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With this study, we aimed to replicate and extend the findings obtained by Tressoldi, Martinelli, Zaccaria, and Massaccesi (2009) who showed that in participants with high scores on the Tellegen Absorption Scale (score > 20), anti...
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With this study, we aimed to replicate and extend the findings obtained by Tressoldi, Martinelli, Zaccaria, and Massaccesi (2009) who showed that in participants with high scores on the Tellegen Absorption Scale (score > 20), anticipatory heart rate responses in an implicit pre-alerting paradigm could be used to improve their intuitive decisions on random events. In this study, two pools of pleasant and alerting sounds were used to test the generality of previous findings. By using fifty participants, it was also possible to study whether gender could be a further moderator of the observed effect. Results confirm the findings of Tressoldi, Martinelli, Zaccaria, and Massaccesi (2009), clarifying that the effect was present only in females. Females with a high level of absorption predict more hits than females with a low level. Further statistical analysis suggests that absorption acts as an implicit cognitive "filter" only for pleasant sounds.
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In this study, we investigated time perception in patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI). Fifteen TB1 patients and 15 matched healthy controls participated in the study. Participants were tested with durations above and below ...
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In this study, we investigated time perception in patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI). Fifteen TB1 patients and 15 matched healthy controls participated in the study. Participants were tested with durations above and below 1 s on three different temporal tasks that involved time reproduction, production, and discrimination tasks. Data variables analyzed included amount of errors, relative errors, and coefficient of variation. Both groups completed a neuropsychological battery that included measures of attention, working memory, and executive functions. Results revealed significant differences between groups on the time reproduction and discrimination tasks, whereas groups showed similar performance on the time production task. Correlation analyses showed involvement of attention, working memory and executive functions on the time reproduction and time discrimination tasks, but there was no involvement on the time production task. These findings suggest that TBI does not impact specific temporal function. Rather, impairments in attention, working memory and executive function abilities may explain lower temporal performance in people with TBI.
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The inferential system anticipates the external environment by building up internal representations ofits regularities. To that purpose, two sources of information are especially important and attract atten-tional resources: expec...
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The inferential system anticipates the external environment by building up internal representations ofits regularities. To that purpose, two sources of information are especially important and attract atten-tional resources: expected and unexpected events, which are useful for checking the accuracy of internalrepresentations. In the present study, we investigated the behavioural properties and the neural mech-anisms underlying the strategic allocation of attention triggered by those events. To that end, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during the performance of two tasks requiring detection ofpredictable and unpredictable response events embedded in a visuospatial or numeric sequence. Thebehavioural results in the two tasks mirror each other, suggesting the recruitment of similar attentionalallocation processes between the two domains. The ERPs showed partially similar effects. In bothtasks, a P3a-like component signalled the capture of attention by events clashing with previous expec-tations, whilst a P3b-like component marked the focusing of attention on predicted events and itsredistribution among all possible response events occurring after the detection of an unexpected event.
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Differences in professional choice and experience may explain age differences in working memoryperformance of elderly people. The aim of this study was to examine whether expertise and prolongedpractice in verbal and visuo-spatial...
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Differences in professional choice and experience may explain age differences in working memoryperformance of elderly people. The aim of this study was to examine whether expertise and prolongedpractice in verbal and visuo-spatial abilities reduce age differences in laboratory working memorytasks. The effects of age and expertise on working memory performance were examined in three agegroups in two different experiments. Firstly, the role of visuo-spatial expertise was analysed byexamining age differences in architects. Secondly, people with extensive experience in verbalabilities (literary people) were tested in order to evaluate the effect of professional verbal experience.Architects and literary people outperformed a group of unselected age peers on tasks related toprofessional expertise only, but not on general working memory tests. There was no interactionbetween age and experience, suggesting that professional experience does not increase differencesbetween experts and non experts and cannot modulate age-related effects.
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We discuss the results of Vicario (2011, Perception 40 23-29), in the light of an experiment designed to bypass some of the limits of that study. There, participants were asked to perform a temporal bisection on numerical stimuli ...
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We discuss the results of Vicario (2011, Perception 40 23-29), in the light of an experiment designed to bypass some of the limits of that study. There, participants were asked to perform a temporal bisection on numerical stimuli (small or large digits) presented either for 700/900 ms or 2000/2200 ms. For the two longest durations only, bisections of larger digits occurred later than those of smaller digits. Here, subjects judged the temporal position of a flick occurring during the visual presentation of a digit (1, 5, or 9) which lasted on the screen for either 700 ms or 2000 ms. Results revealed no difference in the perceived temporal midpoints of large compared to small digits. In contrast, they showed a response bias: only with the shortest-duration stimuli the digit's magnitude affected the subject's response.
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The aim of the present study was to determine whether hand shaping was affected by planning of an action subsequent to object contact. Ten subjects (5 females and 5 males, ages 19-33) were requested to reach toward and grasp a con...
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The aim of the present study was to determine whether hand shaping was affected by planning of an action subsequent to object contact. Ten subjects (5 females and 5 males, ages 19-33) were requested to reach toward and grasp a convex object between the thumb and the four fingers of the right hand and to perform one of the following actions: 1) lift up the object; 2) insert the object into a niche of a similar shape and size as the object, or 3) insert the object into a rectangular niche much larger than the object. Flexion/extension at the metacarpal-phalangeal and proximal interphalangeal joints of all digits were measured using resistive sensors embedded in a glove. Although all experimental conditions required grasping the same object, we found different covariation patterns among finger joint angles across conditions. Gradual preshaping of the hand occurred only when planning object lift or when the end-goal required object placement into the tight niche. In contrast, for the larger niche, gradual preshaping was not evident for the ring and the little finger. Further, reaching movements were faster for movements ending with the larger niche than for the other movement conditions. The present results suggest that hand shaping takes into account end-goal in addition to object geometry. We discuss these findings in the context of forward internal models that allow the prediction of the sensorimotor consequences of motor commands in advance to their execution.
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Neuroimaging studies of numerical cognition have pointed to the horizontal segment of the intraparietal sulcus (hIPS) as the neural correlate of numerical representations in humans. However, the specificity of hIPS for numbers rem...
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Neuroimaging studies of numerical cognition have pointed to the horizontal segment of the intraparietal sulcus (hIPS) as the neural correlate of numerical representations in humans. However, the specificity of hIPS for numbers remains controversial. For example, its activation during numerical comparison cannot be distinguished from activation during ordinal judgments on non-numerical sequences such as letters (Fias et al., 2007, J. Neuroscience). Based on the hypothesis that the fine-grained distinction between representations of numerical vs. letter order in hIPS might simply be invisible to conventional fMRI data analysis, we used support vector machines (SVM) to reanalyse the data of Fias et al. (2007). We show that classifiers trained on hIPS voxels can discriminate between number comparison and letter comparison, even though the two tasks produce the same metric of behaviour. Voxels discriminating between the two conditions were consistent across subjects and contribution analysis revealed maps of distinct sets of voxels implicated in the processing of numerical vs. alphabetical order in bilateral hIPS. These results reconcile the neuroimaging data with the neuropsychological evidence suggesting dissociations between numbers and other non-numerical ordered sequences, and demonstrate that multivariate analyses are fundamental to address fine-grained theoretical issues with fMRI studies.
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Rate and severity of contralesional loss of awareness following stroke is highly variable across patients and assessment methods. We studied whether the degree of impairment for contralesional space awareness depends on the quanti...
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Rate and severity of contralesional loss of awareness following stroke is highly variable across patients and assessment methods. We studied whether the degree of impairment for contralesional space awareness depends on the quantity of attentional resources that are available for task performance. A new computer-based paradigm was used to assess visual extinction and single-target detection rate in four right hemisphere stroke patients. In the single-task condition, they had to report only the position of the target(s) ("right", left second task, visual or auditory, that recruited additional attentional resources. The same tasks were also performed by healthy controls and by a left hemisphere stroke patient. Patients' performance was apparently unimpaired in the single-task condition. In contrast, dramatic failures to report the left-sided target emerged in the dual-task conditions. The performance of control participants was unaffected by the dual-task manipulation, whereas the left stroke patient showed the opposite pattern (i.e., unawareness of right-sided targets). Severe contralesional space unawareness under dual-task conditions reveals that visuospatial deficits can dramatically emerge when attentional resources are consumed by a concurrent task. Apparently spared contralesional awareness may simply reflect the availability of resources that are just sufficient to perform a single-task. This finding has important implications for the assessment of contralesional space awareness following stroke, because everyday life activities are often more demanding than most of the tests adopted for diagnosing space awareness disorders.
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Rate and severity of contralesional loss of awareness following stroke is highly variable across patients and assessment methods. We studied whether the degree of impairment for contralesional space awareness depends on the quanti...
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Rate and severity of contralesional loss of awareness following stroke is highly variable across patients and assessment methods. We studied whether the degree of impairment for contralesional space awareness depends on the quantity of attentional resources that are available for task performance. A new computer-based paradigm was used to assess visual extinction and single-target detection rate in four right hemisphere stroke patients. In the single-task condition, they had to report only the position of the target(s) ("right", left second task, visual or auditory, that recruited additional attentional resources. The same tasks were also performed by healthy controls and by a left hemisphere stroke patient. Patients' performance was apparently unimpaired in the single-task condition. In contrast, dramatic failures to report the left-sided target emerged in the dual-task conditions. The performance of control participants was unaffected by the dual-task manipulation, whereas the left stroke patient showed the opposite pattern (i.e., unawareness of right-sided targets). Severe contralesional space unawareness under dual-task conditions reveals that visuospatial deficits can dramatically emerge when attentional resources are consumed by a concurrent task. Apparently spared contralesional awareness may simply reflect the availability of resources that are just sufficient to perform a single-task. This finding has important implications for the assessment of contralesional space awareness following stroke, because everyday life activities are often more demanding than most of the tests adopted for diagnosing space awareness disorders.
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The spatial Simon effect is often asymmetric, being greater on one side than on the other. To date, not much attention has been paid to these asymmetries, and explanations of the Simon effect do not take them into account. In the ...
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The spatial Simon effect is often asymmetric, being greater on one side than on the other. To date, not much attention has been paid to these asymmetries, and explanations of the Simon effect do not take them into account. In the present article, we attempt to clarify the statistical implications of the asymmetries so as to provide a useful tool for future empirical investigation. Starting with examples from our laboratory and previous well-known studies, we point out the consequences of ignoring the asymmetries in the Simon effect. We suggest an alternative data analysis that might render the results clearer. Finally, through a comparison of left- and right-handed subjects, we demonstrate that asymmetries in the Simon effect are linked to the lateralization of processes involved in the Simon task—that is, attention and response selection. This approach provides a strong argument against collapsing data from the two sides to measure the Simon effect.
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