Search results for "perception"
showing 10 items of 3634 documents
Stability and Change of Personality Across the Life Course: The Impact of Age and Major Life Events on Mean-Level and Rank-Order Stability of the Big…
2011
Does personality change across the entire life course, and are those changes due to intrinsic maturation or major life experiences? This longitudinal study investigated changes in the mean levels and rank order of the Big Five personality traits in a heterogeneous sample of 14,718 Germans across all of adulthood. Latent change and latent moderated regression models provided four main findings: First, age had a complex curvilinear influence on mean levels of personality. Second, the rank-order stability of Emotional Stability, Extraversion, Openness, and Agreeableness all followed an inverted U-shaped function, reaching a peak between the ages of 40 and 60, and decreasing afterwards, whereas…
Cognitive deficits in beta-thalassemia major.
2000
OBJECTIVES: To assess cognitive functioning in patients affected by beta-thalassemia major (beta-th) by using a neuropsychological battery, and to identify clinical correlates. MATERIAL AND METHODS:Forty-six beta-th patients and 46 controls similar for age, sex, and education participated in the study. All subjects performed a comprehensive neuropsychological battery including tests of abstract reasoning, attention, executive functions, language, constructional/visuospatial skills, and memory. RESULTS:Compared to controls beta-th patients, in particular those showing signs of hemosiderosis, were significantly impaired on all neuropsychological tests. There was no relationship between cognit…
Psychophysical evidence for long-term potentiation of C-fiber and Adelta-fiber pathways in humans by analysis of pain descriptors.
2007
Long-term potentiation of human pain perception (nociceptive LTP) to single electrical test stimuli was induced by high-frequency stimulation (HFS) of cutaneous nociceptive afferents. Numerical pain ratings and a list of sensory pain descriptors disclosed the same magnitude of nociceptive LTP (23% increase for >60 min, P < 0.001), whereas affective pain descriptors were not significantly enhanced. Factor analysis of the sensory pain descriptors showed that facilitation was restricted to two factors characterized by hot and burning (+41%) and piercing and stinging (+21%, both P < 0.01), whereas a factor represented by throbbing and beating was not significantly increased (+9%, P = …
Effects of Spatial Frequency Similarity and Dissimilarity on Contour Integration.
2015
We examined the effects of spatial frequency similarity and dissimilarity on human contour integration under various conditions of uncertainty. Participants performed a temporal 2AFC contour detection task. Spatial frequency jitter up to 3.0 octaves was applied either to background elements, or to contour and background elements, or to none of both. Results converge on four major findings. (1) Contours defined by spatial frequency similarity alone are only scarcely visible, suggesting the absence of specialized cortical routines for shape detection based on spatial frequency similarity. (2) When orientation collinearity and spatial frequency similarity are combined along a contour, performa…
Differentiating explanations of attitude-consistent behavior: The role of perspectives and mode of perspective taking
2005
We examined whether participants could differentiate between explanations of attitude-consistent behavior related to EU membership given from two perspectives (EU supporter and EU opponent) by means of three perspective taking modes (the explainer's own perspective, imagined in-group members' perspective, and imagined out-group members' perspective). Participants were presented with explanations provided from different perspectives and perspective taking modes, and they were asked to judge the extent to which they agreed with each explanation, to guess the attitude of the provider of each explanation, and to rate the quality of each explanation in various respects. Participants could not di…
Processing of Musical Syntax Tonic versus Subdominant: An Event-related Potential Study
2006
Abstract The present study investigates the effect of a change in syntactic-like musical function on event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Eight-chord piano sequences were presented to musically expert and novice listeners. Instructed to watch a movie and to ignore the musical sequences, the participants had to react when a chord was played with a different instrument than the piano. Participants were not informed that the relevant manipulation was the musical function of the last chord (target) of the sequences. The target chord acted either as a syntactically stable tonic chord (i.e., a C major chord in the key of C major) or as a less syntactically stable subdominant chord (i.e., a C ma…
Positive erotic picture stimuli for emotion research in heterosexual females
2011
In most experimental studies, emotional pictures are widely used as stimulus material. However, there is still a lack of standardization of picture stimuli displaying erotic relationships, despite the association between a number of psychological problems and severe impairments and problems in intimate relationships. The aim of the study was to test a set of erotic stimuli, with the potential to be used in experimental studies, with heterosexual female subjects. Twenty International Affective Picture System (IAPS) pictures and an additional 100 pictures showing romantic but not explicitly sexual scenes and/or attractive single males were selected. All pictures were rated with respect to val…
Mirror Visual Feedback Training Improves Intermanual Transfer in a Sport-Specific Task: A Comparison between Different Skill Levels
2016
Mirror training therapy is a promising tool to initiate neural plasticity and facilitate the recovery process of motor skills after diseases such as stroke or hemiparesis by improving the intermanual transfer of fine motor skills in healthy people as well as in patients. This study evaluated whether these augmented performance improvements by mirror visual feedback (MVF) could be used for learning a sport-specific skill and if the effects are modulated by skill level. A sample of 39 young, healthy, and experienced basketball and handball players and 41 novices performed a stationary basketball dribble task at a mirror box in a standing position and received either MVF or direct feedback. Af…
Symmetry, averageness, and feature size in the facial attractiveness of women
2004
International audience; Female facial attractiveness was investigated by comparing the ratings made by male judges with the metric characteristics of female faces. Three kinds of facial characteristics were considered: facial symmetry, averageness, and size of individual features. The results suggested that female face attractiveness is greater when the face is symmetrical, is close to the average, and has certain features (e.g., large eyes, prominent cheekbones, thick lips, thin eyebrows, and a small nose and chin). Nevertheless, the detrimental effect of asymmetry appears to result solely from the fact that an asymmetrical face is a face that deviates from the norm. In addition, a factor …
Dysfunctional cortical inhibition in adult ADHD: neural correlates in auditory event-related potentials.
2013
In recent times, the relevance of an accurate diagnosis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in adults has been the focus of several studies. No longer considered a pathology exclusive to children and adolescents, and taking into account its social implications, developing enhanced support tools for the current diagnostic procedure becomes a priority. Here we present a method for the objective assessment of ADHD in adults using chirp-evoked, paired auditory late responses (ALRs) combined with a two-dimensional ALR denoising scheme to extract correlates of intracortical inhibition. Our method allows for an effective single-sweep denoising, thus requiring less trials to obtain r…