Search results for " TAS"
showing 10 items of 721 documents
Global diversity in the TAS2R38 bitter taste receptor: revisiting a classic evolutionary PROPosal
2016
AbstractThe ability to taste phenylthiocarbamide (PTC) and 6-n-propylthiouracil (PROP) is a polymorphic trait mediated by the TAS2R38 bitter taste receptor gene. It has long been hypothesized that global genetic diversity at this locus evolved under pervasive pressures from balancing natural selection. However, recent high-resolution population genetic studies of TAS2Rs suggest that demographic events have played a critical role in the evolution of these genes. We here utilized the largest TAS2R38 database yet analyzed, consisting of 5,589 individuals from 105 populations, to examine natural selection, haplotype frequencies and linkage disequilibrium to estimate the effects of both selectio…
Child specific activation in left auditory cortex predicts behavioral performance in inhibition tasks
2020
Sensory processing during development is important for the emerging cognitive skills underlying goal-directed behavior. Yet, it is not known how auditory processing in children is related to their cognitive functions. Here, we utilized combined magneto- and electroencephalographic (M/EEG) measurements to show that child-unique auditory cortical activity at ∼250 ms after auditory stimulation predicts the performance in inhibition tasks. While unaffected by task demands, the amplitude of the left-hemisphere activation pattern was significantly correlated with the variability of behavioral response time. Since this activation pattern is not present in adults, our results suggest divergent brai…
Do children with overweight respond faster to food-related words?
2020
Abstract Overweight in childhood is a risk factor in developing obesity as an adult, thus having severe consequences on the individuals’ physical health and psychological well-being. Therefore, studying the cognitive and emotional processes that sustain overweight is essential not only at a theoretical level but also to develop effective interventions. In the present experiment, we examined whether children with overweight respond faster to food-related than non-food-related words in a word recognition task: lexical decision. The participants were 24 children diagnosed with exogenous overweight and 24 children with a healthy weight. The stimulus list included positively valenced food-relate…
Do transposed-letter similarity effects occur at a morpheme level? Evidence for morpho-orthographic decomposition
2007
When does morphological decomposition occur in visual word recognition? An increasing body of evidence suggests the presence of early morphological processing. The present work investigates this issue via an orthographic similarity manipulation. Three masked priming lexical decision experiments were conducted to examine the transposed-letter similarity effect (e.g., jugde facilitates JUDGE more than the control jupbe) in polymorphemic and monomorphemic words. If morphological decomposition occurs at early stages of visual word recognition, we would expect an interaction with transposed-letter effects. Experiment 1 was carried out in Basque, which is an agglutinative language. The nonword pr…
Cerebellar patients demonstrate preserved implicit knowledge of association strengths in musical sequences
2006
Recent findings suggest the involvement of the cerebellum in perceptual and cognitive tasks. Our study investigated whether cerebellar patients show musical priming based on implicit knowledge of tonal-harmonic music. Participants performed speeded phoneme identification on sung target chords, which were either related or less-related to prime contexts in terms of the tonal-harmonic system. As groups, both cerebellar patients and age-matched controls showed facilitated processing for related targets, as previously observed for healthy young adults. The outcome suggests that an intact cerebellum is not mandatory for accessing implicit knowledge stored in long-term memory and for its influenc…
Orosensory detection of bitter in fat-taster healthy and obese participants: Genetic polymorphism of CD36 and TAS2R38
2017
In Press, Corrected Proof — Note to users; International audience; Background & aimsWe assessed orosensory detection of a long-chain fatty acid, linoleic acid (LA), and a bitter taste marker, 6-n-propylthiouracil (PROP), and correlated lipid-taster subjects with PROP detection and polymorphism in genes encoding bitter and lipid taste receptors, respectively, TAS2R38 and CD36, in normal weight and obese subjects.DesignThe normal weight (n = 52, age = 35.3 ± 4.10 years, BMI = 23.22 ± 1.44 kg/m2) and obese (n = 52, age = 35.0 ± 5.43 years, BMI = 34.29 ± 5.31 kg/m2) participants were recruited to determine fat and bitter detection thresholds. The genomic DNA was used to determine single nucleot…
ERP correlates of transposed-letter priming effects: The role of vowels versus consonants
2008
One key issue for any computational model of visual-word recognition is the choice of an input coding scheme for assigning letter position. Recent research has shown that pseudowords created by transposing two letters are very effective at activating the lexical representation of their base words (e.g., relovution activates REVOLUTION). We report a masked priming lexical decision experiment in which the pseudoword primes were created by transposing/replacing two consonants or two vowels while event-related potentials were recorded. The results showed a modulation of the amplitude at an early window (150-250 ms) and at the N400 component for vowels but not for consonant transpositions. In ad…
Does the proportion of associatively related pairs modulate the associative priming effect at very brief stimulus-onset asynchronies?
2002
A number of experiments have shown that the magnitude of the associative priming effect increases substantially when there is a high proportion of associatively related pairs in the list when the stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) between prime and target is long (more than 400 ms). In the present series of experiments we manipulated the proportion of associatively related pairs when the SOA was very brief (less than 200 ms). If processing of a target word is facilitated automatically by the prior presentation of a related prime, the occurrence of priming should be unaffected by the proportion of related pairs in the list. Experiment 1 showed a robust relatedness proportion effect obtained in …
Neurocognitive processing of auditorily and visually presented inflected words and pseudowords: Evidence from a morphologically rich language
2009
The aim of the study was to investigate how the input modality affects the processing of a morphologically complex word. The processing of Finnish inflected vs. monomorphemic words and pseudowords was examined during a lexical decision task, using behavioral responses and event-related potentials. The stimuli were presented in two modalities, visually and auditorily, to two groups of participants. Half of the words and pseudowords carried a case-inflection. At the behavioral level, the inflected words elicited a processing cost with longer decision latencies and higher error rates. At the neural level, pseudowords elicited an N400 effect, which was more pronounced in the visual modality. In…
Interhemispheric cooperation for face recognition but not for affective facial expressions
2003
Abstract Interhemispheric cooperation can be indicated by enhanced performance when stimuli are presented to both visual fields relative to one visual field alone. This “bilateral gain” is seen for words but not pseudowords in lexical decision tasks, and has been attributed to the operation of interhemispheric cell assemblies that exist only for meaningful words with acquired cortical representations. Recently, a bilateral gain has been reported for famous but not unfamiliar faces in a face recognition task [Neuropsychologia 40 (2002) 1841]. In Experiment 1 of the present paper, participants performed familiarity decisions for faces that were presented to the left (LVF), the right (RVF), or…