Publications by authors named "Timothy Slattery"

Computational models of eye movement control during reading have revolutionized the study of visual, perceptual, and linguistic processes underlying reading. However, these models can only simulate and test predictions about the reading of single lines of text. Here we report two studies that examined how input variables for lexical processing (frequency and predictability) in these models influence the processing of line-final words.

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We introduce a novel Dual Input Stream Transformer (DIST) for the challenging problem of assigning fixation points from eye-tracking data collected during passage reading to the line of text that the reader was actually focused on. This post-processing step is crucial for analysis of the reading data due to the presence of noise in the form of vertical drift. We evaluate DIST against eleven classical approaches on a comprehensive suite of nine diverse datasets.

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Words with high orthographic relatedness are termed "word neighbors" (angle/angel; birch/birth). Activation-based models of word recognition assume that lateral inhibition occurs between words and their activated neighbors. However, studies of eye movements during reading have not found inhibitory effects in early measures assumed to reflect lexical access (e.

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Spatial memory studies often employ static images depicting a scene, an array of objects, or environmental features from one perspective and then following a perspective-shift-prompt memory either of the scene or objects within the scene. The current study investigated a previously reported systematic bias in spatial memory where, following a perspective shift from encoding to recall, participants indicated the location of an object farther to the direction of the shift. In Experiment 1, we aimed to replicate this bias by asking participants to encode the location of an object in a virtual room and then indicate it from memory following a perspective shift induced by camera translation and rotation.

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Purpose: To assess efficacy and toxicity of combination immunotherapy with ipilimumab plus nivolumab in routine practice in a retrospective multicentre cohort of patients with advanced melanoma.

Patients And Methods: This retrospective analysis included patients with advanced melanoma treated with ipilimumab and nivolumab between October 2015 and January 2020 at six centres in Australia, Europe and the United States of America. We describe efficacy outcomes (overall survival [OS], progression-free survival [PFS] and objective response rate [ORR]) in treatment-naïve and pre-treated patients, with and without brain metastases, plus treatment-related adverse events (trAEs) in all patients treated.

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In the current study, we investigated whether the introduction of perspective shifts in a spatial memory task results in systematic biases in object location estimations. To do so, we asked participants to first encode the position of an object in a virtual room and then to report its position from memory or perception following a perspective shift. Overall, our results showed that participants made systematic errors in estimating object positions in the same direction as the perspective shift.

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Online data collection offers a wide range of benefits including access to larger and more diverse populations, together with a reduction in the experiment cycle. Here we compare performance in a spatial memory task, in which participants had to estimate object locations following viewpoint shifts, using data from a controlled lab-based setting and from an unsupervised online sample. We found that the data collected in a conventional laboratory setting and those collected online produced very similar results, although the online data was more variable with standard errors being about 10% larger than those of the data collected in the lab.

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Recent research on return-sweep saccades has improved our understanding of eye movements when reading paragraphs. However, these saccades, which take our gaze from the end of one line to the start of the next line, have been studied only within the context of silent reading. Articulatory demands and the coordination of the eye-voice span (EVS) at line boundaries suggest that the execution of this saccade may be different in oral reading.

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In the current study, we conducted 2 eye-tracking reading experiments to explore whether sentence context can influence neighbor effects in word recognition during Chinese reading. Chinese readers read sentences in which the targets' orthographic neighbors were either plausible or implausible with the pretarget context. The results revealed that the neighbor effect was influenced by context: The context in the biased condition (where only targets but not neighbors can fit in the pretarget context) evoked a significantly weaker inhibitory neighbor effect than in the neutral condition (where both targets and neighbors can fit in the pretarget context).

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Ageing is associated with declines in spatial memory, however, the source of these deficits remains unclear. Here we used eye-tracking to investigate age-related differences in spatial encoding strategies and the cognitive processes underlying the age-related deficits in spatial memory tasks. To do so we asked young and older participants to encode the locations of objects in a virtual room shown as a picture on a computer screen.

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The aim of the current study was to develop a novel task that allows for the quick assessment of spatial memory precision with minimal technical and training requirements. In this task, participants memorized the position of an object in a virtual room and then judged from a different perspective, whether the object has moved to the left or to the right. Results revealed that participants exhibited a systematic bias in their responses that we termed the reversed congruency effect.

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Reading saccades that occur within a single line of text are guided by the size of letters. However, readers occasionally need to make longer saccades (known as return-sweeps) that take their eyes from the end of one line of text to the beginning of the next. In this study, we tested whether return-sweep saccades are also guided by font size information and whether this guidance depends on visual acuity of the return-sweep target area.

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Therapeutic options for treating advanced renal cell cancer (RCC) are rapidly evolving. Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF)-directed therapy, predominantly VEGF receptor (VEGFr) tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) had been the most effective first line treatment since 2005 irrespective of International Metastatic RCC Database Consortium (IMDC) risk stratification. However, immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICI) have recently changed the treatment paradigm for advanced RCC particularly as the first-line systemic treatment modality.

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Aging is accompanied by changes in general cognitive functioning which may impact the learning rate of older adults; however, this is often not controlled for in cognitive aging studies. We investigated the contribution of differences in learning rates to age-related differences in landmark knowledge acquired from route learning. In Experiment 1 we used a standard learning procedure in which participants received a fixed amount of exposure to a route.

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The ability to recognise places is known to deteriorate with advancing age. In this study, we investigated the contribution of age-related changes in spatial encoding strategies to declining place recognition ability. We recorded eye movements while younger and older adults completed a place recognition task first described by Muffato et al.

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There is a growing understanding that the parafoveal preview effect during reading may represent a combination of preview benefits and preview costs due to interference from parafoveal masks. It has been suggested that visually degrading the parafoveal masks may reduce their costs, but adult readers were later shown to be highly sensitive to degraded display changes. Four experiments examined how preview benefits and preview costs are influenced by the perception of distinct parafoveal degradation at the target word location.

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Successful navigation requires memorising and recognising the locations of objects across different perspectives. Although these abilities rely on hippocampal functioning, which is susceptible to degeneration in older adults, little is known about the effects of ageing on encoding and response strategies that are used to recognise spatial configurations. To investigate this, we asked young and older participants to encode the locations of objects in a virtual room shown as a picture on a computer screen.

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In recent years, there has been an increase in research concerning individual differences in readers' eye movements. However, this body of work is almost exclusively concerned with the reading of single-line texts. While spelling and reading ability have been reported to influence saccade targeting and fixation times during intra-line reading, where upcoming words are available for parafoveal processing, it is unclear how these variables affect fixations adjacent to return-sweeps.

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Return sweeps take a reader's fixation from the end of one line to the start of the next. Return sweeps frequently undershoot their target and are followed by a corrective saccade toward the left margin. The pauses prior to corrective saccades are typically considered to be uninvolved in linguistic processing.

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It is commonly accepted that phonological codes can be activated parafoveally during reading and later used to aid foveal word recognition- a finding known as the phonological preview benefit. However, a closer look at the literature shows that this effect may be less consistent than what is sometimes believed. To determine the extent to which phonology is processed parafoveally, a Bayesian meta-analysis of 27 experiments and a survey of the unpublished literature were conducted.

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Models of eye movement control during reading focus on the reading of single lines of text. Within these models, word frequency and predictability are important input variables which influence fixation probabilities and durations. However, a comprehensive model of eye movement control will have to account for readers' eye movements across multiline texts.

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Models of eye-movement control during reading focus on reading single lines of text. However, with multiline texts, return sweeps, which bring fixation from the end of one line to the beginning of the next, occur regularly and influence ~20% of all reading fixations. Our understanding of return sweeps is still limited.

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During reading, binocular coordination ensures that a unified perceptual representation of the text is maintained across eye movements. However, slight vergence errors exist. The magnitude of disparity at fixation onset is related to the length of the preceding saccade.

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Return-sweeps are an essential eye-movement that takes the readers' eyes from the end of one line of text to the start of the next. While return-sweeps are common during normal reading, the eye-movement literature is dominated by single-line reading studies where no return-sweeps are needed. The present experiment was designed to explore what readers are targeting with their return-sweeps.

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In the research reported here, we investigated how phonological processing in the lexical decision task is influenced by individual differences in the reading and spelling abilities of participants. We used phonological neighborhood spread as a measure of phonological processing. Spread refers to the number of phoneme positions in a word that can be changed to form a phonological neighbor.

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