Nonverbal Material Research Articles

Lithuanian I-S-T version: Reliability and validity

This paper refers to the psychometric properties of IST-70 {Intelligence Structure Test). The aim of investigation was to evaluate the reliability and validity of A and B forms of IST-70 for the Lithuanian population of 12th grade children (sample of 295 schoolchildren). The obtained data show that there are significant differences between the results of Lithuanian 12th grade schoolchildren and German standardisation sample of the same age. Analysis of results show that some psychometric properties of IST-70 cannot meet strict psychometric criteria for tests. Item analysis show there are many of subtests which have non-discriminating items. Also there was found very little subtests of IST-70 met the criteria of reliability. Many correlational links were established between the results of subtests also. The factor analysis of results showed the A form of IST-70 has no theoretically clear factorial structure while the B form has two hypothetical factors: verbal material and nonverbal material. The origin of this factors still remains unexplained.

Processing of emotional kanji words in the right hemisphere and the effect of handedness on the processing

Experimental and clinical evidence indicates that the right hemisphere plays a special role in the processing of non-verbal emotional material. The possibility that verbal material may also be similarly processed in the hemisphere was investigated with a reading aloud task, with unilateral tachistoscopic presentation of emotional and non-emotional kanji words. Right-handed subjects, both male and female, participated in Experiment 1 and right and left-handed subjects of both sexes in Experiment 2. Results of Experiment 1 showed that response to non-emotional kanji words were more accurate in the right visual field than in the left, but no difference was found for emotional words. Results of Experiment 2 showed the word-emotionality by visual-field interaction effect on accuracy of both right- and left-handed subjects, but the effect was more pronounced for the right-handed. The results suggest that the right hemisphere processes emotional kanji words just as well as the left.

The integration of verbal and non-verbal materials in some instances of written scientific discourse

Cet article porte sur l'integration de modes de representation dissimilaires (verbal, partiellement verbal, et visuel) souvent presents au sein du discours ecrit des sciences dites dures. Elle repose sur l'etude de trente communications scientifiques redigees en anglais par des chercheurs natifs et non natifs dans les domaines du genie mecanique et de la conception/fabrication assistees par ordinateur. Plusieurs types de procedes lexico-syntaxiques, semantiques et pragmatiques/rhetoriques qui assurent habituellement la cohesion du discours strictement verbal sont envisages dans la perspective d'un discours integre hybride. La communication fait reference a diverses demarches representatives au sein de la theorie de l'enonciation et a des recherches sur la valeur communicationnelle de la representation visuelle.

Transient global amnesia and functional retrograde amnesia: contrasting examples of episodic memory loss.

We studied 11 patients with transient global amnesia (TGA) and ten patients with functional retrograde amnesia (FRA). Patients with TGA had a uniform clinical picture: a severe, relatively isolated amnesic syndrome that started suddenly, persisted for 4-12 h, and then gradually improved to essentially normal over the next 12-24 h. During the episode, the patients had severe anterograde amnesia for verbal and non-verbal material and retrograde amnesia that typically covered at least two decades. Thirty hours to 42 days after the episode, the patients had recovered completely and performed normally on tests of anterograde and retrograde amnesia. By contrast, patients with FRA had a sudden onset of memory problems that were characterized by severe retrograde amnesia without associated anterograde amnesia and with a clinical presentation that otherwise varied considerably. The episodes persisted from several weeks to more than two years, and some of the patients had not recovered at the time of our last contact with them. The uniform clinical picture of TGA and the variable clinical picture of FRA presumably reflect their respective neurologic ('organic') and psychogenic ('non-organic') aetiologies.

Associative learning in children with perinatal brain injury

Associate learning for visual nonverbal and auditory verbal items was examined in 21 children with spastic diplegic cerebral palsy (SDCP) and 28 healthy children using four paired associate tasks. SDCP children showed poorer performance than the comparison group for learning pairs that required visual nonverbal responses, regardless of the stimulus modality. Within the SDCP group, lesion severity was assessed in 17 of the children. Lesion severity was related to the level of performance on paired associate tasks requiring visual nonverbal responses; lesion severity did not reach statistical significance for tasks requiring auditory verbal responses. The study suggests: (1) periventricular white matter regions are important for the development of basic learning processes, such as associative learning, and (2) learning of visual nonverbal material is disproportionately affected following white matter injury early in life.

Life in a mirrored world: report of a case showing mirror reversal in reading and writing and for non-verbal materials

Life in a mirrored world: report of a case showing mirror reversal in reading and writing and for non-verbal materials

Life in a Mirrored World: Report of a Case Showing Mirror Reversal in Reading and Writing and for Non-verbal Materials

Abstract We report a single case study of a patient ‘Ailce’ who, following a series of ischaemic attacks, became a mirror reader and mirror writer. Alice read mirror-reversed words much more efficiently than conventionally presented items. Additional tests revealed a mirror reversal of many non-verbal, spatial representations including clock faces, geometric figures and country outlines. Although Alice showed more efficient right-left than left-right scanning, this scanning bias was not able to account for all her mirror symptoms. Possible theoretical interpretations of Alice's pattern of symptoms are discussed.

Life in a mirrored world: Report of a case showing mirror reversal in reading and writing and for non-verbal materials

We report a single case study of a patient ‘Ailce’ who, following a series of ischaemic attacks, became a mirror reader and mirror writer. Alice read mirror-reversed words much more efficiently than conventionally presented items. Additional tests revealed a mirror reversal of many non-verbal, spatial representations including clock faces, geometric figures and country outlines. Although Alice showed more efficient right-left than left-right scanning, this scanning bias was not able to account for all her mirror symptoms. Possible theoretical interpretations of Alice's pattern of symptoms are discussed.

Diencephalic temporal order amnesia.

OBJECTIVE: Amnesia for temporal relations may occur without amnesia for content memories. The aim was to determine whether a patient with mild memory loss due to a thalamic lesion had...

Deterioration in the Production of Verbal and Nonverbal Material as a Function of Time is Contingent Upon the Meaningfulness of the Items

The performances of 100 university students were compared for their levels of production on fluency tests for verbal and nonverbal material that was manipulated to be meaningful or nonsense. For both the meaning conditions there was a significant deterioration in performance as a function of time, while production of the nonsense items remained constant. The results are consistent with the notion that the obligation for the items on the Verbal Fluency Test to be meaningful may require that the subject draws on the available word store, resulting in deterioration of performance as this word store is exhausted. © 1997 National Academy of Neuropsychology. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd

Deterioration in the Production of Verbal and Nonverbal Material as a Function of Time is Contingent Upon the Meaningfulness of the Items

The performances of 100 university students were compared for their levels of production on fluency tests for verbal and nonverbal material that was manipulated to be meaningful or nonsense. For both the meaning conditions there was a significant deterioration in performance as a function of time, while production of the nonsense items remained constant. The results are consistent with the notion that the obligation for the items on the Verbal Fluency Test to be meaningful may require that the subject draws on the available word store, resulting in deterioration of performance as this word store is exhausted.

Rates of forgetting in organic amnesia following temporal lobe, diencephalic, or frontal lobe lesions.

Forgetting rates were examined in patients with diencephalic, temporal lobe, or frontal lesions. No significant differences were found in short-term forgetting of verbal and nonverbal material; in recognition memory for pictures, words, or designs over delays between 1 min and 20 or 30 min; or on a measure of explicit cued recall for words, calculated in terms of the process dissociation procedure. Significantly faster forgetting was found in the diencephalic and the temporal lobe groups in the free recall of pictures of objects, although there was no difference between these 2 groups. It is concluded that the major deficit in amnesic patients' memory processes is in the initial acquisition of information but that there is a subtler deficit in retention over specific delays, detectable only on measures of free recall.

Hemispheric lateralization of perception and memory for emotional verbal stimuli in normal individuals.

The purposes of this study were to extend the literature on lateralization of perception of emotional verbal stimuli in normal individuals, including a test of both the right hemisphere and valence models, and to investigate predictions from these models regarding lateralization of memory for emotional verbal stimuli in normal individuals, an area that, to our knowledge, has not been investigated. Seventy-nine undergraduates were presented lateralized positive, negative, and neutral English words and nonwords. Participants were then asked to freely recall the presented words and, after a 20-min delay, to recognize the words. Recognition memory data provided strong support for the valence model. In addition, free-recall and perception data provided partial support for this model. The literature on the lateralization of processing emotional verbal and nonverbal material is discussed.

Patterns of content, contextual, and working memory impairments in schizophrenia and nonamnesic alcoholism.

This study used tests of content memory (item recognition of words and abstract designs), context memory (order recognition of verbal and nonverbal items), and working memory (recognition at a short retention interval) to examine patterns of performance in 27 schizophrenic patients, 52 chronic alcoholic patients, and 66 healthy control participants. When performance was age- and IQ-adjusted the schizophrenia group was significantly impaired in item and order recognition of verbal and nonverbal material; the alcoholic group was impaired only in order recognition for both material types. Item- and order-recognition deficits in the schizophrenia group were greatest at the shortest retention intervals, a pattern previously observed in patients with Parkinson's disease, suggesting a prominence of a working memory deficit in schizophrenia.

Hemispheric lateralization of perception and memory for emotional verbal stimuli in normal individuals.

The purposes of this study were to extend the literature on lateralization of perception of emotional verbal stimuli in normal individuals, including a test of both the right hemisphere and valence models, and to investigate predictions from these models regarding lateralization of memory for emotional verbal stimuli in normal individuals, an area that, to our knowledge, has not been investigated. Seventy-nine undergraduates were presented lateralized positive, negative, and neutral English words and nonwords. Participants were then asked to freely recall the presented words and, after a 20-min delay, to recognize the words. Recognition memory data provided strong support for the valence model. In addition, free-recall and perception data provided partial support for this model. The literature on the lateralization of processing emotional verbal and nonverbal material is discussed.

Patterns of content, contextual, and working memory impairments in schizophrenia and nonamnesic alcoholism.

This study used tests of content memory (item recognition of words and abstract designs), context memory (order recognition of verbal and nonverbal items), and working memory (recognition at a short retention interval) to examine patterns of performance in 27 schizophrenic patients, 52 chronic alcoholic patients, and 66 healthy control participants. When performance was age- and IQ-adjusted the schizophrenia group was significantly impaired in item and order recognition of verbal and nonverbal material; the alcoholic group was impaired only in order recognition for both material types. Item- and order-recognition deficits in the schizophrenia group were greatest at the shortest retention intervals, a pattern previously observed in patients with Parkinson's disease, suggesting a prominence of a working memory deficit in schizophrenia.

Implicit memory for nonverbal associations.

A color-naming priming task was used to examine implicit memory for new nonverbal associations. Implicit memory was observed for associations between words and colors and between abstract shapes and colors. The authors also asked whether nonverbal association priming might occur more readily than verbal association priming. Colored compound nonwords were used as stimuli, and participants were asked to attend either to the 2 syllables of the compound nonword or to the compound nonword and the color in which it was printed. The authors found that the association formed depended on which attributes of the stimuli were attended to and were not more readily formed for nonverbal material. The results demonstrate that tasks that encourage unitization between the elements to be associated facilitate associative priming.

Memory Encoding Following Complete Callosotomy

Three patients with complete resection of the corpus callosum were tested in a series of memory tasks to determine the effects of callosotomy on the encoding and retrieval of information in memory. Verbal and pictorial conjunction tests were administered to measure patients' ability to consolidate the elements of a stimulus into an accurate composite memory. Patients were also tested in a paired-associate learning task to determine the consequences of callosotomy on the encoding and retrieval of associations between stimuli. Although callosotomy patients were unimpaired in the verbal conjunction task, results from both the pictorial conjunction task and the paired-associate learning task suggest that the absence of callosal cross-talk impairs encoding in these patients. In addition, the pattern of results in the paired-associate learning task suggests that callosotomy impairs retrieval processes. The role of the callosum in the formation of memory traces for nonverbal material and associations between verbal stimuli is discussed.

Beyond the word in psychoanalysis the unspoken dialogue

The practice of psychoanalysis, traditionally, has privileged verbal communication. In relational theory the therapeutic significance of unconscious, semantically unformulated, but nonverbally encoded communications has been recognized. While patients are understood to generate significant nonverbal material for use in the treatment process, similar nonverbal productions from analysts rarely have been acknowledged as useful for treatment. In this paper, I demonstrate a way to recognize and use the nonverbal productions of analysts as well as of analysands within the analytic process. A brief review is offered of contemporary authors who have conceptualized the importance of the nonverbal realm for psychoanalytic treatment. An approach is then described that builds on process conceptualizations derived from the infant research literature. The model, illustrated with two clinical examples, provides a way of conceptualizing “process contours”; on a nonverbal level of exchange between analyst and analysand that becomes the medium for catalyzing the transition from presymbolic interactions to symbolic language. Working on this level, analyst and analysand coconstruct scenes from both the dreaded past and the hoped‐for present/future, which, when reflected on in a joint process of narrative construction, provide a new context for accessing previously dissociated affective experience.

Selective loss of verbal imagery

This single case study of the ability to generate verbal and non-verbal imagery in a woman who sustained a gunshot wound to the brain reports a significant difficulty in generating images of word shapes but not a significant problem in generating object images. Further dissociation, however, was observed in her ability to generate images of living vs non-living material. She made more errors in imagery and factual information tasks for non-living items than for living items. This pattern contrasts with our previous report of the agnosic patient, M.S., who had severe difficulty in generating images of living material, whereas his ability to image the shape of words was comparable to that of normal control subjects. Furthermore, with regard to the generation of images of living compared with non-living material, M.S. shows more errors with living than non-living items. In contrast, the present patient, S.M., made significantly more errors with non-living relative to living items. There appear to be two types of double dissociation which reinforce the growing evidence of dissociable impairments in the ability to generate images for different types of verbal and non-verbal material. Such dissociations, presumably related to sensory and cognitive processing demands, address the problem of the neural basis of imagery.