitive Brown Bag Wednesday at noon in Tobin 521B, title TBA.

Next week, Tina Chen will be presenting “More Than Noise? Individual Differences in Response Bias in Memory and Reasoning”.

You’re invited to the Data Science Tea!
Note the change in time – 2:30pm.

Who: Spyros Matsoukas
What: tea, refreshments, presentations and conversations about topics in data science
Where: Computer Science Building Rooms 150
When: 2:30 Tuesday March 1

Abstract: We will introduce Amazon Echo and Alexa, the virtual personal assistant that powers Echo, and focus on the challenges our team is facing when developing machine learning solutions for wake word detection, automatic speech recognition, natural language understanding, question answering, dialog management, and speech synthesis.

Bio: Spyros Matsoukas is a Principal Scientist at Amazon.com, developing spoken language understanding technology for voice-enabled products such as Amazon Echo. From 1998 to 2013 he worked at BBN Technologies, Cambridge MA, conducting research in acoustic modeling for ASR, speaker diarization, statistical machine translation, speaker identification, and language identification