0000000000917858
AUTHOR
Patrick Bonin
Spotlight on the Survival Processing Advantage': An FNIRS Study on Adaptive Memory
International audience; In the present study, participants had to rate words for their relevance in an ancestral survival scenario (e.g., is bottle relevant in the fictious scenario of being stranded in the grasslands of a foreign land without basic supplies) and for their pleasantness (e.g., is bottle a pleasant word?). A distractor task lasting a few minutes followed and the participants were then tested on their recall of the words. We used fNIRS to bilaterally monitor the dorsolateral-prefrontal cortex (DLPFC, known to be involved in strategic encoding) during the processing of verbal material in these two deep encoding situations. At the behavioral level, we replicated the survival pro…
Animacy effects in episodic memory: do imagery processes really play a role?
International audience; Animates are remembered better than inanimates because the former are ultimately more important for fitness than the latter. What, however, are the proximate mechanisms underpinning this effect? We focused on imagery processes as one proximate explanation. We tested whether animacy effects are related to the vividness of mental images (Study 1), or to the dynamic/motoric nature of mental images corresponding to animate words (Study 2). The findings showed that: (1) Animates are not estimated to be more vivid than inanimates; (2) The potentially more dynamic nature of the representations of animates does not seem to be a factor making animates more memorable than inan…
Bonin, P., Nugier, A., Meot, P. (2013). Impact of a minimal social feedback in written picture naming.
International audience
Computational evidence that frequency trajectory theory does not oppose but emerges from age-of-acquisition theory.
International audience; According to the age-of-acquisition hypothesis, words acquired early in life are processed faster and more accurately than words acquired later. Connectionist models have begun to explore the influence of the age/order of acquisition of items (and also their frequency of encounter). This study attempts to reconcile two different methodological and theoretical approaches (proposed by Lambon Ralph & Ehsan, 2006 and Zevin & Seidenberg, 2002) to age-limited learning effects. The current simulations extend the findings reported by Zevin and Seidenberg (2002) that have shown that frequency trajectories (FTs) have limited and specific effects on word-reading tasks. Using th…
Coarse scales are sufficient for efficient categorization of emotional facial expressions: Evidence from neural computation
The human perceptual system performs rapid processing within the early visual system: low spatial frequency information is processed rapidly through magnocellular layers, whereas the parvocellular layers process all the spatial frequencies more slowly. The purpose of the present paper is to test the usefulness of low spatial frequency (LSF) information compared to high spatial frequency (HSF) and broad spatial frequency (BSF) visual stimuli in a classification task of emotional facial expressions (EFE) by artificial neural networks. The connectionist modeling results show that an LSF information provided by the frequency domain is sufficient for a distributed neural network to correctly cla…
Do Phonological Codes Constrain the Selection of Orthographic Codes in Written Picture Naming?
Sound-to-print consistency of picture labels was manipulated in five experiments to investigate whether phonological codes constrain the selection of orthographic codes in written picture naming. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants wrote down picture names which were inconsistent or consistent in the phono-orthographic mapping defined either at the level of the word unit, i.e., heterographic homophones versus nonhomophones (Experiment 1), or at the sublexical level (Experiment 2). In neither experiment did phonographic consistency affect written latencies. Although more errors were observed for inconsistent than for consistent picture names, the observation of a similar error pattern in an…
Normes d’associations verbales pour 520 mots concrets et étude de leurs relations avec d’autres variables psycholinguistiques
Resume Cet article presente un nouvel ensemble de normes d’associations verbales pour 520 noms concrets du francais. Les normes d’associations verbales sont utiles pour l’etude des processus fondamentaux et representations en jeu dans les habiletes memorielles, de comprehension et production du langage. Les relations qu’entretiennent les normes d’associations verbales avec d’autres variables psycholinguistiques sont analysees. Aussi la stabilite des normes d’associations verbales a-t-elle ete etudiee sur un sous-ensemble de mots de l’etude de Ferrand et Alario (1998). Parmi les principaux resultats, il apparait que : 1. les items se repartissent en trois grands ensembles relativement distin…
Impact de l'âge d'acquisition des mots et de la fréquence objective dans des tâches lexicales
International audience; La question générale abordée dans ce chapitre est celle de déterminer pourquoi certains mots sont traités plus rapidement que d'autres. Le mot dragon est-il traité plus rapidement que le mot taxe par des adultes et si oui, pourquoi? Ce chapitre est centré sur le traitement lexical chez des adultes, ce qui peut sembler paradoxal dans un ouvrage consacré au développement, à l'acquisition lexicale. Toutefois, nous montrerons que cette problématique présente un intérêt pour les chercheurs qui étudient l'acquisition du langage.
At what age did you learn ‘Dog’, ‘Harp’ and other words that you know? The issue of what adult age of acquisition (AoA) estimates really measure
International audience
Psycholinguistic norms for 320 fixed expressions (idioms and proverbs) in French
International audience; We provide psycholinguistic norms for a new set of 160 French idiomatic expressions and 160 proverbs: knowledge, predictability, literality, compositionality, subjective and objective frequency, familiarity, age of acquisition (AoA), and length. Different analyses (reliability, descriptive statistics, correlations) performed on the norms are reported and discussed. The norms can be downloaded as supplemental material.
Comment l’information circule d’un niveau de traitement à l’autre lors de l’accès lexical en production verbale de mots ? Éléments de synthèse
Resume Cet article propose une synthese des principaux travaux sur la question de la transmission de l’activation en production verbale a l’oral. Apres avoir rappele brievement quels sont les differents niveaux des traitement identifies par les chercheurs, nous decrivons trois types d’architectures fonctionnelles – discrete-serielle, en cascade et interactive – qui ont ete proposees pour rendre compte de la maniere dont l’activation se transmet entre les differents niveaux de traitement. Nous exposons ensuite les arguments en faveur de la conception discrete et serielle soutenue par Levelt, Roelofs et Meyer (1999), tout en les critiquant notamment parce qu’ils reposent le plus souvent sur d…
Is perception a two-way street ?The case of feedback consistency in visual word recognition
It is generally assumed that during reading, the activation produced over orthographic units feeds forward to phonological units. Supporting interactive models of word recognition, Stone, Vanhoy, and Van Orden (1997) recently claimed that phonological activation reverberates to orthographic processing units and consequently constrains orthographic encoding. They found that the consistency of the relations between phonology and orthography (feedback consistency) influenced lexical decision performance. We explored the effect in five experiments conducted with French words. Although feedback consistency affected writing performance, no significant effect was observed in lexical decision even …
The Behavioral Immune System
International audience; This chapter presents theoretical and empirical arguments in support of the existence of a defense system against pathogens called the Behavioral Immune System, which the authors argue complements the biological immune system and is characterized by cognitive, emotional, motivational, and social aspects
Do animacy effects persist in memory for context?
International audience; The adaptive view of human memory (Nairne, 2010) assumes that animates (e.g., rabbit) are remembered better than inanimates (e.g., glass) because animates are ultimately more important for fitness than inanimates. Previous studies provided evidence for this view by showing that animates were recalled or recognized better than inanimates (e.g., Nairne, VanArsdall, Pandeirada, Cogdill, & LeBreton, 2013), but they did not assess memory for contextual details (e.g., where animates vs. inanimates occurred). In this study, we tested recollection of spatial information (Study 1) and temporal information (Study 2) associated with animate versus inanimate words. The findings …
A new set of 299 pictures for psycholinguistic studies : French norms for name agreement, image agreement, conceptual familiarity, visual complexity, image variability, age of acquisition, and naming latencies.
Pictures are often used as stimuli in studies of perception, language, and memory. Since performances on different sets of pictures are generally contrasted, stimulus selection requires the use of standardized material to match pictures across different variables. Unfortunately, the number of standardized pictures available for empirical research is rather limited. The aim of the present study is to provide French normative data for a new set of 299 black-and-white drawings. Alario and Ferrand (1999) were closely followed in that the pictures were standardized on six variables: name agreement, image agreement, conceptual familiarity, visual complexity, image variability, and age of acquisit…
Masked form priming in writing words from pictures: evidence for direct retrieval of orthographic codes.
Three experiments used the masked priming paradigm to investigate the role of orthographic and phonological information in written picture naming. In all the experiments, participants had to write the names of pictures as quickly as possible under three different priming conditions. Nonword primes could be: (1) phonologically and orthographically related to the picture name; (2) orthographically related as in (1) but phonologically related to a lesser degree than in (1); (3) orthographically and phonologically unrelated except for the first consonant (or consonant cluster). Orthographic priming effects were observed with a prime exposure duration of 34 ms (Experiments 1 and 2) and of 51 ms …
The influence of uncertainty and the idea of death on risk taking
International audience
Notre mémoire en mode survie : quand la contamination « booste » les performances mnésiques !
International audience
Psychologie du langage : la fabrique des mots ; approche cognitive
International audience; Comment fabrique-t-on des mots ? Quels mécanismes cognitifs et représentations mentales nous permettent-ils de produire un mot sous sa forme orale ou écrite ? Autrement dit, quels «ingrédients» et quelle «recette» le cerveau utilise-t-il pour y parvenir ?Volontairement accessible et pédagogique, ponctué de nombreuses illustrations, cet ouvrage propose une synthèse à la fois claire et concise des recherches consacrées aux mécanismes cognitifs employés dans la production verbale.Il présente la particularité d'exposer, outre les travaux portant sur la production verbale orale de mots, ceux bien moins nombreux et plus difficiles d'accès menés sur la production verbale éc…
Do healthy elders, like young adults, remember animates better than inanimates? An adaptive view
International audience; Background/Study Context: It has been found that young adults remember animates better than inanimates. According to the adaptive view of human memory, this is due to the fact that animates are more important for fitness purposes than inanimates. This effect has been ascribed to episodic memory, where older people exhibit difficulties. Methods: Here the authors investigated whether the animacy effect in memory also occurs for healthy older adults. Older and young adults categorized words for their animacy characteristics and were then given an unexpected recognition test on the words using the Remember/Know paradigm. Executive functions were also evaluated using seve…
The Stability-Plasticity Dilemma: Investigating the Continuum from Catastrophic Forgetting to Age-Limited Learning Effects
The stability-plasticity dilemma is a well-know constraint for artificial and biological neural systems. The basic idea is that learning in a parallel and distributed system requires plasticity for the integration of new knowledge, but also stability in order to prevent the forgetting of previous knowledge. Too much plasticity will result in previously encoded data being constantly forgotten, whereas too much stability will impede the efficient coding of this data at the level of the synapses. However, for the most part, neural computation has addressed the problems related to excessive plasticity or excessive stability as two different fields in the literature.
Ce cro-magnon qui est en moi !
La psychologie évolutionnaire ne cesse de nous rappeler que nous sommes tous les descendants de chasseurs-cueilleurs qui ont réussi à résoudre des problèmes adaptatifs, comme trouver de la nourriture, se protéger des prédateurs, trouver un partenaire. Si nous pouvons l'ignorer en tant qu'individu, comme le présent ouvrage espère en convaincre les lecteurs, nos cerveaux le savent...La psychologie évolutionnaire, en se penchant sur le passé de notre espèce, permet de mieux comprendre le pourquoi de nos comportements présents. L’ouvrage est focalisé sur des études expérimentales (plus de 200 expériences sont relatées !) de psychologie évolutionnaire. Il s'adresse aux étudiants en psychologie e…
“With a little help from my friends”: Orthographic influences in spoken word recognition
Resume Dans la presente etude, une tâche de decision lexicale auditive a ete utilisee avec des mots consistants (dans la direction phonie-graphie) ayant beaucoup, ou au contraire, peu « d’amis » au sein de leur voisinage phonologique. Les mots ayant beaucoup d’amis ont conduit a des temps de decision de lexicalite plus courts que ceux en ayant peu. Ce resultat est en accord avec l’hypothese selon laquelle l’orthographe faconne la perception des mots entendus du fait d’une restructuration des representations phonologiques par les connaissances orthographiques.
“It is alive!” Evidence for animacy effects in semantic categorization and lexical decision
AbstractAnimacy is one of the basic semantic features of word meaning and influences perceptual and episodic memory processes. However, evidence that this variable also influences lexicosemantic processing is mixed. As animacy is a semantic variable thought to have evolutionary roots, we first examined its influence in a semantic categorization task that did not make the animacy dimension salient, namely, concrete-abstract categorization. Animates were categorized faster (and more accurately) than inanimates. We then assessed the influence of animacy in two lexical decision experiments. In Experiment 2, we mostly used legal nonwords, whereas in Experiment 3, we varied the context of the non…
MEGALEX- A new mega-study of visual word recognition: Some preliminary data
International audience
Mental imagery as a proximate explanation of the better remembering of living things over nonliving things
International audience
Impact of a Minimal Feedback in Written Picture Naming
International audience; The impact of a minimal feedback in writing was investigated in two experiments. During the first part, participants wrote down the names of pictures as quickly as possible. Before the second part, half of them were given either positive (Experiment 1) or negative (Experiment 2) feedback on their naming speed. The feedback was a virtual score indicating to the participants that they were among the fastest or the slowest writers. In both experiments, the control condition was an instruction indicating that the continuation of the experiment was being loaded. All the participants then wrote down the names of different pictures. The frequency of the picture names was ma…
Animacy effects in episodic memory : evidence for a stone-age memory
International audience
An Experimental Study of Lexical Access in the Writing and Naming of Isolated Words
Unlike speech production, lexical access in written production has not systematically been investigated experimentally. Four experiments were run on literate adults to support the view that although the spoken and written language production systems may obviously share some processing levels, they also both have some specific processing components. The general findings provide evidence for such a view and are discussed in the framework of studies in verbal production conducted on normals and on braindamaged patients. Contrairement a la production verbale orale, l'acces lexical en production verbale ecrite n'a pas ete etudie experimentalement de facon systematique. Quatre experiences ont ete…
QJE-STD_16-208.R2-Supplemental_Material – Supplemental material for Do animacy effects persist in memory for context?
Supplemental material, QJE-STD_16-208.R2-Supplemental_Material for Do animacy effects persist in memory for context? by Margaux Gelin, Patrick Bonin, Alain Méot and Aurélia Bugaiska in Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology