Intermodal Perception of Temporal Order and Motor Skills: Effects of Age

1968 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 987-1000 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert J. Dinnerstein ◽  
Phyllis Zlotogura

Employing visual, auditory, and tactile stimuli, intermodal differences in perceptual latency were inferred by means of perception of temporal order (PTO) and by varieties of serial reaction times (RT) to the same stimuli. Skill at reading, peg board, tapping, and tracking was also determined for the same Ss. Mean intermodal differences in latency inferred from PTO were significantly different from those obtained from mean RTs. A correlation matrix showed that individual differences in visual, auditory and tactile latencies inferred from PTO were relatively independent of latencies inferred from RT. Consonant with previous studies, PTO scores correlated with reading rate and also with peg board speed. Taking age of Ss into account, the latter correlations were seen to be due exclusively to the presence of older Ss, who did show a correlation between PTO and RT. It was hypothesized that aged Ss show a decrease in perceptual “channel capacity” and a resulting overloading of short-term memory when faced with a complex perceptual and motor task.

1991 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 433-452 ◽  
Author(s):  
Loraine K. Obler ◽  
Deborah Fein ◽  
Marjorie Nicholas ◽  
Martin L. Albert

ABSTRACTComprehension of six syntactic structures was tested across four age groups. Each structure was presented with both plausible and implausible content. The contribution of cognitive nonlinguistic factors important for comprehension (attention, short-term memory, and mental control) was tested via standard neuropsychological tasks. Sixty-six women aged 30–79 were tested. Both errors and reaction times increased with age, especially for more complex syntactic types and implausible sentences. The neuropsychological factors tested contributed minimally to an age-related decline in comprehension, suggesting that the subtle breakdown seen in syntactic processing may be a language-specific impairment.


1989 ◽  
Vol 154 (6) ◽  
pp. 797-800 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Sahakian ◽  
Gemma Jones ◽  
Raymond Levy ◽  
Jeffrey Gray ◽  
David Warburton

Nicotine in patients with dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT) producted a significant and marked improvement in discriminative sensitivity and reaction times on a computerised test of attention and information processing. Nicotine also improved the ability of DAT patients to detect a flickering light in a critical flicker fusion test. These results suggest that nicotine may be acting on cortical mechanisms involved in visual perception and attention, and support the hypothesis that acetylcholine transmission modulates vigilance and discrimination. Nicotine may therefore be of some value in treating deficits in attention and information processing in DAT patients.


1987 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 612-614 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cherrie A. Galletly ◽  
Colin D. Field

A double-blind trial to determine the effects of a single dose of 2 mg benzhexol on cognitive functioning was undertaken using normal volunteers. Ninety minutes after the drug or placebo was taken, subjects completed a battery of psychological tests designed to measure learning, memory and motor skills. Benzhexol ingestion was associated with significant impairment of short-term memory and slowing of the rate of new learning.


1993 ◽  
Vol 76 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliver W. Hill ◽  
Ralph W Stuckey

This study examined the effect of spatial cues on judgments of temporal order for digits presented to the right or left visual field. 56 subjects were better able to recall temporal order on trials with congruent temporal and spatial cues, and on trials in which stimuli were presented to the right visual field. The implications of these results for several models of temporal encoding are discussed.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-50
Author(s):  
B.B. Velichkovsky ◽  
F.R. Sultanova ◽  
D.V. Tatarinov ◽  
A.A. Kachina

The study investigates the problem of information displacement from short-term memory. In two experiments, reaction times for recent negative probes were analyzed in the Sternberg’s memory scanning task. The diffusion model of reaction times was used with parameters estimated with the fast-dm software. It was found (experiment 1) that recent negative probes are characterized by a reduction in the speed of information accumulation (drift rate). This suggests residual activation of irrelevant cognitive representation in memory after they have been displaced from short-term memory. It was also found (experiment 2) that negative probes semantically related to items in a preceding target set (semantic recent negative probes) are characterized by a similar decrease in the drift rate. This suggests activation spreading from irrelevant cognitive representations displaced from short-term memory along semantic connections and identifies activated long-term memory as the target of information displacement from short-term memory. Additional mechanisms of short-term memory scanning (negative priming and dynamic decision thresholds) are discussed.


Author(s):  
Josje Verhagen ◽  
Elise de Bree

Abstract Earlier work indicates that bilingualism may positively affect statistical learning, but leaves open whether a bilingual benefit is (1) found during learning rather than in a post-hoc test following a learning phase and (2) explained by enhanced verbal short-term memory skill in the bilinguals. Forty-one bilingual and 56 monolingual preschoolers completed a serial reaction time task and a nonword repetition task (NWR). Linear mixed-effect regressions indicated that the bilinguals showed a stronger decrease in reaction times over the regular blocks of the task than the monolinguals. No group differences in accuracy-based measures were found. NWR performance, which did not differ between the groups, did not account for the attested effect of bilingualism. These results provide partial support for effects of bilingualism on statistical learning, which appear during learning and are not due to enhanced verbal short-term memory. Taken together, these findings add to a growing body of research on effects of bilingualism on statistical learning, and constitute a first step towards investigating the factors which may underlie such effects.


1972 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 253-261 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edith V. Sullivan ◽  
M. T. Turvey

In three experiments subjects were required to reproduce after varying delays the locus of a tactile stimulation delivered to the upper-side of the arm. During the retention periods subjects either performed a subsidiary, arithmetic task or rested. Recall, as measured by accuracy in reproducing the locus of stimulation, decreased as a function of retention interval, asymptoting after approximately 5 s. Performance was poorer in the subsidiary task condition than in the rest condition; however, the effect of the subsidiary task appeared to be more on subject recall strategies than on rehearsal capacity. No evidence of proactive interference effects was found, and a decay interpretation of forgetting of discrete tactile stimuli in the short-term memory distractor paradigm was favoured.


Perception ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 46 (5) ◽  
pp. 605-623 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryota Kanai ◽  
Edwin S. Dalmaijer ◽  
Maxine T. Sherman ◽  
Genji Kawakita ◽  
Chris L. E. Paffen

The time it takes for a stimulus to reach awareness is often assessed by measuring reaction times (RTs) or by a temporal order judgement (TOJ) task in which perceived timing is compared against a reference stimulus. Dissociations of RT and TOJ have been reported earlier in which increases in stimulus intensity such as luminance intensity results in a decrease of RT, whereas perceived perceptual latency in a TOJ task is affected to a lesser degree. Here, we report that a simple manipulation of stimulus size has stronger effects on perceptual latency measured by TOJ than on motor latency measured by RT tasks. When participants were asked to respond to the appearance of a simple stimulus such as a luminance blob, the perceptual latency measured against a standard reference stimulus was up to 40 ms longer for a larger stimulus. In other words, the smaller stimulus was perceived to occur earlier than the larger one. RT on the other hand was hardly affected by size. The TOJ results were further replicated in a simultaneity judgement task, suggesting that the effects of size are not due to TOJ-specific response biases but more likely reflect an effect on perceived timing.


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