This study investigated how word frequency, word length and visual complexity affect lexical processing during Chinese sentence oral reading, and whether these effects differ between developing and skilled readers. Third-grade children and adults read sentences aloud while their eye movements were recorded with an EyeLink 1000 Plus eye-tracker. Linear mixed-effects models revealed three main findings. First, children showed larger word-frequency and visual-complexity effects than adults, indicating less efficient lexical processing in developing readers. Second, word length moderated the effects of word frequency and visual complexity. Frequency effects were amplified for two-character words, whereas visual-complexity effects were stronger for single-character words on early measures and followed a different pattern on some late measures. Third, at the sentence level, children exhibited shorter forward saccades, more regressions and longer total reading times than adults. These findings provide developmental evidence for the visual and linguistic constraints hypothesis and show how visual recognition and overt phonological output jointly shape foveal lexical processing in Chinese oral reading.

The majority of Chinese characters convey meaning explicitly via their semantic radical and studies investigating isolated character identification and character acquisition have shown them to be an important source of sublexical semantic information. However, to date, it is unclear whether Chinese readers recruit and utilize semantic cues from radicals when encountering, learning and representing entirely novel characters in natural reading - an important aspect of vocabulary growth. To address this question, we created sixteen semantic-phonetic compound single pseudo-character words as novel targets, whose semantic radicals were either consistent (i.e., transparent) or inconsistent (i.e., opaque) with high-constraint sentential contexts, and embedded them within nine sentence frames to support the formation of new lexical representations. The eye movements of 113 undergraduates were recorded as they read sentences. The results revealed that reading times for transparent novel words were significantly shorter relative to opaque novel words. This effect diminished over exposures, indicating a familiarity, or learning effect. When participants were categorized into faster and slower readers, we found that the semantic transparency effect was greater for faster than slower readers suggesting that faster readers utilized sublexical semantic information associated with semantic radicals to enhance word learning to a greater degree than slower readers. We consider our results in the context of Chen and Zhang's (2012) model of sublexical semantic radical processing and Share's self-teaching hypothesis. Our results are the first to demonstrate effects of sub-lexical semantic transparency during novel word learning in Chinese and highlight the important and distinctive role of semantic radicals in Chinese orthographic learning.

We investigated how scarcity perception and the order in which scarcity and abundance are experienced influence inhibitory control,as well as whether these effects are immediate or long-lasting.In Experiment 1,272 college students were recruited to examine the association between perceived scarcity and inhibitory control using both questionnaire-based measures and an experimental task(the Flanker task).The results indicated that individuals exhibited significantly lower levels of inhibitory control when scarcity,rather than abundance,was perceived at the time of the experiment. Experiment 2 involved 101 college students and employed situational manipulations in which participants experienced scarcity and abundance on separate occasions,with the order of exposure counterbalanced.The findings showed that compared with participants who transitioned from abundance to scarcity,those who experienced scarcity first and abundance subsequently demonstrated significantly shorter response times on the Flanker task under the abundance condition.However,transition order did not affect the inhibitory control. Experiment 3 recruited 126 college students.Participants were split into two groups based on the level of childhood scarcity experience reported:high vs low.For all participants,the experimental manipulations of scarcity and abundance were identical to those in Experiment 2.The results showed that when individuals experienced abundance first and scarcity afterward,those with more childhood scarcity experience exhibited significantly higher levels of inhibitory control than those with less childhood scarcity experience.These findings suggest that resource scarcity perception exerts both immediate and long-term effects rooted in early-life experiences. In summary,our results indicate that transitions from frugality to luxury are associated with enhanced general cognitive processing and behavioral performance.In contrast,transitions from luxury to frugality impair inhibitory control,particularly among individuals with limited exposure to scarcity during childhood.Collectively,these findings extend scarcity theory by highlighting the dynamic and developmental nature of scarcity-related cognitive effects.

Two experiments are reported that used the boundary paradigm to investigate how foveal lexical processing load (high/low frequency) of a pre-target word influences parafoveal processing of upcoming target word(s) with either zero-, one-, two- or three-character, or full preview in Chinese reading. In Experiment 1, the three characters comprised a single word as the target while in Experiment 2 they formed multiple words (two or three words). Pre-target word analyses showed an effective foveal load manipulation with low frequency pre-targets being fixated for longer than high frequency pre-targets in both experiments. Both experiments showed robust preview extent effects at the target words, such that fixation times increased, and landing positions shortened dramatically with reduced preview extent. Modulatory influences of foveal load effects were obtained on both fixation times and landing positions at the target region. These effects themselves were consistent, but reduced, for parafoveal character strings comprised of multiple words relative to a single word, consistent with the MCU hypothesis (Zang, 2019). Our findings demonstrate that increased foveal load reduces the disruptive influence of restrictive parafoveal windows and reduces preview extent in relation to saccadic targeting. The current findings align at a very basic level with the Foveal Load Hypothesis (Henderson & Ferreira, 1990), though the results indicate that a more nuanced theoretical account is necessary to capture all aspects of the results in respect of Chinese reading.

The present study investigated how statistical learning of distractor features influences suppression mechanisms by evaluating neural dynamics. Two hypotheses were tested: proactive signal suppression hypotheses and reactive “search and destroy” hypotheses. Twenty-three participants performed a combined working memory task and a variant of the additional singleton paradigm in which one distractor color appeared much more frequently than the others, while recording EEG under distractor conditions. High-probability color distractors facilitated behavioral RTs and enhanced the early Pd component, while the N2pc was absent. This pattern, in which early suppression occurs without attentional capture, indicates that feature-based distractor suppression is proactive. Crucially, both RTs and Pd component revealed no interaction with working memory load. These results demonstrate that learned feature-based distractor suppression shapes early visual cortical processing to proactively inhibit distractors, and that this process proceeds independently of cognitive resources. These findings provide direct neural evidence that learned distractor suppression is an early and proactive filtering mechanism that aligns with the signal suppression hypothesis.

The present study aimed to determine the processing stage at which learned feature‑based distractor suppression occurs. Both the signal suppression hypothesis and the search and destroy hypothesis account for distractor suppression but posit different processing stages. In addition, the two hypotheses differ in their demands on cognitive resources. Participants performed a combined a working memory task and a variant of the additional singleton paradigm, in which one distractor color appeared much more frequently than the others. EEG was used to record the temporal dynamics underlying feature‑based suppression. High-probability color distractors elicited faster RTs and enhanced early Pd components compared to low-probability color distractors, indicating suppression based on feature statistical learning. Moreover, no N2pc component was observed under any distractor condition, suggesting early suppression without attentional capture. Critically, both behavioral and ERP results indicated that distractor suppression was not constrained by cognitive resources. These findings suggest that feature‑based distractor suppression occurs at an early stage and operates independently of cognitive resources, supporting the signal suppression hypothesis.

Semantic radicals are meaning-bearing sublexical components of Chinese characters that have been shown to facilitate incidental vocabulary learning in L1 Chinese readers. However, it remains unclear whether this sublexical mechanism extends to learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL), and how semantic radicals shape the online processing and learning outcomes of novel words in both populations. The present study investigated the role of semantic radical consistency in incidental vocabulary learning among L1 readers and CFL learners. Eye movements were recorded while participants read sentences containing novel two-character pseudowords whose semantic radicals were manipulated to be either consistent or inconsistent with the word’s semantic category. Both groups successfully acquired orthographic and semantic representations of the novel words, with L1 readers outperforming CFL learners. Eye-tracking data revealed a significant group-by-consistency interaction during initial exposures. L1 readers exhibited dynamic sensitivity to radical consistency, allocating more fixation time to inconsistent items at first exposure and rapidly adjusting by the second, whereas CFL learners showed no reliable online consistency effects. Moreover, reading time proved a task-specific predictor of learning outcomes. Longer initial fixation benefited orthographic learning, while extended cumulative reading time was negatively associated with semantic accuracy. Taken together, these findings suggest that sublexical semantic cue deployment during real-time reading is qualitatively distinct between L1 readers and CFL learners.

Internet addiction (IA) refers to an individual's excessive and uncontrollable internet use. According to the cognitive-behavioral model of IA, school disconnectedness and relative deprivation may function as environmental and cognitive risk factors for adolescent IA, while adversity beliefs could serve as a protective factor. To examine whether relative deprivation mediates the link between school disconnectedness and adolescent IA, and whether adversity beliefs moderate this mediation, 2485 Chinese adolescents completed anonymous measures assessing school disconnectedness, relative deprivation, adversity beliefs, and IA. Results showed that: (1) school disconnectedness positively predicted IA; (2) relative deprivation partially mediated this relationship; (3) adversity beliefs moderated the relationship between school disconnectedness and IA; (4) adversity beliefs also moderated the link between relative deprivation and IA. These findings show the mediating role of relative deprivation and the moderating role of adversity beliefs in the association between school disconnectedness and IA, suggesting that fostering adversity beliefs could help reduce IA among adolescents.

Chinese children aged 8 to 10 years can utilize character positional probability-the likelihood of a character appearing at initial or final word positions-as a cue to facilitate word segmentation and identification during novel word learning. Given the distinct roles of initial and final characters in Chinese word recognition, we conducted two parallel experiments to investigate how positional probability influences children's processing during reading. Sixteen two-character pseudowords were constructed as novel target words. In Experiment 1, we manipulated the positional probability of the initial character while keeping the final character constant. In Experiment 2, we reversed this manipulation for the final characters. Each novel word was embedded in six semantically constrained sentence frames. Forty-five children's eye movements were recorded as they read these sentences. Results revealed that novel words containing characters with high positional probability in their preferred positions elicited shorter fixation durations compared to those with low positional probability characters. This effect emerged earlier for initial than for final characters, suggesting that Chinese children are sensitive to positional probability cues associated with both initial and final characters when learning new words during reading, but with a processing advantage for initial characters. Moreover, the positional probability effects remained stable across multiple exposures, indicating that children consistently rely sub-lexical cues such as positional probability before fully forming new lexical representations. Our findings highlight the protracted nature of lexical learning in children and their extended reliance on statistical positional information during early stage of lexical acquisition.

Aims and Objectives: Previous research has utilized cognates and interlingual homographs to investigate the co-activation of the native (L1) and second language (L2) in the lexical processing of bilinguals. However, it remains unclear whether logographic script bilinguals, with distinct lexical access pathways from alphabetic script bilinguals, show variations in such co-activation.Approach: In Experiment 1, Chinese-Japanese bilinguals performed an L2 (Japanese) lexical decision task. In Experiment 2, we used an eye-tracker to record participants' reading of Japanese sentences containing cognates and interlingual homographs (Experiment 2A) and Chinese sentences (Experiment 2B).Data and Analysis: The participants in Experiment 1 were 32 college students majoring in Japanese, and the data for Experiment 2 were collected from 25 college students majoring in Japanese.Findings and Conclusion: In Experiment 1, we found a significant cognate interference effect and an interlingual homograph interference effect. During the Japanese sentence reading, we observed a facilitation effect of cognates and interlingual homographs compared to Japanese control words; however, during the Chinese sentence reading, we did not find any significant differences. We conclude that Chinese-Japanese bilinguals exhibit co-activation of L1 and L2 during lexical processing, but this co-activation differs from that in bilinguals reading alphabetic languages.Originality: This study further explored the lexical recognition of Chinese-Japanese bilinguals using a lexical decision task and, for the first time, investigated their recognition during the natural reading of sentences. The results of this study demonstrate differences in bilinguals' reading of alphabetic languages.Significance and Implications: The findings indicate that the bilingual lexical recognition model based on alphabetic script bilinguals can be generalized to logographic script bilinguals, though certain differences in lexical recognition exist between the two groups.

Numerous theoretical and empirical studies have demonstrated that the quality of friendship is significantly related to the social adaptation of children and adolescents. However, previous research has revealed the differential contributions of various dimensions of friendship quality to social adaptation. In this study, we utilize network analysis to conceptualize the relationship between friendship quality (FQ) and social adaptation (SA) as a network of interacting dimensions, enabling us to identify core dimensions and their interrelationships. This study included a total of 2,433 children and adolescents (mage = 11.68, sd = 2.37). The results indicate that interpersonal adaptation (IA) serves as the central dimension of social adaptation, while affirmation and care (AC) represent the central dimension of friendship quality. The key bridging nodes of the FQ-SA network remain consistent across various developmental stages and gender-specific networks. However, the connection patterns among these key bridging nodes exhibit notable differences between the two networks. The comparisons indicate that networks exhibit a similar overall structure and global strength; however, they differ in specific dimension associations, offering nuanced insights into the intrinsic differences in the connections between friendship quality and social adaptation across various developmental stages and gender groups.

Spontaneous micro-gestures (SMGs) are subtle, in voluntary body movements that reflect suppressed affective states and constitute an important source of behavioral evidence for emotional stress assessment. However, SMGs are extremely sparse and often kinematically indistinguishable from non affective background motions, making reliable affective inference fundamentally constrained by epistemic uncertainty rather than classification accuracy alone. In this paper, we propose EUA Mamba, an epistemic uncertainty-aware framework that reformulates SMG spotting and emotional stress assessment as an evidence-regulated affective inference process. Instead of treating SMGs as deterministic action patterns, the proposed approach explicitly models the sufficiency and reliability of behavioral evidence through a VFE-guided energy gating mechanism, enabling the system to actively veto ambiguous movements while preserving informative affective cues. To support continuous inference over hours-long behavioral streams, we adopt the Mamba state-space architecture with selective scan mechanisms. Experiments on a benchmark SMG dataset show that, under the IoU = 0.1 evaluation setting for affective biomarker localization, EUA-Mamba improves SMG spotting performance from an F1 score of 0.312 to 0.420, corresponding to a relative gain of 34.6%, while reducing false positives by over 60% in long-term recordings. The resulting SMG representations further support emotional stress assessment with an accuracy of 70.0%, exceeding human expert performance on skeletal modalities.

Background and aims: learning engagement is an important indicator for assessing students' development and evaluating the quality of school education. How to improve students' learning engagement has attracted widespread attention. Based on the perspective of positive psychology, this study explores the mechanism of student's positive psychological resource (psychology resilience) on learning engagement, while also considering the inevitable effects of social comparison and emotions among students. Method: In this study, a questionnaire survey was conducted on 1784 college students in Tianjin. Participants completed the psychological resilience questionnaire, shame scale, learning engagement scale and upward social comparison scale. Results: These results showed that psychological resilience significantly positively predicted learning engagement. Shame partially mediated the relationship between psychological resilience and learning engagement. Additionally, upward social comparison moderated the process of psychological resilience predicting sham. Conclusion: Shame and upward social comparison may serve as important variables in the relationship between psychological resilience and learning engagement. These findings provide a new perspective for interventions of students' learning engagement.

The high school stage is a critical period for students to develop their perspectives on life and to form healthy relationships with others. This study aimed to investigate the relationship between social comparison orientation and malicious envy among high school students, as well as the mediating effects of avoidance goal orientation and negative rumination. A survey was conducted with 643 high school students, employing the Iowa-Netherlands Comparison Orientation Measure, the Avoidance Goal Orientation Scale, the Negative Rumination Scale, and the Malicious Envy Scale. The findings indicated that: (1) there is a significant positive association between social comparison orientation, avoidance goal orientation, negative rumination, and malicious envy; (2) social comparison orientation does not directly and significantly predict malicious envy among high school students when avoidance goal orientation and negative rumination are considered as mediating factors; (3) social comparison orientation indirectly affects the negative rumination of high school students through the independent and chain mediating effects of avoidance goal orientation and negative rumination. This research sheds light on the underlying mechanisms by which social comparison orientation influences malicious envy.

Background and aims: learning engagement is an important indicator for assessing students' development and evaluating the quality of school education. How to improve students' learning engagement has attracted widespread attention. Based on the perspective of positive psychology, this study explores the mechanism of student's positive psychological resource (psychology resilience) on learning engagement, while also considering the inevitable effects of social comparison and emotions among students. Method: In this study, a questionnaire survey was conducted on 1784 college student in Tianjin. Participants completed the psychological resilience questionnaire, shame scale, learning engagement scale and upward social comparison scale. Results: These results showed that psychological resilience predicted learning engagement not only directly but also indirectly via shame. Shame played a partial mediating role between psychological resilience and learning engagement. Additionally, upward social comparison moderated the process of psychological resilience predicting sham. Conclusion: Shame and upward social comparison may serve as important variables in the relationship between psychological resilience and learning engagement. These findings provide a new perspective for interventions of students' learning engagement. In the future, educators can further improve students' academic performance and mental health by strengthening their psychological resilience and guiding them to effectively cope with the pressure of social comparison.

Visual context plays an important role in reading behavior. However, the effects of background color on reading performance remain underexplored. This study investigated how background color (white vs. light green) affects reading performance, visual fatigue, emotion, and physiological responses in first language (L1, Chinese) and second language (L2, English) reading contexts. Forty university students completed reading tasks under both background color conditions, and self-report, behavioral, eye-tracking, and physiological data were collected. The results showed differential effects of background color across L1 and L2 reading contexts. In L1 reading experiment, a light green background significantly increased pupil diameter (indicating lower visual fatigue), reduced negative emotion, and improved reading performance compared to a white background. Moreover, background color significantly affected skin temperature among female participants only. In L2 reading, the green background also increased pupil diameter, though this effect was limited to female readers, with no significant improvements in reading performance or emotional response. These findings suggest that perceptual features of digital reading environments can influence multiple aspects of reading, including visual fatigue, emotion, and performance, with varying effects across L1 and L2 reading contexts. Notably, the effects of background color appear to be moderated by task complexity and gender, with female readers showing greater sensitivity to background color effects, particularly under more demanding reading conditions. The study highlights the role of individual differences and perceptual context in shaping reading experience, with implications for interface design and digital learning platforms.

Previous research has indicated an indirect link between Mastery-approach (MAP) goals and perseverance; however, the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. This cross-sectional study, involving 758 senior high school students (369 males; mean age = 17.02 +/- 0.82 years), aimed to assess the relationships among MAP goals, self-esteem, positive rumination, and perseverance. A serial mediation analysis was conducted using the PROCESS macro in SPSS. Significant positive correlations were identified between MAP goals, perseverance, selfesteem, and positive rumination within the sample of senior high school students. Both self-esteem and positive rumination were found to partially mediate the relationship between MAP goals and perseverance. Additionally, self-esteem and positive rumination exhibited a chain mediating effect between MAP goals and perseverance. These findings suggest that self-esteem and positive rumination serve as significant mediators influencing the relationship between MAP goals and perseverance. This study enhances our understanding of the positive psychological mechanisms that foster perseverance among high school students, thus contributing to and refining the motivational framework model of adolescence and the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. Furthermore, it establishes a foundation for the development of targeted educational interventions. By promoting students' mastery goals, self-esteem, and positive rumination, their perseverance can be significantly enhanced.

Remarkable achievements are often achieved by overcoming setbacks and failures. Realizing achievements without encountering some form of challenge or difficulty is uncommon. Previous studies have independently examined the effects of failure and success on subsequent perseverance, showing that repeated failures tend to lead to poorer performance, while consecutive successes generally improve performance. However, few studies have investigated how the combination of failures and successes influences an individual's perseverance in the future. The present study aims to explore the impact of prior failures and successes on subsequent perseverance performance. This study employed a 2 (number of failures: 5 vs. 10) x 2 (number of successes: 1 vs. 5) between-subjects design, comprising a total of four experiments. A total of 528 undergraduate students participated in this study. The experiments employed a figure reasoning task to create two feedback scenarios: an absolute feedback scenario (Studies 1a and 1b: n = 132) and a relative feedback scenario (Studies 2a and 2b: n = 132). The task was divided into two sections. In the initial section, participants experienced either five or ten failures, followed by one or five subsequent successes, depending on their assigned experimental conditions. Afterward, participants were asked to report on various aspects of their perseverance, including positive emotions, belief in success, persistent intentions, and challenge-seeking behavior (Studies 1b and 2b). In the second section, participants received continuous feedback indicating failure and could continue attempting the task as many times as they desired. The number of persistent attempts made by participants was used as an index of persistent behavior. The findings indicate that, regardless of whether the difficulty level of the task is varied or kept consistent, absolute feedback frustration plays a key role in perseverance (Studies 1a and 1b). Specifically, five successes following five consecutive failures lead to greater improvements in perseverance indicators compared to only one success. Moreover, consistent manipulation of the difficulty level enhances the experience of success, which subsequently boosts perseverance performance under high-failure conditions (ten consecutive failures), particularly when participants achieve five successes. In the context of relative feedback frustration (Studies 2a and 2b), five successes following ten consecutive failures are more effective than a single success in enhancing perseverance indicators. However, when the difficulty level is consistently manipulated, no remarkable difference in perseverance performance is observed between the condition with five successes and that with one success following five consecutive failures. This finding suggests that, under low failure conditions (five consecutive failures), increasing the number of successes is not a prerequisite for improving perseverance. Overall, the variability in individual perseverance performance can be attributed to a combination of past experiences with failures and successes, with the number of successful experiences playing a particularly crucial role in overcoming setbacks of varying degrees. The effect of the number of successes on perseverance following consecutive failures is consistent across different situations. Furthermore, compared to absolute feedback contexts, successful experiences have a more pronounced and positive effect on perseverance in relative feedback situations. These results support the view that success breeds further success

Previous studies have shown that semantic radical transparency supports vocabulary learning. However, whether this effect affects the reading of novel words (pseudowords) during incidental vocabulary learning is unclear. Accordingly, in order to investigate the effect of semantic radical transparency on Chinese novel word learning and how this effect changes with the gradual accumulation of novel word representations, the present study integrated the incidental vocabulary learning paradigm with a vocabulary knowledge test. We manipulated whether the semantic radicals of pseudowords were related to the meaning imparted in the informative learning context. Each pseudoword was described as a novel concept of a specific semantic category by 15 informative contexts, and these sentences were divided into five learning phases. We recorded the eye movements of the study participants during the learning phase and their responses during the test phase. A within-subjects experimental design of 2 (semantic radical transparency: transparent, opaque) × 5 (learning phases: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th) was used. The results of the learning phase revealed that, in the first learning phase, readers had shorter reading times and made fewer regressions back to novel words containing transparent semantic radicals. The post-test outcomes showed that the accuracy of the choice of semantic category task for semantic transparent novel words was significantly higher than those for opaque ones. The results of this study indicate that proficient Chinese readers spontaneously use the semantic information of sublexical-level semantic radical units to facilitate incidental vocabulary learning.

Autistic traits exist on a continuum within the general population, yet how these traits influence regional neural activity during real-world social interactions remains unclear. Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), we investigated how autistic traits relate to the fractional amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations (fALFF) during both resting-state and real-time conversations in 62 high autistic trait and 58 low autistic trait neurotypical adults. While resting-state differences were minimal, significant group differences emerged during conversation. Specifically, individuals with high autistic traits showed lower ΔfALFF in the right superior temporal gyrus, with the largest differences observed during emotionally positive topics. Interestingly, although fALFF strongly correlated with functional connectivity across both states, only ΔfALFF demonstrated sensitivity to autistic traits. These findings reveal state-dependent neural differences linked to autistic traits, emphasizing the importance of studying brain activity during naturalistic social interactions. Our results provide new insights into how autistic traits modulate neural processing during dynamic social contexts and suggest fALFF change as a sensitive marker for studying social processing differences.