The research presented here was supported by a SSHRC Standard Research Grant and a SSHRC Insight Grant to the 1st author and by a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship and an Ontario Graduate Fellowship to the 2nd author. We wish to thank the members of the ERPLing lab for discussion of the data and for help with the testing of the participants.

All methods and procedures described here have been approved by the University of Ottawa Research Ethics Board.
<img alt="Figure 1" class="xfigimg" src="/files/ftp_upload/60479/60479fig1a.jpg" /> 
Figure 1: Stroop task sample stimuli. The color and noncolor terms as well as the background color used in the current experiment are shown. For Incongruent and Neutral stimuli, sample color-word stimuli are shown. In the experiment, any word could be in any of the six colors. <a href="https://www.jove.com/files/ftp_upload/60479/60479fig1alarge.jpg" target="_blank">Please click here to view a larger version of this figure.</a>
1. Prepare the stimuli for the bilingual Stroop task
NOTE: The Stroop task can be programmed in many commercially available software packages designed for the presentation of behavioral experiments (see Table of Materials)
<ol>
	<li>Create the Congruent items in Language a (La) by programming six color terms written in capital letters in size 60 Times New Roman font, for which the written word and the font color match. For example, present the word GREEN in green font, and the word RED in red font.</li>
	<li>Create the Incongruent items in La by programming six color terms written in capital letters in size 60 Times New Roman font, for which the written word and the font color do not match. For example, present the word GREEN in red font, and the word RED in green font.</li>
	<li>Create the Neutral items in La by programming six noncolor and noncolor-associated terms, written in capital letters in size 60 Times New Roman font. Words are used instead of symbols in order to elicit baseline reading speeds for this reading-based task.
	<ol>
		<li>Present each word in each of the colors used in the previous two steps. For example, present the word BOOK in both green and red font.</li>
	</ol>
	</li>
	<li>Repeat the previous three steps to create items in Language b (Lb). Ensure that you do not use color terms that are cognates in the two languages (e.g., the word BLUE and BLEU in English and French, respectively.) 
	NOTE: In the current experiment, La was English, and the color terms used were RED, YELLOW, GREEN, BLACK, SILVER, and WHITE. Lb was French, and the color terms used were ROUGE, JAUNE, VERT, NOIR, ARGENT, and BLANC.</li>
</ol>
2. Create two single-language blocks
<ol>
	<li>Create an La block which includes 25 Congruent, 25 Incongruent, and 25 Neutral items, for a total of 75 items in the block. Include five Neutral practice items at the beginning of the block.</li>
	<li>Program the experiment to present all items in randomized intermixed trials as shown in Figure 2.</li>
</ol>
<img alt="Figure 2" class="xfigimg" src="/files/ftp_upload/60479/60479fig2a.jpg" /> 
Figure 2: Stroop task procedure. An incongruent trial is shown. Trials began with a 250 ms fixation cross and ended when the participant pressesed a response button or 4,000 ms elapsed. <a href="https://www.jove.com/files/ftp_upload/60479/60479fig2alarge.jpg" target="_blank">Please click here to view a larger version of this figure.</a>
<ol start="3">
	<li>Repeat the previous two steps with 25 Congruent, 25 Incongruent, and 25 Neutral items in Lb, for a total of 75 items in the block.</li>
	<li>Include a self-timed break between the two blocks, and a self-timed break before the presentation of the mixed-language block described in Part 3 below.</li>
</ol>
3. Create one mixed-language block
<ol>
	<li>Create a block which includes the 25 Congruent, 25 Incongruent, and 25 Neutral items in La, and the 25 Congruent, 25 Incongruent, and 25 Neutral items in Lb, for a total of 150 items in the block. Include five Neutral practice items at the beginning of the block.</li>
	<li>Program the experiment to present all items in randomized intermixed trials as shown in Figure 2.</li>
</ol>
4. Test participants
<ol>
	<li>Test participants in a sound-attenuated testing room or booth. Participants should be seated comfortably in front of a computer screen with a button box or keyboard in front of them.</li>
	<li>Explain to the participants that they will see words in different colors on the screen in front of them, and that their task is to press the button that matches the color of the text that they see. Emphasize that they should answer as quickly and accurately as possible, but that it is okay if they make a mistake. Allow time for participants to ask questions.</li>
	<li>Once participants are comfortable with the task, leave the testing room/booth and allow them to begin the experiment. The experiment will take approximately 8 min to complete.</li>
	<li>At the end of the experiment, thank the participants for their time and debrief them about the task and its purpose.</li>
</ol>

<ol>
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J., Stanley, E. M., Wicha, N. Y. Y. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&cmd=Search&doptcmdl=Citation&defaultField=Title+Word&term=Cognitive+and+electrophysiological+correlates+of+the+bilingual+Stroop+effect.">Cognitive and electrophysiological correlates of the bilingual Stroop effect.</a> Frontiers in Psychology. 3 (81), 1-16 (2012).</li><li>Zied, K. M., et al. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&cmd=Search&doptcmdl=Citation&defaultField=Title+Word&term=Bilingualism+and+adult+differences+in+inhibitory+mechanisms:+Evidence+from+a+bilingual+Stroop+task.">Bilingualism and adult differences in inhibitory mechanisms: Evidence from a bilingual Stroop task.</a> Brain and Cognition. 54, 254-256 (2004).</li><li>Tzelgov, J., Henik, A., Leiser, D. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&cmd=Search&doptcmdl=Citation&defaultField=Title+Word&term=Controlling+Stroop+interference:+Evidence+from+a+bilingual+task.">Controlling Stroop interference: Evidence from a bilingual task.</a> Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. 16, 760-771 (1990).</li><li>Pelham, S. 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The authors have nothing to disclose.

The experimental design presented here describes a twist on the traditional Stroop task. The main goal of this twist is to add a level of complexity to the task that may allow differences to emerge between groups that, due to their age, are being tested at their peak of performance. Essentially, to make the task more challenging in order to be able to distinguish between groups, we added a mixed-language block to the traditional Stroop task, which typically only collects data from trials in one language at a time. For th...

The Stroop task, named after its creator John Ridley Stroop, has enjoyed over 80 years of popularity in the literature1. This simple task has been used in hundreds of studies, with different variants created to examine diverse populations and research questions in fields such as psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience. In particular, it has allowed researchers to examine language processes such as the automaticity of written word reading2, as well as associated cognitive control processes. The latter are also termed &#34;executive control&#34;, and encompass a set of processes that include, but are not limited to, inhibition (i.e., interference suppression), attention, conflict monitoring and resolution, selection, and task switching. Looking specifically at bilinguals, the task is highly suitable for obtaining measures of language interference and control in both a bilingual&#39;s first language (L1) and second language (L2), as well as for testing the bilingual advantage hypothesis3, which is currently a topic of considerable debate.4
In the original task, the colors red, green, blue, brown, and purple were used in a series of three experiments. In the first experiment, participants read aloud a list of color words printed in incongruent colors (e.g., the word PURPLE printed in blue ink; correct answer &#34;purple&#34;) and the same list printed in black ink. In the second experiment, participants said aloud the color of the words in the list (e.g., the word PURPLE printed in blue ink; correct answer &#34;blue&#34;) and also named the same colors presented simply as colored squares. Finally, the third experiment examined whether practice of these tasks would affect the outcome, measured in all cases as the time required to read or to name the items in a given list.
The results revealed an interesting asymmetry between word-reading and color-naming: the difference between reading words in different colors and in black was a nonsignificant 2.3 seconds (or a 5.6% increase in the time required to read the color words), while the difference between naming the colors in which incongruent color words were written and naming the colors of squares was a 47.0 seconds, or a significant 74.3% increase in naming time for the words1. In other words, colors did not interfere with word reading, but reading strongly interfered with color naming. This increase in color naming time in the presence of a conflicting written word has come to be known as the Stroop effect, and while practice can reduce its magnitude, the interference cannot be altogether eliminated.
Different theories have been proposed to account for the Stroop effect, and in an extensive review of 50 years of Stroop literature, MacLeod5 describes two of the more predominant ones: 1) the relative speed of processing and 2) selective attention. In the former, words are read faster than colors are named, and this difference in relative processing time causes the Stroop effect. In the latter, the controlled, resource-intensive process of color naming occurs in parallel with the automatic process of reading; the direct competition between diverging word and color information is the source of interference and the Stroop effect2. The theory of selective attention is currently the more accepted view6,7,8,9.
Resolving the word-color competition is a cognitively demanding process that requires inhibiting distracting information while turning attention to the goal of the task. In order to correctly name the color, this interference from the automatically processed written word must be suppressed, while attention must be turned to the less practiced, and therefore controlled, task of color naming. Thus, the Stroop task becomes a measure of not only inhibition, but also of attention, and through various manipulations, it allows different levels of cognitive control to be examined10. Typically, a decreased magnitude of Stroop interference is considered indicative of better inhibition and attentional resource allocation. A full theoretical review of the Stroop task is beyond the scope of the current paper, but is available from previous works2,5. Although nonlinguistic versions of the Stroop task exist (e.g., numerical11, oculomotor12, spatial13), the current work is interested in linguistic cognitive control, and the remainder of the discussion will therefore be focused on the original linguistic version of the task.
The original Stroop task has undergone various modifications since 1935, and the task commonly used now includes a congruent condition where the color word is presented in the color it names (the word BLUE presented in blue ink; correct answer, &#34;blue&#34;) and a control condition that can be made up of colored shapes as in the original task, asterisks (***), a row of symbols such as X&#39;s, %&#39;s or #&#39;s, or high-frequency, noncolor-related words (e.g., DOG). These additions allow the Stroop task to examine facilitation effects. Facilitation effects are brought about by the convergence of information from the written word and the visual color in the congruent condition and thereby speed up naming times7 (although see MacLeod5 for reliability issues regarding facilitation effects). They can also be used to obtain baseline reading time or color naming time measures using the control items, in addition to Stroop interference effects. Facilitation and interference are defined as the difference in response time between the congruent and control, and as the difference between the incongruent and control trials, respectively, although the Stroop effect can sometimes be calculated as the difference between the congruent and incongruent trial, as in the original task6. In the task, the congruent, incongruent, and neutral conditions can be presented in individual blocks (all congruent, all incongruent, or all neutral trials) or in a single block made up of all three conditions, and in a variety of languages.
In the bilingual Stroop task, color terms in the bilingual&#39;s first language (L1) or second language (L2), or both, may be presented, and participants may be instructed to name the colors in either of their two languages. This type of task allows researchers to examine both within-language interference (by having the participant name L1 words in the L1 and L2 words in the L2) and between-language interference (naming L1 words in the L2, and vice versa), giving greater insight into how bilinguals process and manage their languages. For example, between-language interference can tell us about lexical representation and the strength of connections between languages in the mental lexicon, and this interference is typically smaller than within-language interference14.
A variety of language pairs have been used for the Stroop task&#39;s bilingual adaptation, including Chinese-English15,16, Japanese-English15,17,18, Spanish-English15,19,20, French-Arabic21, Arabic-Hebrew22, English-Greek14, English-German14, and Dutch-English7. As some have noted15, factors such as orthography in these languages can influence the magnitude of the within- and between-language interference. Still, despite differences in magnitude, the Stroop effect is always apparent.
It is important to note that many of the studies that incorporate two languages simultaneously20 require overt naming, which is susceptible to lexical access effects23. In tasks requiring a button press, the L1 and L2 are typically presented separately24, and only include three or four colors6,8. However, such a presentation may make the task too simple for young adults, whose cognitive control abilities are at their peak25, and result in all participants performing at ceiling. Thus, a single-language presentation with a small number of possible responses may not be sufficient to elicit any possible differences between groups of young adult bilinguals. Therefore, the current protocol seeks to increase the task challenge by increasing the number of color terms and mixing both the L1 and L2 items in a single block, thus not only examining reading automaticity, attention, and cognitive control processes, but also creating a task that is suitable for testing bilingual cognitive control in the young adult population.
In this bilingual task, stimuli were selected in English and French. An example of our stimuli in used is in Figure 1. However, any two languages can be used. For this reason, the protocol below will simply use Language A (La) and Language B (Lb) to describe stimuli in each language. For full details of the experimental protocol, please refer to our previous work26,27.

<table border="1" fo:keep-together.within-page="1" fo:keep-with-next.within-page="always">
	<tbody>
		<tr>
			<td>Button box</td>
			<td>Cedrus</td>
			<td></td>
			<td>Button box for response; however, any response pad or the computer keyboard can be used to collect responses.</td>
		</tr>
		<tr>
			<td>Desktop computer (Windows OS)</td>
			<td>Dell</td>
			<td></td>
			<td>Computer system for delivering stimuli; however, any computer, including laptops, can be used.</td>
		</tr>
		<tr>
			<td>Presentation</td>
			<td>Neurobehavioural Systems</td>
			<td></td>
			<td>Software for presenting behavioural experiments; however, the experiment can be programmed using a variety of experimental software.</td>
		</tr>
	</tbody>
</table>

examining bilingual language control using the stroop task

The Stroop task in its many variations has been used in fields such as psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience to examine questions regarding the automaticity of reading, language processing, and cognitive control, among others. When looking at bilingual individuals, this task can be used to obtain measures of language interference and control in both a bilingual&#39;s first language (L1) and second language (L2), as well as for testing the bilingual advantage hypothesis. The Stroop task presents participants with color terms written in congruent colors (e.g., the word RED written in red font), incongruent colors (e.g., the word RED written in green font), in addition to noncolor terms for control (e.g., the word TREE presented in any color), and uses the reaction times from the different conditions to assess the degree of interference and facilitation. In the covert version of the Stroop bilingual task (i.e., participants respond by pressing a button rather than naming aloud), stimuli in the L1 and the L2 are typically presented in separate blocks. While this allows for a simple, yet effective assessment of processing and cognitive control in each language, it fails to capture any potential differences in processing and control within bilingual young adult groups. The present task combines single-language blocks with a novel mixed-language block to increase the level of difficulty of the task, thus making it suitable for testing cognitive control in young adults. Representative results showing differences between performance in the single-language vs. mixed-language blocks are presented, and the benefits of a mixed-language block are discussed.

One benefit of including both single-language blocks as well as a mixed-language blocks is that it is possible to confirm the expected results (facilitation and inhibition effects) in each of the participants&#39; languages. It will then be possible to interpret the findings from the mixed-language block. The results presented below are from a study investigating English-French Bilinguals. One of our main research questions focuses on how the age at which a second language is learned (age of acquisition, or AoA) may affe...

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Examining Bilingual Language Control Using the Stroop Task

This bilingual Stroop task uses Congruent, Incongruent, and Neutral stimuli presented in blocks in the first language (L1) only, the second language (L2) only, and a combination of L1 and L2. This task allows for an examination of language processing and cognitive control in both L1 and L2.

The Stroop task in its many variations has been used in fields such as psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience to examine questions regarding the ...

examining-bilingual-language-control-using-the-stroop-task

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JoVE Journal

Behavior

14.3K Views.  University of Ottawa. This bilingual Stroop task uses Congruent, Incongruent, and Neutral stimuli presented in blocks in the first language (L1) only, the second language (L2) only, and a combination of L1 and L2. This task allows for an examination of language processing and cognitive control in both L1 and L2.

Video: Examining Bilingual Language Control Using the Stroop Task

The 5-Choice Serial Reaction Time Task: A Task of Attention and Impulse Control for Rodents

This protocol describes the 5-choice serial reaction time task, which is an operant based task used to study attention and impulse control in rodents. Test day challenges, modifications to the standard task, can be used to systematically tax the neural systems controlling either attention or impulse control. Importantly, these challenges have consistent effects on behavior across laboratories in intact animals and can reveal either enhancements or deficits in cognitive function that are not apparent when rats are only tested on the standard task. The variety of behavioral measures that are collected can be used to determine if other factors (i.e., sedation, motivation deficits, locomotor impairments) are contributing to changes in performance. The versatility of the 5CSRTT is further enhanced because it is amenable to combination with pharmacological, molecular, and genetic techniques.

This protocol describes the 5-choice serial reaction time task, which is an operant based task used to study attention and impulse control in rodents. Test day challenges, which are modifications of the standard task, increase flexibility of the task and can be combined with other manipulations to more fully characterize behavior.

This protocol describes the 5-choice serial reaction time task, which is an operant based task used to study attention and impulse control in rodents. ...

Examining Recall Memory in Infancy and Early Childhood Using the Elicited Imitation Paradigm

The ability to recall the past allows us to report on details of previous experiences, from the everyday to the significant. Because recall memory is commonly assessed using verbal report paradigms in adults, studying the development of this ability in preverbal infants and children proved challenging. Over the past 30 years, researchers have developed a non-verbal means of assessing recall memory known as the elicited or deferred imitation paradigm. In one variant of the procedure, participants are presented with novel three-dimensional stimuli for a brief baseline period before a researcher demonstrates a series of actions that culminate in an end- or goal-state. The participant is allowed to imitate the demonstrated actions immediately, after a delay, or both. Recall performance is then compared to baseline or to performance on novel control sequences presented at the same session; memory can be assessed for the individual target actions and the order in which they were completed. This procedure is an accepted analogue to the verbal report techniques used with adults, and it has served to establish a solid foundation of the nature of recall memory in infancy and early childhood. In addition, the elicited or deferred imitation procedure has been modified and adapted to answer questions relevant to other aspects of cognitive functioning. The broad utility and application of imitation paradigms is discussed, along with limitations of the approach and directions for future research.

The elicited imitation procedure was established to examine the development of recall memory in infancy and early childhood. This procedure has been widely used to establish a solid foundation of the nature of recall memory in infancy and early childhood.

The ability to recall the past allows us to report on details of previous experiences, from the everyday to the significant. Because recall memory is ...

The Emotional Stroop Task: Assessing Cognitive Performance under Exposure to Emotional Content

The emotional Stroop effect (ESE) is the result of longer naming latencies to ink colors of emotion words than to ink colors of neutral words. The difference shows that people are affected by the emotional content conveyed by the carrier words even though they are irrelevant to the color-naming task at hand. The ESE has been widely deployed with patient populations, as well as with non-selected populations, because the emotion words can be selected to match the tested pathology. The ESE is a powerful tool, yet it is vulnerable to various threats to its validity. This report refers to potential sources of confounding and includes a modal experiment that provides the means to control for them. The most prevalent threat to the validity of existing ESE studies is sustained effects and habituation wrought about by repeated exposure to emotion stimuli. Consequently, the order of exposure to emotion and neutral stimuli is of utmost importance. We show that in the standard design, only one specific order produces the ESE.

The emotional Stroop effect (ESE) is the result of longer naming latencies to ink colors of emotion words than those of neutral words. This report refers to potential sources of confounding and includes a modal experiment that provides the means to control for them.

The emotional Stroop effect (ESE) is the result of longer naming latencies to ink colors of emotion words than to ink colors of neutral words. The ...

Behavioral Assessment of Hearing in 2 to 4 Year-old Children: A Two-interval, Observer-based Procedure Using Conditioned Play-based Responses

Collecting reliable behavioral data from toddlers and preschoolers is challenging. As a result, there are significant gaps in our understanding of human auditory development for these age groups. This paper describes an observer-based procedure for measuring hearing sensitivity with a two-interval, two-alternative forced-choice paradigm. Young children are trained to perform a play-based, motor response (e.g., putting a block in a bucket) whenever they hear a target signal. An experimenter observes the child&#39;s behavior and makes a judgment about whether the signal was presented during the first or second observation interval; the experimenter is blinded to the true signal interval, so this judgment is based solely on the child&#39;s behavior. These procedures were used to test 2 to 4 year-olds (n = 33) with no known hearing problems. The signal was a 1,000 Hz warble tone presented in quiet, and the signal level was adjusted to estimate a threshold corresponding to 71%-correct detection. A valid threshold was obtained for 82% of children. These results indicate that the two-interval procedure is both feasible and reliable for use with toddlers and preschoolers. The two-interval, observer-based procedure described in this paper is a powerful tool for evaluating hearing in young children because it guards against response bias on the part of the experimenter.

This paper describes a procedure for measuring hearing sensitivity in 2 to 4 year-old children. Children are trained to perform play-based responses when they hear a target signal. Thresholds are then estimated in a two-interval, two-alternative forced-choice paradigm, based on observations of the child&#39;s behaviors.

Collecting reliable behavioral data from toddlers and preschoolers is challenging. As a result, there are significant gaps in our understanding of human ...

Using Eye Movements Recorded in the Visual World Paradigm to Explore the Online Processing of Spoken Language

In a typical eye tracking study using the visual world paradigm, participants' eye movements to objects or pictures in the visual workspace are recorded via an eye tracker as the participant produces or comprehends a spoken language describing the concurrent visual world. This paradigm has high versatility, as it can be used in a wide range of populations, including those who cannot read and/or who cannot overtly give their behavioral responses, such as preliterate children, elderly adults, and patients. More importantly, the paradigm is extremely sensitive to fine grained manipulations of the speech signal, and it can be used to study the online processing of most topics in language comprehension at multiple levels, such as the fine grained acoustic phonetic features, the properties of words, and the linguistic structures. The protocol described in this article illustrates how a typical visual world eye tracking study is conducted, with an example showing how the online processing of some semantically complex statements can be explored with the visual world paradigm.

The visual world paradigm monitors participants' eye movements in the visual workspace as they are listening to or speaking a spoken language. This paradigm can be used to investigate the online processing of a wide range of psycholinguistic questions, including semantically complex statements, such as disjunctive statements.

In a typical eye tracking study using the visual world paradigm, participants' eye movements to objects or pictures in the visual workspace are recorded ...

Using the Visual World Paradigm to Study Sentence Comprehension in Mandarin-Speaking Children with Autism

Sentence comprehension relies on the ability to rapidly integrate different types of linguistic and non-linguistic information. However, there is currently a paucity of research exploring how preschool children with autism understand sentences using different types of cues. The mechanisms underlying sentence comprehension remains largely unclear. The present study presents a protocol to examine the sentence comprehension abilities of preschool children with autism. More specifically, a visual world paradigm of eye-tracking is used to explore the moment-to-moment sentence comprehension in the children. The paradigm has multiple advantages. First, it is sensitive to the time course of sentence comprehension and thus can provide rich information about how sentence comprehension unfolds over time. Second, it requires minimal task and communication demands, so it is ideal for testing children with autism. To further minimize the computational burden of children, the present study measures eye movements that arise as automatic responses to linguistic input rather than measuring eye movements that accompany conscious responses to spoken instructions.

We present a protocol to examine the use of morphological cues during real-time sentence comprehension by children with autism.

Sentence comprehension relies on the ability to rapidly integrate different types of linguistic and non-linguistic information. However, there is ...

Decomposing the Variance in Reading Comprehension to Reveal the Unique and Common Effects of Language and Decoding

The Simple View of Reading is a popular model of reading that claims that reading is the product of decoding and language, with each component uniquely predicting reading comprehension. Although researchers have argued whether the sum rather than the product of the components is the better predictor, no researchers have partitioned the variance explained to examine the extent to which the components share variance in predicting reading. To decompose the variance, we subtract the R2 for the language-only model from the full model to obtain the unique R2 for decoding. Second, we subtract the R2 for the decoding-only model from the full model to obtain the unique R2 for language. Third, to obtain the common variance explained by language and decoding, we subtract the sum of the two unique R2 from the R2 for the full model. The method is demonstrated in a regression approach with data from students in grades 1 (n = 372), 6 (n = 309), and 10 (n = 122) using an observed measure of language (receptive vocabulary), decoding (timed word reading), and reading comprehension (standardized test). Results reveal a relatively large amount of variance in reading comprehension explained in grade 1 by the common variance in decoding and language. By grade 10, however, it is the unique effect of language and the common effect of language and decoding that explained the majority of variance in reading comprehension. Results are discussed in the context of an expanded version of the Simple View of Reading that considers unique and shared effects of language and decoding in predicting reading comprehension.

Here we present a protocol for decomposing the variance in reading comprehension into the unique and common effects of language and decoding.

The Simple View of Reading is a popular model of reading that claims that reading is the product of decoding and language, with each component uniquely ...

Exploring Infant Sensitivity to Visual Language using Eye Tracking and the Preferential Looking Paradigm

We discuss the use of the preferential looking paradigm in eye tracking studies in order to study how infants develop, understand, and attend to the world around them. Eye tracking is a safe and non-invasive way to collect gaze data from infants, and the preferential looking paradigm is simple to design and only requires the infant to be attending to the screen. By simultaneously showing two visual stimuli that differ in one dimension, we can assess whether infants show different looking behavior for either stimulus, thus demonstrating sensitivity to that difference. The challenges in such experimental approaches are that experiments must be kept brief (no more than 10 min) and be carefully controlled such that the two stimuli differ in only one way. The interpretation of null results must also be carefully considered. In this paper, we illustrate a successful example of an infant eye tracking study with a preferential looking paradigm to discover that 6-month-olds are sensitive to linguistic cues in a signed language despite having no prior exposure to signed language, suggesting that infants possess intrinsic or innate sensitivities to these cues.

Eye tracking studies using a preferential looking paradigm can be used to study infants&#39;&#160;emerging understanding of, and attention to, their external visual world.

We discuss the use of the preferential looking paradigm in eye tracking studies in order to study how infants develop, understand, and attend to the world ...

Examining Changes in HRV and Emotion Following Artmaking with Three Different Art Materials

This protocol enables the examination of psychological and physiological responses to different types of behavioral engagements. Specifically, in this study example, the emotional response and changes in heart rate variability are examined in response to artmaking with three different art materials that vary in their levels of fluidity. This protocol can be adapted to examine other types of behavior or engagement in artmaking with other materials. There are several benefits to using this protocol. Firstly, the order randomization of the materials improves the probability that the response measured is associated with its qualities and not the order of presentation. Secondly, the continuous measuring of electrocardiogram enables the examination of changes in heart rate variability after engagement with each art material and changes that might occur during the artmaking itself. The advantages of this protocol should be considered with their limitations. The music listening is before each art making session; thus, the return to baseline can only be measured in the first two conditions. The return to baseline provides information on how fast individuals recover after response to working with each of the materials. Furthermore, a more liquid material instead of gouache paint with a brush, such as finger paints, provides more difference between materials. Finally, this protocol can be adapted to specific research needs.

The goal of the protocol is to guide researchers in conducting experiments that are intended to measure changes in self-reported emotional response and heart rate variability following art making with different materials. The protocol can easily be adapted for use in a variety of behavioral conditions and activities.

This protocol enables the examination of psychological and physiological responses to different types of behavioral engagements. Specifically, in this ...

A Complex Diving-For-Food Task to Investigate Social Organization and Interactions in Rats

For many species, where status is a vital motivator that can affect health, social hierarchies influence behavior. Social hierarchies that include dominant-submissive relationships are common in both animal and human societies. These relationships can be affected by interactions with others and with their environment, making them difficult to analyze in a controlled study. Rather than a simple dominance hierarchy, this formation has a complicated presentation that allows rats to avoid aggression. Status can be stagnant or mutable, and results in complex societal stratifications. Here we describe a complex diving-for-food task to investigate rodent social hierarchy and behavioral interactions. This animal model may allow us to assess the relationship between a wide range of mental illnesses and social organization, as well as to study the effectiveness of therapy on social dysfunction.

This protocol describes a method of examining social hierarchy in a rat model. Rats perform a complex diving-for-food task in which they form a distinct hierarchy according to their willingness to dive underwater and swim to obtain a food pellet. This method is used to understand decision making and social relationships among highly social animals in small groups.