Why is a verb like an inanimate object? Grammatical category and semantic category deficits

Semantic category effects, such as difficulties in naming animate things relative to inanimate objects, have been explained in terms of the relative weightings of perceptual and functional features within the semantic representations of these concepts. We argue that grammatical category deficits, such as difficulties in naming nouns relative to verbs, can be explained within the same framework. We hypothesize that verb concepts are richer in functional than sensory features and present a model of the semantic representations of animate nouns, inanimate nouns, and verbs. The model demonstrates that sensory feature damage results in a deficit for naming living things but spares verb naming, and functional feature damage results in a deficit for naming inanimate objects and verbs. We then report the assessment results of two patient groups. In accordance with the model's predictions, the "verb spared" patients were consistently worse at naming living things than inanimate objects, and their definitions of both living and nonliving items were lacking in sensory information. We conclude that damage to sensory features in semantic representations causes difficulties in naming concrete nouns relative to action verbs, and within the grammatical category of nouns, animate items will be more severely affected. Imageability was shown to be a strong predictor of naming performance in the "verb deficit" patients, and when this variable was controlled no class effect remained. Production of definitions revealed no differential damage to sensory or functional features, and no consistent effect of animacy in naming was shown. While the model suggests that verb deficits might occur in patients for whom functional features are damaged relative to sensory features, we conclude that the "verb deficit" shown in our patients (and potentially in many previously reported cases) was an artifact of the lower imageability of verbs in confrontation naming tasks.     

Extinction-like effects in normals: independence of localization and response selection

An extinction-like effect in normal subjects was previously elicited when a low-salience target in the left was simultaneously presented with a highly salient distractor in the right visual hemifield, but not vice versa (Pollmann, 1996). We investigated in four experiments whether this extinction-like effect depends on (a) explicit localization and (b) response competition. It was found that the extinction-like effect could be replicated in the absence of both. In contradistinction to our previous results, low-salience distractors had no effect on pop-out target search. This showed that explicit spatial localization demands lead to low-salience distractor interference on pop-out search.     

Afferent dysgraphia after right cerebral stroke: an autonomous syndrome?

Afferent dysgraphia is an acquired writing deficit characterized by deletions and duplications of letters and strokes. The commonly accepted interpretation states that afferent dysgraphia is associated with three main clinical features: production of spatial writing errors; the presence of left unilateral neglect; and no deterioration in performance when writing blindfolded. In order to test whether these symptoms necessarily co-occur with afferent dysgraphia, we studied the writing performances of a series of eight right brain-damaged patients. In sentence copying, spontaneous handwriting, and writing to dictation they showed afferent dysgraphia. However, signs of left neglect and spatial dysgraphia were evident only in some cases. Furthermore, the frequency of afferent errors increased when patients were required to write without vision. The present study demonstrates that afferent dysgraphia is an autonomous clinical entity and that it results from a selective impairment of a mechanism whose function is that of comparing the information about the number of letters and strokes specified at the level of letter motor programs and the actual number of movements already realized.     

视觉工作记忆的同类别存储优势

概念规律如记忆项间的类别关系如何影响视觉工作记忆容量是一个有争议的问题。针对该问题, 学界存在两种预测截然不同的假说：(1)混合类别优势假说, (2)同类别优势假说。综述文献发现, 该类研究均采用带有细节特征的真实客体作为实验材料, 因此前人研究中发现的混合类别优势效应或同类别优势效应中必然混有低水平知觉特征的影响。故本研究采用去除细节信息的动物剪影作为记忆材料来排除上述因素的影响, 旨在厘清上述两种假设, 并采用对侧延迟活动作为神经指标, 来进一步探讨概念规律影响工作记忆容量的内在机制。两个行为实验发现, 不论记忆项同时呈现还是序列呈现, 均存在同类别记忆优势效应。脑电实验结果发现相比记忆不同类别客体, 记忆同等数量的同类别客体诱发的对侧延迟活动的幅值更小。上述结果一致表明, 视觉工作记忆可借助概念的方式将同类别客体加以组织, 从而有效扩大视觉工作记忆容量, 支持了同类别优势假说。     

Development and Content Validity of the Participation and Sensory Environment Questionnaire

Qualitative methodology was used to develop items for a questionnaire designed to examine the perspectives of parents regarding the impact of the sensory environment on participation for children aged 3 to 5 who have autism spectrum disorders. A total of 34 parents/caregivers of children with autism spectrum disorders and 8 experts in autism spectrum disorders and/or measurement completed qualitative interviews for concept, content review, and cognitive interviewing. The result was a pool of 35 items for home/community domains for 3 scales. The outcome of this study was the development and content validation of the Participation and Sensory Environment Questionnaire.     

Illusory hand ownership in a patient with personal neglect for the upper limb,but no somatoparaphenia

The symptoms of patients with left personal neglect are characterized by inattention towards contralesional (left) body parts while at the same time explicitly ascertaining ownership for the neglected hemibody. It is currently unknown if personal neglect is associated with more subtle or implicit disturbances of own body perception and body ownership as measured with the rubber hand illusion. In this study, we report data from a patient with a right hemispheric lesion and personal neglect, without associated somatosensory deficits. We administered to the patient (and to 12 age‐matched controls) the rubber hand illusion paradigm to the right and left hands, to elicit illusory ownership for a fake hand, before and after recovery from personal neglect for the left arm. In a first session, run when the patient showed personal neglect affecting the left arm, he experienced a significantly enhanced subjective illusion of embodiment for the left fake hand as compared to the right hand (as assessed through a standard questionnaire). After recovery from personal neglect for the left arm (second session), the results of the left and right rubber hand illusion experiments were comparable, with no modulation of hand ownership. We argue that personal neglect may consist not only in an inattentional disorder, but also in a deficit of multisensory body representation characterized by a high sensitivity to experimental manipulations of subjective aspects of body ownership.     

Modality-specific interference between action planning and perceptual processing

This paper reports a study which examined an interaction between action planning and processing of perceptual information in two different sensory modalities. In line with the idea that action planning consists in representing the action’s sensory outcomes, it was assumed that different types of actions should be coupled with different modalities. A visual and auditory oddball paradigm was combined with two types of actions: pointing and knocking (unrelated to the perceptual task). Results showed an interactive effect between the action type and the sensory modality of the oddballs, with impaired detection of auditory oddballs for knocking (congruent) action, as compared to a pointing (incongruent) action. These findings reveal that action planning can interact with modality-specific perceptual processing and that preparing an action presumably binds the respective perceptual features with an action plan, thereby making these features less available for other tasks.     

Effect of stress on a cognitive autopoietic system

A cognitive autopoietic system is a dynamic, self-generating, organized and self-organizing thing which self-regulates (by internal rearrangement) with respect to an external medium. The present model of the effect of stress on a cognitive autopoietic (ESCA) system captures the notion of how a priori cognitive structures (categories), combined with external sensations, constitute the basis for the development of cognitive structures (CS) and their architecture. The ESCA model integrates the fact that the mind–environment relation has a twofold effect: on one hand, it enables self-regulation of mind (the matching of external sensations with CS), but on the other hand, it poses a potential perturbation on the same, which may result in the breakdown of the self-regulation of mind. The architecture of the CS developed on the basis of the ESCA model is consistent with the manifestations of the effect of stress on mind behavior at different levels. The ESCA model predicts that the faculty to concatenate synthetic propositions, which enables enhanced categorical conscious cognition (ECCC) on the basis of CS, is inhibited by stress, thus reducing cognition to a mechanized heuristic categorical conscious cognition (HCCC) and/or an unconscious cognition (UC) level. The ESCA model explains the casual relation between cognition of persistent social stress and self-esteem, sensory deprivation and self-cognition, a mechanized mind state and accumulated stress, and the effect of stress activated short-term emotions on cognition. Finally, it is speculated how persistently perceived uncertainty may induce stress.