This study investigates whether incongruency of valences between emoji and text in texting will promote stronger negative inference in readers. An experiment assessed participants’ judgments of the text messages by recording their response times and perceived valence from the messages (either positive or negative) under the following manipulations: positive or negative messages paired with an emoji that convey positive, negative or ambiguous/neutral emotions (i.e. the pairing of emojis and test may be congruent or incongruent in their valences). Compared with congruent text messages, we found that incongruency between emojis and texts promoted stronger negative inference and elicited a longer processing time, even in texts that conveyed a positive meaning or when the emoji itself was ambiguous/neutral. These results suggest that texts and emojis jointly influence the perceived mood of messages, hinting the importance of the effective use of emojis in order to convey intended meanings and emotions efficiently.

The use of face masks is one of the measures adopted by the general community to stop the transmission of disease during this ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. This wide use of face masks has indeed been shown to disrupt day-to-day face recognition. People with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often have predisposed impairment in face recognition and are expected to be more vulnerable to this disruption in face recognition. When faces were initially learned unobstructed, we showed that people with higher autistic traits had a lower face recognition performance for masked faces. In contrast, there was a stronger facilitation in subsequent face recognition of masked faces in typically developing adults, but not in adults with ASD, when masked faces were learned first—this face recognition facilitation is predicted by a higher level of empathy. This paper also discusses how autistic traits and empathy influence processing of faces with and without face masks.

The present study examined the relationship between Holistic processing (HP), a well-established perceptual-expertisephenomenon for visual-object recognition, and Chinese literacy ability in Hong Kong preschoolers. The literacy abilityof participants was assessed by The Hong Kong Reading Ability Screening Test for Preschool Children (RAST-K); whileHP of Chinese characters was measured by adopting the complete composite paradigm from Hsiao & Cottrell (2009). Inline with the previous findings, preschoolers also showed HP in Chinese character perception, with a negative correlationbetween HP and writing ability when other measurements were controlled. This study provides a theoretical contributionon the study of Chinese writing difficulties among preschoolers. Educational implications will also be discussed.

Through comparing autistic and non-autistic adults in learning and recognizing masked faces, we found that although autistic participants generally had poorer face recognition performance than matched controls, the two groups were similarly impaired by mask use. Nevertheless, when viewing masked faces during learning, they showed reduced tendency to look at the eyes and reduced change in eye movement consistency as compared with controls; this was not observed during recognition. Across participants, selective attention ability and flexibility to change face scanning behavior according to mask conditions were two important factors accounting for individual differences in performance. Interestingly, autistic spectrum quotient accounted for additional variance when recognizing masked faces learned also with a mask, suggesting additional influence from one's autistic traits that could have impacted face learning experience during development. Our findings have important implications for identifying vulnerable populations whose face recognition ability may be particularly affected by mask use.

Prior research on the effects of acoustic music on stress reduction and cognitive performance has produced inconsistent results. This study investigated this relationship by conducting a within-subject experiment involving fifty five college students. The experiment involved playing acoustic music during assessment tasks and measuring changes in perceived stress levels and cognitive performance in music and non-music conditions. Results showed no significant one-way impacts of acoustic music on stress levels or cognitive performance. However, the effect of music on stress levels mediated the relationship between perceived pleasantness of the music and change in cognitive performance in response to music. Listening to liked music may reduce stress, improving performance, while disliked music may increase stress to an optimal level, facilitating performance. Thus, the effect of music on performance depends on individual perceived pleasantness of the music. This study has implications for selecting music for specific purposes, such as relaxation or cognitive enhancement.

Expert face recognition has been marked by holistic processingand left-side bias/right hemisphere involvement. Hencerecognition for Chinese characters, sharing many visualperceptual properties with face perception, was thought toinduce stronger holistic processing and left-side bias effect.However, Hsiao & Cottrell (2009) showed that expertise inChinese character recognition involved reduced holisticprocessing, while Tso, Au & Hsiao (2014) suggested this effectmay be modulated by writing experiences; in contrast, left-sidebias was found to be a consistent expertise marker regardlessof writing experiences. Here we examine holistic processingand left-side bias effect of Chinese character recognitionbetween adolescents with and without dyslexia. Students withdyslexia were found to recognize Chinese characters with astronger holistic processing effect than the typical controls.However, compared with the controls, dyslexics showed amore reduced left-side bias in processing mirror-symmetricChinese characters. The theoretical and educationalimplications of these results were discussed.

Visual-spatial attention has been shown to influence literacy development, yet studies investigating its influence on readingin non-alphabetic scripts such as Chinese are scarce, despite recent studies demonstrating orthographic and visuo-spatialskills to be key deficits in people with dyslexia in Chinese. Here, we investigate visual-spatial processing skills in Chi-nese adolescents by measuring their 1) exogenous and endogenous attentional orienting, and 2) holistic processinga phe-nomenon typically demonstrated in face perceptionin Chinese character recognition. Compared with typically developingstudents, Chinese high-school students with dyslexia showed deficits in both endogenous and exogenous visual-spatialattention. Dyslexics also perceived characters more holistically than the controls, suggesting that they selectively attendedto individual components within Chinese characters less readily. These results demonstrated irregularities in visual-spatialprocessing skills in students in dyslexia. This study provides implications for reading intervention programs in order tofacilitate selective attention to character components to enhance literacy.

Holistic processing (HP) and right-hemispheric lateralizationboth mark expertise in visual object recognition such as faceand sub-ordinate object perception. However, counter-examples have been found recently: Experiences of selectiveattention to parts such as writing experiences in Chinesecharacters reduced HP while increased right hemispherelateralization. We investigated the association between HPand brain activities measured by event-related potentials(ERP) in participants trained to recognize artificially-createdscripts using either whole-word or grapheme-to-phonemeapproaches. Stronger N170 activities were found in bothhemispheres in both training approaches. Though the type oftraining approaches induced opposite directions incorrelations between HP and the ERP signals in the righthemisphere: In the whole-word condition, the HP effectincreased with stronger right-hemispheric N170 activities;while the direction of this correlation was reversed in thegrapheme-to-phoneme condition. This demonstrates that HPand right hemispheric lateralization are separate processesthat are associated with different perceptual mechanisms.

Research on second-language (L2) English literacy development in Chinese children with dyslexia is limited, but existing studies suggest a puzzling phenomenon: These children experience difficulties in reading both native (L1) Chinese and L2 English, despite the distinct cognitive processes involved in reading Chinese and English which suggest minimal transfer between the two writing systems. This paper aims to investigate the above phenomenon and examine the role of phonics skills in improving English word reading in dyslexic Chinese children in 2 studies. Study 1 found that letter-sound-decoding knowledge robustly and significantly predicted English word naming and reading fluency in Chinese dyslexic children. Study 2 revealed that phonics-based interventions is required to significantly improve English literacy skills. The accommodation-assimilation hypothesis explains cross-language transfer of reading difficulties in Chinese-English bilinguals: Dyslexic Chinese children assimilate English word-decoding processes using their native language; they can accommodate and improve English literacy by learning letter-sound decoding skills.