Search results for "Concept Formation"
showing 10 items of 34 documents
The development of facial emotion recognition: The role of configural information
2007
International audience; The development of children's ability to recognize facial emotions and the role of configural information in this development were investigated. In the study, 100 5-, 7-, 9-, and 11-year-olds and 26 adults needed to recognize the emotion displayed by upright and upside-down faces. The same participants needed to recognize the emotion displayed by the top half of an upright or upside-down face that was or was not aligned with a bottom half that displayed another emotion. The results showed that the ability to recognize facial emotion develops with age, with a developmental course that depends on the emotion to be recognized. Moreover, children at all ages and adults e…
Double-decision lexical tasks in thought-disordered schizophrenic patients: a path towards cognitive remediation?
2005
Abstract It has been shown that schizophrenics have certain difficulties in the processing of semantic context. These difficulties have usually been evaluated using lexical decision tasks with semantic priming. In this study, we chose to examine the idea of an abnormality in the early stages of semantic context processing in thought-disordered schizophrenics using two double lexical decision tasks: one with a high (25%) and one with a low (15%) proportion of related words to assess the participants’ competency in controlled and possibly also more automatic context processing. The results obtained in 40 control participants and 40 schizophrenic patients revealed no significant differences in…
(De-)Accentuation and the Processing of Information Status: Evidence from Event-Related Brain Potentials
2012
The paper reports on a perception experiment in German that investigated the neuro-cognitive processing of information structural concepts and their prosodic marking using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Experimental conditions controlled the information status (given vs. new) of referring and non-referring target expressions (nouns vs. adjectives) and were elicited via context sentences, which did not – unlike most previous ERP studies in the field – trigger an explicit focus expectation. Target utterances displayed prosodic realizations of the critical words which differed in accent position and accent type. Electrophysiological results showed an effect of information status, maxi…
Olfactory categorization: a developmental study.
2012
International audience; This study examined the ability of children to classify fruit and flower odors. We asked four groups of children (4-11 years of age) and a group of adults to identify, categorize, and evaluate the edibility, liking, and typicality of 12 fruit and flower odors. Results showed an increase in interindividual agreement with age for the taxonomic (fruit/flower) and function-based (edible/nonedible) categories but not for the hedonic component. So, it seems that this hedonic component is not the explicit basis for this increase in interindividual agreement when categorizing an odor as a fruit/flower odor or as being edible or nonedible. An age-related trend was also observ…
Measuring Task-Switching Ability in the Implicit Association Test
2005
Abstract. Recently, the role of method-specific variance in the Implicit Association Test (IAT) was examined ( McFarland & Crouch, 2002 ; Mierke & Klauer, 2003 ). This article presents a new content-unspecific control task for the assessment of task-switching ability within the IAT methodology. Study 1 showed that this task exhibited good internal consistency and stability. Studies 2-4 examined method-specific variance in the IAT and showed that the control task is significantly associated with conventionally scored IAT effects of the IAT-Anxiety. Using the D measures proposed by Greenwald, Nosek, and Banaji (2003 ), the amount of method-specific variance in the IAT-Anxiety could b…
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 …
Conceptual proposition selection and the LIFG: neuropsychological evidence from a focal frontal group.
2010
Much debate surrounds the role of the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG). Evidence from lesion and neuroimaging studies suggests the LIFG supports a selection mechanism used in single word generation. Single case studies of dynamic aphasic patients with LIFG damage concur with this and extend the finding to selection of sentences at the conceptual preparation stage of language generation. A neuropsychological group with unselected focal frontal and non-frontal lesions is assessed on a sentence generation task that varied the number of possible conceptual propositions available for selection. Frontal patients with LIFG damage when compared to Frontal patients without LIFG damage and Posterio…
From algorithmic computing to direct retrieval: Evidence from number and alphabetic arithmetic in children and adults
1998
A number of theories of mental arithmetic suggest that the ability to solve simple addition and subtraction problems develops from an algorithmic strategy toward a strategy based on the direct retrieval of the result from memory. In the experiment presented here, 2nd and 12th graders were asked to solve two tasks of number and alphabet arithmetic. The subjects transformed series of 1 to 4 numbers or letters (item span) by adding or subtracting an operand varying from 1 to 4 (operation span). Although both the item and operation span were associated with major and identical effects in the case of both numbers and letters at 2nd grade, such effects were clearly observable only in the case of …
Immediate transfer of synesthesia to a novel inducer.
2009
In synesthesia, a certain stimulus (e.g. grapheme) is associated automatically and consistently with a stable perceptual-like experience (e.g. color). These associations are acquired in early childhood and remain robust throughout the lifetime. Synesthetic associations can transfer to novel inducers in adulthood as one learns a second language that uses another writing system. However, it is not known how long this transfer takes. We found that grapheme-color associations can transfer to novel graphemes after only a 10-minute writing exercise. Most subjects experienced synesthetic associations immediately after learning a new Glagolitic grapheme. Using a Stroop task, we provide objective ev…
Working Memory in Children: A Time-Constrained Functioning Similar to Adults
2009
International audience; Within the Time-Based Resource-Sharing (TBRS) model, we tested a new conception of the relationships between processing and storage in which the core mechanisms of WM are time constrained. However, our previous studies were restricted to adults. The present study aimed at demonstrating that these mechanisms are present and functional before adulthood. For this purpose, we investigated the effect on maintenance of the duration of the attentional capture induced by processing. In two experiments using computer-paced WM span tasks, 10- year-old children were asked to maintain letters while performing spatial location judgments. The duration of this processing was manipu…