Recognition of faces and Greebles in 3-month-old infants: Influence of temperament and cognitive abilities

2011 ◽  
Vol 35 (5) ◽  
pp. 432-440 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sibylle M. Spangler ◽  
Claudia Freitag ◽  
Gudrun Schwarzer ◽  
Marc Vierhaus ◽  
Manuel Teubert ◽  
...  

The aim of the present study was to investigate whether temperament and cognitive abilities are related to recognition performance of Caucasian and African faces and of a nonfacial stimulus class, Greebles. Seventy Caucasian infants were tested at 3 months with a habituation/dishabituation paradigm and their temperament and cognitive abilities were measured. Analyses revealed that only infants with easy temperament recognized familiar Greebles from the habituation phase. A similar pattern was found for cognitive abilities showing that only infants with higher cognitive abilities recognized Greebles. Irrespectively of temperament and cognitive abilities, all infants recognized the faces. Thus, the data suggest that recognition of unfamiliar Greebles, but not of faces, is demanding for 3-month-old infants with difficult temperament or lower cognitive abilities.

1998 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 449-473 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helmut Leder ◽  
Vicki Bruce

Distinctiveness contributes strongly to the recognition and rejection of faces in memory tasks. In four experiments we examine the role played by local and relational information in the distinctiveness of upright and inverted faces. In all experiments subjects saw one of three versions of a face: original faces, which had been rated as average in distinctiveness in a previous study (Hancock, Burton, & Bruce, 1996), a more distinctive version in which local features had been changed ( D-local), and a more distinctive version in which relational features had been changed ( D-rel). An increase in distinctiveness was found for D-local and D-rel faces in Experiment 1 (complete faces) and 3 and 4 (face internals only) when the faces had to be rated in upright presentation, but the distinctiveness of the D-rel faces was reduced much more than that of the D-local versions when the ratings were given to the faces presented upside-down (Experiments 1 and 3). Recognition performance showed a similar pattern: presented upright, both D-local and D-rel revealed higher performance compared to the originals, but in upside-down presentation the D-local versions showed a much stronger distinctiveness advantage. When only internal features of faces were used (Experiments 3 and 4), the D-rel faces lost their advantage over the Original versions in inverted presentation. The results suggest that at least two dimensions of facial information contribute to a face's apparent distinctiveness, but that these sources of information are differentially affected by turning the face upside-down. These findings are in accordance with a face processing model in which face inversion effects occur because a specific type of information processing is disrupted, rather than because of a general disruption of performance.


2020 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 233121652096060
Author(s):  
Anna R. Tinnemore ◽  
Sandra Gordon-Salant ◽  
Matthew J. Goupell

Speech recognition in complex environments involves focusing on the most relevant speech signal while ignoring distractions. Difficulties can arise due to the incoming signal’s characteristics (e.g., accented pronunciation, background noise, distortion) or the listener’s characteristics (e.g., hearing loss, advancing age, cognitive abilities). Listeners who use cochlear implants (CIs) must overcome these difficulties while listening to an impoverished version of the signals available to listeners with normal hearing (NH). In the real world, listeners often attempt tasks concurrent with, but unrelated to, speech recognition. This study sought to reveal the effects of visual distraction and performing a simultaneous visual task on audiovisual speech recognition. Two groups, those with CIs and those with NH listening to vocoded speech, were presented videos of unaccented and accented talkers with and without visual distractions, and with a secondary task. It was hypothesized that, compared with those with NH, listeners with CIs would be less influenced by visual distraction or a secondary visual task because their prolonged reliance on visual cues to aid auditory perception improves the ability to suppress irrelevant information. Results showed that visual distractions alone did not significantly decrease speech recognition performance for either group, but adding a secondary task did. Speech recognition was significantly poorer for accented compared with unaccented speech, and this difference was greater for CI listeners. These results suggest that speech recognition performance is likely more dependent on incoming signal characteristics than a difference in adaptive strategies for managing distractions between those who listen with and without a CI.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lianne Atkinson ◽  
Janice E. Murray ◽  
Jamin Halberstadt

Eliciting negative stereotypes about ageing commonly results in worse performance on many physical, memory, and cognitive tasks in adults aged over 65. The current studies explored the potential effect of this “stereotype threat” phenomenon on older adults’ emotion recognition, a cognitive ability that has been demonstrated to decline with age. In Study 1, stereotypes about emotion recognition ability across the lifespan were established. In Study 2, these stereotypes were utilised in a stereotype threat manipulation that framed an emotion recognition task as assessing either cognitive ability (stereotypically believed to worsen with age), social ability (believed to be stable across lifespan), or general abilities (control). Participants then completed an emotion recognition task in which they labelled dynamic expressions of negative and positive emotions. Self-reported threat concerns were also measured. Framing an emotion recognition task as assessing cognitive ability significantly heightened older adults’ (but not younger adults’) reports of stereotype threat concerns. Despite this, older adults’ emotion recognition performance was unaffected. Unlike other cognitive abilities, recognising facially expressed emotions may be unaffected by stereotype threat, possibly because emotion recognition is automatic, making it less susceptible to the cognitive load that stereotype threat produces.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-149
Author(s):  
Jingjing Xu ◽  
Robyn M. Cox

Recent research has established a connection between hearing aid (HA) users’ cognition and speech recognition performance with short and long compression release times (RT). Contradictive findings prevent researchers from using cognition to predict RT prescription. We hypothesized that the linguistic context of speech recognition test materials was one of the factors that accounted for the inconsistency. The present study was designed to examine the relationship between HA users’ cognition and their aided speech recognition performance with short and long RTs using materials with various linguistic contexts. Thirty-four older HA users’ cognitive abilities were quantified using a reading span test. They were fitted with behind-the-ear style HAs with adjustable RT settings. Three speech recognition tests were used: the word-in-noise (WIN) test, the American four alternative auditory feature (AFAAF) test, and the Bamford-Kowal-Bench speech-in-noise (BKB-SIN) test. The results showed that HA users with high cognitive abilities performed better on the AFAAF and the BKB-SIN than those with low cognitive abilities when using short RT. None of the speech recognition tests produced significantly different performance between the two RTs for either cognitive group. These findings did not support our hypothesis. The results suggest that cognition might not be important in prescribing RT.


2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 191-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samantha D. Jansen ◽  
Joseph R. Keebler ◽  
Alex Chaparro

Listeners attempting to understand speech in noisy environments rely on visual and auditory processes, typically referred to as audiovisual processing. Noise corrupts the auditory speech signal and listeners naturally leverage visual cues from the talker’s face in an attempt to interpret the degraded auditory signal. Studies of speech intelligibility in noise show that the maximum improvement in speech recognition performance (i.e., maximum visual enhancement or VEmax), derived from seeing an interlocutor’s face, is invariant with age. Several studies have reported that VEmaxis typically associated with a signal-to-noise (SNR) of −12 dB; however, few studies have systematically investigated whether the SNR associated with VEmaxchanges with age. We investigated if VEmaxchanges as a function of age, whether the SNR at VEmaxchanges as a function of age, and what perceptual/cognitive abilities account for or mediate such relationships. We measured VEmaxon a nongeriatric adult sample () ranging in age from 20 to 59 years old. We found that VEmaxwas age-invariant, replicating earlier studies. No perceptual/cognitive measures predicted VEmax, most likely due to limited variance in VEmaxscores. Importantly, we found that the SNR at VEmaxshifts toward higher (quieter) SNR levels with increasing age; however, this relationship is partially mediated by working memory capacity, where those with larger working memory capacities (WMCs) can identify speech under lower (louder) SNR levels than their age equivalents with smaller WMCs. The current study is the first to report that individual differences in WMC partially mediate the age-related shift in SNR at VEmax.


Author(s):  
Bonnie M. Perdue ◽  
Andrew J. Kelly ◽  
Michael J. Beran

There are many parallels between human and nonhuman animal cognitive abilities, suggesting an evolutionary basis for many forms of cognition, including memory. For instance, past research found that two chimpanzees exhibited an isolation effect, or improved memory for semantically distinctive items on a list (Beran, 2011). These results support the notion that chimpanzees are capable of semantic, relational processing in memory, and introduce the possibility that other effects observed in humans, such as distinctiveness effects or false memories, may be present in nonhuman species. The Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm is a commonly used task to explore these phenomena, and it was adapted for use with chimpanzees. We tested four chimpanzees for isolation effects during encoding, distinctiveness effects during recognition, and potential “false memories” generated by the DRM paradigm by presenting a serial recognition memory task. The isolation effect previously reported (Beran, 2011) was not replicated in this experiment. Two of four chimpanzees showed improved recognition performance when information about distinctiveness could be used to exclude incorrect responses. None of the chimpanzees were significantly impaired in the “false memory” condition. However, limitations to this approach are discussed that require caution about assuming identical memory processes in these chimpanzees and in humans.


2020 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Whiten

Abstract The authors do the field of cultural evolution a service by exploring the role of non-social cognition in human cumulative technological culture, truly neglected in comparison with socio-cognitive abilities frequently assumed to be the primary drivers. Some specifics of their delineation of the critical factors are problematic, however. I highlight recent chimpanzee–human comparative findings that should help refine such analyses.


Author(s):  
G. I. Kaye ◽  
J. D. Cole

For a number of years we have used an adaptation of Komnick's KSb(OH)6-OsO4 fixation method for the localization of sodium in tissues in order to study transporting epithelia under a number of different conditions. We have shown that in actively transporting rabbit gallbladder epithelium, large quantities of NaSb(OH)6 precipitate are found in the distended intercellular compartment, while localization of precipitate is confined to the inner side of the lateral plasma membrane in inactive gallbladder epithelium. A similar pattern of distribution of precipitate has been demonstrated in human and rabbit colon in active and inactive states and in the inactive colonic epithelium of hibernating frogs.


2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 633-640 ◽  
Author(s):  
Canice E. Crerand ◽  
Ari N. Rabkin

Purpose This article reviews the psychosocial risks associated with 22q11.2 deletion syndrome, a relatively common genetic condition associated with a range of physical and psychiatric problems. Risks associated with developmental stages from infancy through adolescence and early adulthood are described, including developmental, learning, and intellectual disabilities as well as psychiatric disorders including anxiety, mood, and psychotic disorders. Other risks related to coping with health problems and related treatments are also detailed for both affected individuals and their families. Conclusion The article ends with strategies for addressing psychosocial risks including provision of condition-specific education, enhancement of social support, routine assessment of cognitive abilities, regular mental health screening, and referrals for empirically supported psychiatric and psychological treatments.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 314-325
Author(s):  
Kimberly F. Frazier ◽  
Jessica Collier ◽  
Rachel Glade

Background The aim of this study was to determine the clinical efficacy of combining self-management strategies and a social thinking approach to address the social performance and executive function of an adolescent female with autism spectrum disorder. Method This research examined the effects of a social knowledge training program, “Think Social,” as well as strategies to improve higher order cognitive abilities. Results and Conclusion Although quantitative improvement was not found, several qualitative gains in behavior were noted for the participants of this study, suggesting a benefit from using structured environmental cues of self-management strategies, as well as improved social understanding through social cognitive training.


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