Impairment of voice and face recognition in patients with hemispheric damage

Voice and face recognition were tested in 21 left- and 9 right-hemisphere-damaged patients. Test materials were photographs and recordings of famous political and entertainment personalities. Pathological face recognition (prosopagnosia) and voice recognition (phonagnosia) were both significantly more prevalent in the right-hemisphere group. Only one instance of prosopagnosia and one of phonagnosia were observed in the left-hemisphere group, all of whom were aphasic. Of the right-hemisphere cases, there were four instances of each agnosia, with three patients showing a dual impairment. These findings are discussed in relation to differential modes of processing by the two cerebral hemispheres.     

师生认知方式与藏族双语儿童学业成绩关系研究

以藏族双语儿童和任课教师为被试,采用北师大心理系编制的CSFT工具,测查了师生认知方式相互作用对双语儿童学业成绩的影响,研究结果表明：师生认知方式的相互关系对学生的学业成绩有显著的影响,这种影响与学科性质、学习任务有关;双语儿童的认知方式是影响其汉语文、数学成绩的重要因素;不周性别师生认知方式的相互匹配对其汉语文的学习有显著影响;师生认知方式的相互作用对双语儿童学习成绩的影响并非是线性的,师生间性别、认知方式相互作用都是影响双语儿童学业成绩的重要变量。     

Emotionality of encoding activity in face memory

The effects of emotionality of study tasks on face recognition were examined. Subjects made either personality decisions or self-comparisons about the people shown in a series of photographs. The personality traits judged during the encoding tasks had been selected to be either arousing or relatively nonarousing. Face recognition performance was best after an emotional nonself study task, on both immediate and delayed tests. In a companion study examining these manipulations in verbal memory, self-reference study tasks produced the best word recognition, with no difference due to the emotionality of nonself tasks. These results suggest emotionality and self-awareness have different effects on facial and verbal memory. A final study indicated that the effect of emotionality disappeared if it was added to self-reference. As regards self-reference differences in face and verbal memory, this series of experiments seems to rule out an emotionality confounding. It was concluded that self-images are less effective mnemonic aids than the propositional self-concept.     

A noninvasive index of hemispheric activity

Tympanic thermometers were used to measure fluctuations in the temperature of the left and right hemispheres of 22 normal high school students while performing verbal and nonverbal visual discrimination tasks. The nonverbal task involving face recognition demonstrated the predicted effect of hemispheric bias on performance: The subjects performed better when they showed a relative rise in right-hemisphere temperature. No significant relationship between hemispheric temperature and level of performance was observed during the verbal task, perhaps owing to the opportunity to treat effectively the nonwords as either linguistic strings or visual patterns. It is concluded that tympanic temperature effectively measures hemispheric activity during cognitive processing.     

Apparent shift in visual field preference after unilateral stroke

Patients with either a left- or a right-hemisphere stroke lesion scored higher in tasks of word-picture matching and of nonverbal shape matching when information was presented tachistoscopically (120 msec) to the visual field (VF) projecting to their undamaged hemisphere. Left-hemisphere stroke patients (n = 13) were dissociated from right-hemisphere stroke patients (n = 15) by low word recognition from memory and by low right VF but nearly normal left VF accuracy in word-picture matching or shape matching; the former appeared to rely upon processing of word meaning by the right hemisphere. In contrast, right-stroke patients had higher right than left VF scores in both tasks, and their discrimination of nonverbal shapes via the right VF was not different from that of controls (n = 15). Preferred processing by the VF projecting to the undamaged hemisphere appeared as a shift in perceptual asymmetry but may indicate, in support of a "direct access" model, that each hemisphere responds more or less efficiently to word and to nonverbal shape discriminations.     

Familiarity decisions for faces presented to the left and right cerebral hemispheres

Right-handed subjects were asked to decide whether or not faces presented briefly in the RVF or in the LVF were familiar (familiar faces were those of famous people). This task avoids the need for extensive semantic processing or temporary storage involved in conventional naming or identification tasks, and thus eliminates the contribution of such factors to any observed asymmetry. The resulting finding of faster reaction times to LVF faces, with no overall visual hemifield difference in error rates, is taken to indicate a right-hemisphere superiority either in the processes used to construct facial representations or in the accessing of face recognition units, or both.     

Extreme elemental processing in a high schizotypy population: Relation to cognitive deficits

The cognitive deficits observed in schizophrenia have been characterized as a failure to utilize task-setting information to guide behaviour, especially in situations in which there is response conflict. Recently, we have provided support for this account; high schizotypy individuals demonstrated inferior biconditional discrimination performance compared to low scorers, but were not impaired on a simple discrimination that did not require the use of task-setting cues. These results may, however, also be explained by the way in which individuals with high schizotypy process stimulus compounds. Here, we examine the initial approaches to solving biconditional and control discrimination tasks of participants with high and low schizotypy scores. In particular, we focus on performance during the first block of training trials to capture processing style before the acquisition of the discrimination tasks. Participants scoring highly on the introvertive anhedonia subscale (which has been allied to the negative and cognitive symptoms of schizophrenia) demonstrated better biconditional performance during the first block of training trials than did low-schizotypy individuals, consistent with a highly elemental approach to stimulus processing. Subsequent recognition tests confirmed this analysis demonstrating that the pattern of performance observed in participants with high schizotypy was associated with a failure to discriminate conjunctions of items that had been seen before from those that had not. These results suggest that the negative/cognitive symptoms of schizophrenia may reflect an extreme bias towards elemental, as opposed to configural, processing of stimulus conjunctions.     

Alignment effect: primary-secondary learning and cognitive styles

The degree to which the way of learning spatial information (primary/secondary learning) and spatial cognitive style (landmark/route/survey) affect orientation specificity (alignment effect) is studied. We think that the most important factor explaining the absence of the alignment effect is the spatial cognitive style. We hypothesise that while landmark participants show an alignment effect after both primary and secondary learning, route participants show this effect only after secondary learning, and survey participants do not show it at all. Participants performed three tasks in order to distinguish their cognitive style; they were then randomly assigned to primary or secondary learning and submitted to directional judgment tasks to verify whether the alignment effect was present. The results confirm our hypothesis.     

Selective attention to facial identity and emotion in children

Three age groups of participants (6–8 years, 9–11 years, adults) performed two tasks: A face recognition task and a Garner task. In the face recognition task, the participants were presented with 20 faces and then had to recognize them among 20 new faces. In the Garner tasks, the participants had to sort, as fast as possible, the photographs of two persons expressing two emotions by taking into account only one of the two dimensions (identity or emotion). When the sorting task was on one dimension, the other dimension was varied either in a correlated, a constant or an orthogonal way in distinct subsessions. The results indicated an increase in face recognition abilities. They also showed an interference of identity in the emotion-sorting task that was similar in the three age groups. Nevertheless, an interference of emotion in the identity-sorting task was significant only for the children and was more important for the youngest group. These observations suggest that the development in face recognition ability rests on the development of the ability to attend selectively to identity, without paying attention to emotional facial expression.     

Ear asymmetry in recognition of unfamiliar voices

Female right-handed subjects were presented with a memory set consisting of five unfamiliar female voices. They were then tested with a recognition procedure in which samples of voice, memory set or novel, 2 or 4 sec in duration, were heard in one ear and a competing noise stimulus was heard in the other ear. There was an overall left-ear advantage in accuracy of recognition. This advantage held particularly for identifications of memory-set voices in the second half of trials. Internal analyses indicated that the left-ear advantage could not be attributed to greater retroactive interference during right-ear presentation. Congruent with studies of recognition of unfamiliar faces, the findings suggested right-hemisphere superiority in the recognition of unfamiliar voices.     

Spirituality and Cognition: Does Spirituality Influence What We Attend to and Remember?

This study investigated how spirituality as a positive life theme might be related to one’s unique style of cognitive processing. Study participants included 80 individuals; 40 older adults and 40 younger adults. Word recall and recognition tasks assessed memory for positive, negative, neutral, and religious words. Results indicated that spirituality does not appear to be related to cognitive bias, but that words with either positive, negative, neutral, or religious connotations are recalled and recognized at different rates.     

Hemispheric differences for semantically and phonologically primed nouns: A tachistoscopic study in normals

Normal individuals performed two matching tasks. In one task, semantic processing, synonyms had to be recognized. Half the stimuli were picturable and half were nonpicturable nouns. In this task, recognition of picturable synonyms was found to have hemifield symmetry, whereas recognition of nonpicturable synonyms yielded a left-hemisphere superiority, indicating that semantic matching itself did not reveal equal performance of both hemispheres. It is concluded that picturable synonyms might be recognized either by processes of visual imagery, which pertain to right-hemisphere function, or by their phonological or phonic features, which are processed by the left hemisphere. The other task, shown in previous research to exhibit a left-hemisphere superiority, was to decide if two nouns (homophones) were equally pronounced. Here a distinct left-hemisphere advantage was revealed.     

Evidence for the self as an imaginal prototype

This study investigated recognition memory of self-photographs which had been previously rated by subjects for their degree of reference to an imaginal prototype of “real self.” The number of false alarms to NEW photographs was found to increase with degree of self-reference to the imaginal prototype with the exception of photographs rated highest in self-reference. Females were reliably superior to males in self-recognition. Males and females also differed in nonverbal behaviors reflecting differences in their image of real self. Results were interpreted as supporting an hypothesis that the self functions as a cognitive prototype which has both imaginal and verbal characteristics.     

The influence of cognitive styles and strategies in the digit span backwards task: Effects on performance and neuronal activity

The way information is processed in the brain varies strongly between individuals. A prominent distinction is made between visual and verbal processing in everyday-life as well as concrete tasks at hand. To investigate the role of routinely-used cognitive styles and task-specific cognitive strategies, n = 40 participants were presented with the digit span backwards task - which is widely used as a measure of working memory capacity - with acoustically or optically presented stimuli. In a dual task condition, the participants had to remember both an acoustically and an optically presented digit series. The task specific cognitive strategy was predictive for dual task performance, while the habitual cognitive style was not. Also, the preference for a verbal or visual cognitive style was not associated with the task specific strategy, indicating that a visual or verbal strategy can be adapted deliberately in order to perform the task at hand. Functional magnetic resonance imaging showed that a verbal processing style is associated with higher activation in the middle frontal gyrus, which is crucial for working memory performance. The results indicate that a verbal processing style is associated with more effort, possibly due to the adaptation of a task-specific strategy.     

Visuospatial over verbal demands in predicting Tower of London planning tasks

The role of verbal and visuospatial information processing in Tower of London (TOL) tasks was investigated. The first part of the investigation examined the verbal and visuospatial abilities and preferred cognitive style (visualizer vs. verbalizer) of 79 participants, in an inter-individual differences approach. Visuospatial abilities significantly predicted TOL performance, but the impact of cognitive style was negligible. The second part applied a dual-task manipulation of concurrent interference of TOL planning tasks on verbal and visuospatial memory, using the same participants. Concurrent processing of the TOL tasks diminished visuospatial memory performance considerably but had no effect on verbal memory, and there was no interaction between cognitive style and memory. These findings clearly underscore the role of visuospatial information processing in TOL tasks and indicate little bearing of verbal or visual cognitive style on TOL problem solving. These results have important implications for TOL and cognitive style in clinical application and cognitive neuroimaging research.     

Memory for objects in real scenes: The development of recognition and recall

Subjects examined crowded semirealistic layouts of toy objects, or photographs of these layouts, and then tried to identify added, moved or deleted items. The main study, involving 1st-, 3rd, 6th-graders, and adults, showed that although successful recognition of added items was superior to both recall of deleted items and recognition of moved ones, all three scores improved with age. In addition, false reports of “new” items decreased markedly in the older groups. The results argue against the widely held view that recognition memory undergoes little or no developmental improvement. No significant difference between real layouts and photographs appeared either in the main experiment or in replications involving shorter exposure (Experiment 2) or retarded subjects (Experiment 3).     

认知风格影响框架效应的ERP研究

采用ERP方法,考察了不同认知风格被试在决策过程中的框架效应。分析的脑电成分为N200和P300成分。结果发现：场依存者的反应时显著高于场独立者;场依存者诱发的N200和P300平均波幅均显著低于场独立者;大脑右半球的N200和P300平均波幅均显著高于左半球。这些结果表明,场独立者在决策过程中更具有理性,基本不受决策问题表述方式的影响,且该决策过程主要发生在大脑的右半球。     

Recognition memory performance and residential burglary

This paper reports two studies of recognition memory performance in groups of juvenile residential burglars. Memory performance of the burglars was compared in Experiment 1 with police officers and a group of adult householders. In Experiment 2 a second group of juvenile burglars was compared with a group of juvenile offenders who had no experience of housebreaking. All groups were asked first to identify houses in photographs that would be attractive or otherwise to burglars. Subsequently, subjects were given a surprise recognition test where, in some photographs, physical features had been changed. Recognition memory for information about physical features of houses was significantly better for the burglary group than for the police officers, who in turn were better than members of the law-abiding public. In Experiment 2 the juvenile burglars' recognition memory performance was significantly better than the other offenders. These results are interpreted in terms of the burglary subjects possessing a level of expertise associated with their experience of offending. This is a finding with implications for criminology and for the application of cognitive psychology to crime prevention, an area of considerable practical importance.     

The effect of standard, motivation, and strategy instructions on the facial processing accuracy of internal and external subjects

In the present study, it was hypothesized that poorer performance of externals in cognitive and interpersonal tasks also would be found in the processing of nonverbal information in the form of a facial affect recognition task. It was further hypothesized that the poorer nonverbal processing performance of externals was due to either their lower motivation or their use of less effective processing strategies. Subjects (N = 70) were divided into internal and external groups and then further subdivided into groups that received standard, motivational, or strategy instructions. Analysis of subjects' responses to the facial affect recognition task showed internals performed significantly better than externals under standard conditions. However, neither motivational nor strategy instructions improved the performance of externals. The implications for interpersonal functioning of the poorer nonverbal processing ability of extenrals was discussed from both theoretical and methodological perspectives.     

The differential effects of thalamus and basal ganglia on facial emotion recognition

This study examined if subcortical stroke was associated with impaired facial emotion recognition. Furthermore, the lateralization of the impairment and the differential profiles of facial emotion recognition deficits with localized thalamic or basal ganglia damage were also studied. Thirty-eight patients with subcortical strokes and 19 matched normal controls volunteered to participate. The participants were individually presented with morphed photographs of facial emotion expressions over multiple trials. They were requested to classify each of these morphed photographs according to Ekman's six basic emotion categories. The findings indicated that the clinical participants had impaired facial emotion recognition, though no clear lateralization pattern of impairment was observed. The patients with localized thalamic damage performed significantly worse in recognizing sadness than the controls. Longitudinal studies on patients with subcortical brain damage should be conducted to examine how cognitive reorganization post-stroke would affect emotion recognition.