Conceptual Familiarity Research Articles

Exploring recollection and familiarity impairments in Parkinson’s disease

There is conflicting evidence on whether patients diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease (PD) have cognitive deficits associated with episodic memory and particularly with recognition memory. The aim of the present study was to explore whether PD patients exhibit deficits in recollection and familiarity, the two processes involved in recognition. A sample of young healthy participants (22) was tested to verify that the experimental tasks were useful estimators of recognition processes. Two further samples—one of elderly controls (16) and one of PD patients (20)—were the main focus of this research. All participants were exposed to an associative recognition test aimed at estimating recollection followed by a two-alternative forced-choice (2AFC) test designed to estimate familiarity. The analyses showed a deficit in associative recognition in PD patients and no difference between elderly controls and PD patients in the 2AFC test. By contrast, young healthy participants were better than elderly controls and PD patients in both components of recognition. Further analyses of results of the 2AFC test indicated that the measure chosen to estimate conceptual familiarity was adequate.

FN400 Effect: Conceptual Processing in Explicit Memory Test

Conceptual priming and familiarity are hot spots of researches on neuro-mechanisms of implicit and explicit memory.Supporters of dual-process theories put forward that brain potentials at pre-frontal areas between 300 and 500ms(FN400) are associated with familiarity.However,supporters of singleprocess theories think that studies supporting FN400 as index of familiarity did not take into account the contamination of conceptual priming on explicit memory.Through a series of studies,Paller and his colleagues proved that FN400 is associated with conceptual priming but not familiarity and that familiarity is indexed by brain potentials at parietal areas between 500 and 800ms(LPC).So far,there are still debates on the nero-mechanism of familiarity and conceptual priming.Further researches should explore new methods to dissociate familiarity and conceptual priming.The neuro-mechanism of effects of fluency on familiarity should also be investigated.

A standardized set of 260 pictures for Turkish: Norms of name and image agreement, age of acquisition, visual complexity, and conceptual familiarity

In the present study, normative data in Turkish are presented for the 260 color versions of the original Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980) picture set for the first time. Norms are reported for name and image agreement, age of acquisition (AoA), visual complexity, and conceptual familiarity, together with written word frequency, and numbers of letters and syllables. We collected data from 277 native Turkish adults in a variety of tasks. The results indicated that, whilst several measures displayed language-specific variation, we also reported what seem to be language-independent-that is, universal-measures that show a systematic relationship across several languages. The implications of the reported measures in the domain of psycholinguistic research in Turkish and for wider cross-linguistic comparisons are discussed.

Russian norms for name agreement, image agreement for the colorized version of the Snodgrass and Vanderwart pictures and age of acquisition, conceptual familiarity, and imageability scores for modal object names

The aim of the present study was to provide Russian normative data for the Snodgrass and Vanderwart (Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 28, 516-536, 1980) colorized pictures (Rossion & Pourtois, Perception, 33, 217-236, 2004). The pictures were standardized on name agreement, image agreement, conceptual familiarity, imageability, and age of acquisition. Objective word frequency and objective visual complexity measures are also provided for the most common names associated with the pictures. Comparative analyses between our results and the norms obtained in other, similar studies are reported. The Russian norms may be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society supplemental archive.

Morphological influences on the recognition of monosyllabic monomorphemic words

Balota et al. [Balota, D., Cortese, M., Sergent-Marshall, S., Spieler, D., & Yap, M. (2004). Visual word recognition for single-syllable words. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 133, 283–316] studied lexical processing in word naming and lexical decision using hierarchical multiple regression techniques for a large data set of monosyllabic, morphologically simple words. The present study supplements their work by making use of more flexible regression techniques that are better suited for dealing with collinearity and non-linearity, and by documenting the contributions of several variables that they did not take into account. In particular, we included measures of morphological connectivity, as well as a new frequency count, the frequency of a word in speech rather than in writing. The morphological measures emerged as strong predictors in visual lexical decision, but not in naming, providing evidence for the importance of morphological connectivity even for the recognition of morphologically simple words. Spoken frequency was predictive not only for naming but also for visual lexical decision. In addition, it co-determined subjective frequency estimates and norms for age of acquisition. Finally, we show that frequency predominantly reflects conceptual familiarity rather than familiarity with a word’s form.

French normative data and naming times for action pictures

The aim of the present study was to provide French normative data for 112 action line drawings. The set of action pictures consisted of 71 drawings taken from Masterson and Druks (1998) and 41 additional drawings. It was standardized on six psycholinguistic variables--that is, name agreement, image agreement, image variability, visual complexity, conceptual familiarity, and age of acquisition (AoA). Naming latencies to the action pictures were collected, and a regression analysis was performed on the naming latencies, with the standardized variables, as well as with word frequency and length, taken as predictors. A reliable influence of AoA, name agreement, and image agreement on the naming latencies was observed. The findings are consistent with previous published studies in other languages. The full set of these norms may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive/.

Objective age-of-acquisition (AoA) norms for a set of 230 object names in French: Relationships with psycholinguistic variables, the English data from Morrison et al. (1997), and naming latencies

Picture naming speed is strongly influenced by the age of acquisition (AoA) of words. Most studies of AoA have relied on adults' AoA ratings. However, objective AoA has been found to be a stronger determinant of picture naming latencies. Whereas objective AoA norms for words have been collected for some language communities, no objective AoA measures for words were previously available in French. The study provides objective AoA norms for a set of 230 object names following the procedures used by Morrison, Chappell, and Ellis (1997) to collect objective AoA measures in English. The relationships between objective AoA measures, rated AoA, other variables used in psycholinguistic experiments (name agreement, image agreement, conceptual familiarity, etc.), the English data collected by Morrison et al., and naming latencies are analysed and discussed. In addition, reanalyses of data on picture naming latencies (Bonin, Chalard, Méot, & Fayol, 2002) with the use of objective AoA norms are provided. Stepwise multiple analyses show that objective AoA is a stronger determinant of (spoken and written) naming latencies than rated AoA, whereas objective word frequency is not a reliable independent determinant and does not interact reliably with AoA in any of the analyses.

Normes de concrétude, de valeur d'imagerie, de fréquence subjective et de valence émotionnelle pour 866 mots

Résumé Cet article présente des normes de concrétude, de valeur d'imagerie, de fréquence subjective et de valence émotionnelle pour 866 mots. Ces normes ont été collectées auprès de 97 participants de langue maternelle française, âgés de 23 ans en moyenne. Des statistiques descriptives et des analyses corrélationnelles ont été conduites sur ces normes et sur d'autres indices normatifs déjà publiés (âge d'acquisition, familiarité conceptuelle, variabilité d'imagerie) et objectifs (fréquence objective). Les analyses de corrélation révèlent la nature composite des estimations. En particulier, la fréquence subjective et la valeur d'imagerie sont fortement corrélées à l'ensemble des variables. La concrétude est fortement corrélée uniquement à la valeur d'imagerie et à la valence émotionnelle, laquelle est faiblement corrélée avec les autres variables. Les chercheurs doivent disposer de telles indications pour sélectionner du matériel dans le cadre d'expériences ayant recours à des plans factoriels ou pour réaliser des analyses de régression multiple. Mots-clés: concrétude, valeur d'imagerie, fréquence subjective, valence émotionnelle.

Category-Specific Naming Errors in Normal Subjects: The Influence of Evolution and Experience

The importance of “artifactual” variables (such as conceptual familiarity) have been highlighted in current accounts of category-specific disorders for living things (e.g., Funnell & Sheridan, 1992). The difficulties experienced by patients are essentially viewed as an exaggeration of normal processes and the implication is that normal subjects should also have greater difficulty naming living items (because they have lower conceptual familiarity than nonliving things). The current study examined normal subjects' ability to name pictures of artifact-matched sets of living and nonliving things in a naming-to-deadline paradigm. Contrary to the prediction, normal subjects made more nonliving naming errors. Furthermore, female subjects made more nonliving-thing errors than male subjects. These findings could not be reduced to differences in either category-based or gender-based familiarity ratings. Rather, it is proposed that an elaborated domain-specific evolutionary model parsimoniously explains both the greater incidence of living thing deficits in patients and the better performance of normal subjects with living things.

Rationality and Understanding

I wish to discuss some of the problems that arise when we attempt to understand beliefs and actions that are alien to the thingswebelieve and do. This will involve my saying something about the concepts of rationality and understanding so as to provide grounds for a claim I wish to make that we can understand beliefs, or doctrines, and actions that would not count as rational by our standards. I shall further examine a problem, in education, not all of whose perplexities have been resolved by empirical research in conceptual development: the problem of how children with only a limited familiarity with the conceptual frameworks of their own culture can come to understand conceptual frameworks and ways of acting radically at variance with their own. British children, from the ages of eight or nine onwards, hear stories of the lives of the Aboriginals and the Eskimoes, and learn about the Romans, the Vikings and Elizabethan England, the beliefs and prophecies of the Old Testament, moral stories of the classical world and even the characteristics within their own societies of such institutions as monasteries. Not only have they to meet the problems of the historian and the anthropologist of understanding ways of life strange and distant, but they encounter them without the conceptual familiarity with the beliefs and actions of their own society possessed by the former. Lacking settled criteria of intelligibility for understanding their own society, they are asked to develop the criteria of intelligibility necessary to making some sort of sense of societies very different from their own: a situation probably not paralleled in any other aspect of their education.

Logistics systems engineering— solving the distribution planning problem

A growing familiarity by corporate planners and policy markers with the concept of integrated logistics management is becoming apparent on both sides of the Atlantic. With this conceptual familiarity however come the practical problems of implementation and many companies, whilst welcoming the benefits that this new approach can bring, are hesitant to introduce the radical changes to existing company structures that the concept demands. The focus of concern in this paper is with just how this concept may successfully be implemented within the modern corporation and what the systems engineering problems are likely to be.