Search results for "Physiological psychology"

2017

Some years ago Cheung et al. (2008) proposed the complete design (CD) for measuring the failure of selective attention in composite objects. Since the CD is a fully balanced design, analysis of response bias may reveal potential effects of the experimental manipulation, the stimulus material, and/or attributes of the observers. Here we used the CD to prove whether external features modulate perception of internal features with the context congruency paradigm (Nachson et al., 1995; Meinhardt-Injac et al., 2010) in a larger sample of N = 303 subjects. We found a large congruency effect (Cohen's d = 1.78), which was attenuated by face inversion (d = 1.32). The congruency relation also strongly…

2014

Some years ago an improved design (the "complete design") was proposed to assess the composite face effect in terms of a congruency effect, defined as the performance difference for congruent and incongruent target to no-target relationships (Cheung et al., 2008). In a recent paper Rossion(2013) questioned whether the congruency effect was a valid hallmark of perceptual integration, because it may contain confounds with face-unspecific interference effects. Here we argue that the complete design is well-balanced and allows one to separate face-specific from face-unspecific effects. We used the complete design for a same/different composite stimulus matching task with face and non-face objec…

Music as a mnemonic to learn gesture sequences in normal aging and Alzheimer’s disease

2014

Strong links between music and motor functions suggest that music could represent an interesting aid for motor learning. The present study aims for the first time to test the potential of music to assist in the learning of sequences of gestures in normal and pathological aging. Participants with mild Alzheimer's disease (AD) and healthy older adults (Controls) learned sequences of meaningless gestures that were either accompanied by music or a metronome. We also manipulated the learning procedure such that participants had to imitate the gestures to-be-memorized in synchrony with the experimenter or after the experimenter during encoding. Results show different patterns of performance for t…

2021

In vowel discrimination, commonly found discrimination patterns are directional asymmetries where discrimination is faster (or easier) if differing vowels are presented in a certain sequence compared to the reversed sequence. Different models of speech sound processing try to account for these asymmetries based on either phonetic or phonological properties. In this study, we tested and compared two of those often-discussed models, namely the Featurally Underspecified Lexicon (FUL) model (Lahiri and Reetz, 2002) and the Natural Referent Vowel (NRV) framework (Polka and Bohn, 2011). While most studies presented isolated vowels, we investigated a large stimulus set of German vowels in a more n…

A role for backward transitional probabilities in word segmentation?

2008

A number of studies have shown that people exploit transitional probabilities between successive syllables to segment a stream of artificial continuous speech into words. It is often assumed that what is actually exploited are the forward transitional probabilities (given XY, the probability that X will be followed by Y ), even though the backward transitional probabilities (the probability that Y has been preceded by X) were equally informative about word structure in the languages involved in those studies. In two experiments, we showed that participants were able to learn the words from an artificial speech stream when the only available cues were the backward transitional probabilities.…

Graphemic complexity and multiple print-to-sound associations in visual word recognition

2005

Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands It has recently been reported that words containing a multiletter grapheme are processed slower than are words composed of single-letter graphemes (Rastle & Coltheart, 1998; Rey, Jacobs, Schmidt-Weigand, & Ziegler, 1998). In the present study, using a perceptual identification task, we found in Experiment 1 that this graphemic complexity effect can be observed while controlling for multiple print-to-sound associations, indexed by regularity or consistency. In Experiment 2, we obtained cumulative effects of graphemic complexity and regularity. These effects were replicated in Experiment 3 in a naming task. Overall, these r…

2020

Regular physical activity (PA) offers positive effects on the human body. However, the effects of PA on cognition and in the brain are less clear. In this paper, we narratively review the relationship of PA with cognition and dementia, first from general perspective and then through genetically informed studies on the topic. Then we move on to imaging studies on exercise and brain anatomy first by presenting an overall picture of the topic and then discussing brain imaging studies addressing PA and brain structure in twins in more detailed way. Regarding PA and cognition or dementia, genetically informed studies are uncommon, even though the relationship between PA and cognitive ageing has …

EEG Effective Source Projections Are More Bilaterally Symmetric in Infants Than in Adults

2020

Although anatomical brain hemispheric asymmetries have been clearly documented in the infant brain, findings concerning functional hemispheric specialization have been inconsistent. The present report aims to assess whether bilaterally symmetric synchronous activity between the two hemispheres is a characteristic of the infant brain. To asses cortical bilateral synchronicity, we used decomposition by independent component analysis (ICA) of high-density electroencephalographic (EEG) data collected in an auditory passive oddball paradigm. Decompositions of concatenated 64-channel EEG data epochs from each of 34 typically developing 6-month-old infants and from 18 healthy young adults particip…

2017

Many daily activities, such as tying one’s shoe laces, opening a jar of jam or performing a free throw in basketball, require the skillful coordinated use of both hands. Even though the non-invasive method of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has been repeatedly shown to improve unimanual motor performance, little is known about its effects on bimanual motor performance. More knowledge about how tDCS may improve bimanual behavior would be relevant to motor recovery, e.g. in persons with bilateral impairment of hand function. We therefore examined the impact of high-definition anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (HD-atDCS) on the performance of a bimanual sequential s…

2020

Healthy aging is associated with deficits in focused and sustained attention and executive functions. However, cognitive training (CT) provides a promising method to counteract these deficits. In the present randomized controlled study, we examined to what extent CT regimes can improve attention, verbal skills, and inhibition capacities. Over a period of 16 weeks, healthy older adults (65 years and older, mean: 70 years) received a trainer-guided multidomain paper-and-pencil and computerized CT. Pre- and post-training, a battery of psychometric tests was applied that measured the critical functions. This study used two control groups: a passive control and an active control group performing…