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Title:	Understanding and awareness project 2014-2018
Keywords:	INFANTS LANGUAGES 2019
Description:	This deposit contains the diverse experimental and meta-analytic datasets collected during the Understanding and Awareness project. The datasets assess psychological research questions involving the relationship between how we understand and use language, and how we attend to the world around us. For example, one dataset investigates whether words and sentences can be partially understood when they have been masked from conscious awareness. Another dataset investigates how preschool children allocate their attention when describing scenes that require them to use potentially ambiguous language. Note that this project did not collect one large dataset, but rather a range of different datasets, with many different characteristics; fuller descriptions of each dataset are provided in the uploaded documentation file. The datasets in this deposit report 1) Chronometric (response time) studies conducted with adults and with preschool children (aged 3 and 5). 2) Eye tracking studies conducted with adults and with preschool children (aged 2 through 5). 3) Psychophysical (continuous flash suppression) studies conducted with adults. 4) Looking time experiments conducted with infants (age 7 months). 5) A database containing records of a meta-analysis of infant looking time data. <p>In 1957, the advertising executive James Vicary gathered reporters to announce a startling finding. He had taken movie reels from a local cinema and repeatedly inserted single frames containing simple messages: "Eat popcorn" or "Drink Coca-Cola". The frames were essentially invisible, rushing by too fast for anyone to see, but their effects were extreme: A huge increase in sales at the concession stand. Vicary's finding suggested a powerful role for the unconscious in our everyday lives, and a lucrative new method for advertisers. There was just one problem: He was never able to corroborate the data. His startling result was false. In the intervening fifty years, we have learned a lot about the unconscious. Techniques for "masking" the world from consciousness have revealed the complex cognitive processes that proceed without awareness. But the role of awareness in language - our primary means of understanding the world and making ourselves understood - remains surprisingly unexplored, perhaps a legacy of Vicary's controversy. This project aims to correct that imbalance, investigating how understandable linguistic meanings arise from the combination of language and awareness. I want to understand the degree to which awareness of the world is a precondition for understanding and producing language. This topic is important in many different ways. It is important for science: Language and consciousness are two critical components of the human experience; understanding their interrelation can help us understand ourselves. It is important for society: Delineating the role of conscious awareness in understanding and being understood can help us to make sense of, and predict, people's behaviour. Finally, it is important for healthy development: As children grow, they have to develop the correct relationship between language and awareness. Understanding how this process might go wrong could improve the lives of both typically and atypically developing individuals. My approach is broadly focused and experimental in nature. The project examines how language and awareness interact in healthy adults, typically developing children, and individuals with schizophrenia, a developmental disorder often associated with impaired awareness. I use sophisticated experimental techniques to mask sentences from awareness, and then test the degree to which adults can still extract some understanding. I use eye tracking to measure what things in the world children, patients and healthy adults are aware of, and then test whether differences in awareness can explain some of the difficulties that both children and patients have in crafting clear, understandable descriptions of the world. The results should be important for all of the reasons set out above: They will inform both scientific theories, and methods for alleviating linguistic difficulties. And they will set the stage for future work where, in collaboration with others, I can complement our initial measurements of behaviour with an assessment of the twin neural underpinnings of language and consciousness.</p>
URI:	https://t2-4.bsc.es/jspui/handle/123456789/60194
Other Identifiers:	10.5255/UKDA-SN-853404 853404 https://doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-853404
Appears in Collections:	Cessda

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