Biomedical subjects

M E Faust

Publications and source records attributed to M E Faust.

11 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2001

Building episodic connections: changes in episodic priming with age and dementia.

Previous studies of associative encoding that used explicit retrieval tasks have shown both age- and dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT)-related declines, but such results may be biased by group differences in explicit retrieval. In the present experiment, the authors assessed implicit associative encoding for 25 younger adults (ages 18-25), 73 healthy older adults (ages 59-91), and 65 adults with DAT (ages 59-91) during a speeded word-naming task using an episodic priming measure. Episodic priming refers to the facilitation in responding to a target word after repetition of both words in a prime-target pair, in comparison with simple repetition of the target word with a new prime on each presentation. In contrast with other studies of implicit associative encoding that did not use an implicit episodic priming measure, the present study found both age- and DAT-related declines in associative encoding under conditions of massed learning trials.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2000

Levels of selective attention revealed through analyses of response time distributions.

The present research examines the nature of the interference effects in a number of selective attention tasks. All of these tasks result in interference in performance by presenting information that is irrelevant to task performance but competes for selection. The interference from this competing information slows the response time (RT) of participants relative to a condition where the competition is minimized. The authors use a convolution of an exponential and a Gaussian (ex-Gaussian) distribution to examine the influence of interference on the characteristics of RT distributions. Consistent with previous research, the authors show that interference in the Stroop task is reflected by both the Gaussian and exponential portions of the ex-Gaussian. In contrast, in 4 experiments they show that several other interference tasks evidence interference that is reflected only in the Gaussian portion of the ex-Gaussian distribution. The authors suggest that these differences reflect the operation of different selection mechanisms, and they examine how sequential sampling models accommodate these effects.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1999

Individual differences in information-processing rate and amount: implications for group differences in response latency.

Research on group differences in response latency often has as its goal the detection of Group x Treatment interactions. However, accumulating evidence suggests that response latencies for different groups are often linearly related, leading to an increased likelihood of finding spurious overadditive interactions in which the slower group produces a larger treatment effect. The authors propose a rate-amount model that predicts linear relationships between individuals and that includes global processing parameters based on large-scale group differences in information processing. These global processing parameters may be used to linearly transform response latencies from different individuals to a common information-processing scale so that small-scale group differences in information processing may be isolated. The authors recommend linear regression and z-score transformations that may be used to augment traditional analyses of raw response latencies.

Adult↗

PubMed1998

Explorations of Cohen, Dunbar, and McClelland's (1990) connectionist model of Stroop performance.

The J. D. Cohen, K. Dunbar, and J. L. McClelland (1990) model of Stroop task performance is used to model data from a study by D. H. Spielder, D. A. Balota, and M. E. Faust (1996). The results indicate that the model fails to capture overall differences between word reading and color naming latencies when set size is increased beyond 2 response alternatives. Further empirical evidence is presented that suggests that the influence of increasing response set size in Stroop task performance is to increase the difference between overall color naming and word reading, which is in direct opposition to the decrease produced by the Cohen et al. architecture. Although the Cohen et al. model provides a useful description of meaning-level interference effects, the qualitative differences between word reading and color naming preclude a model that uses identical architectures for each process, such as that of Cohen et al., to fully capture performance in the Stroop task.

Aged↗

PubMed1997

Inhibitory control during sentence comprehension in individuals with dementia of the Alzheimer type.

In two experiments we investigated the extent to which individuals with dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT) manage the activation of contextually appropriate and inappropriate meanings of ambiguous words during sentence comprehension. DAT individuals and healthy older individuals read sentences that ended in ambiguous words and then determined if a test word fit the overall meaning of the sentence. Analysis of response latencies indicated that DAT individuals were less efficient than healthy older individuals at suppressing inappropriate meanings of ambiguous words not implied by sentence context, but enhanced appropriate meanings to the same extent, if not more, than healthy older adults. DAT individuals were also more likely to allow inappropriate information to actually drive responses (i.e., increased intrusion errors). Overall, the results are consistent with a growing number of studies demonstrating impairments in inhibitory control, with relative preservation of facilitatory processes, in DAT.

Aged↗

PubMed1997

Inhibition of return and visuospatial attention in healthy older adults and individuals with dementia of the Alzheimer type.

Covert orienting of visuospatial attention in response to peripherally presented cues was assessed in healthy younger and older adults and those with dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT) during a simple detection task. The results yield both an age-related increase (Experiments 1 and 2) and a DAT-related increase (Experiment 2) in the facilitatory effect of a single peripheral cue on detection. By contrast, equivalent inhibition of return (i.e., a slowing of target detection at previously cued locations) was observed for all 3 groups when a 2nd cue was presented at central fixation. Results suggest that both healthy older adults and individuals with DAT experience changes in the posterior attention system thought to subserve visuospatial attention. Results also suggest limitations on the generality of inhibitory deficits in healthy aging and DAT.

Adult↗

PubMed1996

Cerebral mechanisms for suppression of inappropriate information during sentence comprehension.

In two experiments we investigated the extent to which interference from contextually inappropriate information was attenuated or suppressed over time in the two cerebral hemispheres during sentence comprehension. Subjects viewed centrally presented sentences ending in either a homophone or a homograph and made speeded judgments as to whether a laterally presented test word was related to the overall meaning of the sentence. Suppression of contextually inappropriate forms of homophones was found when test words were presented to either hemifield, but suppression of inappropriate senses of homographs was found only when test words were presented to the right visual hemifield. The results from the homograph experiment are consistent with the hypothesis that right and left hemisphere semantic selection systems operate in qualitatively different ways. The results from the homophone experiment suggest that while the left hemisphere may be more efficient at suppression, both hemispheres possess the ability to suppress inappropriate information to some degree.

Brain↗

PubMed1996

Stroop performance in healthy younger and older adults and in individuals with dementia of the Alzheimer's type.

Components of the Stroop task were examined to investigate the role that inhibitory processes play in cognitive changes in healthy older adults and in individuals with dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT). Inhibitory breakdowns should result in an increase in Stroop interference. The results indicate that older adults show a disproportionate increase in interference compared with younger adults. DAT individuals show interference proportionate to older adults but a disproportionate increase in facilitation for congruent color-word trials, and an increased intrusion of word naming on incongruent color naming trials. An ex-Gaussian analysis of response time distributions indicated that the increased interference observed in older adults was due to an increase in the tail of the distribution. Application of the process dissociation analysis of the Stroop task (D.S. Lindsay & L.L. Jacoby, 1994) indicated that older adults showed increased word process estimates, whereas DAT individuals showed differences in both color and word process estimates. Taken together, the results are consistent with an inhibitory breakdown in normal aging and an accelerated breakdown in inhibition in DAT individuals.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1993

Evidence for identity inhibition during selective attention in old adults.

Previous studies of negative priming have shown that, relative to young adults, old adults can effectively suppress location information associated with stimuli, but not information about the identity of stimuli. S.L. Connelly and L. Hasher (1993) attributed this dissociation to an age-related decrement in the inhibitory processes that suppress meaning-bearing information. In this study, the authors report both identity negative priming and distractor interference in a group of young and old adults. Their results force a reconsideration of an age-related decrement in the inhibitory processes underlying the suppression of meaning-bearing information. The results also suggest that whether a relationship between negative priming and interference is observed may depend on whether the 2 measures index the same level of processing.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1991

The mechanism of suppression: a component of general comprehension skill.

We investigated whether the cognitive mechanism of suppression underlies differences in adult comprehension skill. Less skilled comprehenders reject less efficiently the inappropriate meanings of ambiguous words (e.g., the playing card vs. garden tool meaning of spade), the incorrect forms of homophones (e.g., patients vs. patience), the highly typical but absent members of scenes (e.g., a tractor in a farm scene), and words superimposed on pictures or pictures surrounding words. However, less skilled comprehenders are not less cognizant of what is contextually appropriate; in fact, they benefit from a biasing context just as much (and perhaps more) as more skilled comprehenders do. Thus, less skilled comprehenders do not have difficulty enhancing contextually appropriate information. Instead, we suggest that less skilled comprehenders suffer from a less efficient suppression mechanism, which we conclude is an important component of general comprehension skill.

Attention↗

PubMed1990

Investigating differences in general comprehension skill.

For adults, skill at comprehending written language correlates highly with skill at comprehending spoken language. Does this general comprehension skill extend beyond language-based modalities? And if it does, what cognitive processes and mechanisms differentiate individuals who are more versus less proficient in general comprehension skill? In our first experiment, we found that skill in comprehending written and auditory stories correlates highly with skill in comprehending nonverbal, picture stories. This finding supports the hypothesis that general comprehension skill extends beyond language. We also found support for the hypotheses that poorer access to recently comprehended information marks less proficient general comprehension skill (Experiment 2) because less skilled comprehenders develop too many mental substructures during comprehension (Experiment 3), perhaps because they inefficiently suppress irrelevant information (Experiment 4). Thus, the cognitive processes and mechanisms involved in capturing and representing the structure of comprehensible information provide one source of individual differences in general comprehension skill.

Attention↗