Biomedical subjects

Marieke Saher

Publications and source records attributed to Marieke Saher.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Attitudes towards genetically modified and organic foods.

Finnish students (N=3261) filled out a questionnaire on attitudes towards genetically modified and organic food, plus the rational-experiential inventory, the magical thinking about food and health scale, Schwartz's value survey and the behavioural inhibition scale. In addition, they reported their eating of meat. Structural equation modelling of these measures had greater explanatory power for attitudes towards genetically modified (GM) foods than for attitudes towards organic foods (OF). GM attitudes were best predicted by natural science education and magical food and health beliefs, which mediated the influence of thinking styles. Positive attitudes towards organic food, on the other hand, were more directly related to such individual differences as thinking styles and set of values. The results of the study indicate that OF attitudes are rooted in more fundamental personal attributes than GM attitudes, which are embedded in a more complex but also in a more modifiable network of characteristics.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2004

Impressions of functional food consumers.

Functional foods provide a new way of expressing healthiness in food choices. The objective of this study was to apply an indirect measure to explore what kind of impressions people form of users of functional foods. Respondents (n=350) received one of eight versions of a shopping list and rated the buyer of the foods on 66 bipolar attributes on 7-point scales. The shopping lists had either healthy or neutral background items, conventional or functional target items and the buyer was described either as a 40-year-old woman or man. The attribute ratings revealed three factors: disciplined, innovative and gentle. Buyers with healthy background items were perceived as more disciplined than those having neutral items on the list, users of functional foods were rated as more disciplined than users of conventional target items only when the background list consisted of neutral items. Buyers of functional foods were regarded as more innovative and less gentle, but gender affected the ratings on gentle dimension. The impressions of functional food users clearly differ from those formed of users of conventional foods with a healthy image. The shopping list method performed well as an indirect method, but further studies are required to test its feasibility in measuring other food-related impressions.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2004

Long-term exposure to noise impairs cortical sound processing and attention control.

Long-term exposure to noise impairs human health, causing pathological changes in the inner ear as well as other anatomical and physiological deficits. Numerous individuals are daily exposed to excessive noise. However, there is a lack of systematic research on the effects of noise on cortical function. Here we report data showing that long-term exposure to noise has a persistent effect on central auditory processing and leads to concurrent behavioral deficits. We found that speech-sound discrimination was impaired in noise-exposed individuals, as indicated by behavioral responses and the mismatch negativity brain response. Furthermore, irrelevant sounds increased the distractibility of the noise-exposed subjects, which was shown by increased interference in task performance and aberrant brain responses. These results demonstrate that long-term exposure to noise has long-lasting detrimental effects on central auditory processing and attention control.

Adult↗

PubMed2002

Temporal integration: intentional sound discrimination does not modulate stimulus-driven processes in auditory event synthesis.

OBJECTIVE: Our previous study showed that the auditory context could influence whether two successive acoustic changes occurring within the temporal integration window (approximately 200ms) were pre-attentively encoded as a single auditory event or as two discrete events (Cogn Brain Res 12 (2001) 431). The aim of the current study was to assess whether top-down processes could influence the stimulus-driven processes in determining what constitutes an auditory event. METHODS: Electroencepholagram (EEG) was recorded from 11 scalp electrodes to frequently occurring standard and infrequently occurring deviant sounds. Within the stimulus blocks, deviants either occurred only in pairs (successive feature changes) or both singly and in pairs. Event-related potential indices of change and target detection, the mismatch negativity (MMN) and the N2b component, respectively, were compared with the simultaneously measured performance in discriminating the deviants. RESULTS: Even though subjects could voluntarily distinguish the two successive auditory feature changes from each other, which was also indicated by the elicitation of the N2b target-detection response, top-down processes did not modify the event organization reflected by the MMN response. CONCLUSIONS: Top-down processes can extract elemental auditory information from a single integrated acoustic event, but the extraction occurs at a later processing stage than the one whose outcome is indexed by MMN. SIGNIFICANCE: Initial processes of auditory event-formation are fully governed by the context within which the sounds occur. Perception of the deviants as two separate sound events (the top-down effects) did not change the initial neural representation of the same deviants as one event (indexed by the MMN), without a corresponding change in the stimulus-driven sound organization.

Acoustic Stimulation↗