Short-term Familiarity Research Articles

Music Familiarization Elicits Functional Connectivity Between Right Frontal/Temporal and Parietal Areas in the Theta and Alpha Bands

Frequent listening to unfamiliar music excerpts forms functional connectivity in the brain as music becomes familiar and memorable. However, where these connections spectrally arise in the cerebral cortex during music familiarization has yet to be determined. This study investigates electrophysiological changes in phase-based functional connectivity recorded with electroencephalography (EEG) from twenty participants’ brains during thrice passive listening to initially unknown classical music excerpts. Functional connectivity is evaluated based on measuring phase synchronization between all pairwise combinations of EEG electrodes across all repetitions via repeated measures ANOVA and between every two repetitions of listening to unknown music with the weighted phase lag index (WPLI) method in different frequency bands. The results indicate an increased phase synchronization during gradual short-term familiarization between the right frontal and the right parietal areas in the theta and alpha bands. In addition, the increased phase synchronization is discovered between the right temporal areas and the right parietal areas at the theta band during gradual music familiarization. Overall, this study explores the short-term music familiarization effects on neural responses by revealing that repetitions form phasic coupling in the theta and alpha bands in the right hemisphere during passive listening.

Long- and short-term implicit talker familiarity: Effects on children's word and sentence recognition

While previous research has highlighted the positive effects of talker familiarity on children’s word recognition in quiet, its role in challenging listening conditions remains poorly understood for this age group. Additionally, the amount of familiarity required to yield benefits remains unclear. The current study explored implicitly acquired short and long-term talker familiarity effects in school-age children (8–12 years), utilizing speech or noise maskers. Experiment 1 assessed open-set sentence recognition in a two-talker-female masker, with the child's mother's voice serving as the target or masker speech. Experiment 2 measured closed-set word recognition in a noise masker, both before and after a 5-day exposure to a female talker. Results from Experiment 1 indicate that children benefit from familiarity when their mother is the target talker, but not when she is the masking speech. In Experiment 2, children exhibited familiarity effects after only a 5-day exposure period to a previously unfamiliar voice, demonstrating a significant impact of implicit short-term familiarity. Working memory and selective attention did not predict performance or benefit. Together, these findings underscore the importance of talker familiarity in children's speech recognition in challenging listening situations. The implications of these findings for understanding the mechanisms underlying familiarity effects will be discussed.

A systematic review and meta-analysis of how social memory is studied

Social recognition is crucial for survival in social species, and necessary for group living, selective reproduction, pair bonding, and dominance hierarchies. Mice and rats are the most commonly used animal models in social memory research, however current paradigms do not account for the complex social dynamics they exhibit in the wild. To assess the range of social memories being studied, we conducted a systematic analysis of neuroscience articles testing the social memory of mice and rats published within the past two decades and analyzed their methods. Our results show that despite these rodent’s rich social memory capabilities, the majority of social recognition papers explore short-term memories and short-term familiarity levels with minimal exposure between subject and familiar stimuli—a narrow type of social memory. We have identified several key areas currently understudied or underrepresented: kin relationships, mates, social ranks, sex variabilities, and the effects of aging. Additionally, reporting on social stimulus variables such as housing history, strain, and age, is limited, which may impede reproducibility. Overall, our data highlight large gaps in the diversity of social memories studied and the effects social variables have on social memory mechanisms.

Spread of pathological human Tau from neurons to oligodendrocytes and loss of high-firing pyramidal neurons in aging mice.

Intracellular aggregation of hyperphosphorylated Tau (pTau) in the brain is associated with cognitive and motor impairments, and ultimately neurodegeneration. We investigate how human pTau affects cells and network activity in the hippocampal formation of the THY-Tau22 tauopathy model mice invivo. We find that pTau preferentially accumulates in deep-layer pyramidal neurons, leading to neurodegeneration, and we establish that pTau spreads to oligodendrocytes. During goal-directed virtual navigation in aged transgenic mice, we detect fewer high-firing prosubicular pyramidal cells, but the firing population retains its coupling to theta oscillations. Analysis of network oscillations and firing patterns of pyramidal and GABAergic neurons recorded in head-fixed and freely moving mice suggests preserved neuronal coordination. In spatial memory tests, transgenic mice have reduced short-term familiarity, but spatial working and reference memory are surprisingly normal. We hypothesize that unimpaired subcortical network mechanisms maintain cortical neuronal coordination, counteracting the widespread pTau aggregation, loss of high-firing cells, and neurodegeneration.

Training face perception in developmental prosopagnosia through perceptual learning

BackgroundRecent work has shown that perceptual learning can improve face discrimination in subjects with acquired prosopagnosia. ObjectiveIn this study, we administered the same program to determine if such training would improve face perception in developmental prosopagnosia. MethodWe trained ten subjects with developmental prosopagnosia for several months with a program that required shape discrimination between morphed facial images, using a staircase procedure to keep training near each subject's perceptual threshold. To promote ecological validity, training progressed from blocks of neutral faces in frontal view through increasing variations in view and expression. Five subjects did 11 weeks of a control television task before training, and the other five were re-assessed for maintenance of benefit 3 months after training. ResultsPerceptual sensitivity for faces improved after training but did not improve after the control task. Improvement generalized to untrained expressions and views of these faces, and there was some evidence of transfer to new faces. Benefits were maintained over three months. Training also led to improvements on standard neuropsychological tests of short-term familiarity, and some subjects reported positive effects in daily life. ConclusionWe conclude that perceptual learning can lead to persistent improvements in face discrimination in developmental prosopagnosia. The strong generalization suggests that learning is occurring at the level of three-dimensional representations with some invariance for the dynamic effects of expression.

Long-term familiarity creates preferred social partners in dairy cows

Group is an essential resource for gregarious animals. Dairy cows are however frequently (re-)grouped according to productivity and reproductive state leading to an unstable social environment for the animals. The present study aimed at investigating whether cows maintain social relationships in a dynamic group. Therefore we analysed whether more familiar cows spend more time in close proximity, and interact more often in an affiliative way. Social interactions and direct neighbours during feeding and resting of 12 Holstein cows (1st to 3rd lactation) in a dynamic dairy cow group of 50 animals were assessed continuously over four days using focal animal sampling. A principal component analysis over the twelve assessed social behaviour variables per pair revealed four main components: social relationships may be characterised by time spent as direct neighbours when feeding and interacting affiliative as well as agonistically (excluding displacements), by displacement success, allogrooming interactions, and time spent as direct neighbours when resting. Long-term (shared youth experience, shared adult experience) and short-term (shared dry-period, synchronised group entry) familiarity was associated with higher scores for interacting and being direct neighbours when feeding (p<0.05 for shared youth experience, shared adult experience, and shared dry-period), allogrooming (p<0.1 for shared adult experience×shared dry-period), and being direct neighbours when resting (p<0.05 for shared youth experience×shared adult experience). Long-term familiarity had a stronger effect on the intensity of social relationships, i.e. regarding investment of time and energy, than very recent shared experience. These results support the notion that dairy cows actively maintain valuable dyadic relationships. In practical terms, keeping well-acquainted cows together may contribute to a stable inner structure of a dairy herd and thus promote dairy cow welfare.

Cross-Accent Intelligibility of Speech in Noise: Long-Term Familiarity and Short-Term Familiarization

Listeners must cope with a great deal of variability in the speech signal, and thus theories of speech perception must also account for variability, which comes from a number of sources, including variation between accents. It is well known that there is a processing cost when listening to speech in an accent other than one's own, but recent work has suggested that this cost is reduced when listening to a familiar accent widely represented in the media, and/or when short amounts of exposure to an accent are provided. Little is known, however, about how these factors (long-term familiarity and short-term familiarization with an accent) interact. The current study tested this interaction by playing listeners difficult-to-segment sentences in noise, before and after a familiarization period where the same sentences were heard in the clear, allowing us to manipulate short-term familiarization. Listeners were speakers of either Glasgow English or Standard Southern British English, and they listened to speech in either their own or the other accent, thereby allowing us to manipulate long-term familiarity. Results suggest that both long-term familiarity and short-term familiarization mitigate the perceptual processing costs of listening to an accent that is not one's own, but seem not to compensate for them entirely, even when the accent is widely heard in the media.

Toddlers’ imitative learning in interactive and observational contexts: The role of age and familiarity of the model

Three experiments examined the effects of age and familiarity of a model on toddlers’ imitative learning in observational contexts (Experiments 1, 2, and 3) and interactive contexts (Experiments 2 and 3). Experiment 1 (N=112 18-month-old toddlers) varied the age (child vs. adult) and long-term familiarity (kin vs. stranger) of the person who modeled the novel actions. Experiment 2 (N=48 18-month-olds and 48 24-month-olds) and Experiment 3 (N=48 24-month-olds) varied short-term familiarity with the model (some or none) and learning context (interactive or observational). The most striking findings were that toddlers were able to learn a new action from observing completely unfamiliar strangers who did not address them and were far less likely to imitate an unfamiliar model who directly interacted with them. These studies highlight the robustness of toddlers’ observational learning and reveal limitations of learning from unfamiliar models in interactive contexts.

The Price of Fame: The Impact of Stimulus Familiarity on Proactive Interference Resolution

Interference from previously learned information, known as proactive interference (PI), limits our memory retrieval abilities. Previous studies of PI resolution have focused on the role of short-term familiarity, or recency, in causing PI. In the present study, we investigated the impact of long-term stimulus familiarity on PI resolution processes. In two behavioral experiments and one event-related fMRI experiment, long-term familiarity was manipulated through the use of famous and nonfamous stimuli, and short-term familiarity was manipulated through the use of recent and nonrecent probe items in an item recognition task. The right middle frontal gyrus demonstrated greater sensitivity to famous stimuli, suggesting that long-term stimulus familiarity plays a role in influencing PI resolution processes. Further examination of the effect of long-term stimulus familiarity on PI resolution revealed a larger behavioral interference effect for famous stimuli, but only under speeded response conditions. Thus, models of memory retrieval--and of the cognitive control mechanisms that guide retrieval processes--should consider the impact of and interactions among sources of familiarity on multiple time scales.

Context dependent acquisition of familiarity recognition in Trinidadian guppies

Animals have the cognitive capacity to distinguish between familiar and unfamiliar conspecifics, and gain a range of benefits as a result of behavioural decisions linked to this ability. Familiarity recognition emerges after repeated encounters among individuals. In Trinidadian guppies (Poecilia reticulata), for example, females preferentially shoal with other, familiar females after 12 days of prior association, while the same time frame of familiarity acquisition exits in males when shoaling with other males. In a mating context, however, female guppies preferentially mate with males displaying unfamiliar colour patterns. Similarly, males prefer to court unfamiliar females after spending six weeks in the same tank. Given the different reproductive agendas of the sexes in promiscuous species such as guppies, we predict that context influences the development of familiarity. Specifically, we argue that males, who move between shoals of fish in pursuit of mating opportunities, do not ordinarily need to distinguish between familiar and unfamiliar females. Therefore, we predict that male guppies do not develop short-term familiarity with their mating partners. Here we confirm that shoaling preferences by females emerge within 12 days, but go on to show that familiarity cues are not used by males in mate choice over the equivalent time frame. We argue that it is only after prolonged association, as occurs for example when guppies are confined to isolated pools, that familiarity cues become important in male mating decisions.

The role of long-term and short-term familiarity in visual and haptic face recognition

Recent studies have suggested that the familiarity of a face leads to more robust recognition, at least within the visual domain. The aim of our study was to investigate whether face familiarity resulted in a representation of faces that was easily shared across the sensory modalities. In Experiment 1, we tested whether haptic recognition of a highly familiar face (one's own face) was as efficient as visual recognition. Our observers were unable to recognise their own face models from tactile memory alone but were able to recognise their faces visually. However, haptic recognition improved when participants were primed by their own live face. In Experiment 2, we found that short-term familiarisation with a set of previously unfamiliar face stimuli improved crossmodal recognition relative to the recognition of unfamiliar faces. Our findings suggest that familiarisation provides a strong representation of faces but that the nature of the information encoded during learning is critical for efficient crossmodal recognition.

Recognition of own-race and other-race faces by three-month-old infants.

People are better at recognizing faces of their own race than faces of another race. Such race specificity may be due to differential expertise in the two races. In order to find out whether this other-race effect develops as early as face-recognition skills or whether it is a long-term effect of acquired expertise, we tested face recognition in 3-month-old Caucasian infants by conducting two experiments using Caucasian and Asiatic faces and a visual pair-comparison task. We hypothesized that if the other race effect develops together with face processing skills during the first months of life, the ability to recognize own-race faces will be greater than the ability to recognize other-race faces: 3-month-old Caucasian infants should be better at recognizing Caucasian faces than Asiatic faces. If, on the contrary, the other-race effect is the long-term result of acquired expertise, no difference between recognizing own- and other-race faces will be observed at that age. In Experiment 1, Caucasian infants were habituated to a single face. Recognition was assessed by a novelty preference paradigm. The infants' recognition performance was better for Caucasian than for Asiatic faces. In Experiment 2, Caucasian infants were familiarized with three individual faces. Recognition was demonstrated with both Caucasian and Asiatic faces. These results suggest that (i) the representation of face information by 3-month-olds may be race-experience-dependent (Experiment 1), and (ii) short-term familiarization with exemplars of another race group is sufficient to reduce the other-race effect and to extend the power of face processing (Experiment 2).

Head raising during foraging and pausing during intermittent locomotion as components of antipredator vigilance in chipmunks

Although many studies of vigilance examine head raising in foraging, grooming or resting animals, pauses during intermittent locomotion are rarely considered from the perspective of vigilance, and no studies have compared head raising and pausing in the same system. We videotaped central place foraging chipmunks, Tamias striatus, as they approached a patch, collected sunflower seeds, and left to return to their burrows. There was a strong similarity between head raising during foraging and pausing during intermittent locomotion. Chipmunks paused more frequently when moving towards the patch than when leaving the patch. Chipmunks in the patch raised their heads at an intermediate rate, which tended to decrease with time in the patch. Pauses and the duration of motionless periods during head raises were very short (∼0.4 s), and their frequency distributions were similar. Animals remained motionless during 22% of the time spent approaching the patch, 14% of the time spent in the patch and 7% of the time spent leaving the patch. Rates of pausing and head raising generally decreased with short-term familiarity (number of trips to the patch) and with long-term familiarity (proximity of the patch to the burrow). Trials with higher pause rates when approaching the patch had higher head-raising rates in the patch. Whether the focal individual was solitary, dominant or subordinate in a dyad, or competing with multiple chipmunks in the patch had no effect on pausing or head raising. In a separate experiment, exposure to a model hawk increased pause and head-raising rates. We conclude that head raising during foraging and pausing during locomotion serve a similar vigilance function, that this vigilance is directed towards detection of predators rather than conspecifics, and that time allocated to vigilance is sufficient to significantly reduce foraging rates and affect many space use and foraging decisions.

Attending to faces: change detection, familiarization, and inversion effects.

We tested detection of changes to eye position, eye color (brightness), mouth position, and mouth color in frontal views of faces. Two faces were presented sequentially for 555 ms each, with a blank screen of 120 ms separating the two. Faces were presented either both upright or both inverted. Measures of detection (d') were calculated for several different degrees of change for each of the four dimensions of change. We first compared results to an earlier experiment that used an oddity design, in which subjects indicated which of three simultaneously viewed and otherwise identical faces had been altered on one of these four dimensions. Subjects in both of these experiments were partially cued, in that they knew the four possible types of changes that could occur on a given trial. The change-detection results correlated well with the oddity data. They confirmed that face inversion had little effect upon detection of changes in eye color, a moderate effect upon detection of eye-position or mouth-color changes, and caused a drastic reduction in the detection of mouth-position changes. An experiment in which uncued and fully cued subjects were compared showed that cueing significantly improved detection of feature color changes, but there was little difference between upright and inverted faces. Full cueing eliminated all effects of inversion. Compared to partial cueing, changes in mouth color were poorly detected by uncued subjects. Last, a change in the frequency of the base (unaltered) face in an experiment from 75% to 40% showed that increased short-term familiarity decreased the detection of eye changes and increased the detection of mouth changes, regardless of face orientation and the type of change made (color or position). We conclude that uncued subjects encode the spatial relations of features more than the colors of features, that mouth color in particular is not considered a relevant dimension for encoding, and that familiarization redistributes attention from more to less salient facial regions. Inversion effects are not simply an exaggeration of the salience effects revealed by withdrawing cueing, but represent an interaction of spatial encoding with salience, in that the greatest inversion effects occur for spatial shifts in less salient facial regions, and can be eliminated through the use of focused attention.

Object Recognition and Object Segregation in Infancy: Historical Perspective, Theoretical Significance, “Kinds” of Knowledge, and Relation to Object Categorization

Needham (2001, this issue) reports that 4.5-month-old infants can use a short-term familiarization experience with a single object to facilitate the segregation of a visual display consisting of a configurally similar object and a configurally dissimilar adjacent object. We reflect on this finding in the larger context of Needham's systematic research on the development of object perception, a program that has included (1) a series of empirical studies designed to identify the different cues that infants use for object segregation and (2) a theoretical framework in which infants are presumed to integrate these cues to form interpretations of complex visual displays.

The effects of short-term familiarization of infants, perceptual-motor co-ordination in a simultaneous discrimination situation.

This study set out to demonstrate that around six months of age the infant's ability visually to categorize stimuli in terms of their familiarity‐unfamiliarity is not yet associated with manipulative approach‐avoidance responses and that such responses come under visual control only some time in the course of the second half‐year of life. A short‐term familiarization period was administered to infants aged 5–7 months, 8–10 months and 11–13 months, followed by a simultaneous discrimination test involving the familiar and a novel stimulus. Results indicate that the ability visually to discriminate between the stimuli occurred at all three age levels, but that manipulative discrimination took place only in the two older groups. In addition, the effects on discrimination of some parameters defining the experimental procedure, namely the colour of the familiarized stimulus and the nature of the familiarization condition (visual‐tactual or visual‐only), were also investigated.

Amount of Short-Term Familiarization and the Response to Auditory Discrepancies

McCALL, ROBERT B., and MELSON, WILLIAM H. Amount of Short-Term Familiarization and the Response to Auditory Discrepancies. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1970, 41, 861-869. Infant boys, 5% months of age, were given 4, 8, or 12 presentations of a standard 8-note tonal sequence prior to the introduction of a series of discrepancies formed by the sequential rearrangement of these same 8 notes. Cardiac deceleration to the discrepancies relative to the preceding standard stimuli increased as a function of the number of familiarization trials with the standard. This result was not simply due to increased habituation to the standard by the well-familiarized groups. In addition, there was an inverse relationship (-.70) between the magnitude of cardiac change elicited by visual and by auditory discrepancies such that infants who displayed large decelerations to visual stimuli responded only minimally to analogous auditory discrepancies and vice versa. This effect appeared to be directly linked to the discrepancies per se and was not simply a function of the arousal potential of the stimulus modality in general.