Search results for "Verbal Learning"
showing 10 items of 72 documents
Information structure in language acquisition. Production and comprehension of (in)definite articles by German-speaking children.
2020
AbstractThe present study investigates the production and comprehension of indefinite and definite articles as markers of givenness by typically-developing German-speaking children, from the perspective of information structure theory. The study involves 93 typically-developing children aged four to seven years old with normal language-skills and 20 adults. The results of a story-narration task and a truth-value judgment task reveal that children have more problems with new than with given referents in production as well as comprehension suggesting a “given better than new”-pattern. These findings are explained in the context of perspective-taking capacities and cue weighting theory.
The formation of structurally relevant units in artificial grammar learning
2002
A total of 78 adult participants were asked to read a sample of strings generated by a finite state grammar and, immediately after reading each string, to mark the natural segmentation positions with a slash bar. They repeated the same task after a phase of familiarization with the material, which consisted, depending on the group involved, of learning items by rote, performing a short term matching task, or searching for the rules of the grammar. Participants formed the same number of cognitive units before and after the training phase, thus indicating that they did not tend to form increasingly large units. However, the number of different units reliably decreased, whatever the task that…
Are there specific neuropsychological deficits underlying poor insight in first episode psychosis?
2011
Insight in psychosis is a multi-dimensional phenomenon, and has been hypothesised to have some sort of neuropsychological basis. It is unclear to what extent specific neuropsychological abilities are able to predict insight beyond the effect of generalised cognitive ability. We aimed to test this, alongside the relationship of insight with illness duration and diagnosis, in a sample of first episode psychosis patients. We recruited 102 patients experiencing their first episode of psychosis and assessed their insight, symptoms, diagnosis as well as administering a full neuropsychological battery. Low insight was related to worse performance in a variety of neuropsychological tasks. Regressio…
Enhancing effects of acute psychosocial stress on priming of non-declarative memory in healthy young adults.
2011
Social stress affects cognitive processes in general, and memory performance in particular. However, the direction of these effects has not been clearly established, as it depends on several factors. Our aim was to determine the impact of the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis and sympathetic nervous system (SNS) reactivity to psychosocial stress on short-term non-declarative memory and declarative memory performance. Fifty-two young participants (18 men, 34 women) were subjected to the Trier Social Stress Task (TSST) and a control condition in a crossover design. Implicit memory was assessed by a priming test, and explicit memory was assessed by the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test…
Acute pre-learning stress and declarative memory: impact of sex, cortisol response and menstrual cycle phase.
2012
This study explores the influence of pre-learning stress on performance on declarative memory tasks in healthy young adults in relation to sex and menstrual cycle phase. The sample was composed of 119 students (32 men and 87 women) from 18 to 25 years of age. The women were tested in different hormonal stages (30 in follicular phase, 34 in luteal phase, and 23 using oral contraceptives). The participants were exposed to the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) or a control condition. Afterwards, their memory performance was measured using a standardized memory test (Rey's Auditory Verbal Learning Test). In the control condition, all groups of women recalled more words than men, but these differe…
The effects of length and transposed-letter similarity in lexical decision: evidence with beginning, intermediate, and adult readers.
2007
Do length and transposed-letter effects reflect developmental changes on reading acquisition in a transparent orthography? Can computational models of visual word recognition accommodate these changes? To answer these questions, we carried out a masked priming lexical decision experiment with Spanish beginning, intermediate, and adult readers (N=36, 44, and 39; average age: 7, 11, and 22 years, respectively). Target words were either short or long (6.5 vs. 8.5 letters), and transposed-letter primes were formed by the transposition of two letters (e.g. aminal-ANIMAL) or by the substitution of two letters (orthographic control: arisal-ANIMAL). Children showed a robust length effect (i.e. long…
The role of noticing in prospective memory forgetting.
2007
Two experiments used autonomic reactions (i.e., skin conductance responses; SCRs) in conjunction with behavioral responses to study retrieval processes in prospective memory. SCRs were recorded while participants performed a prospective memory task embedded in an ongoing task. Stimuli that received the same behavioral response (i.e., no prospective memory response) evoked different autonomic reactions as a function of whether they were versus were not prospective cues (Experiments 1 and 2) and as a function of whether they did versus did not share perceptual or conceptual features with prospective cues (Experiment 2). To the extent that SCRs provide an index of noticing a stimulus, increase…
Working memory and everyday cognition in adults with Down's syndrome.
2001
A number of previous studies have suggested that young people with Down's syndrome (DS) have a specific deficit of the phonological loop component of the working memory. However, there have also been studies which have proposed a specific deficit of the central executive component of working memory and suggested similarities of working memory functioning with patients with Alzheimer's disease. Fifteen middle-aged people with DS were matched for their individual scores of non-verbal intelligence to 15 individuals with mixed aetiology of intellectual disability. A versatile range of tasks was used in order to evaluate the functioning of working memory components. In addition, several everyday…
Experimental evidence for a motivational origin of cognitive impairment in major depression.
2007
BackgroundDiagnostic criteria and empirical evidence support the existence of cognitive deficits in depression. However, depressed mood, loss of interest and low self-efficacy might influence cognitive performance.MethodGoal-setting instructions were used to promote motivation in depressed patients and control subjects during neuropsychological assessment. The resulting performance was compared with performance using standard instructions. Sixty in-patients with non-psychotic unipolar depression and 60 age- and education-matched healthy control subjects were assessed with standard neuropsychological tests [the Auditory Verbal Learning Test (AVLT), the Digit Symbol Test (DST), the Regensburg…
Cognitive impairment in Behçet's disease patients without overt neurological involvement
2003
We investigated the prevalence of cognitive impairment in patients with Behc¸et’s disease (BD) without overt neurological involvement. The influence of disease duration, disease activity, prednisone dosage, and anxiety and depression levels was evaluated. Twenty-six consecutive BD outpatients and 26 healthy controls matched for age, education and sex completed a comprehensive neuropsychological battery including tests of memory, visuospatial and constructional abilities, language, attention and psychomotor speed, non-verbal reasoning and executive functioning. The Hamilton scales for anxiety and depression were administered. Disease activity was assessed using the Behc¸et’s Disease Current …