Search results for "behavioral"
showing 10 items of 3011 documents
Synergy and masking in odor mixtures: an electrophysiological study of orthonasal vs. retronasal perception
2008
Perceptual interactions in a model of wine woody–fruity binary mixtures were previously reported in a psychophysical study performed through orthonasal stimulation only. However, recent studies suggested that the perception of food-like and nonfood-like odors may depend on the route of stimulation. The aim of the present study was two-fold: first to examine the neural correlates of perceptual interactions using electroencephalogram (EEG)-derived event-related potentials (ERPs) and second to test the influence of the stimulation route on quality perception. Therefore, we designed an experiment with 30 subjects to study perceptual interactions in woody–fruity mixtures and compared ortho- vs. …
Binaural release from masking in forward-masked intensity discrimination: Evidence for effects of selective attention
2012
In a forward-masked intensity discrimination task, we manipulated the perceived lateralization of the masker via variation of the interaural time difference (ITD). The maskers and targets were 500 Hz pure tones with a duration of 30 ms. Standards of 30 and 60 dB SPL were combined with 60 or 90 dB SPL maskers. As expected, the presentation of a forward masker perceived as lateralized to the other side of the head as the target resulted in a significantly smaller elevation of the intensity difference limen than a masker lateralized ipsilaterally. This binaural release from masking in forward-masked intensity discrimination cannot be explained by peripheral mechanisms because varying the ITD l…
Sequential grouping modulates the effect of non-simultaneous masking on auditory intensity resolution.
2012
The presence of non-simultaneous maskers can result in strong impairment in auditory intensity resolution relative to a condition without maskers, and causes a complex pattern of effects that is difficult to explain on the basis of peripheral processing. We suggest that the failure of selective attention to the target tones is a useful framework for understanding these effects. Two experiments tested the hypothesis that the sequential grouping of the targets and the maskers into separate auditory objects facilitates selective attention and therefore reduces the masker-induced impairment in intensity resolution. In Experiment 1, a condition favoring the processing of the maskers and the targ…
Meaning-making as a mediator of anxiety and depression reduction during cognitive behavioral therapy intervention in participants with adjustment dis…
2021
There is a consensus among researchers about the link between low meaning in life and anxiety and depressive symptoms. One unanswered question is whether meaning-making is a mediator of the change in anxiety and depression symptoms in participants with adjustment disorders during cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) treatment. The aims of this study were (a) to analyse whether there was meaning-making during the application of the CBT, (b) to analyse whether meaning-making was a mediator of anxiety psychopathology and (c) to analyse whether meaning-making was a mediator of depressive symptoms. The sample was composed of 115 patients who satisfied the full Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of…
Familiarity-based recognition in the young, healthy elderly, mild cognitive impaired and Alzheimer's patients
2009
This study investigates the possible existence of deficits in familiarity in five samples of participants spanning a broad range of ages and cognitive states. Five groups of 16 participants with a diagnosis of multi-domain cognitive impairment with a slight or no deficit in memory, 16 multi-domain amnestic, and 16 Alzheimer's disease patients were compared in a recognition test with equivalent samples of old and young healthy participants. In one of the tests, participants studied words extracted from a restricted set of letters of the alphabet that were later mixed with new words from a different set. The unconscious use of the fluency produced by the repeated use of the set of letters was…
Mood-congruent bias and attention shifts in the different episodes of bipolar disorder
2013
An "affective" go/no-go task was used in the different episodes of bipolar patients (euthymic, depressed, and manic) to examine (1) the presence of a mood-congruent attentional bias; and (2) the patients' ability to inhibit and invert associations between stimuli and responses through blocks. A group of healthy individuals served as controls. Results revealed a mood-congruent attentional bias: patients in the manic episode processed positive information faster, whereas those in the depressive episode processed negative information faster. In contrast, neither euthymic patients nor healthy individuals showed any mood-congruent biases. Furthermore, there was a shift cost across blocks for hea…
Attention orienting and inhibitory control across the different mood states in bipolar disorder: An emotional antisaccade task
2013
An antisaccade experiment, using happy, sad, and neutral faces, was conducted to examine the effect of mood-congruent information on inhibitory control (antisaccade task) and attentional orienting (prosaccade task) during the different episodes of bipolar disorder (BD) - manic (n=22), depressive (n=25), and euthymic (n=24). A group of 28 healthy controls was also included. Results revealed that symptomatic patients committed more antisaccade errors than healthy individuals, especially with mood-congruent faces. The manic group committed more antisaccade errors in response to happy faces, while the depressed group tended to commit more antisaccade errors in response to sad faces. Additionall…
Dynamics of brain activity underlying working memory for music in a naturalistic condition
2014
We aimed at determining the functional neuroanatomy of working memory (WM) recognition of musical motifs that occurs while listening to music by adopting a non-standard procedure. Western tonal music provides naturally occurring repetition and variation of motifs. These serve as WM triggers, thus allowing us to study the phenomenon of motif tracking within real music. Adopting a modern tango as stimulus, a behavioural test helped to identify the stimulus motifs and build a time-course regressor of WM neural responses. This regressor was then correlated with the participants' (musicians') functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) signal obtained during a continuous listening condition. In…
Frontal–posterior theta oscillations reflect memory retrieval during sentence comprehension
2015
Abstract Successful working-memory retrieval requires that items be retained as distinct units. At the neural level, it has been shown that theta-band oscillatory power increases with the number of to-be-distinguished items during working-memory retrieval. Here we hypothesized that during sentence comprehension, verbal-working-memory retrieval demands lead to increased theta power over frontal cortex, supposedly supporting the distinction amongst stored items during verbal-working-memory retrieval. Also, synchronicity may increase between the frontal cortex and the posterior cortex, with the latter supposedly supporting item retention. We operationalized retrieval by using pronouns, which r…
Relationship between Meditative Practice and Self-Reported Mindfulness: the MINDSENS Composite Index
2014
Mindfulness has been described as an inherent human capability that can be learned and trained, and its improvement has been associated with better health outcomes in both medicine and psychology. Although the role of practice is central to most mindfulness programs, practice-related improvements in mindfulness skills is not consistently reported and little is known about how the characteristics of meditative practice affect different components of mindfulness. the present study explores the role of practice parameters on self-reported mindfulness skills. A total of 670 voluntary participants with and without previous meditation experience (n = 384 and n = 286, respectively) responded to an…