Cross-domain semantic priming in normal subjects and a prosopagnosic patient

Cross-domain semantic priming of person recognition (from face primes to name targets at 500msecs SOA) is investigated in normal subjects and a brain-injured patient (PH) with a very severe impairment of overt face recognition ability. Experiment 1 demonstrates equivalent semantic priming effects for normal subjects from face primes to name targets (cross-domain priming) and from name primes to name targets (within-domain priming). Experiment 2 demonstrates cross-domain semantic priming effects from face primes that PH cannot recognize overtly. Experiment 3 shows that cross-domain semantic priming effects can be found for normal subjects when target names are repeated across all conditions. This (repeated targets) method is then used in Experiment 4 to establish that PH shows equivalent semantic priming to normal subjects from face primes which he is very poor at identifying overtly and from name primes which he can identify overtly. These findings demonstrate that automatic aspects of face recognition can remain intact even when all sense of overt recognition has been lost.     

Accessing stored information about familiar people

Summary Two experiments investigating access to occupations and names of familiar people are reported, in which the response requirements of occupation and name-categorization tasks were made equivalent. In Experiment 1 matching tasks were used, in which subjects were required to determine whether simultaneously presented pairs of faces, surnames, or full names were those of people with the same or different occupations (politician or nonpolitician) or with same or different first names (Michael or David). Experiment 2 required binary classification of individual faces or surnames in terms of the bearer's occupation (politician or nonpolitician) or first name (Michael or David). In both experiments responses to faces were faster in tasks involving access to occupations than in tasks involving access to first names, whereas for surnames there was no difference in reaction times between occupations and first names in matching or classification tasks. These findings are consistent with the idea that identity-specific semantic codes and name codes are accessed sequentially from faces, but in parallel from written names.     

Childhood prosopagnosia

K.D. has been unable to recognize people's faces since sustaining cerebral injury in infancy. Investigation of this disorder carried out when K.D. was aged 8 to 11 years showed that although her basic visual abilities were impaired, they were no poorer than those of other children who recognized faces without difficulty. K.D. had learned to read, but had not regained ability to recognize people's faces; instead she relied primarily on voices as a cue to person recognition. There was no evidence of any degree of overt or covert recognition of familiar faces, and K.D. also experienced problems in visual object recognition. She could, however, classify a visual input as a face, was able to perceive and imitate facial expressions, and was able to perform face matching tasks to an extent limited by her use of a feature by feature matching strategy. It is suggested that K.D.'s impairment affected higher order perceptual abilities, and is in a number of respects comparable to the impairments found in adult prosopagnosic patients.     

An individual differences additive model: An alterating least squares method with optimal scaling features

An individual differences additive model is discussed which represents individual differences in additivity by differential weighting of additive factors. A procedure for estimating the model parameters for various data measurement characteristics is developed. The procedure is evaluated using both Monte Carlo and real data. The method is found to be very useful in describing certain types of developmental change in cognitive structure, as well as being numerically robust and efficient.The work reported here was partly supported by Grant A6394 to the first author by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.     

A cognitive developmental perspective on counselling adolescents

Although developmental perspectives on counselling are increasingly popular, difficulties inherent in these perspectives impede their actual use in practice. In this paper, individual counselling is situated within a cognitive developmental (Piagetian) framework. Its major constructs — structure and function, assimilation and accommodation, and equilibration — can profitably be applied to the counselling of adolescents. The implications of these constructs for use by counsellors are presented in the light of the traditional responsive and initiative conditions required of the helping relationship. Thus, a perspective on actual counselling intervention founded on a major direction in developmental psychology is provided.     

Teaching maxi- and minicomputer programming at the same time: Is there an advantage?

A course is described that provides concurrent and equal coverage of maxi- and minicomputer systems. The results of student evaluations are provided.