Biomedical subjects

T Meulemans

Publications and source records attributed to T Meulemans.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed1999

Exploration of implicit artificial grammar learning in Parkinson's disease.

Parkinson's disease (PD) patients and matched control subjects were compared in an artificial grammar learning task, one of the main paradigms of implicit learning. The evaluation material was constructed in such a way that grammaticality judgements (classification task) made on the test strings could not be based on some superficial features of the learning strings: the grammatical and nongrammatical test strings did not differ according to different measures of chunk strength (based on the frequency with which their bigram and trigram components appear in the learning strings). Unknown to participants, two successive presentations of the set of test strings were allowed during the classification task. Results show that PD patients and controls performed at the same level during the first presentation of the test strings series, which suggests that the striatum is not (crucially) implicated in the ability to learn implicitly the complex conditional associations between elements present in a set of examples generated by a finite-state grammar. However, and contrary to control subjects, the classification performance of PD patients was at chance during the second presentation of the test strings. We argue that this latter result could be the consequence of the attentional deficit of PD patients.

Association Learning↗

PubMed1998

Implicit sequence learning in children.

The main purpose of the present study was to examine whether implicit learning abilities, assessed by means of a serial reaction time task, are present to the same extent in 6- and 10-year-old children as in adults. We also wondered whether the knowledge acquired after one learning session is retained after a 1-week delay. And finally, we studied the explicit knowledge developed by the children in this task. Our results show no age-related difference in the serial reaction time performance, which is consistent with the idea that implicit learning abilities may be efficient early in development.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1996

Anterior cingulate dysfunction in presenile dementia due to progressive supranuclear palsy.

We report neuropsychological and neuroimaging investigations performed in a patient suffering from presenile onset degenerative dementia and subsequent mild extrapyramidal and pyramidal signs. Early neuropsychological testing revealed frontal lobe dysfunction. Neuroanatomical pictures were not contributive. After four years of evolution, the clinical pattern was consistent with progressive supranuclear palsy. Statistical parametric mapping analysis of functional imaging revealed a highly significant metabolic impairment in the anterior cingulate gyrus, that might be a key feature of subcortico-frontal dementia in progressive supranuclear palsy.

Brain↗

PubMed1994

Acquisition of new concepts by two amnesic patients.

Two Korsakoff amnesics (A.G. and G.S.) and two control subjects were taught six new concepts. Each concept was composed of three parts: the name of the concept, the context in which the concept originated and its definition. The learning procedure consisted of two phases: (1) learning the concept names and definitions by means of the vanishing-cues method; (2) practice on examples of the concepts through a classification task: examples were either set in the same context as that given in the original definition or in mixed contexts (same and new contexts). Subjects were then tested after 24 hours, a week and a month on their ability to identify new examples as belonging to one of the conceptual rules studied (transfer tests). Both patients showed substantial learning. Patient A.G. was slow and dependent of the first letter cues in the vanishing-cues learning phase but nevertheless, she acquired a large and flexible conceptual knowledge and this was especially true for concepts that were practised by means of mixed-context examples. Patient G.S. easily learned to associate the definitions with the concept names but her conceptual knowledge remained more limited. These results confirm the existence of a semantic learning ability in amnesic patients. They also suggest that under appropriate learning conditions, amnesics may eventually acquire a new flexible conceptual knowledge.

Alcohol Amnestic Disorder↗