Search results for " representation"
showing 10 items of 811 documents
Integration of cognitive allocentric information in visuospatial short-term memory through the hippocampus
2005
Visuospatial short-term memory relies on a widely distributed neocortical network: some areas support the encoding process of the visually acquired spatial information, whereas other ares are more involved in the active maintenance of the encoded information. Recently, in a pointing to remembered targets task, it has been shown in healthy subjects that, for memory delays of 5 s, spatial errors are affected also by cognitive allocentric information, i.e., covert spatial information derived from a pure mental representation. We tested the effect of a lesion of the hippocampus on the accuracy of pointing movements toward remembered targets, with memory delays falling in the 0.5-30 s range. The…
Theory of Mind and Emotional Awareness Deficits in Patients With Somatoform Disorders
2010
To explore whether deficits are present in the mental representation of emotion signals and whether these are related to more general deficits in Theory of Mind (ToM) functioning test. To test this hypothesis in patients suffering from somatoform disorders, we used the Frith-Happé-Animations Task (AT)-an established ToM measure. We previously demonstrated that somatization in psychiatric patients is associated with decreased emotional awareness as measured by the Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale (LEAS). These findings suggest that individuals with decreased emotional awareness often fail to experience affective arousal as feelings and instead experience emotional distress somatically.We …
Brand Discrimination: An Implicit Measure of the Strength of Mental Brand Representations
2015
While mental associations between a brand and its marketing elements are an important part of brand equity, previous research has yet to provide a sound methodology to measure the strength of these links. The following studies present the development and validation of an implicit measure to assess the strength of mental representations of brand elements in the mind of the consumer. The measure described in this paper, which we call the Brand Discrimination task, requires participants to identify whether images of brand elements (e.g. color, logo, packaging) belong to a target brand or not. Signal detection theory (SDT) is used to calculate a Brand Discrimination index which gives a measure …
Investigating centre of mass stabilisation as the goal of posture and movement coordination during human whole body reaching
2000
In the light of experimental results showing significant forward centre of mass (CoM) displacements within the base of support, this study investigated if whole body reaching movements can be executed whilst keeping the CoM fixed in the horizontal axis. Using kinematic simulation techniques, angular configurations were recreated from experimental data imposing two constraints: a constant horizontal position of the CoM and an identical trajectory of the hand to grasp an object. The comparison between recorded and simulated trials showed that stabilisation of the CoM was associated with greater backward hip displacements, which became more marked with increasing object distance. This was in c…
Exploring the relationship between semantics and space
2009
The asymmetric distribution of human spatial attention has been repeatedly documented in both patients and healthy controls. Biases in the distribution of attention and/or in the mental representation of space may also affect some aspects of language processing. We investigated whether biases in attention and/or mental representation of space affect semantic representations. In particular, we investigated whether semantic judgments could be modulated by the location in space where the semantic information was presented and the role of the left and right parietal cortices in this task. Healthy subjects were presented with three pictures arranged horizontally (one middle and two outer picture…
Mixing against culture vs mixing against nature: ontologization of prohibited interethnic relationships.
2009
In this paper, we develop the theory of ontologization: Social representations that prevent members of minority and majority groups who are living in contact with each other to mingle. The process of ontologization consists of separating some humans from their own species, and anchoring them in another environment, that of an animal, for example. We propose that underlying the famous slogan "equal but separate" is the social representation of interracial mixing as a "counter-nature" phenomenon. It is predicted that a sexual relationship between people of different "races" leads to a greater degree of ontologization, and, as such, this miscegenation will be explained in terms of biologistic …
Mental representation of arm motion dynamics in children and adolescents.
2013
International audience; Motor imagery, i.e., a mental state during which an individual internally represents an action without any overt motor output, is a potential tool to investigate action representation during development. Here, we took advantage of the inertial anisotropy phenomenon to investigate whether children can generate accurate motor predictions for movements with varying dynamics. Children (9 and 11 years), adolescents (14 years) and young adults (21 years) carried-out actual and mental arm movements in two different directions in the horizontal plane: rightwards (low inertia) and leftwards (high inertia). We recorded and compared actual and mental movement times. We found th…
The role of posterior parietal cortices on prismatic adaptation effects on the representation of time intervals
2013
Previous studies provided evidence of an ascending left-to-right spatial representation of time durations by using a technique affecting high levels of spatial cognition, i.e. prismatic adaptation (PA). Indeed, PA that induced a leftward aftereffect distorted time representation toward an underestimation, while PA that induced a rightward aftereffect distorted time representation toward an overestimation. The present study advances previous findings on the effects of PA on time by investigating the neural basis subtending these effects. We focused on the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) since it is involved in the PA procedure and also in the formulation of the spatial representation of time…
Neurobiological signature of intimacy in anorexia nervosa
2019
Background Intimacy and psychosexual development represent core problems of anorexia nervosa (AN). Experiential and neurobiological evidence however is scarce. Material and methods Thirty-one female AN patients were compared with 35 non-patients (NP) and 22 recovered participants (REC) by using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Participants viewed pictures of couples in intimate relationships and control stimuli. Results AN patients experienced intimate stimuli with lower valence and dominance. AN showed decreased activation of parietal cortices. NP decreased the prefrontal cortex response, which AN patients did not. REC participants did not differ from NP on a behavioural level, thoug…
Darstellung von Hyperebenen in verallgemeinerten affinen Räumen durch Moduln
1994
The starting point of this article is a generalized concept of affine space which includes all affine spaces over unitary modules. Our main result is a representation theorem for hyperplanes of affine spaces: Every hyperplane which satisfies a weak richness condition is induced by a module. 1