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Biomedical subjects

J R Hanley

Publications and source records attributed to J R Hanley.

31 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
PubMed1993

Detecting the faking of amnesia: performance differences between simulators and patients with memory impairment.

This study attempted to establish criteria for distinguishing patients with genuine memory problems from those who are attempting to simulate amnesia. The performance of simulators and genuine amnesics was compared under distraction conditions in which subjects had to count backwards between presentation and recall, and under no-distraction conditions in which the retention interval was unfilled. Genuine amnesics performed significantly worse than controls under distraction conditions, but did not perform significantly worse than controls under no-distraction conditions. However, those attempting to fake amnesia performed significantly worse than controls under no-distraction as well as under distraction conditions. They also exaggerated the memory deficit overall relative to genuine amnesics. It is suggested that these two criteria might be used successfully in clinical settings to assist in the detection of simulators.

Adult↗
PubMed1993

Access to visual information from a name is contingent on access to identity-specific semantic information.

In this study, we investigated subjects' ability to retrieve information about a familiar person's facial appearance in response to seeing their name. Each famous name was associated with one of four occupations (sport, music, politics, and acting) and one of four distinctive facial features (beard, long hair, glasses, baldness). Subjects were asked to state which occupation, and which facial feature was associated with each name. The most important finding was that subjects were generally only able to recall the distinctive facial feature that a person possessed if they were also able to recall their occupation. Recall of the person's occupation, by contrast, was not contingent on remembering the person's facial appearance. These results suggest that there are no direct links between the representation of a person's name in memory and visual information about their facial appearance. The link appears to be indirect, and to be mediated by non-visual semantic information about the person, such as their occupation. This conclusion was also supported by an examination of the effects of biographical cues on subjects' ability to recall facial information that they had previously failed to recall. In a second experiment, subjects were presented with biographical details about famous people, and were asked to retrieve information about their face and name. Retrieval of facial information did not appear to be contingent on recall of the name, nor did recall of the name appear to be contingent on retrieval of facial information. On the basis of the results, an hierarchical model of name recognition is presented which is analogous to current models of face recognition (e.g. Bruce & Young, 1986).

Adult↗
PubMed1992

The tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon: do experimenter-presented interlopers have any effect?

When a person is in a tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) state, they will sometimes recall a word that is similar in sound to the word they are attempting to retrieve. Woodworth (1929) argued that these interloper words both cause and sustain TOT states, whereas Brown and McNeill (1966) suggested that they are part of the process that leads to TOT resolution. Jones and Langford (1987) and Jones (1989) explicitly presented interloper words along with definitions of words that subjects were asked to recall. They reported that interlopers that were phonologically related to the target word increased the incidence of TOTs and concluded that this supported Woodworth's position. In three experiments, we adopted the interloper paradigm, but also included a control group who heard the definitions without interloper words. In Experiment 1, the definitions that Jones used with phonological interlopers created more TOTs even when no interlopers were presented. In Experiments 2a and 2b, we matched definitions for the number of TOTs they produced in the absence of interlopers. Under these circumstances we found no effect of interloper words at all. We conclude that there is no evidence from this paradigm to support the idea that interloper words are involved in either the causation or resolution of TOTs.

Adult↗
PubMed1992

Does letter-by-letter reading involve the spelling system?

Warrington and Shallice (Brain 103, 99-112, 1980) proposed that letter-by-letter readers can no longer access the visual word-form system, and read by using the spelling system 'in reverse'. Contrary to their suggestion, this paper presents the case of a letter-by-letter reader who appears to use quite different strategies in word reading and spelling. Reading and spelling are both impaired, but they appear to be impaired in different ways. Most strikingly, the patient's spelling errors consist largely of phonological regularizations--indeed there is little evidence that he has any lexical spelling knowledge available--whereas there are virtually no regularizations amongst his reading errors. These are largely visual paralexias and letter misidentifications. It is suggested that this pattern is more easily explained in terms of compensatory mechanisms that access the reading lexicon than by use of the spelling system 'in reverse'.

Adult↗
PubMed1992

Developmental surface dyslexia and dysgraphia: an orthographic processing impairment.

This study presents a detailed investigation of a young man in his early twenties who has suffered from a severe spelling impairment since childhood, and currently has a spelling age of only 9 years and 2 months. In contrast with the developmental phonological dyslexics reported by Campbell and Butterworth (1985) and Funnell and Davison (1989), his performance on tests of phonological awareness is good. In addition, he can read and spell non-words competently and, unlike normal 9-year-old children, virtually all of his spelling errors are phonologically appropriate. Further analysis of these errors reveals that he has knowledge of many of the different ways in which a given phoneme can be written, and that he uses phoneme-to-grapheme correspondences at the end of a word that are different from those he uses earlier in a word. However, he finds it difficult to spell words that contain uncommon phoneme-to-grapheme correspondences, which is compatible with the view that he has not developed an orthographic spelling lexicon. Although his oral reading of words is prompt and generally accurate, analysis of his lexical decision performance and the way that he defines homophones indicate that he does not have fully specified lexical entries available for reading either. We suggest that he suffers from a general orthographic processing deficit, and relies instead upon the combination of sub-lexical phonology and a lexicon that contains only partial information about the way in which words are spelt. This leads to reasonably competent reading, even of many irregular words, but produces very poor spelling. It is argued that qualitatively different types of developmental dyslexia do genuinely exist, but that reading impairments are likely to be much more pronounced in children who have a phonological rather than an orthographic processing deficit.

Adult↗
PubMed1991

Perception and memory for faces in Parkinson's disease.

This study investigated face processing abilities in patients with late-onset Parkinson's disease. In the first experiment, the Parkinson's disease patients were impaired on a recognition memory test for unfamiliar faces but showed no deficit relative to controls in recognition memory for words. The Parkinson's disease patients were also impaired at matching different photographs of unfamiliar faces. Experiment 2 revealed that the memory deficit affected recognition of familiar as well as unfamiliar faces and extended the face perception impairment to sex decisions and to the analysis of facial speech. An additional verbal recognition memory test again revealed no significant differences between the performance of the Parkinson's disease and control groups. It is argued that the memory impairment is not accountable for simply in terms of the perceptual deficits, and the problems that the patients experience are discussed in terms of the functional model of face processing put forward by Bruce and Young (Brit. J. Psychol. 77, 305-327, 1986).

Aged↗
PubMed1991

Impairment of the visuo-spatial sketch pad.

A case study is presented of a female patient, ELD, who has difficulty in the immediate recall of short sequences of visuo-spatial material following a right-hemisphere aneurysm. Despite poor performance on tasks such as the Brooks Matrix and the Corsi Blocks, ELD is good at the immediate serial recall of letters even when presentation modality is visual and shows effects of phonological similarity and articulatory suppression. This pattern of performance represents a double dissociation from that which has been observed with the short-term memory patient PV (Vallar & Baddeley, 1984), who is extremely poor at serial recall of verbal material but shows no visual memory impairment. It is argued that ELD has an impairment to the visuo-spatial component of working memory (Baddeley, 1986) in the absence of any phonological loop deficit. Further investigation reveals that ELD performs poorly on mental rotation tasks and finds it difficult to use imagery mnemonics, but has no difficulty in retrieving visuo-spatial information from long-term memory so long as it was learnt before her illness.

Attention↗
PubMed1990

Verbal fluency in Parkinson's disease.

This study compares the performance of Parkinson's disease patients with age-matched controls on semantic and letter-initial verbal fluency tests. An analysis of variance revealed that Parkinsonian patients showed impaired word production. However when the covariates of age, present verbal ability (Mill Hill Synonyms) and severity of depression (Geriatric Depression Screening Scale) were included in an analysis of covariance, the significant effect of Parkinson's disease on verbal fluency disappeared. Instead, age and present verbal ability were revealed to be the significant sources of between subject variation in total verbal fluency performance; results indicated that increased age and lower present verbal ability resulted in poorer performance on the verbal fluency tests. Depression score was not a significant source of between subject variation. The results are discussed in relation to those recently reported by Gurd and Ward (1989).

Aged↗
PubMed1990

Impaired memory for new visual forms.

A case study is presented of a female patient who has had impairment of visual recent memory following damage to the right cerebral hemisphere from rupture of a middle cerebral artery aneurysm. Her ability to remember unfamiliar faces is severely impaired in comparison with controls, as is her ability to identify the faces of celebrities who have become famous since the time of her illness in 1985. By contrast, she performs well on tests of recognition memory for words and has no problem in identifying celebrities from their names. She is also good at identifying faces of people who became famous before her illness. On tests of episodic memory, she continues to perform well at remembering familiar faces and objects, regardless of whether the test demands memory for which face/object was presented or memory for which view of a face/object was presented. Her poor memory for visual material is confined to unfamiliar faces and objects. Consequently, it is evident that she can learn new visual information so long as it relates to a familiar visual form; it is the learning of new visual forms that is impaired. A final experiment revealed that she is also poor at remembering unfamiliar voices. This raises the possibility that the basic deficit affects recent nonverbal memory and is not confined to the visual modality. Overall, the findings have important implications for the nature of recent visual memory loss, and for the way in which visual information is stored in memory.

Female↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Community organization to enhance the delivery of preventive health services.

Preventive health services are most effective when provided to large groups, but health care professionals often are limited to provision to individuals or small groups. As recent studies show, the effects of preventive services can be enhanced through the use of community organization, which mobilizes a community's energies and resources to define and address a problem in a way that promotes local ownership and generates increasing effects over time. We pragmatically adapt community organization for health care practitioners. There are three guiding principles: (1) the community of interest must be clearly defined; (2) existing community structures should be used to reach and stimulate community members; and (3) the organizer's role is temporary. We discuss four tactics of community organization: (1) use of community analysis to understand the community; (2) stimulation of community activity; (3) provision of concrete assistance to accomplish community change; and (4) reinforcement of structures that will remain to carry on the programs. Use of these community organization tactics will allow delivery of preventive health services in a way that promotes widespread and lasting effects.

Community Health Services↗
PubMedDate not supplied

In vivo overexpression of c-erbB-2 oncoprotein in xenografts of mice implanted with human colon cancer lines.

We have previously shown that c-erbB-2 oncoprotein encoded by the erbB-2 gene is overexpressed in human colorectal cancers that metastasis compared to those that are cured by surgery. To determine whether c-erbB-2 is also differentially expressed in vivo in metastasising and non-metastasising tumours, we developed models of colorectal cancer growth in nude mice. Human colon cancer cell lines, HCT116, KM12SM, LIM1215 and SW480, were injected into the caecum after characterising their morphology, doubling time, DNA flow-cytometry and expression of c-erbB-2. Six weeks later, xenografted tissues were fixed for histological analysis and detection of c-erbB-2 by immunohistochemistry, 78% (21/27) of mice developed caecal cancers. The caecal tumours derived from HCT116, KM12SM or LIM1215 were highly metastatic; 67 to 100% of them had liver metastases and lymph node involvement and 33 to 75% had lung tumours. Most of the tumours were c-erbB-2-positive. In contrast SW480 caecal tumours had only 33% lymph node involvement, but not liver or lung metastases. Only one SW480 caecal tumour and one lymph node metastasis expressed c-erbB-2. C-erB-2 was more frequently expressed in xenografted tissues in colon cancer primaries and secondaries of the highly metastatic cells (HCT116, KM12SM and LIM1215) compared to the cells (SW480) giving predominantly local growth. Our results suggest that c-erbB-2 gene may play an important role in the development of metastasis from colorectal cancer.

Animals↗