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Biomedical subjects

J R Beech

Publications and source records attributed to J R Beech.

17 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1997

Spatial visualization: running visualization for empty squares.

A technique is reported in which an oral description of empty squares had to be visualized. A tone signaled completion, and a response was made whether the last square had touched a previous square. The chain lengths varied from 10 to 19 squares at closure. Local closure sizes consisted of 4 to 10 squares. Closures up to 6 squares produced the least errors. There were biases in response as a function of response type and chain length. The technique could be useful for monitoring continuous spatial visualization.

Auditory Perception↗
PubMed1996

Attitudes toward health risks and sunbathing behavior.

Sunbathing confers the benefits of looking and feeling good but presents the long-term risk of skin cancer. In a disguised experiment exploring attitudes toward sunbathing by British adults, participants were asked to rate their willingness to take a hypothetical new drug (with different levels of risk) that would make them look and feel good. One aspect of the resulting risk profiles was significantly related to a positive attitude to open-air sunbathing but not to sunbed use, possibly because it was erroneously thought that using a sunbed is not risky. The well-established finding that women are more cautious was confirmed; the risk function for men was curvilinear, in contrast to women, who were willing to increase their risk linearly over their lifetime.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1995

Effects of caffeine on functional asymmetry in a Posner letter-recognition task.

A Posner task was used to investigate whether caffeine, in common with other drugs, has an asymmetric effect on cerebral functioning. Subjects consumed decaffeinated coffee either with or without added caffeine at 2 mg/kg body weight. They were then required to identify letter-pairs as the same or different. Same was defined as two identical letters irrespective of case (AA, Aa); different was defined as two different letters irrespective of case (AB, Ab). Main effects of stimulus type were found for both accuracy and speed of response. In the noncaffeine condition pattern-matching was faster by the right hemisphere and phonologic matching was faster by the left hemisphere. These results replicate much previous work, but under caffeine, a previously unreported reversal in the balance of hemispheric processing efficiency was found. An explanation is offered in terms of the disruption of the normal, optimum, rate of cerebral processing for each hemisphere.

Adult↗
PubMed1995

The reading and semantic link tests: a comparison between probable Alzheimer patients and reading-matched controls.

The performance in those diagnosed as probably suffering from Alzheimer's disease was compared with age-matched controls on a test of semantic and contextual processing relative to a test of silent reading. The former test, the Semantic Link Test, was hypothesized to deteriorate to a greater degree in those suffering from Alzheimer's disease. The controls were matched on reading performance as well as on age. Consequently, a deterioration in performance on the Semantic Link Test for Alzheimer's patients relative to controls was hypothesized. This hypothesis was confirmed, lending further support to the notion that Alzheimer's disease can specifically affect semantic processes.

Aged↗
PubMed1992

Lexical and nonlexical routes: a comparison between normally achieving and poor readers.

This study investigated qualitative differences in poor readers relative to normally achieving readers of the same reading level. Thirty-eight 9-year-old poor readers and forty 7- and 8-year-old reading-age-matched normally achieving readers from the United Kingdom were matched in phonemic processing and then given tests of memory span and visual discrimination of letter-like characters, were required to read different word types (regular, exception, and pseudoword), and were asked to complete a homophonic pseudoword test. The poor readers were worse at reading pseudowords compared to the controls, but this difference was unrelated to phonemic length of number of letters, or to the ease of producing analogies for the pseudowords. The results suggest that although there are no differences with reading-age controls in phonological processing, poor readers have worse grapheme-phoneme conversion skills and greater reluctance to relinquish the lexical route when appropriate. The results also showed that poor readers were slightly better at visual discrimination but had poorer memory spans.

Achievement↗
PubMed1990

Parents' attitudes and the reading performance of their children.

A group of 60 children were given tests in reading performance, intelligence and personality while their parents were tested on personality, attitudes towards reading, and the frequency and duration of listening to their children reading. Factor analysis yielded two factors related to parental attitudes towards reading and their activities with their children as measured overtly and covertly, but these were not linked to the reading performance of the children. Instead, reading performance was linked to a morality variable in both the children and their parents. This suggested that there was a tendency for the poor readers and their parents to "fake good." This might account for the lack of association between reading performance and parental attitudes and activity in reading.

Achievement↗
PubMed1989

Developmental lag in reading in relation to physical growth and sex differences.

The relationship between physical growth and reading development was investigated using 200 children between 4 and 8 yr. of age. Boys of varied teeth maturity, controlling for age, IQ, class and physical height, varied significantly in their reading maturity. The same relationship was not found for girls.

Age Determination by Teeth↗
PubMed1984

The effects of visual and spatial interference on spatial working memory.

Baddeley and Lieberman (1980) have shown that processing within spatial working memory is disrupted by a spatial secondary task, but not significantly by a visual processing secondary task. In the present study their experiment was replicated under broadly similar circumstances. The spatial and verbal primary tasks involved remembering descriptions of spatially arranged or nonsense sequences of digits, respectively. The secondary visual and spatial tasks involved either judging the level of brightness or pressing an unseen matrix of buttons in a predetermined sequence. In contrast to the finding of Baddeley and Lieberman, both the visual and spatial secondary tasks significantly impaired spatial working memory. Neither of these secondary tasks significantly interfered with concurrent verbal processing. The present findings suggest that spatial working memory draws from resources from both visual and spatial quarters.

Adult↗
PubMed1980

Imaginal vs perceptual scanning of a visual representation.

Imaginal and perceptual scanning were compared to determine whether the reaction time function obtained during imaginal scanning in previous studies is analogous to what would happen in the perceptual situation. Subjects scanned arrays of four digits which were either imagined of physically present. Monotonic increases in reaction time as a function of distance were found in both cases. However, the zero intercept of the reaction times was significantly faster for the perceptual scanning group, probably due to the easier access to the loci. The over-all similarity in the results might suggest that a common structure is employed to represent information from imaginal and perceptual sources.

Distance Perception↗
PubMed1980

A comparison between listening to and shadowing a play for selective attention.

One of the problems associated with shadowing when studying selective attention is that the subject's own voice interferes with the other messages in the dichotic listening task. The present study compared shadowing with just listening to a play about which the subjects were questioned afterward. In the secondary channel subjects heard another play that had to be ignored. A digit monitoring task performed at the same time on both channels showed that virtually no digits could be monitored on the secondary channel during shadowing. Digit detection was much lower on the secondary channel compared with that on the primary channel for subjects listening to the primary channel, but listening produced higher digit detection rates on the primary channel compared with shadowing. The other main findings were first, that the number of digits detected on both channels by subjects listening to the play was inversely related to their performance on a comprehension test and second, that it was likely that for a proportion of the time, at least, listeners were listening to both messages simultaneously.

Adult↗
PubMed1979

Scanning visual images: implications for the representation of space.

This study investigated whether reaction time to detect an item within an image increases as a monotonic function of the relative or the absolute distance from the starting item to the probed item with the image. It was found that when relative probed distances were manipulated and absolute distances kept constant and, conversely, when absolute distances were manipulated and relative distances kept constant, reaction times were invariant across relative distance but increased as a function of increasing absolute distance. This result may be interpreted either in terms of operations within an imaginal representation or in terms of operations on propositional statements underlying the image.

Adult↗
PubMed1979

Image latency and recall as functions of array size.

A comparison of image latencies and recall as a function of increasing arrays of objects involved three groups of subjects listening to descriptions of arrangements of objects and responding when they had visualized each array as a whole. After each latency response, one group of subjects indicated if they had visualized all the objects, another group free recalled, and a third group had no additional task. A fourth group recalled the arrays immediately after the end of the description. Increasing array size, and hence the demands on the resources of the visual imagery system, produced a concomitant exponential-like deterioration in performance according to the latency and recall measures. However, the deterioration in recall only started above arrays of four objects compared with an increase in latencies across these array sizes; so the latency function is not produced by the unavailability of information, at least for smaller array sizes. The group who immediately recalled did not remember spatial positional information concerning the middle serial positions of six-object arrays as well as the group who underwent wholistic visualization prior to recall, indicating that the wholistic visualization process can facilitate the coding of spatial information.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1978

Visualization of compound scenes.

Subjects listened to descriptions of familiar objects and the spatial relations between them and attempted to visualize these objects as a composite scene. The time taken to generate a composite visual image, measured from the end of the verbal description, increased dramatically and linearly with the number of objects in the scene. As this relationship was independent of the rate of presentation of the verbal description, over a wide range, it could not be due to the visualization process cumulatively lagging behind the verbal description. Our evidence indicates that this relationship is due to some process, necessary to the subjective visualization of a composite array as a whole, which commences only after the verbal description is complete.

Female↗
PubMed1977

Effect of selective visual interference on visualization.

The extent of visual processing involved in visualizing objects was investigated by the use of selective visual interference. Subjects read concrete words and visualized them. This produced an approximately ten-fold increase in the slope of the latencies of wholistic visualization as a function of set size compared to that when subjects responded after listening to the descriptions of the objects. Males produced significantly steeper slopes than females in both listening and reading conditions, indicating that they find visualization more difficult. It is concluded that the interference on the visualization task was in the main disrupting active visual processing as no spatial manipulation of the objects was required.

Auditory Perception↗