Anterior Temporal Lobectomy,Hippocampal Sclerosis,and Memory: Recent Neuropsychological Findings

Anterior temporal lobectomy (ATL) is an effective and increasingly utilized treatment for nonlesional, intractable mesial temporal lobe epilepsy. However, this surgery results in domain-specific neuropsychological morbidity for a subset of patients. Within the past decade, multidisciplinary studies have revealed that left ATL patients without significant sclerosis in the resected hippocampus are most at risk for a substantial postacute decline in the ability to encode new verbal information. These patients are also at risk for a significant decrement in confrontation naming and other retrieval-based language abilities. The memory deficit is not attributable to this disruption of language. A relationship between hippocampal sclerosis (HS) status and memory performance has not been identified consistently in right ATL patients, but investigation of new visuospatial measures continues. The influence of variables other than HS on neuropsychological outcome is also discussed.     

Establishing equivalence–equivalence analogical relations via tact and listener training

We investigated the role of verbal behavior on the emergence of analogy-type responding as measured via equivalence–equivalence relations. In Experiment 1, 8 college students learned to label arbitrary stimuli as, “vek,” “zog,” and “paf”, and in Experiment 2, 8 additional participants learned to select these stimuli when hearing their names in an auditory–visual matching-to-sample (MTS) task. Experimenters tested for the emergence of relational tacts (i.e., “same” and “different”) and equivalence–equivalence relations (analogy tests) via visual–visual MTS. Half of the participants were exposed to a think-aloud procedure. Even though they all passed analogy tests while tacting stimuli relationally, only participants exposed to tact training (Experiment 1) did so without the need for remediation. The results of these experiments confirm that individual discriminative and relational control of stimuli established through verbal behavior training is sufficient to produce equivalence–equivalence analogical responding, advancing the analysis of complex cognitive (problem-solving) phenomena.     

Nonsimultaneous stimulus presentations and their role in listener naming

Previous studies on naming have presented the object and its name simultaneously during both training and testing, and thus the training component may establish a transformation of function directly between the object and the name. Successful tests for listener naming may thus not require the emergence of a novel (entailed) transformation of function. The current study aimed to control for this possibility by presenting the object and the name sequentially and nonsimultaneously. Eight typically developing toddlers participated in the current study. During name training, objects and names were presented nonsimultaneously, and all participants failed to emit listener-naming responses during the first test session. Subsequently, 4 participants received multiple exemplar training, which led to improvements in listener naming for all 4; and speaker naming for only 1 participant. As a control condition, the remaining 4 participants were tested repeatedly, without multiple exemplar training, and did not show any consistent improvements in their listener or speaker performances. Multiple exemplar training thus appeared to be effective in establishing generalized listener responses, which involved generating entailed transformation of functions. The strategy of using nonsimultaneous stimulus presentations could allow for greater precision in identifying the behavioral processes involved in listener-naming.     

Training intraverbal naming to establish equivalence class performances

The purpose of this three‐experiment study was to evaluate whether performance consistent with the formation of equivalence classes could be established after training adults to tact and intraverbally relate the names of visual stimuli. Fourteen participants were exposed to tact training, listener testing, and intraverbal training (A'B’ and B'C’) prior to matching‐to‐sample (MTS) and intraverbal posttests presented in different sequences across experiments. All participants demonstrated emergent MTS and intraverbal relations consistent with equivalence class formation. More importantly, all participants emitted experimentally defined or self‐generated tacts or intraverbally named the correct sample‐comparison pairs at some point during posttests. These results are consistent with the intraverbal naming account (Horne & Lowe, 1996) in that participants who passed novel relations MTS tests also demonstrated emergence of corresponding intraverbal relations. However, verbal reports and latency data suggest that participants did not necessarily have to use intraverbal naming as a problem solving strategy continuously throughout MTS posttests. These results extended previous research by showing that verbal behavior training of baseline relations (A'B’ and B'C’) is sufficient to establish novel conditional relations consistent with equivalence class formation.     

An experimental comparison between rival theories of rapid automatized naming performance and its relationship to reading

Two studies investigated the degree to which the relationship between rapid automatized naming (RAN) performance and reading development is driven by shared phonological processes. Study 1 assessed RAN, phonological awareness, and reading performance in 1010 7- to 10-year-olds. Results showed that RAN deficits occurred in the absence of phonological awareness deficits. These were accompanied by modest reading delays. In structural equation modeling, solutions where RAN was subsumed within a phonological processing factor did not provide a good fit to the data, suggesting that processes outside phonology may drive RAN performance and its association with reading. Study 2 investigated Kail's proposal that speed of processing underlies this relationship. Children with single RAN deficits showed slower speed of processing than did closely matched controls performing normally on RAN. However, regression analysis revealed that RAN made a unique contribution to reading even after accounting for processing speed. Theoretical implications are discussed.     

Visual experiences during letter production contribute to the development of the neural systems supporting letter perception

Letter production through handwriting creates visual experiences that may be important for the development of visual letter perception. We sought to better understand the neural responses to different visual percepts created during handwriting at different levels of experience. Three groups of participants, younger children, older children, and adults, ranging in age from 4.5 to 22 years old, were presented with dynamic and static presentations of their own handwritten letters, static presentations of an age‐matched control's handwritten letters, and typeface letters during fMRI. First, data from each group were analyzed through a series of contrasts designed to highlight neural systems that were most sensitive to each visual experience in each age group. We found that younger children recruited ventral‐temporal cortex during perception and this response was associated with the variability present in handwritten forms. Older children and adults also recruited ventral‐temporal cortex; this response, however, was significant for typed letter forms but not variability. The adult response to typed letters was more distributed than in the children, including ventral‐temporal, parietal, and frontal motor cortices. The adult response was also significant for one's own handwritten letters in left parietal cortex. Second, we compared responses among age groups. Compared to older children, younger children demonstrated a greater fusiform response associated with handwritten form variability. When compared to adults, younger children demonstrated a greater response to this variability in left parietal cortex. Our results suggest that the visual perception of the variability present in handwritten forms that occurs during handwriting may contribute to developmental changes in the neural systems that support letter perception.     

Developmental shifts in children's sensitivity to visual speech: a new multimodal picture-word task

This research developed a multimodal picture-word task for assessing the influence of visual speech on phonological processing by 100 children between 4 and 14 years of age. We assessed how manipulation of seemingly to-be-ignored auditory (A) and audiovisual (AV) phonological distractors affected picture naming without participants consciously trying to respond to the manipulation. Results varied in complex ways as a function of age and type and modality of distractors. Results for congruent AV distractors yielded an inverted U-shaped function with a significant influence of visual speech in 4-year-olds and 10- to 14-year-olds but not in 5- to 9-year-olds. In concert with dynamic systems theory, we proposed that the temporary loss of sensitivity to visual speech was reflecting reorganization of relevant knowledge and processing subsystems, particularly phonology. We speculated that reorganization may be associated with (a) formal literacy instruction and (b) developmental changes in multimodal processing and auditory perceptual, linguistic, and cognitive skills.     

情绪Stroop效应:来自汉字的证据

通过颜色命名和词汇阅读两种作业任务,采用情绪词、中性词两类刺激材料,探索情绪Stroop效应中Stroop加工的特点和机制。结果发现：（1）两种作业任务都发现明显的情绪Stroop效应;（2）两种作业任务中情绪Stroop效应不受情绪词的抽象性影响。它说明情绪stroop效应与经典的Stroop效应是两种独立的现象,前者的加工过程是由于情绪词所产生的情绪威胁而导致反应延迟,而不是经典Stroop效应的选择性注意机制。     

聋人手语视觉表象生成能力的实验研究

通过视觉表象判断实验,对聋手语使用者和听力正常人两类被试视觉表象生成的能力进行了比较。实验发现：与听力正常的人相比,聋手语使用者学习和记忆大写字母的时间短于听力正常的被试,并且两组被试记忆复杂字母的时间都较长;聋被试和听力正常被试采用了相同的字母表征方式。但是,习得手语的年龄对聋手语者生成表象的能力没有明显的影响。     

再探汉字加工中语音、语义激活的相对时间进程

在Zhou和Marslen-Wilson（2000）基础之上,进一步探讨汉字加工中语音和语义信息激活的相对时间进程及其对汉字加工理论的含义。采用启动范式,用同一目标字与语义相关启动字、同音启动字以及无关控制启动字配对,变化同音启动字读音与其声旁的规则性,变化启动字与目标字呈现之间的时间间隔（SOA,57ms或200ms）,使用两种实验任务（真假字判断和命名）,考察语义、语音效应发生的时间先后与效应量的大小。真假字判断实验发现,不管SOA如何,语义启动效应都非常显著,而同音启动效应则随SOA的增长而逐渐加大,从不显著到显著;同音启动字读音规则性对启动效应没有明显影响。命名实验发现,语义启动、同音启动效应同时存在于长、短SOA条件中。长SOA时,两者在数值上没有显著差异;短SOA时,同音不规则字产生的启动效应等同于语义启动效应,而同音规则字产生的启动效应则大于语义启动效应。结合其它实验发现,这些结果说明,在熟练的汉字加工中,语音信息的激活并不比语义信息早,语音激活也不是语义激活的先决条件;但汉字各种信息激活的相对激活量和时间进程会随任务性质和材料性质而在一定范围内有所改变。