Relative Familiarity Research Articles

Familiarity Effect in the Perception of Handwriting: Evaluating in-group/out-group effect among readers of the Latin script

There is much evidence that familiarity can affect perception of stimuli, with items that are familiar to the individual being preferred and better remembered. Previous research has also shown that familiarity with a typeface increases preference for it, but no studies have evaluated the impact of familiarity in relation to the affect towards handwritten text. For the present study, a two-part experiment (N = 422) was designed to measure how contemporary users of the Latin script perceive handwritten text. The first section was designed to collect specimens of the participants’ handwriting. The second, which was adapted to each participant’s handwriting style, measured implicit judgments of certain familiar letter shapes against unfamiliar ones. Results show that familiarity positively influences the extent to which one judges the friendliness and trustworthiness of handwritten text. Furthermore, the greater the similarity to how one writes a letterform, the greater the observed effect in terms of perceived friendliness. These findings suggest that people have an implicit bias towards handwriting that looks like their own.

Validation of a rodent model of episodic memory replay.

Vivid episodic memories in humans have been described as the replay of the flow of past events in sequential order. Recently, Panoz-Brown et al. Current Biology, 28, 1628-1634, (2018) developed an olfactory memory task in which rats were presented with a list of trial-unique odors in an encoding context; next, in a distinctive memory assessment context, the rats were rewarded for choosing the second to last item from the list while avoiding other items from the list. In a different memory assessment context, the fourth to last item was rewarded. According to the episodic memory replay hypothesis, the rat remembers the list items and searches these items to find the item at the targeted locations in the list. However, events presented sequentially differ in memory trace strength, allowing a rat to use the relative familiarity of the memory traces, instead of episodic memory replay, to solve the task. Here, we directly manipulated memory trace strength by manipulating the odor intensity of target odors in both the list presentation and memory assessment. The rats relied on episodic memory replay to solve the memory assessment in conditions in which reliance on memory trace strength is ruled out. We conclude that rats are able to replay episodic memories.

Environmental Enrichment Improves the Recognition Memory in Adult Mice Following Social Isolation via Downregulation of Kv4.2 Potassium Channels.

Recognition memory is a cognitive process that enables us to distinguish familiar objects and situations from new items, which is essential for mammalian survival and adaptation to a changing environment. Social isolation (SI) has been implicated as a detrimental factor for recognition memory. The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) has been shown to carry information concerning the relative familiarity of individual stimuli, and modulating neuronal function in this region may contribute to recognition memory. The present study aimed to investigate the neuronal mechanisms in the mPFC of environmental enrichment (EE) on recognition memory in adult mice following SI. Mice were assigned into three groups: control, SI, and SI + EE groups. Novel location recognition (NLR) and novel object recognition (NOR) tests were performed to evaluate the recognition memory. The levels of Kv4 channels were assessed by qRT-PCR and western blotting. The effects of SI and SI + EE on the excitability of pyramidal neurons in the mPFC were measured using whole-cell recording. We found that SI led to a reduction in the excitability of pyramidal neurons. Specifically, we have identified that the reduction in the firing activity of pyramidal neurons resulted from alterations in the function and expression of Kv4.2 channels. Furthermore, EE regulated Kv4.2 channels, normalized the activity of pyramidal neurons, and restored the behavioral deficits following SI. Thus, the roles of Kv4.2 channels in excitability of pyramidal neurons suggest that the Kv4.2 channels present a promising therapeutic target for recognition memory impairment.

Computational models can distinguish the contribution from different mechanisms to familiarity recognition.

Familiarity is the strange feeling of knowing that something has already been seen in our past. Over the past decades, several attempts have been made to model familiarity using artificial neural networks. Recently, two learning algorithms successfully reproduced the functioning of the perirhinal cortex, a key structure involved during familiarity: Hebbian and anti-Hebbian learning. However, performance of these learning rules is very different from one to another thus raising the question of their complementarity. In this work, we designed two distinct computational models that combined Deep Learning and a Hebbian learning rule to reproduce familiarity on natural images, the Hebbian model and the anti-Hebbian model, respectively. We compared the performance of both models during different simulations to highlight the inner functioning of both learning rules. We showed that the anti-Hebbian model fits human behavioral data whereas the Hebbian model fails to fit the data under large training set sizes. Besides, we observed that only our Hebbian model is highly sensitive to homogeneity between images. Taken together, we interpreted these results considering the distinction between absolute and relative familiarity. With our framework, we proposed a novel way to distinguish the contribution of these familiarity mechanisms to the overall feeling of familiarity. By viewing them as complementary, our two models allow us to make new testable predictions that could be of interest to shed light on the familiarity phenomenon.

The Effect of Negative Expectancy Violations and Relational Familiarity on Client Managers’ Negotiation Positions

ABSTRACT During the interactive process of issue resolution, client managers may develop expectations about the auditor’s position. We examine the effect that negative expectancy violations have on managers’ pre-negotiation positions and how relational familiarity can moderate this effect. Through a series of experiments, we find that, when the partner’s proposed adjustment is within the client’s original expectations, managers offer greater concessions to a more familiar partner than to a less familiar partner. However, depending on relational familiarity, client managers react to expectancy violations very differently. Managers react more severely when a more familiar partner violates expectations, offering lower negotiation concessions than when no violation occurs. In contrast, managers tend to ignore violations committed by a less familiar partner, offering similar negotiation concessions whether or not a violation has occurred. Furthermore, we find support for a practical intervention to repair damage from expectancy violations committed by more familiar partners.

Perceptions and Opinions on Cannabidiol in the Orthopaedic Sports Medicine Community.

Cannabidiol (CBD) is a known pain modulator that is garnering increased attention in the orthopaedic world. There may be a considerable knowledge gap among orthopaedic sports medicine providers and their perception of its therapeutic value. To (1) examine the knowledge and beliefs of sports medicine orthopaedic providers with respect to CBD, (2) deliver an educational component, and (3) elucidate potential barriers to its widespread application. Cross-sectional study. A 3-component, 25-question online survey was distributed to members of the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine and the Arthroscopy Association of North America between July and October 2022. The first 20 questions assessed baseline knowledge and opinions regarding CBD, followed by an educational component, and then 5 questions assessing whether the respondents' opinions had changed after learning more about CBD. Responses were compared according to age, practice setting, and state's cannabinoid legalization status using the chi-square test, and changes in opinions from before to after the educational component were compared using the paired t test. There were 101 survey responses, for a response rate of approximately 1%. Most respondents believed that there is a role for CBD in postoperative pain management (76%), acute pain and inflammation after an injury (62%), and chronic pain (94%). Most respondents admitted that they were not knowledgeable about the mechanism of action (89%) or their state's laws (66%) concerning CBD. A minority (25%) believed that CBD has psychoactive properties. While most respondents (76%) did not believe that they would be stigmatized if they were to suggest CBD to a patient, only 48% had ever suggested CBD. Notably, 94% of respondents had encountered patients who reported trying CBD to treat pain. After reading the fact sheet, 51% of respondents stated that their opinion on CBD had changed, and 63% felt inclined to investigate the topic further. Most survey respondents believed that CBD has a role in postoperative and chronic pain management. Although there was a relative familiarity with CBD, there was a knowledge gap, suggesting that increased attention, education, and research are necessary.

Attitudes of Slovene L2 Speakers of English to Six Native Varieties of English

The paper presents the results of an experiment whose purpose was to study the attitudes towards six L1 varieties of English by Slovene students of English. Using the verbal guise test, the participants were exposed to audio clips of Received Pronunciation (RP), General American (GA), Scottish English (ScE), Irish English (IrE), Australian English (AusE) and New Zealand English (NZE). They were required to complete a two-part questionnaire. In part one, they were asked to rate, on four-point Likert scale, statements about the cognitive, affective and aesthetic traits of the speakers, as well as the linguistic traits which they believed contributed most to their attitudes to a particular variety. In part two, they had to rank the six tested varieties indicating their general order of preference, their relative familiarity with the varieties and the appropriateness of the varieties for teaching to Slovene learners of English. The results of the study confirm the findings of numerous other similar studies in giving preference to the two best-known global standard varieties (RP and GA) over the other varieties.

Role of ‘familiarity’ in Mandarin Chinese speakers’ metapragmatic evaluations of Australian conversational humour

Although research on humorous practices of Anglo-Australians has received much attention, the understanding of those practices by members of various multilingual communities in Australia has not been much studied. In this paper, we look at metapragmatic comments on concept familiarity in relation to conversational humour, particularly focusing on Mandarin Chinese speakers’ perceptions of conversational humour in Australian English. In order to explore what role ‘familiarity’ plays in (inter-)cultural conceptualisation of humour, we analyse interview data where speakers of Mandarin Chinese provide their metapragmatic comments on humorous exchanges among Australians. Drawing on approximately 8.2 hours of interview data elicited by a segment from the reality television gameshow Big Brother 2012, i.e., a teasing sequence between two acquainted persons, it is suggested that the concept of familiarity is the one most frequently alluded to in the theme of how participants ‘draw the boundary’ between intimates and acquaintances. From the analysis it emerged that Mandarin Chinese speakers’ evaluations of humorous exchanges in Australian English are driven by their culturally-informed perceptions that are conceptualised through various emic notions, e.g. guanxi (‘interpersonal relationship’), various labels for classifying different relational distance, and qiji (‘opportune moment’). The findings of this exploratory paper suggest that the role of ‘familiarity’ in relation to humour is crucial in the perception of appropriateness of humorous practices in interaction, especially across cultures.

Organizational Factors Associated with Perceptions of Continuity during Post-Acute Transitional Care

Skilled nursing facilities’ (SNFs) perception of information continuity with hospitals is a critical indicator of the staff’s ability to provide safe and effective post-acute patient care. This perception depends on the quality of information sent by hospitals, and the transitional care environment in which information is received. Using a nationally representative survey of SNF Nursing Directors who reported transitional care relationships with two different hospital referral partners, we assessed this transitional care environment by first analyzing the extent of hospital-SNF integration behaviors (i.e. preferred network status) that could strengthen perception through relational familiarity. Second, we analyzed the presence of discordant or disruptive transitional care practices. SNFs with disparate information sharing behaviors across hospitals lack consistent routines and staff may experience additional cognitive or administration burden to their work that dampens perception of continuity. We found that perception of continuity mediates the relationship between hospital information sharing practices and transitional care outcomes (e.g. readmissions). Holding information sharing practices constant, some care integration practices increase perceptions of continuity while SNFs that experienced discordance across hospitals have lower perceptions of continuity. Improving transitional care quality requires that hospitals improve information sharing behaviors and help build capacity for process improvement in the SNF environment.

Evaluation of Law Enforcement Agency Injury Severity Assessments

Across the United States large discrepancies have been found between law enforcement officers’ injury severity assessments and medically assessed health outcomes of crash victims. This research investigated injury severity discrepancies across law enforcement agencies, analyzing linked crash and medical data for each crash victim from 2010 through 2019 for 520 Wisconsin law enforcement agencies. Serious injury (KABCO “A”) assessments were overestimated in 45% to 90% of crash victims, depending on the agency. Statewide the overestimation rate was 65% across all agencies; the State Patrol overestimated 65% of serious injury assessments, 60% for county sheriff offices, and 64% for municipal police departments. These discrepancies can skew safety estimates and affect the allocation of funds. KABCO definitions were changed to a federally mandated uniform standard in Wisconsin in 2017. Results from an interrupted time series analysis found no significant effects from the changed KABCO definitions, either immediate or over time. At county sheriff’s offices overestimation increased as a function of county population size, and decreased with increasing total reported crashes from a jurisdiction, suggesting workload negatively affects overestimation rate, whereas relative familiarity with crashes and their severities improve overestimation rates. Different trauma scales (MAIS and ISS) and serious injury thresholds were investigated, and ISS of nine was proposed for future KABCO comparisons. Findings show that although KABCO “A” assessment overestimation is an issue everywhere, the magnitude of the issue varies from agency to agency and underscores the importance of uniform injury severity training to ensure accurate serious injury surveillance across the United States.

Stimulus valence, episodic memory, and the priming of brain activation profiles in borderline personality disorder.

Background.Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is characterized by instability in affective regulation that can result in a loss of cognitive control. Triggers may be neuronal responses to emotionally valenced context and/or stimuli. ‘Neuronal priming’ indexes the familiarity of stimuli, and may capture the obligatory effects of affective valence on the brain’s processing system, and how such valence mediates responses to the repeated presentation of stimuli. We investigated the effects of affective valence of stimuli on neuronal priming (i.e. changes in activation to repeated presentation of stimuli), and if these effects distinguished BPD patients from controls.Methods.Forty BPD subjects and 25 control subjects (age range: 18–44) participated in an episodic memory task during fMRI. Stimuli were presented in alternating epochs of encoding (six images of positive, negative, and neutral valence) and recognition (six images for ‘old’ v. ‘new’ recognition). Analyses focused on inter-group differences in the change in activation to repeated stimuli (presented during Encoding and Recognition).Results.Relative to controls, BPD showed greater priming (generally greater decrease from encoding to recognition) for negatively valenced stimuli. Conversely, BPD showed less priming for positively valenced stimuli (generally greater increase from encoding to recognition).Conclusion.Plausibly, the relative familiarity of negative valence to patients with BPD exerts an influence on obligatory responses to repeated stimuli leading to repetition priming of neuronal profiles. The specific effects of valence on memory and/or attention, and consequently on priming can inform the understanding of mechanisms of altered salience for affective stimuli in BPD.

Perirhinal cortex and the recognition of relative familiarity

Spontaneous object recognition (SOR) is a widely used task of recognition memory in rodents which relies on their propensity to explore novel (or relatively novel) objects. Network models typically define perirhinal cortex as a region required for recognition of previously seen objects largely based on findings that lesions or inactivations of this area produce SOR deficits. However, relatively little is understood about the relationship between the activity of cells in the perirhinal cortex that signal novelty and familiarity and the behavioural responses of animals in the SOR task. Previous studies have used objects that are either highly familiar or absolutely novel, but everyday memory is for objects that sit on a spectrum of familiarity which includes objects that have been seen only a few times, or objects that are similar to objects which have been previously experienced. We present two studies that explore cellular activity (through c-fos imaging) within perirhinal cortex of rats performing SOR where the familiarity of objects has been manipulated. Despite robust recognition memory performance, we show no significant changes in perirhinal activity related to the level of familiarity of the objects. Reasons for this lack of familiarity-related modulation in perirhinal cortex activity are discussed. The current findings support emerging evidence that perirhinal responses to novelty are complex and that task demands are critical to the involvement of perirhinal cortex in the control of object recognition memory.

The problem of assessment of foreign communicative competence formation in a non-specialized educational organization revisited

Introduction. The problem of adequate and comprehensive assessment of the level of formation of communicative competence in a foreign language, taking into account all its constituent components, remains relevant, despite the fact that the competence-based approach has long been established in the educational process in the higher education system as the main one. In this regard, we turned to the issue of developing a matrix that combines a complex of aspects for assessing the level of English proficiency by students of non-specialized educational organizations. Materials and methods. In the course of the research, general scientific methods were used, such as analysis, synthesis, generalization, as well as methods of empirical knowledge such as a questionnaire and statistical analysis. The study involved respondents among the teaching staff, representing three educational organizations of the city of Oryol, namely Orel Law Institute of the Ministry of the Interior of Russia named after V.V. Lukyanov, Oryol State University named after I.S. Turgenev, as well as Oryol State University of Economics and Trade. The total number of teachers who took part in the questionnaire was 80 people. The second category of respondents was represented by 320 students. The target group included cadets and trainees of Orel Law Institute of the Ministry of the Interior of Russia named after V.V. Lukyanov (180 people). The control group was represented by students from civil educational organizations (140 people). The total number of respondents who took part in the questionnaire having worked with the proposed grading scale tallied 400 people. Research results. The proposed assessment scale encompasses the criteria for different types of speech activity with the attention paid to the types of tasks and the components of communicative competence. Hence the descriptors according to which the tasks are assessed are differentiated according to the receptive or productive types of speech activity and the level of subordinate competences required for performing the task. Gleaned from the opinions of the respondents, those aspects were identified that require improvement, namely Writing (37% of the respondents’ answers) and Speaking (31% of the respondents’ answers) were pinpointed as the types of speech activity requiring circumstantiation. The assessment criteria for Reading were incontestably acknowledged as feasible, which can be explained by the relative familiarity of the reading formats. As directions for improving the quality of assessment using the rating scale, respondents noted the addition of variability to the list of assessment parameters (20% of the responses), an expansion of the range of control forms (18% of responses), as well as the need to simultaneously introduce new assessment parameters and expand the range of control forms (20% of responses). Сonclusion. The results of the study are of practical value, since they offer a template for assessing the progress of students in mastering the English language, primarily taking into account the specifics of the forms of teaching English in educational institutions of the Ministry of the Interior of Russia. In the future, this study will contribute to the creation of a multi-faceted assessment system for the level of formation of communicative competence.

Cognitive control of working memory but not familiarity in rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta).

Directed forgetting paradigms assess cognitive control by determining whether memory accuracy is superior in trials on which subjects were instructed to remember compared with accuracy in trials on which they were instructed to forget. We used a directed forgetting paradigm to compare the extent to which working memory and familiarity are subject to rehearsal-like cognitive control in rhesus monkeys. Monkeys studied a sample image, then saw one of two distinctive cues during a retention interval. The remember cue typically predicted a four-choice match to sample test, for which memory of the sample was critical. The forget cue typically predicted one of five perceptual discrimination tests, matched for accuracy to the memory tests, for which memory of the sample was irrelevant. On rare probe trials, the test type other than the type typically predicted by the cue was presented. When cognitive control of memory was possible, accuracy should have been higher on memory tests following the remember cue than on those following the forget cue. We found that accuracy was higher following the remember cue under conditions that favored working memory (small image set) but was not higher under conditions that favored matching on the basis of relative familiarity (large image set). Working memory, but not familiarity, is subject to cognitive control in rhesus monkeys.

Gambling in Rural and Remote South Australia

Although most people gamble safely, national prevalence rates indicate that approximately 0.2 to 1% of the Australian population experience problems with gambling. An issue that has not been extensively researched in Australia is whether the nature of gambling, and the associated harms is consistently observed across the nation. In particular, are there are differences between metropolitan and rural areas in people’s experiences with gambling and the associated impacts? A qualitative study involving interviews with 10 help-seekers affected by problem gambling examined the nature of gambling in rural and remote areas and the potential barriers and challenges associated with help-seeking. Particular issues relevant to rural gamblers that set them apart from metropolitan gamblers were: limitations in leisure choices in rural areas; the problem of social familiarity in relation to anonymous help-seeking; and the dearth of specialized services. This study highlights the need to consider the role of rural-specific barriers, motivating and protective factors in developing service delivery models and specialized interventions for problem gambling in rural and remote communities.

Episodic memory in nonhuman animals?

Experimental psychologist Jonathan Crystal and evolutionary psychologist Thomas Suddendorf debate with nonhuman animals experience human-like episodic memory.

How do word frequency and memory task influence directed forgetting: An ERP study

In daily life, it is important either to remember sometimes or to intentionally forget on other occasions. The issue of forgetting following instructions (i.e. directed forgetting, DF) has been broadly studied; however, whether the frequency of contents would matter in DF remains unclear, and the understanding of its neural mechanism in both circumstances of item memory and source memory requires improvement in depth. For these purposes, the current study manipulated word frequency and memory task to investigate relevant behavioral features and neural activities of DF. Adopting event-related potential (ERP) technique, this study applied two-character Chinese words of two types of word frequency (high vs low) in the item-method DF paradigm. During encoding, we found that the increased frontal positivity, an index of active inhibition, was regulated by both word frequency and memory task, while the enhanced parietal positivity reflecting selective rehearsal didn't fluctuate across conditions. In the course of test, three ERP old/new effects were identified: the familiarity-based FN400 and the recollection-driven LPC were both modulated by word frequency and memory task, but the right frontal old/new effect was significant solely in source memory; also, these effects provided compelling evidence for the influences of word frequency and memory task on DF. Our results reinforce the differentiation between absolute familiarity and relative familiarity in memory, reveal their sensitivity to DF, and also support the dual-process interpretation. Implications are made to examine more influential factors for future research.

Interlocutor and Familiarity Effects on L2 Learners’ Use of Lexical LREs During Task-Based Interaction

Numerous studies have examined the language-learning opportunities that arise when the design of tasks is such that successful resolution requires speakers to negotiate for meaning (e.g., Long, 2015). However, interlocutors often influence these learning opportunities. The present study examines the relationships between interlocutors (learner–NS or learner–learner dyads) and interlocutor familiarity in relation to the frequency of lexical language-related episodes (LREs). The data for the study, from the Giessen Long Beach Chaplin Corpus (GLBCC; Smith, Jucker, & Muller, 2001), included 71 transcribed interactions between native and non-native university-level English speakers with varying degrees of familiarity. Results indicated that the number of LREs between familiar and unfamiliar interlocutors was similar in all conditions. These findings indicate that there may be little influence of interlocutor—learner or NS, familiar or unfamiliar—on the frequency of LREs, which suggests that learners negotiate meaning in similar ways regardless of whom they interact with.

Dissociation of memory signals for metamemory in rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta).

Some nonhuman species demonstrate metamemory, the ability to monitor and control memory. Here, we identify memory signals that control metamemory judgments in rhesus monkeys by directly comparing performance in two metamemory paradigms while holding the availability of one memory signal constant and manipulating another. Monkeys performed a four-choice match-to-sample memory task. In Experiment 1, monkeys could decline memory tests on some trials for a small, guaranteed reward. In Experiment 2, monkeys could review the sample on some trials. In both experiments, monkeys improved accuracy by selectively declining tests or reviewing samples when memory was poor. To assess the degree to which different memory signals made independent contributions to the metamemory judgement, we made the decline-test or review-sample response available either prospectively, before the test, or concurrently with test stimuli. Prospective metamemory judgements are likely controlled by the current contents of working memory, whereas concurrent metamemory judgements may also be controlled by additional relative familiarity signals evoked by the sight of the test stimuli. In both paradigms, metacognitive responding enhanced accuracy more on concurrent than on prospective tests, suggesting additive contributions of working memory and stimulus-evoked familiarity. Consistent with the hypothesis that working memory and stimulus-evoked familiarity both control metamemory judgments when available, metacognitive choice latencies were longer in the concurrent condition, when both were available. Together, these data demonstrate that multiple memory signals can additively control metacognitive judgements in monkeys and provide a framework for mapping the interaction of explicit memory signals in primate memory.

Remembering the order of serially presented objects: A matter of time?

Remembering the sequence, in which stimuli are encountered or events have occurred, is a key process in episodic memory and can also facilitate recognition memory. Rodents, when presented with a sequence of objects, will explore the object encountered first; yet, whether this behaviour is because the rodents spontaneously encode the order of stimuli presentation or because of relative familiarity or temporal decay is unknown. Here, we tested sequence memory in rats using a series of spontaneous preference tasks. Experiment 1 demonstrated that when rats are presented with a sequence of four objects, with an inter-sample interval of 5 min or 1 h, they preferentially explored the object presented earlier in the list irrespective of the inter-sample interval. We then demonstrated that such memory for order was not affected by increasing or decreasing the inter-sample interval between the middle objects (Experiment 2). Finally, we showed that memory for order is not a function of absolute object familiarity, as animals showed clear discrimination between the objects presented in the sample phases and a novel object, independent of the sample objects’ position in the sequence (Experiment 3). These results show that animals are able to encode the order of objects presented in a sequence, and as such temporal order memory is not achieved using the process of relative or absolute familiarity or temporal decay.