Name Matching Task Research Articles

Aerobic exercise improves hippocampal function and increases BDNF in the serum of young adult males

Physical activity has been reported to improve cognitive function in humans and rodents, possibly via a brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF)-regulated mechanism. In this study of human subjects, we have assessed the effects of acute and chronic exercise on performance of a face–name matching task, which recruits the hippocampus and associated structures of the medial temporal lobe, and the Stroop word–colour task, which does not, and have assessed circulating concentrations of BDNF and IGF-1 in parallel. The results show that a short period of high-intensity cycling results in enhancements in performance of the face–name matching, but not the Stroop, task. These changes in cognitive function were paralleled by increased concentration of BDNF, but not IGF-1, in the serum of exercising subjects. 3weeks of cycling training had no effect on cardiovascular fitness, as assessed by VO2 scores, cognitive function, or serum BDNF concentration. Increases in fitness, cognitive function and serum BDNF response to acute exercise were observed following 5weeks of aerobic training. These data indicate that both acute and chronic exercise improve medial temporal lobe function concomitant with increased concentrations of BDNF in the serum, suggesting a possible functional role for this neurotrophic factor in exercise-induced cognitive enhancement in humans.

The bilateral field advantage in a sequential face–name matching task with famous and nonfamous faces.

The authors examined the bilateral field advantage (BFA) using a sequential name-face (Experiment 1) or face-name (Experiment 2) matching task with both famous and nonfamous stimuli. In both experiments, the first stimulus (name in Experiment 1, face in experiment 2) was followed by a delay of 1,500 ms. The second stimulus (face in Experiment 1, name in Experiment 2) was then presented during a speeded response interval. Experiment 1 indicated a BFA for famous faces, but not for recently familiarized nonfamous faces. Experiment 2 indicated a BFA for names regardless of familiarity level. These results are compatible with prior findings of a BFA for meaningful stimuli as opposed to nonmeaningful ones, but only if previously unknown personal names are considered meaningful while previously unknown faces are not. These findings suggest that personal names are processed by bilateral neural networks whether they are previously known or not, whereas this is not the case for faces. Our findings have additional implications for working memory-based theories of why the BFA arises, and for the time course of meaningful association formation.

On knowledge-poor methods for person name matching and lemmatization for highly inflectional languages

Web person search is one of the most common activities of Internet users. Recently, a vast amount of work on applying various NLP techniques for person name disambiguation in large web document collections has been reported, where the main focus was on English and few other major languages. This article reports on knowledge-poor methods for tackling person name matching and lemmatization in Polish, a highly inflectional language with complex person name declension paradigm. These methods apply mainly well-established string distance metrics, some new variants thereof, automatically acquired simple suffix-based lemmatization patterns and some combinations of the aforementioned techniques. Furthermore, we also carried out some initial experiments on deploying techniques that utilize the context, in which person names appear. Results of numerous experiments are presented. The evaluation carried out on a data set extracted from a corpus of on-line news articles revealed that achieving lemmatization accuracy figures greater than 90% seems to be difficult, whereas combining string distance metrics with suffix-based patterns results in 97.6---99% accuracy for the name matching task. Interestingly, no significant additional gain could be achieved through integrating some basic techniques, which try to exploit the local context the names appear in. Although our explorations were focused on Polish, we believe that the work presented in this article constitutes practical guidelines for tackling the same problem for other highly inflectional languages with similar phenomena.

Task demands modulate sustained and transient neural activity during visual-matching tasks

The extent to which a task demands verbal or non-verbal processing may influence which neural regions underlie performance. In the present study, sustained and transient responses were examined using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in conjunction with a mixed blocked/event-related design during three visual-matching tasks that varied in the extent to which they relied on verbal processing. In a name-matching task, subjects decided whether two letters had the same or a different name (e.g., A a); in a physical-matching task, subjects decided whether two letters were exactly the same or different (e.g., A A); in a non-letter-matching task, subjects decided whether two non-letters were exactly the same or different. Results revealed several regions in which sustained activity differed across the three tasks as well as several regions in which sustained activity did not differ. Most notably, regions in the right inferior frontal gyrus exhibited greater sustained activity during the name-matching task than during the physical or non-letter-matching tasks, indicating that sustained activity in this region is sensitive to the amount of verbal processing required by a particular task. Moreover, transient activity in the right inferior frontal regions, as well as others, exhibited the opposite pattern of results. In combination, results suggest that sustained and transient activities interact to produce the context-appropriate response during visual-matching tasks.

Matching faces for semantic information and names: an event-related brain potentials study

In face identification, it has been controversial whether or not access to biographical information and to a person’s name are mediated by qualitatively different loci. We recorded ERPs while participants saw two successive faces and performed a matching task that either required retrieval of semantic information (“same or different profession?”), or retrieval of the person’s name (“same or different number of forename syllables?”). For both tasks, slow ERP activity between the first and the second face was characterized by a prominent right posterior negativity, with the asymmetry being larger for the name than the semantic matching task. ERPs to the second face showed a difference between congruent (matching) and incongruent (mismatching) trials, with more negative ERPs for incongruent trials. In the semantic matching task, these differences were significant between 450 and 550 ms, and resembled an N400, with a maximum negativity over the vertex. In the name matching task, the topography of this congruency effect was qualitatively different from that seen in semantic matching. These findings suggest that different brain substrates mediate the access to semantic and name information.

Differential processing of ingroup and outgroup information: the role of relative group status in permeable boundary groups

Perceivers individuate cognitively the ingroup more than the outgroup; that is, perceivers use person categories to process information about the ingroup, but use stereotypic attribute categories to process information about the outgroup. This phenomenon is labelled the differential processing effect (DPE). Is the DPE moderated by relative group status? In two experiments, either high- or low-status members of permeable-boundary groups (i.e. groups that encourage upward mobility) read through information about unfamiliar ingroup and outgroup members. Relative group status moderated the DPE. Clustering indices in recall and confusions in a name-matching task indicated that high-status members individuated the ingroup more than the outgroup, thus replicating the DPE. However, low-status members individuated the outgroup more than the ingroup, thus reversing the DPE. A third experiment suggested that these findings are predicated on the ingroup information being stereotype-consistent. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Effects of closed-head injury on attentional processes: Generality of Sternberg's additive factor method

The present study examined the generality of Shum, McFarland, Bain, and Humphreys' (1990) findings that closed-head injury (CHI) selectively impairs different processes of attention (operationalized in terms of stages of information processing) depending on the severity of, and the time since, injury. The procedure of Shum et al. was based on Sternberg's additive factor method (AFM), with the mode of information processing involved being a physical-directional matching of visual stimuli. The present study followed a similar procedure except that a name-matching task was used. This task was administered to 16 first-year psychology students and two groups of CHI patients (viz., severe short-term (SS) and severe long-term (SL)) with matched control groups. The results obtained replicated the study by Shum in that the SS group was found to be impaired on the identification and response-selection stages of information processing whereas the SL group was found to be impaired only on the response-selection stage. The present study confirms that the AFM is not limited to one specific mode of information process and strengthens the validity of the conclusions made by Shum et al. regarding the effects of CHI on attention.

Hemispheric differences in letter matching of hiragana and katakana

The purpose of the present study was to examine the hemispheric differences in letter matching of hiragana and katakana. The stimuli with a pair of each one letter of hiragana and katakana were presented unilaterally to the right or left visual hemifield with a tachistoscope. The subjects were 40 male right handers. They were required to judge whether a pair of letters had the same name or different one. A significant right visual hemifield superiority was observed for both the accuracy of recognition and reaction time. The results suggest that the callosal relay model of Zaidel may be applied to the name matching task.

Effects of spatial arrangement of letter pairs in a name-matching task with unilateral and bilateral hemifield stimulation

In tachistoscopic studies requiring “same/different” judgements on pairs of stimuli, differences between unilateral and bilateral presentation have been interpreted in terms of higher level cognitive processing. However, unilateral presentation is usually confounded with vertical and bilateral presentation with horizontal arrangement of stimuli. The effect of various stimulus arrangements was examined in two experiments. The results gave no evidence for an independent effect of uni- vs bilateral presentation, but rather a strong effect of the spatial arrangement such that pairs arranged on a straight line through the fixation point yield faster reaction times than any other vertical or horizontal arrangement.

Basic processes in reading: On the development of cross-case letter matching without reference to phonology

We report the case of a youngster who has not learned to name correctly all of the letters of the alphabet, but who nonetheless can do cross-case matching (Posner’s name-matching task) of all the letters, entirely without error. This result suggests that the development of cross-case matching abilities in normal subjects may also proceed without reference to a letter identification process based upon a phonological code.

Hemispheric asymmetry for classifying upright and inverted letter pairs: Handedness and sex differences

Eighty subjects, 20 in each sex/handedness combination, performed a lateralized physical and name matching task with upright and inverted letter pairs. “Same” reaction times only displayed Orientation × Hemisphere × Subject Group interactions which, it was suggested, might be rather too readily interpreted in terms of the usual sex and handedness differences in hemispheric asymmetry.