Formation of semantic associations between subliminally presented face-word pairs

Recent evidence suggests that consciousness of encoding is not necessary for the rapid formation of new semantic associations. We investigated whether unconsciously formed associations are as semantically precise as would be expected for associations formed with consciousness of encoding during episodic memory formation. Pairs of faces and written occupations were presented subliminally for unconscious associative encoding. Five minutes later, the same faces were presented suprathreshold for the cued unconscious retrieval of face-occupation associations. Retrieval instructions required participants to classify the presented individuals according to their putative (1) regularity of income, (2) length of education, and (3) creativity value of occupational activity. The three instructions yielded more classifications consistent with a person’s occupation if the person had been subliminally presented with his written occupation versus a meaningless word (control condition). This suggests that consciousness is not necessary to encode, long-term store, and retrieve semantically precise associations between primarily unrelated items.     

Total Recall: Treating Chronic Mental Illness as a Memory

The ideas outlined in this paper developed from three separate strands of my work as a therapist treating older people. Firstly, I was concerned with reducing the number of patients not benefiting from therapy. In keeping with Pinquart et al.'s (Am J Psychiatry 163:1493–1501, 2006) recent meta-analytic survey concerning the use of psychotherapy and medication, 50% of the depressed patients treated by my team failed to respond adequately. Secondly, the ideas grew out of my attempts to determine why different therapies with older people have often been shown to have equivocal beneficial impacts (Davies and Collerton, J Ment Health 6:335–344, 1997). Thirdly, I was interested in integrating the relevant neuropsychological features, particularly memory, into my therapeutic work. These three strands have led me to propose a pan-theoretical model of distress based on memory functioning and existing information processing perspectives (Teasdale and Barnard, Affect, cognition and change: Remodelling depressive thought, 1993; Power and Dalgleish, Behav Cogn Psychother, 27:129–142, 1996).     

Word meaning and the control of eye fixation: semantic competitor effects and the visual world paradigm

When participants are presented simultaneously with spoken language and a visual display depicting objects to which that language refers, participants spontaneously fixate the visual referents of the words being heard [Cooper, R. M. (1974). The control of eye fixation by the meaning of spoken language: A new methodology for the real-time investigation of speech perception, memory, and language processing. Cognitive Psychology, 6(1), 84-107; Tanenhaus, M. K., Spivey-Knowlton, M. J., Eberhard, K. M., & Sedivy, J. C. (1995). Integration of visual and linguistic information in spoken language comprehension. Science, 268(5217), 1632-1634]. We demonstrate here that such spontaneous fixation can be driven by partial semantic overlap between a word and a visual object. Participants heard the word ‘piano’ when (a) a piano was depicted amongst unrelated distractors; (b) a trumpet was depicted amongst those same distractors; and (c), both the piano and trumpet were depicted. The probability of fixating the piano and the trumpet in the first two conditions rose as the word ‘piano’ unfolded. In the final condition, only fixations to the piano rose, although the trumpet was fixated more than the distractors. We conclude that eye movements are driven by the degree of match, along various dimensions that go beyond simple visual form, between a word and the mental representations of objects in the concurrent visual field.     

Rethinking priming in social psychology: Insight from James' notions of habits and instincts

Research on priming is commonly taken to establish that much of human behavior is automatic and caused by largely subconscious processes. This research has recently come under increased scrutiny as some classic studies have proved difficult to replicate. In this essay, we bring the views of William James to bear on priming. Though James leaves room for instinct and habit, he rejects the view that human psychology is ultimately mechanistic on the grounds that it is naïvely simplistic. James is also able to explain why priming studies are bound to face replicability issues: human behavior unfolds in a dynamic multifarious constellation of interrelationships among people, consciousness, and the world. To offer researchers a productive direction for studying cognition, we conclude by briefly introducing an approach known as enactivism – an approach that resonates with the ideas James puts forth.     

To feel is to know relations: James' concept of stream of thought and contemporary studies on procedural knowledge

The theory of William James concerning the temporal and dynamic nature of mind is analyzed as implying that thought is a flow of subjective experience that belongs to the material flow of living beings, and therefore, that knowledge is primarily affective and practical rather than declarative and contemplative. In this context, we will discuss contemporary theory and research relevant to the discussion about declarative and procedural knowledge, with the focus on a literature review in the neurosciences of knowledge. Then we reconstruct James' theory of mind as flow, in terms of relatedness, feeling, and temporality of experience. The Principles suggest that declarative knowledge is not independent, but derived and supported by a more basic knowledge that is both procedural and affective in nature. Finally, we discuss possible lesson for nowadays efforts to develop a dynamic account of the procedural nature of knowledge.     

Autobiographical memory and well-being in aging: The central role of semantic self-images

Higher levels of well-being are associated with longer life expectancies and better physical health. Previous studies suggest that processes involving the self and autobiographical memory are related to well-being, yet these relationships are poorly understood. The present study tested 32 older and 32 younger adults using scales measuring well-being and the affective valence of two types of autobiographical memory: episodic autobiographical memories and semantic self-images. Results showed that valence of semantic self-images, but not episodic autobiographical memories, was highly correlated with well-being, particularly in older adults. In contrast, well-being in older adults was unrelated to performance across a range of standardised memory tasks. These results highlight the role of semantic self-images in well-being, and have implications for the development of therapeutic interventions for well-being in aging.     

Task-switching and long-term priming: role of episodic stimulus-task bindings in task-shift costs

When subjects switch between two tasks, performance is slower after a task switch than after a task repetition. We report five experiments showing that a large part of these "task-shift-costs" cannot be attributed to a control operation, needed to configure the cognitive system for the upcoming task (e.g., ). In all experiments subjects switched between picture-naming and word-reading. We presented different stimuli either in just one of the two tasks, or in both of them. Shift-costs were larger for stimuli presented in both tasks than for those presented in only one task, even after more than 100 intervening trials between prime and probe events. We suggest (as proposed by ) that stimuli acquire associations with the tasks in which they occur. When the current task activation is weak, as on a switch of tasks, stimuli can trigger retrieval of the associated, competing task, provoking larger time costs.     

Selective deficits in episodic feeling of knowing in ageing: A novel use of the general knowledge task

Failure to recall an item from memory can be accompanied by the subjective experience that the item is known but currently unavailable for report. The feeling of knowing (FOK) task allows measurement of the predictive accuracy of this reflective judgement. Young and older adults were asked to provide answers to general knowledge questions both prior to and after learning, thus measuring both semantic and episodic memory for the items. FOK judgements were made at each stage for all unrecalled responses, providing a measure of predictive accuracy for semantic and episodic knowledge. Results demonstrated a selective effect of age on episodic FOK resolution, with older adults found to have impaired episodic FOK accuracy while semantic FOK accuracy remained intact. Although recall and recognition measures of episodic memory are equivalent between the two age groups, older adults may have been unable to access contextual details on which to base their FOK judgements. The results suggest that older adults are not able to accurately predict future recognition of unrecalled episodic information, and consequently may have difficulties in monitoring recently encoded memories.     

Vocabulary teaching strategies and conceptual representations of words in L2 in children: Evidence with novice learners

A controversial issue in bilingual research is whether in the early stages of L2 learning, access to the conceptual system involves mediation of L1 lexical representations [Kroll, J. F., & Stewart, E. (1994). Category interference in translation and picture naming: Evidence for asymmetric connections between bilingual memory representations. Journal of Memory and Language, 33, 149-174] or a direct route from the L2 word [Altarriba, J., & Mathis, K. M. (1997). Conceptual and lexical development in second language acquisition. Journal of Memory and Language, 36, 550-568; Finkbeiner, M., & Nicol, J. (2003). Semantic category effects in second language word learning. Applied Psycholinguistics, 24, 369-383]. The main goal of this paper is to study, in a child population, whether the creation of conceptual representations for L2 words is possible, even after only one session of learning of the L2 vocabulary. Furthermore, we do so by examining the efficacy of two different L2 learning methods: L2-L1 association learning vs. L2-picture association learning. A translation recognition task was employed to test whether there was a difference between a semantically related pair and an unrelated pair across conditions (i.e., a semantic interference effect). Results showed a significant semantic interference effect—a conceptual effect—in children after just one vocabulary learning session. Importantly, the L2-picture method produced a greater semantic interference effect than the L2-L1 method. The implications of these findings for models of bilingual memory are examined.     

Hemispheric asymmetries in meaning selection: Evidence from the disambiguation of homophonic vs. heterophonic homographs

Research investigating hemispheric asymmetries in meaning selection using homophonic homographs (e.g., bank), suggests that the left hemisphere (LH) quickly selects contextually relevant meanings, whereas the right hemisphere (RH) maintains a broader spectrum of meanings including those that are contextually irrelevant (e.g., Faust & Chiarello, 1998). The present study investigated cerebral asymmetries in maintaining the multiple meanings of two types of Hebrew homographs: homophonic homographs and heterophonic homographs (e.g., tear). Participants read homographs preceded by a biasing, or a non-biasing sentential context, and performed a lexical decision task on targets presented laterally, 1000 ms after the onset of the sentence-final ambiguous prime. Targets were related to either the dominant or the subordinate meaning of the preceding homograph, or unrelated to it. When targets were presented in the LVF/RH, dominant and subordinate meanings, of both types of homographs, were retained only when they were supported by context. In a non-biasing context, only dominant meanings of homophonic homographs were retained. Alternatively, when targets were presented in the RVF/LH, priming effects for homophonic homographs were only evident when meanings were supported by both context and frequency (i.e., when context favored the dominant meaning). In contrast, heterophonic homographs resulted in activation of dominant meanings, in all contexts, and activation of subordinate meanings, only in subordinate-biasing contexts. The results challenge the view that a broader spectrum of meanings is maintained in the right than in the left hemisphere and suggest that hemispheric differences in the time course of meaning selection (or decay) may be modulated by phonology.     

Refractoriness and the healthy brain: A behavioural study on semantic access

While many behavioural studies on refractory phenomena in lexical/semantic access have focused on the mechanisms involved in the oral production of names, comprehension tasks have been almost exclusively used in neuropsychological studies on brain damaged patients. We report the results of two experiments on healthy participants conducted by means of speeded word to picture matching tasks. They assess the effects of the same variables examined in the study of refractory access dysphasic patients: semantic distance and word frequency (experiment 1) and presentation rate and serial position effects (experiment 2). Semantic access patients usually show little effect of word frequency but a large semantic distance effect. However, critical in characterising the syndrome as ‘refractory’, effects of presentation rate and serial position should also be present. The experiments involved the use of a deadline response procedure. The critical manipulation was the absence of a Response Stimulus Interval (RSI) in the fast presentation rate conditions; slower presentation rates involved 1 s RSI. With these manipulations the typical behavioural pattern of performance provided by semantic access dysphasic patients was reproduced. Semantic distance effects were more powerful than word frequency effects (experiment1). Presentation rate effects were found and, most important for a “refractory” account of the effects, a serial position effect was obtained (experiment 2). These results provide the first evidence of such a broad range of refractory effects at the same time in comprehension tasks in healthy subjects and support a purely semantic account for the locus of refractoriness. Moreover, error analysis showed a predominance of perseverative errors with subsequent representations of the same target, supporting a failure of cognitive control mechanisms as the cause of refractory behaviour. The findings are discussed in the light of current models of lexical and semantic processing.     

Episodic Memory in Adult Age and Effects of Sibship Size and Birth Order: Longitudinal Data

This study examined the effects of sibship size and birth order on episodic memory performance in adulthood and old age. Participants were 1,141 healthy individuals aged 35–80 years, who took part in a longitudinal project on age, health, and memory. Episodic memory measurements over a 5-year interval included tests of recognition (recognition of faces, family names, first names, and nouns) and tests of recall (free recall of sentences, free recall and cued recall of nouns, and recall of activities). Results showed significant effects for both recall and recognition, that is, the smaller the sibship size is for an individual and the earlier born, the better memory performance. These results demonstrate that the effects of sibship size and birth order previously shown in children and adolescents (Belmont and Marolla, Science 182:1096–1101, 1973; Zajonc and Markus, Psych Rev 82:74–88, 1975; Zajonc, Am Psychol 56:490–496, 2001) are robust over time and hold over a large adult range.     

Discriminative stimulus properties of drugs: a brief history and a selective review

A brief history of the background of drug discrimination research is given, focusing on the concepts of "drug dissociation" or state-dependent learning; an alternative explanation to the state dependency concept is to view the drug as a discriminative stimulus. In drug discrimination learning both a qualitative and a quantitative dimension is identified as governing the discrimination, examples of which are provided in the text. Examples of how drug discrimination techniques may assist in future research are outlined.     

Semantic asymmetries are modulated by phonological asymmetries: Evidence from the disambiguation of homophonic versus heterophonic homographs

The present study investigated cerebral asymmetries in accessing multiple meanings of two types of homographs: homophonic homographs (e.g., bank) and heterophonic homographs (e.g., tear). Participants read homographs preceded by either a biasing or a non-biasing sentential context and performed a lexical decision on lateralized targets presented 150 ms after onset of the sentence-final ambiguous prime. Targets were either related to the dominant or the subordinate meaning of the preceding homograph or were unrelated to it. In the case of homophonic homographs – our results converge with previous findings: both activation and selection processes are faster in the LH than in the RH. Importantly, however, in the case of heterophonic homographs – opposite asymmetries were found. These results suggest that semantic asymmetries are modulated by phonology. They are discussed in the context of a model of functional architecture of reading in the two hemispheres in which orthography, phonology and semantics are fully interconnected in the LH, whereas in the RH, orthography and phonology are not directly connected, such that phonological processes are mediated by semantics.     

Children with Specific Language Impairment are not impaired in the acquisition and retention of Pavlovian delay and trace conditioning of the eyeblink response

Three converging lines of evidence have suggested that cerebellar abnormality is implicated in developmental language and literacy problems. First, some brain imaging studies have linked abnormalities in cerebellar grey matter to dyslexia and specific language impairment (SLI). Second, theoretical accounts of both dyslexia and SLI have postulated impairments of procedural learning and automatisation of skills, functions that are known to be mediated by the cerebellum. Third, motor learning has been shown to be abnormal in some studies of both disorders. We assessed the integrity of face related regions of the cerebellum using Pavlovian eyeblink conditioning in 7–11 year-old children with SLI. We found no relationship between oral language skills or literacy skills with either delay or trace conditioning in the children. We conclude that this elementary form of associative learning is intact in children with impaired language or literacy development.