Face recognition (Psychology) Research Papers (original) (raw)

We investigated the occurrence and underlying processes of odor-color associations in French and American 6- to 10-year-old children (n = 386) and adults (n = 137). Nine odorants were chosen according to their familiarity to either cultural group. Participants matched each odor with a color, gave hedonic and familiarity judgments, and identified each odor. By 6 years of age, children displayed culture-specific odor-color associations, but age differences were noted in the type of associations. Children and adults in both cultural groups shared common associations and formed associations that were unique to their environment, underscoring the importance of exposure learning in odor-color associations.

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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Face recognition (Psychology), Medicine

Decline in episodic memory is one of the most prominent cognitive deficits seen in late adulthood. It is therefore surprising that few studies have examined how the related capacity for episodic foresight might also be affected in this age group. Preliminary evidence suggests that older adults show deficits in generating phenomenological characteristics of future events, but the critical question of whether such deficits extend to generating and executing appropriate future intentions remains to be addressed. Here, we present 2 studies. In Study 1, we report the results of our pilot testing, which was used to develop and validate stimuli for the first measure of this construct that is appropriate for use in adult populations. In Study 2, we administer this measure to 40 older and 40 younger adults. The results indicate that, relative to their younger counterparts, older adults are less likely to spontaneously acquire items that would later allow a problem to be solved, and are also ...

- by Peter Rendell
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Aging, Face recognition (Psychology)

Despite the dominant role of the hormone oxytocin (OT) in social behavior, little is known about the role of OT in the perception of social relationships. Furthermore, it is unclear whether there are sex differences in the way that OT affects social perception. Here, we employed a double-blind, placebo-controlled crossover design to investigate the effect of OT on accurate social perception. Following treatment, 62 participants completed the Interpersonal Perception Task, a method of assessing the accuracy of social judgments that requires identification of the relationship between people interacting in real life video clips divided into three categories: kinship, intimacy and competition. The findings suggest that OT had a general effect on improving accurate perception of social interactions. Furthermore, we show that OT also involves sex-specific characteristics. An interaction between treatment, task category and sex indicated that OT had a selective effect on improving kinship ...

The current study was designed to investigate whether reported [J. Learn. Disabil. 31 (1998) 286; J. Psycholinguist. Res. 22 (1993) 445] difficulties in language-impaired children's ability to identify vocal and facial cues to emotion could be explained at least partially by nonparalinguistic factors. Children with specific language impairment (SLI) and control participants received an affect discrimination task, which consisted of the following cue situations: (1) facial expression and unfiltered speech; (2) lowpass-filtered speech only; (3) facial expression only; and (4) facial expression and filtered speech. The results of the study indicated that impaired and nonimpaired group performance differed only for the items including facial expression and nonfiltered speech. Developmental and investigative implications of this finding are addressed. Learning outcomes: As a result of this activity, the participant will be able to summarize the findings from existing research on affect comprehension in children with language impairments (LI). As a result of this activity, the participant will be able to discuss ways in which language impairment and difficulties in understanding emotion cues are associated and propose how these associations might influence social interactions. #

- by Elena Plante and +1
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Communication Disorders, Cognition

The feeling of familiarity can be triggered by stimuli from all sensory modalities, suggesting a multimodal nature of its neural bases. In the present experiment, we investigated this hypothesis by studying the neural bases of familiarity processing of odors and music. In particular, we focused on familiarity referring to the participants' life experience. Items were classified as familiar or unfamiliar based on participants' individual responses, and activation patterns evoked by familiar items were compared with those evoked by unfamiliar items. For the feeling of familiarity, a bimodal activation pattern was observed in the left hemisphere, specifically the superior and inferior frontal gyri, the precuneus, the angular gyrus, the parahippocampal gyrus, and the hippocampus. Together with previously reported data on verbal items, visual items, and auditory items other than music, this outcome suggests a multimodal neural system of the feeling of familiarity. The feeling of unfamiliarity was related to a smaller bimodal activation pattern mainly located in the right insula and likely related to the detection of novelty.

- by Royet Jean-Pierre
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- Cognitive Science, Music, Face recognition (Psychology), Recognition memory

We create a novel experimental approach to investigate episodic memory in humans. Incidental encoding and recall phases have been controlled. Complex olfactory episodes are close to real-life situations. Participants recall episodic... more

- by Jean-Pierre Royet and +1
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- Cognitive Science, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Face recognition (Psychology), Episodic Memory

Recent empirical results suggest that there is a decrement in dividing attention between two objects in a scene compared with focusing attention on a single object. However, objects can be made of individual parts. Is there a decrement for dividing attention across different parts of a single object? We addressed this question in two experiments. In Experiment 1, we demonstrated that attention can exhibit part-based selection-that is, the subjects were more accurate in reporting two attributes from the same part of an object than they were in reporting attributes from different parts of an object. In Experiment 2, we demonstrated that part-based attentional decrements occurred simultaneously with object-based attentional decrements. The results from Experiment 2 demonstrated that part-based attention is evident at the same time as objects are processed as coherent wholes. Our results imply that there is an attentional mechanism that can select either objects or their parts.

- by Marlene Behrmann
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Selective Attention, Visual perception

Objective: To examine the neural basis and dynamics of facial affect processing in schizophrenic patients as compared to healthy controls. Method: Fourteen schizophrenic patients and fourteen matched controls performed a facial affect identification task during fMRI acquisition. The emotional task included an intuitive emotional condition (matching emotional faces) and a more cognitively demanding condition (labeling emotional faces). Individual analysis for each emotional condition, and second-level t-tests examining both within-, and between-group differences, were carried out using a random effects approach. Psychophysiological interactions (PPI) were tested for variations in functional connectivity between amygdala and other brain regions as a function of changes in experimental conditions (labeling versus matching). Results: During the labeling condition, both groups engaged similar networks. During the matching condition, schizophrenics failed to activate regions of the limbic system implicated in the automatic processing of emotions. PPI revealed an inverse functional connectivity between prefrontal regions and the left amygdala in healthy volunteers but there was no such change in patients. Furthermore, during the matching condition, and compared to controls, patients showed decreased activation of regions involved in holistic face processing (fusiform gyrus) and increased activation of regions associated with feature analysis (inferior parietal cortex, left middle temporal lobe, right precuneus). Conclusions: Our findings suggest that schizophrenic patients invariably adopt a cognitive approach when identifying facial affect. The distributed neocortical network observed during the intuitive condition indicates that patients may resort to feature-based, rather than configuration-based, processing and may constitute a compensatory strategy for limbic dysfunction.

Primary Objective: To assess three domains of emotion recognition in people with traumatic brain injury (TBI). Research design: A between group comparison. Procedures: Twenty-four participants with severe TBI and 15 matched participants without brain damage were asked to label and match facial expressions with and without context. The participants with TBI were also interviewed regarding changes in subjective experience of emotion. Main outcomes and results: Participants with TBI were found to be significantly impaired on expression labelling and matching, but experienced some improvement when provided with context. Negative emotions were particularly affected. Affective semantic knowledge and face perception appeared to be relatively intact in this group. The majority of participants with TBI reported some change in the post-injury experience of everyday emotion, although the pattern of changes differed greatly between individuals. Reduced subjective experience, especially of sadness and fear, was associated with poor emotion matching but not emotion labelling.

- by Vanessa Croker
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- Perception, Research Design, Traumatic Brain Injury, Visual perception

Memory illusions occur quite frequently in the laboratory as well as in real life, and their developmental trajectory depends on the nature of the illusion. When memory illusions stem from processing semantically related information (e.g., Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm: Brainerd, Holliday, & Reyna, 2004; connected-meaning paradigms: Howe, 2006), typically developing children often demonstrate age-related increases in the frequency of memory errors (Brainerd,

- by Gianluca Lo Presti
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- Psychology, Semantics, Face recognition (Psychology), Adolescent

To provide guidelines for the development of two types of closed-set speech-perception tests that can be applied and interpreted in the same way across languages. The guidelines cover the digit triplet and the matrix sentence tests that are most commonly used to test speech recognition in noise. They were developed by a working group on Multilingual Speech Tests of the International Collegium of Rehabilitative Audiology (ICRA). The recommendations are based on reviews of existing evaluations of the digit triplet and matrix tests as well as on the research experience of members of the ICRA Working Group. They represent the results of a consensus process. The resulting recommendations deal with: Test design and word selection; Talker characteristics; Audio recording and stimulus preparation; Masking noise; Test administration; and Test validation. By following these guidelines for the development of any new test of this kind, clinicians and researchers working in any language will be ...

- by Wouter Dreschler
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- Multilingualism, Audiology, Psychoacoustics, Speech perception

The role of configural information in gender categorisation was studied by aligning the top half of one face with the bottom half of another. The two faces had the same or different genders. Experiment l shows that participants were slower and made more errors in categorising the gender in either half of these composite faces when the two faces had a different gender, relative to control conditions where the two faces were nonaligned or had the same gender. This result parallels the composite effect for face recognition (Young et al, 1987 Perception16 747–759) and facial-expression recognition (Calder et al, 2000 Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance26 527–551). Similarly to responses to face identity and expression, the composite effect on gender discrimination was disrupted by inverting the faces (experiment 2). Both experiments also show that the composite paradigm is sensitive to general contextual interference in gender categorisation.

- by Jean-Yves Baudouin
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Perception, Face

It can be difficult to judge the effectiveness of encoding techniques in a within-subject design. Consider the production effect-the finding that words read aloud are better remembered than words read silently. In the absence of a baseline, a within-subject production effect in a mixed study list could reflect a benefit of reading aloud, a cost of reading silently, or both. To help interpret within-subject data, memory researchers have compared within-subject and between-subjects designs, with the between-subjects (i.e., pure list) conditions serving as baselines against which the within-subject (i.e., mixed-list) conditions are compared. In the present article, the authors highlight a shortcoming of using this comparison to assess costs and benefits in recognition. Unlike between-subjects experiments where separate false alarm rates are obtained for each condition, the typical within-subject experiment yields a collapsed false alarm rate, which, the authors argue, can potentially b...

- by Colin Macleod
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Individuality, Psycholinguistics

■ Special processes recruited during the recognition of personally familiar people have been assumed to reflect the rich episodic and semantic information that selectively represents each person. However, the processes may also include person nonselective ones, which may require interpretation in terms beyond the memory mechanism. To examine this possibility, we assessed decrease in differential activation during the second presentation of an identical face (repetition suppression) as an index of person selectivity. During fMRI, pictures of personally familiar, famous, and unfamiliar faces were presented to healthy subjects who performed a familiarity judgment. Each face was presented once in the first half of the experiment and again in the second half. The right inferior temporal and left inferior frontal gyri were activated during the recognition of both types of familiar faces initially, and this activation was suppressed with repetition. Among preferentially activated regions for personally familiar over famous faces, robust suppression in differential activation was exhibited in the bilateral medial and anterior temporal structures, left amygdala, and right posterior STS, all of which are known to process episodic and semantic information. On the other hand, suppression was minimal in the posterior cingulate, medial prefrontal, right inferior frontal, and intraparietal regions, some of which were implicated in social cognition and cognitive control. Thus, the recognition of personally familiar people is characterized not only by person-selective representation but also by nonselective processes requiring a research framework beyond the memory mechanism, such as a social adaptive response. ■

- by Akihiro Sasaki
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Cognitive Control, Social Cognition

When navigating, women typically focus on landmarks within the environment, whereas men tend to focus on the Euclidean properties of the environment. However, it is unclear whether these observed differences in navigational skill result from disparate strategies or disparate ability. To remove this confound, the present study required participants to follow either landmark-or Euclidean-based instructions during a navigation task (either in the real-world or on paper). Men performed best when using Euclidean information, whereas women performed best when using landmark information, suggesting a dimorphic capacity to use these 2 types of spatial information. Further, a significant correlation was observed between the mental rotation task and the ability to use Euclidean information, but not the ability to use landmark information.

- by Jennifer Leason
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- Psychology, Locomotion, Face recognition (Psychology), Behavioral Neuroscience

The aim of the study was to verify whether adult patients with occipital lobe epilepsy (OLE) are at risk for cognitive impairment compared with controls. Twenty patients with OLE and 20 controls, matched as closely as possible to the epilepsy group in terms of gender, age, education, and intelligence, were administered a battery of tests based on visuoperceptive domains. None of the participants was affected by progressive pathologies, received any medication other than antiepileptic drugs, nor had a psychiatric background. We noted a statistically significant difference between patients with OLE and controls in the following tasks: Perceptive Differences Test, and Object Denomination Test, and Famous Faces Test (P < 0.05). No difference was noted between symptomatic and nonsymptomatic patients with respect to neuropsychological results (P > 0.05). The linear regression analysis performed did not show any statistically significant contribution by clinical variables. Our data confirm that patients with OLE manifest subtle difficulties in processing and mental manipulation of visual spatial data.

- by Ada Piazzini and +1
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- Neuropsychology, Intelligence, Visual perception, Face recognition (Psychology)

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded in cross-modal word fragment priming (CMWP) to address the function of pitch for the identification of spoken words. In CMWP fragments of spoken words (e.g., re taken from Regal [Engl. shelves]) are immediately followed by visual targets. Together with reduced reaction times (RTs), an ERP deflection named P350 has been found to be reduced for targets, which match the primes (e.g., in the prime -target pair re -REGAL) as compared to unrelated targets (e.g., re -WIRBEL [Engl. burble]). The P350 has been related to facilitated lexical identification [Friedrich, Kotz, Friederici and Gunter (in press), ERPs reflect lexical identification in word fragment priming, JOCN]. In the present study, we presented syllable primes with different pitch contours. One version of each prime bore a stressed pitch contour (e.g., re_1), the other an unstressed pitch contour (e.g., re_2). Primes were combined with targets being either stressed on the first syllable (e.g., REgel [Engl. rule]) or on the second syllable (e.g., reGAL [Engl. shelves]). We found a reduced amplitude of the P350 and slightly faster reactions for targets with a stress pattern that matched the pitch of the primes (e.g., re_1 -REgel) as compared to targets with a stress pattern that did not match the pitch of the primes (e.g., re_1 -reGAL). The present study replicates the P350 effect with different material, and indicates that pitch is used for lexical identification in spoken word recognition. D 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Category-specific disorders are perhaps the archetypal example of domain-specificity -being typically defined by the presence of dissociations between living and nonliving naming ability in people following neurological damage. The methods adopted to quantify naming across categories are therefore pivotal since they provide the criterion for defining whether patients have a category effect and necessarily influence the subsequent direction and the interpretation of testing. This paper highlights a series of methodological concerns relating to how we measure and define category (or any) dissociations. These include the common failure to include control data or the use of control data that is inappropriate e.g. at ceiling, unmatched. A review of past cases shows that the overwhelming majority suffers from these problems and therefore challenges conclusions about the purported empirical demonstrations of dissociations and double dissociations in the category specific literature. This is not a refutation of category deficits, but skepticism about the current existence of any convincing empirical demonstrations of category specific double dissociations. As a potential solution, certain minimal criteria are proposed that might aid with the attempt to document category effects that are more methodologically convincing.

- by Keith Laws
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- Neuroscience, Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Science
- by Naoyuki Osaka
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- Psychology, Cognition, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Attention

The recognition of facial emotions is impaired following subthalamic nucleus (STN) deep brain stimulation (DBS) in Parkinson's disease (PD). These changes have been linked to a disturbance in the STN's limbic territory, which is thought to be involved in emotional processing. This was confirmed by a recent PET study where these emotional modifications were correlated with changes in glucose metabolism in different brain regions, including the amygdala and the orbitofrontal regions that are well known for their involvement in emotional processing. Nevertheless, the question as to whether these emotional changes induced by STN DBS in PD are modality-specific has yet to be answered. The objective of this study was therefore to examine the effects of STN DBS in PD on the recognition of emotional prosody.

- by Dominique Drapier and +1
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Emotion, Deep Brain Stimulation
- by Julia Uddén
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Selective Attention, Semantics
- by Nick Glozier
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Mental Health, Depression

Several lines of evidence demonstrate that the motor system is involved in motor simulation of actions, but some uncertainty exists about the consequences of lesions of descending motor pathways on mental imagery tasks. Moreover, recent findings suggest that the motor system could also have a role in recognition of body parts. To address these issues in the present study we assessed patients with a complete damage of descending motor pathways (locked-in syndrome, LIS) on the hand laterality task, requiring subjects to decide whether a hand stimulus in a given spatial orientation represents a left or a right hand. LIS patients were less accurate than healthy controls in judging hand laterality; more importantly, LIS patients' performance was modulated by spatial orientation of hand stimuli whereas it was not affected by biomechanical constraints. These findings demonstrate a dissociation between spared hand recognition and impaired access to action simulation processes in LIS patients.

- by Francesca Pistoia and +2
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Imagination, Face recognition (Psychology)

Evidence for paternal kin recognition and paternally biased behaviors is mixed among primates. We investigate whether infant handling behaviors exhibit paternal kin biases in wild white-faced capuchins monkeys (Cebus capucinus) by comparing interactions between infants and genetic sires, potential sires, siblings (full sibling, maternal, and paternal half-siblings) and unrelated handlers. We used a linear mixed model approach to analyze data collected on 21 focal infants from six groups in Sector Santa Rosa, Costa Rica. Our analyses suggest that the best predictor of adult and subadult male interactions with an infant is the male's dominance status, not his paternity status. We found that maternal siblings but not paternal siblings handled infants more than did unrelated individuals. We conclude that maternal but not paternal kinship influence patterns of infant handling in white-faced capuchins, regardless of whether or not they can recognize paternal kin. Am. J. Primatol. 78:6...

- by Linda Fedigan
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- Zoology, Animal Behavior, Biology, Philippines

False working memories readily emerge using a visual item-recognition variant of the converging associates task. Two experiments, manipulating study and test modality, extended prior working memory results by demonstrating a reliable false recognition effect (more false alarms to associatively related lures than to unrelated lures) within seconds of encoding in either the visual or auditory modality. However, false memories were nearly twice as frequent when study lists were seen than when they were heard, regardless of test modality, although study-test modality mismatch was generally disadvantageous (consistent with encoding specificity). A final experiment that varied study-test modality using a hybrid short- and long-term memory test (Flegal, Atkins & Reuter-Lorenz, 2010) replicated the auditory advantage in the short term but revealed a reversal in the long term: The false memory effect was greater in the auditory study-test condition than in the visual study-test condition. Th...

- by Justyna Olszewska
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Psychophysics, Semantics

Rationale. Associative learning underpins behaviours that are fundamental to the everyday functioning of the individual. Evidence pointing to learning deficits in recreational drug users merits further examination. Objectives. A word pair... more

- by Cathy Montgomery
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- Psychopharmacology, Face recognition (Psychology), Memory, Street Drugs

Attribution of symptoms as medication side effects is informed by pre-existing beliefs about medicines and perceptions of personal sensitivity to their effects (pharmaceutical schemas). We tested whether (1) pharmaceutical schemas were associated with memory (recall/recognition) for side effect information (2) memory explained the attribution of a common unrelated symptom as a side effect. In this analogue study participants saw the patient leaflet of a fictitious asthma drug listing eight side effects. We measured recall and recognition memory for side effects and used a vignette to test whether participants attributed an unlisted common symptom (headache) as a side effect. Participants who perceived pharmaceuticals as more harmful in general recalled fewer side effects correctly (rCorrect Recall = -.273), were less able to differentiate between listed and unlisted side effects (rRecognition Sensitivity = -.256) and were more likely to attribute the unlisted headache symptom as a s...

- by Monika Heller
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- Psychology, Asthma, Face recognition (Psychology), Clinical Health Psychology
- by Blossom Stephan
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Perception, Face Recognition

This article investigated the role of the recognition criterion in the verbal overshadowing effect (VOE). In 3 experiments, people witnessed an event, verbally described a perpetrator, and then attempted identification. The authors found in Experiment 1, which included a "not present" response option and both perpetrator-present (PP) and perpetrator-absent (PA) lineups, an increased reluctance to identify a person from both lineup types after verbalization. Experiment 2 incorporated a forced-choice procedure, and the authors found no effect of verbalization on identification performance. Experiment 3 replicated the essential aspects of these results. Consequently, the VOE may reflect a change in recognition criterion rather than a changed processing style or alteration of the underlying memory trace. This conclusion was confirmed by computational modeling of the data.

- by Stephan Lewandowsky
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Face, Face recognition (Psychology)

The fact that pictures are better remembered than words has been reported in the literature for over 30 years. While this picture superiority effect has been consistently found in healthy young and older adults, no study has directly evaluated the presence of the effect in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) or mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Clinical observations have indicated that pictures enhance memory in these patients, suggesting that the picture superiority effect may be intact. However, several studies have reported visual processing impairments in AD and MCI patients which might diminish the picture superiority effect. Using a recognition memory paradigm, we tested memory for pictures versus words in these patients. The results showed that the picture superiority effect is intact, and that these patients showed a similar benefit to healthy controls from studying pictures compared to words. The findings are discussed in terms of visual processing and possible clinical importance.

2 words are presented successively within 500 ms, subjects often miss the 2nd word. This attentional blink reflects a limited capacity to attend to incoming information. Memory effects were studied for words that fell within an attentional blink. Unrelated words were presented in a modified rapid serial visual presentation task at varying stimulus-onset asynchronies, and attention was systematically manipulated. Subsequently, recognition, repetition priming, and semantic priming were measured separately in 3 experiments. Unidentified words showed no recognition and no repetition priming. However, blinked (i.e., unidentified) words did produce semantic priming in related words. When, for instance, ring was blinked, it was easier to subsequently identify wedding than apple. In contrast, when the blinked word itself was presented again, it was not easier to identify than an unrelated word. Possible interpretations of this paradoxical finding are discussed.

- by Gezinus Wolters
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Perception, Semantics

Gradient descent training of neural networks can be done in either a batch or on-line manner. A widely held myth in the neural network community is that batch training is as fast or faster and/or more 'correct' than on-line training because it supposedly uses a better approximation of the true gradient for its weight updates. This paper explains why batch training is almost always slower than on-line training-often orders of magnitude slower-especially on large training sets. The main reason is due to the ability of on-line training to follow curves in the error surface throughout each epoch, which allows it to safely use a larger learning rate and thus converge with less iterations through the training data. Empirical results on a large (20,000-instance) speech recognition task and on 26 other learning tasks demonstrate that convergence can be reached significantly faster using on-line training than batch training, with no apparent difference in accuracy. q

- by Tony Martinez
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- Algorithms, Speech perception, Neural Networks, Speech Recognition
- by Romina Palermo
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Psychometrics, Face Recognition
- by Claus Bundesen
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Psychophysics, Visual perception

Please cite this article in press as: Cibulski, L., et al., Familiarity with the experimenter influences the performance of Common ravens (Corvus corax) and Carrion crows (Corvus corone corone) in cognitive tasks. Behav. Process. (2013),... more

- by Kurt Kotrschal
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Experimental Psychology, Animal Behavior

Investigate the impact of sleep deprivation on the ability to recognize the intensity of human facial emotions. Randomized total sleep-deprivation or sleep-rested conditions, involving between-group and within-group repeated measures analysis. Experimental laboratory study. Thirty-seven healthy participants, (21 females) aged 18-25 y, were randomly assigned to the sleep control (SC: n = 17) or total sleep deprivation group (TSD: n = 20). Participants performed an emotional face recognition task, in which they evaluated 3 different affective face categories: Sad, Happy, and Angry, each ranging in a gradient from neutral to increasingly emotional. In the TSD group, the task was performed once under conditions of sleep deprivation, and twice under sleep-rested conditions following different durations of sleep recovery. In the SC group, the task was performed twice under sleep-rested conditions, controlling for repeatability. In the TSD group, when sleep-deprived, there was a marked and...

- by E. Van Der Helm
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- Face recognition (Psychology), Facial expression, Adolescent, Emotions

Previous research has suggested that people are unable to correctly choose which unfamiliar voice and static image of a face belong to the same person. Here, we present evidence that people can perform this task with greater than chance accuracy. In Experiment 1, participants saw photographs of two, same-gender models, while simultaneously listening to a voice recording of one of the models pictured in the photographs and chose which of the two faces they thought belonged to the same model as the recorded voice. We included three conditions: (a) the visual stimuli were frontal headshots (including the neck and shoulders) and the auditory stimuli were recordings of spoken sentences; (b) the visual stimuli only contained cropped faces and the auditory stimuli were full sentences; (c) we used the same pictures as Condition 1 but the auditory stimuli were recordings of a single word. In Experiment 2, participants performed the same task as in Condition 1 of Experiment 1 but with the stimuli presented in sequence. Participants also rated the model's faces and voices along multiple "physical" dimensions (e.g., weight,) or "personality" dimensions (e.g., extroversion); the degree of agreement between the ratings for each model's face and voice was compared to performance for that model in the matching task. In all three conditions, we found that participants chose, at better than chance levels, which faces and voices belonged to the same person. Performance in the matching task was not correlated with the degree of agreement on any of the rated dimensions.

- by Lauren Mavica and +1
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Speech perception, Face

While extensive work has examined the role of covert recognition in acquired prosopagnosia, little attention has been directed to this process in the congenital form of the disorder. Indeed, evidence of covert recognition has only been demonstrated in one congenital case in which autonomic measures provided evidence of recognition [Jones RD and Tranel D. Severe developmental prosopagnosia in a child with superior intellect.

- by jeremy tree and +2
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- Cognitive Science, Face recognition (Psychology), Prosopagnosia, Cortex

Sleep has been shown to play a facilitating role in memory consolidation, whereas sleep deprivation leads to performance impairment both in humans and rodents. The effects of 4-h sleep deprivation on recognition memory were investigated in the Djungarian hamster (Phodopus sungorus). Because sleep during the first hours after daily torpor has many similarities to recovery from sleep deprivation, the effects of spontaneous torpor on object recognition were also assessed.

It is commonly found that memory for context declines disproportionately with aging, arguably due to a general age-related deficit in associative memory processes. One possible mechanism for such deficits is an age-related reduction in available processing resources. In two experiments we compared the effects of aging to the effects of division of attention in younger adults on memory for items and context. Using a technique proposed by Craik (1989), linear functions relating memory performance for items and their contexts were derived for a Young Full Attention group, a Young Divided Attention group, and an Older Adult group. Results suggested that the Old group showed an additional deficit in associative memory that was not mimicked by divided attention. It is speculated that both divided attention and aging are associated with a loss of available processing resources that may reflect inefficient frontal lobe functioning, whereas the additional age-related decrement in associative...

- by Fergus Craik
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Aging, Attention

Background: Children with Down syndrome experience difficulty with both spoken and written language acquisition, however controlled intervention studies to improve these difficulties are rare and have typically focused on improving one language domain. Aims: To investigate the effectiveness of an integrated intervention approach on the speech, letter knowledge, and phonological awareness development of ten pre-school children with Down syndrome aged between 4;4 and 5;5. Methods & Procedures: A multiple single-subject design was used to evaluate treatment effectiveness. Baseline and intervention measures for speech and pre-and post-intervention measures for letter knowledge and phonological awareness were compared. The intervention comprised three components: a parent-implemented home programme; centre-based speech -language therapy sessions, and 'Learning through Computer' sessions with a total intervention time of 20 hours over 18 weeks. Letter knowledge and phonological awareness activities were linked to each child's speech targets.

& Previous studies have shown a shared neural circuitry in the somatosensory cortices for the experience of one's own body being touched and the sight of intentional touch. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the present study aimed to elucidate whether the activation of a visuotactile mirroring mechanism during touch observation applies to the sight of any touch, that is, whether it is independent of the intentionality of observed touching agent. During fMRI scanning, healthy participants viewed video clips depicting a touch that was intentional or accidental, and occurring between animate or inanimate objects. Analyses showed equal overlapping activation for all the touch observation conditions and the experience of one's own body being touched in the bilateral secondary somatosensory cortex (SII), left inferior parietal lobule (IPL)/supramarginal gyrus, bilateral temporal-occipital junction, and left precentral gyrus. A significant difference between the sight of an intentional touch, compared to an accidental touch, was found in the left primary somatosensory cortex (SI/ Brodmann's area [BA] 2). Interestingly, activation in SI/BA 2 significantly correlated with the degree of intentionality of the observed touch stimuli as rated by participants. Our findings show that activation of a visuotactile mirroring mechanism for touch observation might underpin an abstract notion of touch, whereas activation in SI might reflect a human tendency to ''resonate'' more with a present or assumed intentional touching agent. & D

- by Sjoerd Ebisch
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Visual perception, Magnetic Resonance Imaging

There is considerable dispute about the nature of infant memory. Using SEM models, we examined whether popular characterizations of the structure of adult memory, including the two-process theory of recognition, are applicable in the infant and toddler years. The participants were a cohort of preterms and full-terms assessed longitudinally -at 1, 2, and 3 years -on a battery containing tasks of immediate and delayed recognition, recall, and memory span (a measure of short-term capacity). Results were in accord with adult models which assume that short-and long-term memory are distinct, and that two processesfamiliarity and recollection -underlie recognition memory, while one alone -recollection -supports recall. The finding that prematurity, which entails risk of hippocampal compromise, affected recollection, but not familiarity, accords well with adult findings that hippocampal damage selectively affects recollection. These findings reveal striking similarity between the structure and theoretical underpinnings of infant and adult memory.

- by Jeffery Jankowski and +1
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Linguistics, Face recognition (Psychology)

Limb apraxia is a neurological disorder characterized by an inability to pantomime and/or imitate gestures. It is more commonly observed after left hemisphere damage (LHD), but has also been reported after right hemisphere damage (RHD). The Conceptual-Production Systems model suggests that three systems are involved in the control of purposeful movements: the conceptual, the production and the sensory/perceptual system. Depending on which system is damaged different patterns of apraxia are expressed. To determine the apraxia pattern, pantomime, delayed, and concurrent imitation tasks need to be administered, as well as conceptual tasks assessing one's knowledge of actions. Based on the model, eight patterns of apraxia should emerge. The purpose of this study is to determine whether these patterns are in fact observed in stroke patients and examine their frequency. If the performance of most stroke patients falls into one of the patterns, then we would have strong support for the conceptual-production model. Stroke (34 LHD and 39 RHD) patients and 27 age-and education-matched healthy controls participated in the study. Participants were assessed in four task modalities: pantomime, delayed imitation, concurrent imitation and conceptual knowledge (two tasks were used: tool naming by action and action identification). Patients were categorized as impaired on a task if they scored 2 SD below the mean performance of the controls for gesture production tasks, or below a cut-off score on the conceptual tasks. They were then classified into patterns depending on their performance on the four task modalities. Most patients (86%) fell into one of seven patterns originally predicted from the Conceptual-Production Systems model. The two most common patterns were deficits in pantomime and imitation with preserved gesture recognition and conduction apraxia (selective deficit in imitation). Four new patterns emerged, but mostly single cases of these were found. Overall, the study provides strong support for the Conceptual-Production Systems model.

- by vessela stamenova
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Performance, Nonverbal Communication

The neural substrates that subserve decoding of different emotional expressions are subject to different rates of degeneration and atrophy in Alzheimer's disease (AD), and there is therefore reason to anticipate that a differentiated profile of affect recognition impairment may emerge. However, it remains unclear whether AD differentially affects the recognition of specific emotions. Further, there is only limited research focused on whether affect recognition deficits in AD generalize to more ecologically valid stimuli. In the present study, relatively mild AD participants (n = 24), older controls (n = 30) and younger controls (n = 30) were administered measures of affect recognition. Significant AD deficits were observed relative to both the younger and older control groups on a measure that involved labeling of static images of facial affect. AD deficits on this measure were observed in relation to all emotions assessed (anger, sadness, happiness, surprise and fear), with the exception of disgust, which was preserved even relative to the younger adult group. The relative preservation of disgust could not be attributed to biases in the choice of labels made, and it is suggested instead that this finding might reflect the relative sparing of the basal ganglia in AD. No significant AD effect was observed for the more ecologically valid measure that involved dynamic displays of facial expressions, in conjunction with paralinguistic and body movement cues, although a trend for greater AD difficulty was observed.

- by Louise Phillips
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Face recognition (Psychology), Social Perception
- by Dawn Neumann
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- Face recognition (Psychology), Facial expression, Empathy, Affect

... assessed. Successful performance, like mirror self-recog-nition, involves mark-directed behaviourreaching up to touch or remove the sticker. ... stickers. Neon coloured sticky notes (3.8 9 5.1 cm) were used to mark each child's... more

- by Cheryl Dissanayake
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- Education, Cognition, Child Development, Theory of Mind

The effect of stimulant medication on recognition memory was examined in 18 children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Recognition memory was assessed using a delayed matching-to-sample task at 6 delays ranging from 1 to 32 s. Each child was tested on 2 separate occasions, once 60 to 90 min after taking stimulant medication and the other at least 18 hr after taking medication. Children performed significantly better on medication than off. Stimulant administration significantly increased accuracy and the number of nickel reinforcers earned. Decreases in observing response latency and correct choice response latency occurred after taking stimulant medication. The results indicate that stimulant medication improved recognition memory for children with ADHD.

- by Eldon Schulz and +1
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- Psychology, Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, Face recognition (Psychology), Recognition memory