Serdecznie zapraszamy na kolejne spotkanie z cyklu WA Wednesday Lunch Talk, które odbędzie się 14 maja o godz. 13:15 w Auli Hrynakowskiego.
W ramach spotkania wysłuchamy dwóch prezentacji w języku angielskim:
- Małgorzata Fabiszak i Tomasz Michalik: “Cultural differences in visual attention: A pilot eye-tracking study of Polish and Chinese museum visitors”
Research by Liu et al. (2013) demonstrated that East Asian viewers, familiar with Ink-wash paintings, tend to spend more time focusing on the white spaces, which are culturally significant and encourage imaginative interpretation, compared to Western viewers, who are less attuned to the cultural importance of these voids. Similarly, Trawiński et al. (2023) found that East Asian participants exhibited greater attention to East Asian faces in paintings, while Western participants focused more on Western faces, revealing the "Other Race Effect" (Feingold, 1914). Together these studies suggest that viewers with cultural familiarity or expertise engage differently with art from their own cultural context. However, most of this research has focused on paintings, with limited attention given to how, or indeed if, cultural background influences the perception of three-dimensional artifacts in historical museum settings. The present study seeks to address this gap by exploring gaze patterns in an eye-tracking experiment conducted with two participant groups—Polish and Chinese visitors to a Polish historical museum. The study is exploratory and addresses two primary research questions: (1) Are there observable differences visual attention between the two groups? (2) If so, what specific differences are evident?
- Rafał Jończyk: “When words sound foreign: Neural dynamics of emotional speech processing in native vs. foreign accent”
Research shows that foreign-accented speakers are often perceived as less trustworthy, competent, or likable than native-accented speakers (Lev-Ari & Keysar, 2010; Boduch-Grabka & Lev-Ari, 2021). Neurophysiological studies suggest that processing foreign-accented speech requires additional cognitive effort (Goslin, Duffy, & Floccia, 2012; Adank, Evans, Stuart-Smith & Scott 2009). Despite these difficulties, listeners can adapt over time, with neural responses indicating increased reliance on top-down processing and perceptual learning (Baese-Berk et al., 2013; Clarke & Garrett, 2004; Hanulíková et al., 2012). Notably, even brief exposure to a foreign accent can bias subsequent perception, underscoring the pervasive influence of accent on both social and neural processing (Boduch-Grabka & Lev-Ari, 2021; Clarke & Garrett, 2004). In this talk, I will present results from a preregistered EEG study investigating the brain dynamics of foreign-accented speech processing. We used a P300 oddball paradigm in a sample of 36 Polish native speakers. Participants heard frequent (standard) and infrequent (deviant) spoken words that were either emotionally neutral or negative. Their task was to press a button whenever they heard a word denoting a fruit or vegetable—target stimuli that occurred on 3% of trials. Words were presented in blocks featuring either a native (Polish) or a non-native (Ukrainian) accent. We hypothesized that foreign-accented speech would elicit weaker emotional responses than native-accented speech, paralleling findings from bilingual EEG studies showing dampened response to emotional content in the second language. Specifically, we predicted an interaction between deviancy and accent: the P300 oddball effect for negative and neutral deviants would be greater in native-accented than in foreign-accented speech. Join the talk to find out whether our predictions were confirmed—and what this reveals about how accent shapes emotional and cognitive processing in the brain!
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