Association Task Research Articles

An investigation into consumer perception of the aftertaste of plant-based dairy alternatives using a word association task

Plant-based alternatives are a growing market segment, but they have been found to be associated with different flavours, textures, and aftertastes than conventional dairy products. The aim of this study was to evaluate consumer perception of plant-based beverages’ (PBBs) and plant-based cheeses’ (PBCs) aftertaste. Two sensory trials were conducted: one investigating PBBs (n = 104) and the other PBCs (n = 109). In both trials, five different samples (PBBs or PBCs) were evaluated using nine-point hedonic scales, intensity scales and a word association task. The participants were asked to provide the first four words or phrases that described the aftertaste of each sample during the word association task. The results found that as the aftertaste intensity increased, the participant's overall liking of the food product decreased. Consumers preferred plant-based alternatives to have an aftertaste that mimics conventional dairy products. Consumers also identified mouthcoating and textural properties when describing the aftertaste of PBBs and PBCs. Lastly, a strong and lingering aftertaste was disliked by the consumers, while PBBs and PBCs with a quick and mild aftertaste were preferred.

A CNN-LSTM Architecture for Marine Vessel Track Association Using Automatic Identification System (AIS) Data.

In marine surveillance, distinguishing between normal and anomalous vessel movement patterns is critical for identifying potential threats in a timely manner. Once detected, it is important to monitor and track these vessels until a necessary intervention occurs. To achieve this, track association algorithms are used, which take sequential observations comprising the geological and motion parameters of the vessels and associate them with respective vessels. The spatial and temporal variations inherent in these sequential observations make the association task challenging for traditional multi-object tracking algorithms. Additionally, the presence of overlapping tracks and missing data can further complicate the trajectory tracking process. To address these challenges, in this study, we approach this tracking task as a multivariate time series problem and introduce a 1D CNN-LSTM architecture-based framework for track association. This special neural network architecture can capture the spatial patterns as well as the long-term temporal relations that exist among the sequential observations. During the training process, it learns and builds the trajectory for each of these underlying vessels. Once trained, the proposed framework takes the marine vessel's location and motion data collected through the automatic identification system (AIS) as input and returns the most likely vessel track as output in real-time. To evaluate the performance of our approach, we utilize an AIS dataset containing observations from 327 vessels traveling in a specific geographic region. We measure the performance of our proposed framework using standard performance metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score. When compared with other competitive neural network architectures, our approach demonstrates a superior tracking performance.

Women’s Brain Health: Midlife Ovarian Removal Affects Associative Memory

Women with early bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy (BSO; removal of ovaries and fallopian tubes) have greater Alzheimer’s disease (AD) risk than women in spontaneous/natural menopause (SM), but early biomarkers of this risk are not well-characterized. Considering associative memory deficits may presage preclinical AD, we wondered if one of the earliest changes might be in associative memory and whether younger women with BSO had changes similar to those observed in SM. Women with BSO (with and without 17β-estradiol replacement therapy (ERT)), their age-matched premenopausal controls (AMC), and older women in SM completed a functional magnetic resonance imaging face-name associative memory task shown to predict early AD. Brain activation during encoding was compared between groups: AMC (n=25), BSO no ERT (BSO; n=15), BSO+ERT (n=16), and SM without hormone therapy (n=16). Region-of-interest analyses revealed AMC did not contribute to functional group differences. BSO+ERT had higher hippocampal activation than BSO and SM. This hippocampal activation correlated positively with urinary metabolite levels of 17β-estradiol. Multivariate partial least squares analyses showed BSO+ERT had a different network-level activation pattern than BSO and SM. Thus, despite being approximately 10 years younger, women with BSO without ERT had similar brain function to those with SM, suggesting early 17β-estradiol loss may lead to an altered functional brain phenotype which could influence late-life AD risk, making face-name encoding a potential biomarker for midlife women with increased AD risk. Despite similarities in activation, BSO and SM groups showed opposite within-hippocampus connectivity, suggesting menopause type is an important consideration when assessing brain function.

Gaze Following as an Early Diagnostic Marker of Autism in a New Word Learning Task in Toddlers

The aim was to test the use of eye-tracking methodology for the early detection of ASD in a task of association between unfamiliar objects and pseudowords. Significant differences were found between ASD (n = 57) and TD (n = 57) Spanish speaking toddlers in the number and time of fixation. The TD children showed more and longer fixations on eyes and mouth while the ASD children attended almost exclusively to objects, making it difficult to integrate lexical and phonological information. Moreover, the TD toddlers looked at the mouth when the pseudoword was produced while the ASD toddlers did not. Gaze fixation on eyes and mouth during word learning recorded by eye-tracking may be used as a biomarker for the early diagnosis of ASD.

The formation of specific and gist associative episodic memory representations during encoding: Effects of rate of presentation.

Assessing the time course under which underlying memory representations can be formed is an important question for understanding memory. Several studies assessing item memory have shown that gist representations of items are laid out more rapidly than verbatim representations. However, for associations among items/components, which form the core of episodic memory, it is unclear whether gist representations form more quickly than, or at least in parallel with, verbatim representations, as fuzzy-trace theory predicts, or whether gist is extracted more slowly from inferring the meaning of verbatim representations, as in gist macroprocessor theories. To test these contrasting possibilities, we used a novel associative recognition task in which participants studied face-scene pairs for .75, 1.5, or 4 seconds each, and were later tested on their ability to discriminate intact pairs from foils which varied in how similar they were to originally studied pairs. Across 2 experiments, we found that verbatim memory for associations, measured using a multinomial-processing-tree model, improved from .75 to 1.5 to 4 seconds of presentation time. Paralleling these effects of encoding time on verbatim memory, for gist memory, there were improvements from .75 seconds to 1.5 seconds in both experiment 1 and 2, while improvements from 1.5 seconds to 4 seconds were only evident when the retention interval between study and test was increased (experiment 2). These results provide strong support for the parallel processing framework of fuzzy-trace theory over the slow gist extraction framework of an alternative gist macroprocessor theory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Developmental differences in value-based remembering: The role of feedback and metacognition.

The ability to prioritize remembering explicitly valuable information is termed value-based remembering. Critically, the processes and contexts that support the development of value-based remembering are largely unknown. The present study examined the effects of feedback and metacognitive differences on value-based remembering in predominantly White adults from a Western university (N = 89) and children aged 9-14 years old recruited nationwide (N = 87). Participants completed an associative recognition task during which they memorized items worth varying point values under one of three feedback conditions (point feedback, memory-accuracy feedback, or no feedback). Developmental differences emerged such that children were most likely to selectively remember high-value items when receiving memory-accuracy feedback while adults were most selective when receiving point-based feedback. Furthermore, adults had more accurate metacognitive insight into how value impacted performance. These findings suggest developmental differences in the effects of feedback in value-based remembering and the role of metacognition. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Vocabulary Breadth and Depth in Early School-Aged Children with Developmental Language Disorder – Evidence from Serbian Speaking Children

Objectives. Taking into account the positive association observed between lexical abilities and academic performance in children, this research aims to compare the expressive vocabulary skills and the organization of the lexical-semantic network in early school-aged children diagnosed with developmental language disorder (DLD) and their typically developing (TD) peers.
 Method. The sample included 57 participants (aged 7 and 8 years), 27 children diagnosed with DLD and 30 TD children. The Boston Naming Test and Word Association Task were employed to assess lexical abilities.
 Results. The findings revealed that children with DLD produced significantly fewer correct answers and a higher number of errors during the naming task when compared to their typically developing peers. Moreover, children with DLD provided significantly fewer developmentally mature types of associations and significantly more developmentally immature ones.
 Conclusion. The study results indicate that children with DLD continue to display significant lexical deficits during school-age, encompassing both vocabulary breadth and depth. These findings highlight the importance of implementing additional intervention approaches that focus on semantic aspects to prevent further language deterioration and mitigate the potential negative impact of lexical impairments on the academic achievements of these children.

Neural correlates of hierarchical predictive processes in autistic adults

Bayesian theories of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) suggest that atypical predictive mechanisms could underlie the autistic symptomatology, but little is known about their neural correlates. Twenty-six neurotypical (NT) and 26 autistic adults participated in an fMRI study where they performed an associative learning task in a volatile environment. By inverting a model of perceptual inference, we characterized the neural correlates of hierarchically structured predictions and prediction errors in ASD. Behaviorally, the predictive abilities of autistic adults were intact. Neurally, predictions were encoded hierarchically in both NT and ASD participants and biased their percepts. High-level predictions were following activity levels in a set of regions more closely in ASD than NT. Prediction errors yielded activation in shared regions in NT and ASD, but group differences were found in the anterior cingulate cortex and putamen. This study sheds light on the neural specificities of ASD that might underlie atypical predictive processing.

Twisted memories: Addiction-related engrams are strengthened by desire thinking

Associative learning plays a central role in addiction by reinforcing associations between environmental cues and addiction-related information. Unsupervised learning models posit that memories are adjusted based on how strongly these representations are coactivated during the retrieval process. From a different perspective, clinical models of addiction posit that the escalation and persistence of craving may depend on desire thinking, a thinking style orienting to prefigure information about positive addiction-related experiences. In the present work, we tested the main hypothesis that desire thinking is a key factor in the strengthening of addiction-related associations. A group of adult smoking volunteers (N = 26) engaged in a period of desire thinking before performing an associative learning task in which neutral words (cues) were shown along with images (smoking-related vs. neutral context) at different frequencies. Two retrieval tests were administered, one immediately after encoding and the other after 24 h, to test how the recall of associations changed as a function of retention interval. Two control groups, smokers (N = 21) and non-smokers (N = 22), performed a similar procedure, with a neutral imagination task replacing desire thinking. Participants who engaged in desire thinking increased their performance from the first to the second retrieval test only for the most frequent smoking-related associations. Crucially, this selective effect was not observed in the two control groups. These results provide behavioral evidence in support of the idea that desire thinking plays a role in strengthening addiction-related associations. Thus, this thinking process may be considered a target for reconsolidation-based conceptualizations of, and treatments for, addiction.

$\nu$-flows: Conditional neutrino regression

We present \nuν-Flows, a novel method for restricting the likelihood space of neutrino kinematics in high-energy collider experiments using conditional normalising flows and deep invertible neural networks. This method allows the recovery of the full neutrino momentum which is usually left as a free parameter and permits one to sample neutrino values under a learned conditional likelihood given event observations. We demonstrate the success of \nuν-Flows in a case study by applying it to simulated semileptonic t\bar{t}tt‾ events and show that it can lead to more accurate momentum reconstruction, particularly of the longitudinal coordinate. We also show that this has direct benefits in a downstream task of jet association, leading to an improvement of up to a factor of 1.41 compared to conventional methods.

Multiobject Tracking via Discriminative Embeddings for the Internet of Things

Multi-object tracking technology can be deployed to the IoT devices to enhance the security and reliability of some video analysis applications such as video surveillance and intelligent security system. However, since the IoT devices with limited computing capacity and storage, most existing multi-object tracking methods are difficult to deploy to IoT devices and exhibit poor tracking robustness in scenes with frequent occlusions, severe crowded and scale variations. To alleviate aforementioned issues, we propose a regression-based online multi-object tracking method. First, an object-aware embedding extraction module (OAEM) is designed to extract preliminary discriminative embedding of the object in current frame. And then an embedding aggregation module (EAM) is proposed to obtain high-quality aggregated embedding in temporal. Finally, the temporal embedding combined with the preliminary embedding extracted from the current frame to obtain a refined embedding feature for subsequent position prediction and association. Importantly, we achieve a beneficial interaction between embedding extraction, position prediction and association task. And the proposed method does not suffer from significant memory consumption. Therefore, our method is a potential solution for intelligent video analysis on IoT devices. To evaluate the proposed method, we have conducted numerous experiments on the MOT16, MOT17 and MOT20 benchmark datasets. Results demonstrate that the proposed method can provide a more robust tracking performance compared to other optimal methods.

Coffee quality: Insights of Brazilian consumers from different sociodemographic levels combining modified Word Association and Maximum Difference Scaling (MaxDiff)

AbstractThe coffee market is dynamic and offers several products (e.g., powder, capsule, instant, and grain) distributed in different quality categories, such as traditional, extra strong, special, gourmet, and premium. However, despite the diversity of products, there is little information about how consumers with different sociodemographic characteristics perceive and idealize high‐quality coffees. This study used a modified Word Association task (n = 142) to determine the attributes of high‐quality coffee and the Maximum Difference Scale (n = 330) to organize the attributes concerning their importance between groups of consumers from different sociodemographic levels. Consumers considered flavor, aroma, and intensity as the most important attributes of high‐quality coffees, regardless of gender or socioeconomic class. In addition, price and sweetness were important attributes for class C consumers, while temperature and roasting were more important for class A.Practical ApplicationKnowing the specificities of coffee consumers allows the manufacturer to direct their products to different niches that perceive the product differently.

The Pandemic in Words: Tracking Fast Semantic Changes via a Large-Scale Word Association Task.

Most words have a variety of senses that can be added, removed, or altered over time. Understanding how they change across different contexts and time periods is crucial for revealing the role of language in social and cultural evolution. In this study we aimed to explore the collective changes in the mental lexicon as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. We performed a large-scale word association experiment in Rioplatense Spanish. The data were obtained in December 2020, and compared with responses previously obtained from the Small World of Words database (SWOW-RP, Cabana et al., 2023). Three different word-association measures detected changes in a word's mental representation from Precovid to Covid. First, significantly more new associations appeared for a set of pandemic-related words. These new associations can be interpreted as incorporating new senses. For example, the word 'isolated' incorporated direct associations with 'coronavirus' and 'quarantine'. Second, when analyzing the distribution of responses, we observed a greater Kullback-Leibler divergence (i.e., relative entropy) between the Precovid and Covid periods for pandemic words. Thus, some words (e.g., 'protocol', or 'virtual') changed their overall association patterns due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, using semantic similarity analysis, we evaluated the changes between the Precovid and Covid periods for each cue word's nearest neighbors and the changes in their similarity to certain word senses. We found a larger diachronic difference for pandemic cues where polysemic words like 'immunity' or 'trial' increased their similarity to sanitary/health words during the Covid period. We propose that this novel methodology can be expanded to other scenarios of fast diachronic semantic changes.

Influence of the sociocultural perspective on the sensory perception of wine consumers in Mexico and Spain.

The increasing globalization of companies and markets, including the wine market, makes this study important as a cultural comparison between the sensory perception of wine in Mexico and Spain. Eighty consumers were selected with different consumption habits, and hedonic (Acceptance and Simple Preference) and descriptive (Word Association Task and the Check-All-That-Apply (CATA) method) sensory tests were performed. The results revealed that there were differences in the conceptualization of wine in the Word Association Task. Both populations preferred wines of Spanish origin over those of Mexican origin, especially in the case of red wine. Finally, the results of the CATA method showed that the attributes that discriminate the two types of wine are due more to the country origin of the tasters than to the samples. Spanish consumers used cultural and tradition descriptors and were stricter when it came to sensory evaluation. Moreover, Spanish participants demonstrated more ability to differentiating all wines in terms of visual, olfactory and taste aspects.

Luvadaxistat: A Novel Potent and Selective d-Amino Acid Oxidase Inhibitor Improves Cognitive and Social Deficits in Rodent Models for Schizophrenia

N-methyl-d-aspartate (NMDA) receptor hypofunctionality is a well-studied hypothesis for schizophrenia pathophysiology, and daily dosing of the NMDA receptor co-agonist, d-serine, in clinical trials has shown positive effects in patients. Therefore, inhibition of d-amino acid oxidase (DAAO) has the potential to be a new therapeutic approach for the treatment of schizophrenia. TAK-831 (luvadaxistat), a novel, highly potent inhibitor of DAAO, significantly increases d-serine levels in the rodent brain, plasma, and cerebrospinal fluid. This study shows luvadaxistat to be efficacious in animal tests of cognition and in a translational animal model for cognitive impairment in schizophrenia. This is demonstrated when luvadaxistat is dosed alone and in conjunction with a typical antipsychotic. When dosed chronically, there is a suggestion of change in synaptic plasticity as seen by a leftward shift in the maximum efficacious dose in several studies. This is suggestive of enhanced activation of NMDA receptors in the brain and confirmed by modulation of long-term potentiation after chronic dosing. DAAO is highly expressed in the cerebellum, an area of increasing interest for schizophrenia, and luvadaxistat was shown to be efficacious in a cerebellar-dependent associative learning task. While luvadaxistat ameliorated the deficit seen in sociability in two different negative symptom tests of social interaction, it failed to show an effect in endpoints of negative symptoms in clinical trials. These results suggest that luvadaxistat potentially could be used to improve cognitive impairment in patients with schizophrenia, which is not well addressed with current antipsychotic medications.

Assessing mechanisms behind crossmodal associations between visual textures and temperature concepts.

In the last decades, there has been a growing interest in crossmodal correspondences, including those involving temperature. However, only a few studies have explicitly examined the underlying mechanisms behind temperature-related correspondences. Here, we investigated the relative roles of an underlying affective mechanism and a semantic path (i.e., regarding the semantic knowledge related to a single common source identity or meaning) in crossmodal associations between visual textures and temperature concepts using an associative learning paradigm. Two online experiments using visual textures previously shown to be associated with low and high thermal effusivity (Experiment 1) and visual textures with no consensual associations with thermal effusivity (Experiment 2) were conducted. Participants completed a speeded categorization task before and after an associative learning task, in which they learned mappings between the visual textures and specific affective or semantic stimuli related to low and high temperatures. Across the two experiments, both the affective and semantic mappings influenced the categorization of visual textures with the hypothesized temperatures, but there was no influence on the reaction times. The effect of learning semantic mappings was larger than that of affective ones in both experiments, suggesting that a semantic path has more weight than an affective mechanism in the formation of the associations studied here. The associations studied here could be modified through associative learning establishing correlations between visual textures and either affective or semantic stimuli. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

한글 단어의 관련성 유형에 따른 성인의 의미 규준 조사

Objectives The purpose of this study were to explore the semantic norm of Hangul words based on type of semantic relationship. We investigated various words that exhibited diverse types of semantic relationships with a single word. Methods We conducted a free association task and controlled association task on 180 Hangul words with 150 adults over the age of 20 who were native Korean speakers. In the free association task, participants were asked to freely report words that came to mind when presented with a given word, while in the controlled association task, they were asked to report words related to the given word semantically, categorically, or functionally. Results The words reported in the free association task were found to overlap with those reported in the controlled association task for the same given word in approximately 74% of cases. Specifically, categorical related words were the most common, accounting for 52%. Subsequently, functional-related words, semantic-related words, and pure associative words constituted the majority of the sample, in descending order. In the free association task, it was found that higher word frequency was associated with a greater number of words generated. However, in the controlled association task, such a correlation was not observed. Conclusions While some cases existed where words related by association differed in their semantic, categorical, or functional relationships, the majority of these words were common. Thus, when designing learning materials, it is crucial to take these factors into account, as words with semantic relationships are likely to be retrieved together.

Representing creative thought: A representational similarity analysis of creative idea generation and evaluation

Dual process theories of creativity suggest that creative thought is supported by both a generation phase, where unconstrained ideas are generated and combined in novel ways, and an evaluation phase, where those ideas are filtered for usefulness in context. Neurocognitively, both the default mode network (DMN) and the executive control network (ECN) have been implicated in generation and evaluation, respectively. Importantly, generating and evaluating ideas implies that the same information, reflected in patterns of neural activity, must be present in both phases, suggesting that information should be ‘reinstated’ (i.e. multidimensional patterns must reappear) within and/or between network nodes. In the present study, we used representational similarity analysis (RSA) to investigate the extent to which nodes of the DMN and ECN reinstate information between a generation phase, in which participants generated novel or appropriate word associations to single nouns, and an evaluation phase, where we presented the associations back to participants to evaluate them. We showed strong evidence for reinstatement within the ECN dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex during the novel association task, and within the DMN medial prefrontal cortex during the appropriate association task. We additionally showed between network reinstatement between the ECN dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex and the DMN posterior parietal cortex during the novelty task. These results demonstrate the importance of both within- and between-informational reinstatement for generating and evaluating ideas, and implicate both the DMN and ECN in dual process models of creativity.

0564 The mechanism of deficits in cognition of OSA: plasma amyloid-beta and tau protein level by the intervention design

Abstract Introduction Obstructive sleep apnea syndrome (OSAS) was shown to impair neurocognitive functioning, which was often attributed to hypoxia and sleep fragmentation. More recently, increased accumulation of amyloid-beta and tau protein in OSAS patients have gotten research attention and have been considered to be a possible cause of neurocognitive impairments. Positive airway pressure (PAP) treatment has been found to improve cognitive functioning in OSAS patients. The current study further explored the association of the effects of PAP treatment on neurocognitive and plasma amyloid-beta (Aβ) and tau protein levels. Methods Sixteen OSAS patients (M:F=10:6; age average = 53.35, SD = 10.43) participated in the study. A package of neurocognitive tasks (CPT-III, verbal paired association task, PASAT-R, and semantic verbal fluency) were administered and blood sample was collected both before and after a 3-month period of PAP intervention. The total tau and Aβ 42 levels in the patients’ plasma were quantified using an ultrasensitive immunomagnetic reduction assay. Results T-tests comparing cognitive performance before and after PAP treatment showed significant difference in total immediate recall score of verbal pair association task (t = 3.412, p = .002) and near significant differences in commission error on CPT-III (t = -.357, p = .097) and total score on PASAT-R (t = 1.35, p = .099). Other neurocognitive tasks as well as Aβ and tau proteins showed no significant changes. However, the change of Aβ after treatment correlated significantly with the improvement on the first immediate recall sequence (r = -.64, p = .005), and tau protein level correlated with the score on 2-sec-ISI subscale of PASAT-R (r = -.45, p = .048). Conclusion The present study showed that three months of PAP treatment was effective in improving immediate memory, but not in other cognitive functions or Aβ and tau protein levels. Moreover, some changes in memory and executive function were associated with decrease of Aβ and tau proteins. The preliminary results suggest that the neurocognitive impairment in OSAS patients might be partially associated with accumulation of Aβ and tau proteins. Future studies are needed to further confirm the findings. Support (if any)

0067 Dreams and Personality Influence Creativity

Abstract Introduction Theoretically, during dreaming, weak associations are explored, and information is combined in novel ways, which could lead to increased creativity during waking. However, little research has explored direct relationships between dreaming and objective measures of creativity and the ability to creatively solve problems. Furthermore, personality influences dream recall frequency (DRF) and other aspects of dreaming, suggesting that the relationship between dreaming and creativity may vary based on personality. The goal of the current experiment was to determine if DRF is related to creativity and creative problem-solving, and if these relationships are influenced by personality traits. Methods Seventy-six participants completed questionnaires about dreaming and the Big 5 personality traits (neuroticism, conscientiousness, openness, extraversion, agreeableness) and completed creativity and creative problem-solving tasks. Two tasks measured creativity. In one task, participants generated as many possible uses for an object as they could in one minute. In the other, they generated novel captions for five cartoons. Creative problem-solving was measured using two classic insight problem sets: the matchstick and compound remote associates tasks. Correlations were conducted to determine if DRF is related to any personality traits and multiple regressions were conducted to determine whether DRF or any personality traits predict creativity or creative problem-solving. Results DRF was negatively correlated with agreeableness, such that individuals higher in agreeableness recalled fewer dreams. The multiple regression analyses revealed that both DRF and conscientiousness are significant predictors of divergent thinking. Neither DRF nor any personality traits predicted creative problem-solving. Conclusion These results indicate that agreeableness reduces the frequency of dream recall, perhaps because agreeable individuals try to find problem solutions immediately while awake so they do not worry about them later. Consistent with current theories, frequently recalling dreams increased creativity, suggesting that the exploration of weak or novel relationships during dreaming increases creativity while awake. Conscientiousness also predicted creativity, suggesting that self-sufficient people tend to be more creative. However, frequently recalling dreams did not increase the ability to creatively solve problems. Collectively, these results suggest that personality influences dreaming behaviors and that frequent dreaming and conscientiousness promote creativity. Support (if any)