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PubMed1996

Seriation, conservation, and theory of mind abilities in individuals with autism, individuals with mental retardation, and normally developing children.

Seriation, conservation, and theory of mind abilities were examined in individuals with autism (N = 16), mental retardation (N = 16), and in normally developing children (N = 16). Seriation tasks included seriation of tubes, blocks, and flat squares. Conservation tasks included conservation of area, number, substance, quantity, and weight. Theory of mind tasks involved predicting false belief and understanding value and fact beliefs. Participants with autism performed better than participants with mental retardation on seriation, while no differences emerged between these groups on conservation and false belief. Individuals with autism performed less well than individuals with mental retardation on the value and fact belief tasks; however, when verbal ability was held as a covariant, the difference was no longer significant. Normally developing children performed better than the other two groups on all tasks. These results suggest that autism does not involve a specific impairment in theory of mind and that theory of mind deficits are not unique to autism.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1996

Learning and memory for hierarchical relationships in the monkey: effects of aging.

Young and aged rhesus monkeys were tested on 2 versions of a transitive inference task measuring learning and memory for hierarchical relationships. Animals initially acquired 4 object discrimination problems arranged such that the relationship between the stimuli followed the hierarchy A > B > C > D > E. The second version of the task was similar but involved a series of 7 objects. Learning and memory for the hierarchical relationships were evaluated during probe trials in which novel pairs of nonadjacent items (e.g., B and D) were presented for a response. Standard task accuracy measures failed to distinguish young and aged subjects at any point in training. In contrast, response latency effects that are indicative of relational information processing in young monkeys were entirely absent in aged subjects. The findings highlight the value of a relational memory framework for establishing a detailed neuropsychological account of cognitive aging in the monkey.

Aging↗
PubMed2001

Influence of centrality and distinctiveness of actions on script sorting and ordering in patients with frontal lobe lesions.

In order to further investigate script knowledge in patients with frontal lobe lesions (FP), 30 participants with frontal brain damage, 14 controls with posterior brain damage (PC) and 30 normal controls (NC) were asked to sort script actions with various degrees of centrality and distinctiveness according to the script to which they belonged and their order of execution. Actions were given in 3 conditions: scripts with headers (SH), scripts without headers (SwH) and scripts with distractor header (SDH). Results confirmed the dual dissociation we observed in a previous study (Allain, Le Gall, Etcharry-Bouyx, Aubin, & Emile, 1999). Twelve FP made numerous errors in sequencing actions regardless of the conditions, but rejected the irrelevant title. Fourteen FP made few sequencing errors but used the irrelevant title. The last 4 FP performed as well as the PC and NC in every condition. Sorting errors made by the FP mainly concerned actions with low levels of centrality and distinctiveness. These data are consistent with the view that frontal lobe lesions selectively impair the syntactic component of script representation without affecting its semantic component.

Adult↗
PubMed2001

Temporal order and processing acuity of visual, auditory, and tactile perception in developmentally dyslexic young adults.

We studied the temporal acuity of 16 developmentally dyslexic young adults in three perceptual modalities. The control group consisted of 16 age- and IQ-matched normal readers. Two methods were used. In the temporal order judgment (TOJ) method, the stimuli were spatially separate fingertip indentations in the tactile system, tone bursts of different pitches in audition, and light flashes in vision. Participants indicated which one of two stimuli appeared first. To test temporal processing acuity (TPA), the same 8-msec nonspeech stimuli were presented as two parallel sequences of three stimulus pulses. Participants indicated, without order judgments, whether the pulses of the two sequences were simultaneous or nonsimultaneous. The dyslexic readers were somewhat inferior to the normal readers in all six temporal acuity tasks on average. Thus, our results agreed with the existence of a pansensory temporal processing deficit associated with dyslexia in a language with shallow orthography (Finnish) and in well-educated adults. The dyslexic and normal readers' temporal acuities overlapped so much, however, that acuity deficits alone would not allow dyslexia diagnoses. It was irrelevant whether or not the acuity task required order judgments. The groups did not differ in the nontemporal aspects of our experiments. Correlations between temporal acuity and reading-related tasks suggested that temporal acuity is associated with phonological awareness.

Adult↗
PubMed2001

Can sequence learning be implicit? New evidence with the process dissociation procedure.

Can we learn without awareness? Although this issue has been extensively explored through studies of implicit learning, there is currently no agreement about the extent to which knowledge can be acquired and projected onto performance in an unconscious way. The controversy, like that surrounding implicit memory, seems to be at least in part attributable to unquestioned acceptance of the unrealistic assumption that tasks are process-pure--that is, that a given task exclusively involves either implicit or explicit knowledge. Methods such as the process dissociation procedure (PDP, Jacoby, 1991) have been developed to overcome the conceptual limitations of the process purity assumption but have seldom been used in the context of implicit learning research. In this paper, we show how the PDP can be applied to a free generation task so as to disentangle explicit and implicit sequence learning. Our results indicate that subjects who are denied preparation to the next stimulus nevertheless exhibit knowledge of the sequence through their reaction time performance despite remaining unable (1) to project this knowledge in a recognition task and (2) to refrain from expressing their knowledge when specifically instructed to do so. These findings provide strong evidence that sequence learning can be unconscious.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2002

Efficiency of temporal order discrimination as an indicator of bradyphrenia in Parkinson's disease: the inspection time loop task.

To investigate the bradyphrenia hypothesis of Parkinson's disease (PD), 32 patients undertook an information-processing task which measured their efficiency of temporal order discrimination. Their performance was compared with 31 non-PD controls matched on age, sex, years of full-time education and pre-morbid IQ. The task was novel and designed to be sensitive to the clinical phenomenon of bradyphrenia (slowing of mental abilities), in the context of temporal order discrimination without confounding from motor ability deficits. The test (the inspection time loop task; ITloop) required judgements as to the temporal sequence of four single letters. The stimulus duration of the letters in each sequence ranged from 100 to 700ms. The PD group had a significantly lower mean score on the ITloop task than did controls (P=0.02). PD patients perform more poorly on temporal order discrimination judgements even when the task makes no motor demands.

Aged↗
PubMed2001

Higher order sequential effects in psychophysical judgments.

We found that the depth of sequential effects depends on the judgment task. An experiment with squares indicated that stimulus-response pairs up to two trials back were included in the judgment process when subjects were required to make category judgments of size, whereas only the immediately preceding event was incorporated when subjects were making magnitude estimations. In the case of category judgment, interactions between the current stimulus and prior stimuli as well as configural effects indicated that events one and two trials back meet an equivalent function in the judgment process and that these events may jointly operate in one trial. These findings can be explained by a class of models that assume that the position of preceding stimuli relative to the current stimulus is decisive in the judgment process. The multiple-standards model is a representative of this class according to which there are two types of standards: (1) the endpoints of the range as long-term standards and (2) traces of preceding stimuli as short-term standards.

Adult↗
PubMed1991

The effects of alcohol on learning as a function of drinking habits.

Thirty-six subjects were categorized as light social drinkers (LSD) and 36 as heavy social drinkers (HSD) on the basis of both biological criteria, gamma-glutamyl transferase (GGT) and the mean corpuscular volume (MCV) and by self-reports of drinking habits. This study examined the effects of alcohol (0.7 ml/kg) and of noise (75 dB(A] on learning and performance, in choice RT and in immediate memory tasks. Each subject was tested in two consecutive sessions (the time factor) under one of the following experimental conditions: (a) silence + placebo; (b) silence + alcohol; (c) noise + placebo; and (d) noise + alcohol. On immediate memory, there was a strong effect of time which interacted with 'drinker' category, suggesting that HSD subjects learn less rapidly than LSD. Time interacted also with state (sober or intoxicated), showing that learning might be impaired even by a moderate dose of alcohol. On the reaction time task no main effects were found but the time X drinker category interaction was significant; in session 1 LSD's RT were shorter than those of HSD. It is suggested that regular heavy drinking might affect the learning abilities of those who are not yet labelled as alcoholics.

Adult↗
PubMed2001

Cortisol differentially affects memory in young and elderly men.

Nine young and 11 elderly men participated in this placebo-controlled, double-blind, crossover study (0.5 mg/kg cortisol or intravenous placebo). Participants learned a word list before cortisol administration, and delayed recall was then tested. A 2nd word list was learned and recalled after drug administration. In addition, the Paragraph Recall Test and tests measuring working memory (Digit Span), attention (timed cancellation), and response inhibition (Stroop Color and Word Test) were administered at 2 time points after drug administration. Cortisol reduced recall from the word list learned before treatment in both groups but did not influence recall of the list learned after treatment. In contrast, Digit Span performance was decreased by cortisol in young but not elderly participants. The possibility that differential age-associated brain changes might underlie the present results is discussed.

Adult↗
PubMed1992

Effects of cocaine and alcohol, alone and in combination, on human learning and performance.

The acute effects of cocaine hydrochloride (4 to 96 mg/70 kg) and alcohol (0 to 1.0 g/kg), administered alone and in combination, were assessed in two experiments with human volunteers responding under a multiple schedule of repeated acquisition and performance of response chains. Subjects were intermittent users of cocaine and regular drinkers who were not cocaine or alcohol dependent. Alcohol was mixed with orange juice and ingested in six drinks within 30 min; cocaine was administered intranasally 45 min after completion of drinking. In each component of the multiple schedule, subjects completed response sequences using three keys of a numeric keypad. In the acquisition component, a new sequence was learned each session. In the performance component, the response sequence always remained the same. Results were consistent in both experiments, despite variations in the order in which the drugs were tested alone and in combination. Alcohol administered alone increased overall percentage of errors and decreased rates of responding in the acquisition component, whereas responding in the performance component generally was unaffected. Cocaine administered alone decreased rates of responding but did not affect accuracy of responding in the acquisition component, and enhanced accuracy of responding without affecting rates of responding in the performance component. The combined doses of cocaine and alcohol attenuated the effects observed with alcohol and cocaine alone. These results suggest that, under the conditions investigated in this study, (a) alcohol produces greater behavioral disruption than cocaine or cocaine-alcohol combinations, (b) cocaine and alcohol each attenuate effects of the other, and (c) such attenuation is most pronounced for cocaine attenuating the disruptive effects of alcohol.

Adult↗
PubMed1993

Anarthria impairs subvocal counting.

We studied subvocal counting in two pure anarthric patients. Analysis showed that they performed definitively worse than normal subjects free to articulate subvocally and their scores were in the lower bounds of the performances of subjects suppressing articulation. These results suggest that subvocal counting is impaired after anarthria.

Adult↗
PubMed1976

Blocking of stimuli and the free recall and subjective organization of EMR adolescents.

Number of unrelated stimulus items presented consistently and spatially grouped (1, 3, or 5) was studied in a multitrial free recall experiment with EMR adolescents. This blocking was effective in (a) improving recall from recently presented items, (b) increasing subjective organization, and (c) leading to the formation of stable clusterable output groups. Some evidence suggested that overall recall also increased as a result of the consistent and simultaneous presentation. Discussion of the results emphasized that for a retarded population the relationship between organization and recall may not be strong unless intensive strategy training is employed.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1977

Neurophysiological aspects and learning processes in schizophrenic patients.

Two groups of schizophrenic patients (acute and chronic subjects) were observed in order to study possible differences in neuropsychological performances and their relationship with symptomatology. 16 acute and 16 chronic patients, aged 18 to 35 years were tested with a battery of neuropsychological tests (Word Association Test, Serial Verbal Learning, Weigl's test, Simple Reaction Times, Choice Continuous Reaction Time). Clinical profiles were evaluated by means of MMPI and WAIS (Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale). Findings concerning cognitive processes show no significant differences between the two groups. Results suggest a correlation between clinical profiles and performances in acute patients, whereas in chronic subjects this correlation seems markedly reduced. Finally, chronicity (i.e. the length of illness) does not seem so be an important factor in determining consistent defects in neuropsychological performances.

Acute Disease↗
PubMed1995

Long-term recall of event sequences in infancy.

The first experiment shows that 11-month-olds can encode novel causal events from a brief period of observational learning, and recall much of the information after 24 h. The second experiment, using both a longitudinal and a cross-sectional design, shows recall of the same events after a delay of 3 months. The infants remembered more individual actions than whole sequences, but reproduced many of the events in their entirety (and always in correct order) after the long delay. Although they also reproduced arbitrarily ordered events immediately after being shown them at 11 months, they began to forget them after 24 h and showed essentially no recall for this type of event after 3 months. The experiments not only indicate long-lasting memory for briefly experienced events in infancy, they also suggest that the factors that organize recall at this young age are similar to those found in older children and adults.

Association Learning↗
PubMed2003

Evidence against response bias in temporal order tasks with attention manipulation by masked primes.

Attending to a location shortens the perceptual latency of stimuli appearing at this location (perceptual latency priming). According to attentional explanations, perceptual latency priming relies on the speeded transfer of attended visual information into an internal model. However, doubts about the attentional origin have repeatedly been raised because efforts to minimize response bias have been insufficient in most studies. Five experiments investigated the contribution of a response bias to perceptual latency priming (judgment bias due to the two-alternative forced-choice method and due to the existence of the prime, criterion effects or second-order bias, sensorimotor priming). If any, only small response biases were found. The results thus support the attentional explanation.

Adult↗