Reflexive gaze following in common marmoset monkeys
Summary (2 min read)
INTRODUCTION
- The adoption of CEFR onto education system needs to be comprehensive and involves a number of major changes.
- Countries such as China, Taiwan, Netherland, Norway and Malaysia have begun to align their tests against the six levels of CEFR descriptors.
- The linking of CEFR to a language test could be conducted from the aspects of familiarization, standardizations, specifications and empirical evidence (Council of Europe 2009).
THE STATUS OF CEFR IN MALAYSIA
- English is regarded as the language of choice by most organizations and industries in Malaysia.
- Some employers have shared their frustrations in employing graduates who are competent in English language (Mohd Shukri, Rafikul & Noor Hazilah 2014; Sheridan 2014; Yuen 2015).
- This study was also interested to explore and link the content of English language courses to CEFR (Ramiaida, Noor Sazaai, Norhana, Fariza, Zarina & Juliana, 2017).
- There are studies that include students as data source.
- Therefore, this study is conducted to address the following objectives: 1. To identify the suitability of the current -writing and reading items against the CEFR level set by the Ministry of Education 2.
RESPONDENT
- The respondents of this study were 331 high school English teachers.
- The number of respondents of that study which was more or less the same to the present study.
- The teachers were chosen and found to be suitable respondents because of their 15 to 20 years of teaching experience and they are familiar with the syllabus and format of English national examination papers.
- The respondents involved in this study were also chosen because they have attended CEFR familiarization workshops organized by Ministry of Education, Malaysia.
- This is important because respondents who are familiar with CEFR global scale could provide more accurate results compared to those who are not familiar with CEFR global scale and its concepts.
INSTRUMENT
- This study uses an assessment checklist to collect the data.
- The assessment checklist was constructed based on the compilation of SPM English papers from 2012 – 2017 table of specifications.
- Then, the types of questions which were frequently asked were chosen and included in the assessment checklist.
- The content expert from UKM has a PhD in Language Testing with more than 30 years of experience as an academic and researcher.
- All items in the assessment checklist are considered good based on the high value of Cronbach Alpha.
PROCEDURES
- The English teachers who were involved in this study were recommended by the schools’.
- The teachers were briefed about the objectives of the study and their roles as subject matter experts.
- Then, the assessment checklist along with the SPM English writing and reading papers of 2017 were given to the teachers.
- The CEFR writing and reading scales were also provided to the teachers as a reference.
- The whole process took approximately 3 weeks to complete.
DATA ANALYSIS
- The data of this study were analyzed using two computer software, namely: Winstep and NVivo version 11.
- Winstep was used in the data analysis in order to determine the suitability of the assessment items from the value of infit mean square (MnSq).
- Second, items with the infit mnsq values which are higher than 1.4 are also found to be not suitable since the items are considered difficult and confusing, hence they should be removed.
- The difficulty level of items decreases as the logit values get smaller.
- Teachers’ comments and feedback were typed and transferred into the form of word document, then the comments and feedback were sorted out and coded according to writing items and reading items.
FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION
- Table 5 shows the details of the assessment items measurement report which consist of logit, standard error (S.E) and infit mean square (mnsq) values.
- These assessment items are considered as easy items because of the negative logit values, nevertheless these items are slightly difficult and not as easy as open topic, argumentative and novel because the S.E value is 23.
- Apart from suggesting suitable CEFR level for the assessment items, the teachers also left their comments and feedback on the items.
- Suggestions by teachers to replace informal letter with email is logic and make sense considering email is widely used as medium of communication in present days.
- The teachers provided several reasons in which they believed reading assessment items of information transfer and reading comprehension could be removed.
CONCLUSION
- In conclusion, all the writing and reading assessment items are suitable with a combination of three easy items, six intermediate items and four difficult items.
- Some of the writing and reading assessment items are found to be relevant against CEFR global scale as well as the new CEFR aligned English syllabus.
- Therefore, the suitable and relevant items should be retained instead of to be removed.
- They have also proved that their judgements as subject matter experts could be used in deciding the appropriate CEFR level for the assessment items.
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References
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Frequently Asked Questions (20)
Q2. What are the future works mentioned in the paper "Reflexive gaze following in common marmoset monkeys" ?
Yet, given the fact that the third animal exhibited a different pattern, characterized by an absence of a second gaze following peak and a constant choice at chance level after 300 ms, further studies will be needed to critically assess the possibility of periodicity. Hence, the question is why the drive to follow gaze is fully expressed in saccadic reaction times for short exposure times, arguably too short to allow a detailed scrutiny of the face whereas the choice bias increases further with exposure time for up to 300 ms. The first is fast, probably subcortical, controlling gaze following based on a rough and potentially error prone analysis of the other ’ s face, too limited to provide information on other aspects of the face like the identity or mood of the agent.
Q3. What is the effect of turning the head to the side?
Turning the head to the side will not only change the balance between paler and darker parts of the face but also disrupt the symmetry of the facial contour.
Q4. Why were saccades associated with long reaction times when presented briefly?
Neutral objects were associated with relatively long saccadic reaction times when presented briefly, probably because of the need to scrutinize the object in order to assess its significance.
Q5. What is the effect of a short exposure to the oriented face on the saccadic?
A short exposure to the oriented face can cause a profound shortening of saccadic reaction time, because the drive to follow gaze direction is already fully expressed whereas facial attraction is still building up.
Q6. What is the significance of the directional preference for the left?
For 100 ms presentation duration, the animals exhibited a significant preference for the target on the brighter side, i.e. opposite to the side preference to be expected based on a mechanism exploiting the luminance asymmetry associated with face orientation.
Q7. What is the way to measure the directional bias of the animals?
A choice bias is evident at the shortest duration time, whereas for longer exposures the animals chose the targets on the right and left at random.
Q8. What is the effect of the directional bias on the face?
A face that appears symmetric when seen in a straight ahead orientation will become asymmetric when turned to the side, an asymmetry that offers directional information.
Q9. What was the go signal for the animals to choose?
The disappearance of the conspecific’s face or the control stimuli and the simultaneous appearance of two peripheral targets was the go signal for the animals to freely choose one of two peripheral targets presented on the horizontal axis at 5° right and left of the center respectively, by means of a saccade.
Q10. How long did the triangles take to be presented?
The orientation was chosen randomly interleaved and the triangles were presented for 100 ms or 300 ms in separate blocks of trials, i.e. for the presentation durations that had provided the strongest effects of oriented marmoset faces.
Q11. How long does the other’s gaze follow?
In all three species the other’s gaze biases decisions on potential targets already after only 100 ms of exposure to the other’s gaze, too short to accommodate a more detailed scrutiny of the other’s face.
Q12. What is the role of gaze following in the study of old world monkeys?
Gaze following is a an important social skill, which enables humans, great apes and old world primates to establish joint attention on an object of interest to the other.
Q13. What is the effect of the directional gaze on the animal?
Here the directional gaze seems to suppress the buildup of attraction to the central object, facilitating the readiness to look elsewhere as determined by the resultant of the other’s gaze direction and an internal directional bias.
Q14. What is the effect of asymmetric non-face shapes on marmosets?
If marmoset gaze following relied on an ability to exploit contour asymmetries, one might expect that even asymmetric non-face shapes might redirect attention.
Q15. How did the animals choose the target?
The animals had to freely choose one of the two targets, a human face (2° × 3°extension), by making an indicative saccade into a window of 2° centered on the target within 500 ms.
Q16. What did the authors do to test the possibility of asymmetric non-face shapes?
In order to test this possibility the authors exposed their experimental animals to the vision of filled out black triangles, covering an area similar to the one covered by the portraits.
Q17. What is the directional bias in a straight ahead marmoset?
The white ear tufts on the left and right of the darker central face of a straight ahead marmoset offer a symmetric luminance profile.
Q18. What is the effect of exposure time on saccades?
latencies of saccades associated with neutral disks showed an influence of exposure time that was qualitatively opposite to the influence on saccades for congruent choices: while being similar to saccades for straight faces for short presentation durations, they became shorter with increasing exposure time (see Fig. 3).
Q19. What is the effect of the longer exposure time on the saccades?
This increased interest in the other’s face, gated by longer exposure times, can be expected to compromise the ability to quickly disengage attention at the time of the go-signal.
Q20. What is the probability of the oriented triangles?
Binomial probability: **p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001. (c) Bar plot of percentage of choices congruent with the side cued by the oriented triangles.