Although the human brain may have evolutionarily adapted to face-to-face communication, other modes of communication, e.g., telephone and e-mail, increasingly dominate our modern daily life. This study examined the neural difference between face-to-face communication and other types of communication by simultaneously measuring two brains using a hyperscanning approach. The results showed a significant increase in the neural synchronization in the left inferior frontal cortex during a face-to-face dialog between partners but none during a back-to-back dialog, a face-to-face monologue, or a back-to-back monologue. Moreover, the neural synchronization between partners during the face-to-face dialog resulted primarily from the direct interactions between the partners, including multimodal sensory information integration and turn-taking behavior. The communicating behavior during the face-to-face dialog could be predicted accurately based on the neural synchronization level. These results suggest that face-to-face communication, particularly dialog, has special neural features that other types of communication do not have and that the neural synchronization between partners may underlie successful face-to-face communication.

No abstract

A wide variety of paradigms have shown that autistic individuals present with superior performance on visual tasks. Here, the impact of task constraints on visual hierarchical processing in autism was investigated. By employing free- and forced-choice procedures, global and local processing of Navon-type hierarchical numerals was examined in 15 autistic persons (13 males, 2 females) and a comparison group. In the free-choice condition, autistics chose global and local targets randomly, though they were faster responding to local than to global targets, regardless of visual angle and exposure duration. In contrast, the comparison group exhibited a global advantage in naming time, which was evident only for shorter exposures, as well as effects of visual angle. In the forced-choice condition, autistics presented with a more important local-to-global interference than global-to-local interference, whereas the comparison group exhibited global advantage and bidirectional interference. Overall, the autistic participants presented with atypical local-to-global interference and local advantage in incongruent conditions (where global and local targets differ), in naming time as well as accuracy. The relative insensitivity of local bias to task constraints in autistics, in comparison to nonautistic participants, indicates that local bias, with local-to-global interference, is a key and characteristic feature of autistic visual cognition and a strong candidate for the "endophenotype" of autism.

No abstract

A backward-masking procedure was used to examine phonological processing in Chinese character identification. In Experiment 1, the character target and mask were presented for 50 ms and 30 ms, respectively. The results indicated graphic but not phonological nor semantic masks affected target recognition. In Experiment 2, the exposure durations of the target and mask were extended to 60 ms and 40 ms, respectively. We observed a significant phonological mask facilitation effect for high-frequency targets and the absence of semantic mask effect. A postexperiment analysis showed that when the high-frequency targets had well-defined meaning, the semantic masks facilitated target identification, whereas when the high-frequency targets had fuzzy meaning, no significant semantic mask effect was obtained. Results indicate that getting at the phonology of highfrequency characters with fuzzy meaning occurs presemantically.