Search results for "REPRESENTATION"
showing 10 items of 1710 documents
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 …
Individual differences in working memory capacity are unrelated to the magnitudes of retrocue benefits
2021
AbstractPrevious studies have associated visual working memory (VWM) capacity with the use of internal attention. Retrocues, which direct internal attention to a particular object or feature dimension, can improve VWM performance (i.e., retrocue benefit, RCB). However, so far, no study has investigated the relationship between VWM capacity and the magnitudes of RCBs obtained from object-based and dimension-based retrocues. The present study explored individual differences in the magnitudes of object- and dimension-based RCBs and their relationships with VWM capacity. Participants completed a VWM capacity measurement, an object-based cue task, and a dimension-based cue task. We confirmed tha…
Motor Activity Improves Temporal Expectancy
2015
International audience; Certain brain areas involved in interval timing are also important in motor activity. This raises the possibility that motor activity might influence interval timing. To test this hypothesis, we assessed interval timing in healthy adults following different types of training. The pre- and post-training tasks consisted of a button press in response to the presentation of a rhythmic visual stimulus. Alterations in temporal expectancy were evaluated by measuring response times. Training consisted of responding to the visual presentation of regularly appearing stimuli by either: (1) pointing with a whole-body movement, (2) pointing only with the arm, (3) imagining pointi…
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 …
Cross-notational semantic priming between symbolic and nonsymbolic numerosity
2008
Symbolic and nonsymbolic numerosities produce similar behavioural effects and activate the same brain areas. These results have usually been interpreted in terms of a common, notation-independent magnitude representation. However, semantic priming between symbolic and nonsymbolic inputs has been somehow elusive (e.g., Koechlin, Naccache, Block, & Dehaene, 1999). In Experiment 1, we looked at whether cross-notational semantic priming depends on exact numerical meaning. Dice faces and digits were mixed as prime and target. Semantic priming occurred when prime and target were in the same notation as much as when they were in different notation. In Experiment 2, we found cross-notation sem…
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…
Frontoparietal cortex and cerebellum contribution to the update of actual and mental motor performance during the day
2016
AbstractActual and imagined movement speed increases from early morning until mid-afternoon. Here, we investigated the neural correlates of these daily changes. Fifteen subjects performed actual and imagined right finger opposition movement sequences at 8 am and 2 pm. Both actual and imagined movements were significantly faster at 2 pm than 8 am. In the morning, actual movements significantly activated the left primary somatosensory and motor areas, and bilaterally the cerebellum; in the afternoon activations were similar but reduced. Contrast analysis revealed greater activity in the cerebellum, the left primary sensorimotor cortex and parietal lobe in the morning than in the afternoon. Im…