Raheleh Saryazdi

University Health Network | UHN · KITE-Toronto Rehabilitation Institute

Age-related changes to perceptual and cognitive abilities have been implicated in an increased risk of collision in older adults. This may be due, in part, to their reduced ability to attend to potentially relevant aspects of their driving environment. An associated general phenomenon of inattentional blindness involves a failure to notice visually...

Contemporary research on aging has provided mixed evidence for whether older adults are less effective than younger adults at designing and delivering spoken utterances. However, most of these studies have focused on only specific aspects of this process. In addition, they tend to vary significantly in terms of the degree of complexity in their cho...

One core question in studies of language processing is the extent to which interlocutors engage in real-time communicative perspective-taking. Current evidence suggests that both children and young adult listeners are able to draw on common ground (shared knowledge) to guide referential interpretation. However, less is known about older listeners,...

Past research suggests listeners treat disfluencies as informative cues during spoken language processing. For example, studies have shown that child and younger adult listeners use filled pauses to rapidly anticipate discourse-new objects. The present study explores whether older adults show a similar pattern, or if this ability is reduced in ligh...

Despite the increase in research on older adults' communicative behavior, little work has explored patterns of age-related change in pragmatic inferencing and how these patterns are adapted depending on the situation-specific context. In two eye-tracking experiments, participants followed instructions like “Click on the greenhouse”, which were eith...

Redundant modifiers can facilitate referential interpretation by narrowing attention to intended referents. This is intriguing because, on traditional accounts, redundancy should impair comprehension. Little is known, however, about the effects of redundancy on older adults’ comprehension. Older adults may show different patterns due to age-related...

In face-to-face interaction, speakers spontaneously produce manual gestures that can facilitate listeners’ comprehension of spoken language. The present study explores the factors affecting the uptake and influence of gesture cues in situations where a speaker is referring to objects visible to the listener. In this context, the listener’s attentio...

Research on referential communication has explored talkers' ability to tailor descriptions for the current context. The present study examines this issue alongside talker adaptations for different addressees. Participants were asked to provide a child, adult, or computer with instructions to select and move objects on a display. Each target object...

Visually induced motion sickness (VIMS) is a specific form of motion sickness caused by dynamic visual content such as Virtual Reality applications. Predicting individual susceptibility to VIMS has proven to be difficult and a reliable method has yet to emerge. Here, we introduce the Visually Induced Motion Sickness Susceptibility Questionnaire (VI...

The present study provides normative measures for a new stimulus set of images consisting of 225 everyday objects, each depicted both as a photograph and a matched clipart image generated directly from the photograph (450 images total). The clipart images preserve the same scale, shape, orientation, and general color features as the corresponding p...

Studies of real-time spoken language comprehension have shown that listeners rapidly map unfolding speech to available referents in the immediate visual environment. This has been explored using various kinds of 2-dimensional (2D) stimuli, with convenience or availability typically motivating the choice of a particular image type. However, work in...