Target Picture Research Articles

Prediction of Human Inhibition Brain Function with Inter-Subject and Intra-Subject Variability.

The stop signal task has been used to quantify the human inhibitory control. The inter-subject and intra-subject variability was investigated under the inhibition of human response with a realistic environmental scenario. In present study, we used a battleground scenario where a sniper-scope picture was the background, a target picture was a go signal, and a nontarget picture was a stop signal. The task instructions were to respond on the target image and inhibit the response if a nontarget image appeared. This scenario produced a threatening situation and endorsed the evaluation of how subject’s response inhibition manifests in a real situation. In this study, 32 channels of electroencephalography (EEG) signals were collected from 20 participants during successful stop (response inhibition) and failed stop (response) trials. These EEG signals were used to predict two possible outcomes: successful stop or failed stop. The inter-subject variability (between-subjects) and intra-subject variability (within-subjects) affect the performance of participants in the classification system. The EEG signals of successful stop versus failed stop trials were classified using quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) (i.e., parametric) and K-nearest neighbor classifier (KNNC) and Parzen density-based (PARZEN) (i.e., nonparametric) under inter- and intra-subject variability. The EEG activities were found to increase during response inhibition in the frontal cortex (F3 and F4), presupplementary motor area (C3 and C4), parietal lobe (P3 and P4), and occipital (O1 and O2) lobe. Therefore, power spectral density (PSD) of EEG signals (1-50Hz) in F3, F4, C3, C4, P3, P4, O1, and O2 electrodes were measured in successful stop and failed stop trials. The PSD of the EEG signals was used as the feature input for the classifiers. Our proposed method shows an intra-subject classification accuracy of 97.61% for subject 15 with QDA classifier in C3 (left motor cortex) and an overall inter-subject classification accuracy of 71.66% ± 9.81% with the KNNC classifier in F3 (left frontal lobe). These results display how inter-subject and intra-subject variability affects the performance of the classification system. These findings can be used effectively to improve the psychopathology of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), schizophrenia, and suicidality.

Attention to numerosity varies across individuals and task contexts

ABSTRACT Children’s spontaneous focus on numerosity (SFON) is described as an unprompted tendency that is stable across contexts. The attention to number task (AtN), an experimental forced-choice picture-matching task designed to evaluate select aspects of children’s focus on numerosity, may reveal whether task materials can implicitly prompt children to focus on numerosity. In two studies, we replicate earlier findings showing an effect of task context on children’s performance on the AtN: When asked to identify one or more matches to a target picture from an array of four options, the frequency with which preschoolers and adults identify a numerosity-based match varies as a function of the features on which the remaining match options are based. We addressed a limitation of the original AtN study by including novel combinations of features as additional trials, with which we continued to demonstrate contextual effects. We also showed that adults seemed more susceptible than children to be primed to attend to numerosity on subsequent trials. Children’s focus on numerosity under these experimental conditions was remarkably low. We discuss the implications of these findings for better understanding the SFON construct.

Spontaneous Distractor Reactivation With Age: Evidence for Bound Target-Distractor Representations in Memory

Reduced attentional control with age is associated with the processing and maintenance of task-irrelevant information in memory. Yet the nature of these memory representations remains unclear. We present evidence that, relative to younger adults (n = 48), older adults (n = 48) both (a) store simultaneously presented target and irrelevant information as rich, bound memory representations and (b) spontaneously reactivate irrelevant information when presented with previously associated targets. In a three-stage implicit reactivation paradigm, re-presenting a target picture that was previously paired with a distractor word spontaneously reactivated the previously associated word, making it become more accessible than an unreactivated distractor word in a subsequent implicit memory task. The accessibility of reactivated words, indexed by priming, was also greater than the degree of distractor priming shown by older adults in a control condition (n = 48). Thus, reduced attentional control influences the processing and representation of incoming information.

Escaping Two Dictators: Czechoslovakian Intelligence Defectors from the New Communist Regime, 1948-1949

ABSTRACT The Soviet-sponsored communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in February 1948 prompted hundreds of government officials to seek opportunities to escape or to remain abroad. Among those who sought opportunities to escape were nine Czechoslovakian military intelligence officers from the Main Staff Second Directorate, who defected to American or British occupation forces in Germany and Austria from March 1948 to May 1949 (see Table 1). Based on these lives of these officers as reflected in archival records, this article pieces together a picture of early communist Czechoslovakian intelligence targets, communist suspicion of Western allies, and the officers’ motivations for leaving their intelligence positions, to show the effects of the communist takeover of Czechoslovakian on intelligence officers and operations.

Age differences in vulnerability to distraction under arousal.

Aging affects brain circuitry involved in both inhibition and arousal. In this study, we tested whether older adults are more or less prone to distraction from emotionally arousing events than young adults. To do so, we examined how arousing taboo distractor words affected concurrent 1-back task performance and subsequent memory for distractors. Our second goal was to examine how the arousal level of 1 item can modulate processing of preceding neutral distractors (taboo-minus-1 distractors). During the task, participants first made 1-back judgments about target pictures that were superimposed with to-be-ignored neutral or taboo distractors. Relative to young adults, older adults were more distracted by taboo than neutral words on the 1-back task and remembered more of the taboo distractors on a later incidental recognition task. Furthermore, young adults showed better suppression of taboo-minus-1 distractors than neutral distractors, whereas in older adults, arousal did not facilitate suppression of taboo-minus-1 distractors. This effect appeared to require attentional control as adding an unrelated attentional load during the 1-back task eliminated the beneficial effect of arousal for young adults' suppression of taboo-minus-1 distractors. Finally, when top-down attentional guidance was provided by increasing the goal relevance of target pictures, both groups showed enhanced suppression of taboo-minus-1 distractors versus other neutral distractors. Together, these findings imply that the effect of arousal on distractibility in aging may arise from an interaction between top-down and bottom-up processes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Creating emotional false recollections: Perceptual recombination and conceptual fluency mechanisms.

We investigated the impact of 2 hypothetical mechanisms of episodic memory reconstruction-perceptual recombination and conceptual fluency-on objectively measured recollection accuracy and false recollections of neutral and emotional stimuli. Participants encoded negative, neutral, and positive pictures depicting objects and scenes (i.e., target pictures), each accompanied with a descriptive verbal label (e.g., "boy crying at funeral," "wooden basket on floor," "four chimpanzees laughing together"). Next, they encoded fragmented pictures of some of the scenes they did and did not earlier see (perceptual misinformation), or they received multiple presentations of the corresponding verbal labels (conceptual misinformation). Recollection of target pictures was then tested, using labels as retrieval cues. We had three key findings in each of two experiments. First, as in our prior work, both perceptual and conceptual misinformation significantly increased false recollection judgments of nonstudied pictures, including high-confidence errors. These effects implicate perceptual recombination and conceptual fluency mechanisms. Second, these misinformation effects generalized across all emotional categories, implicating separable roles of these two mechanisms on emotional recollections. Finally, conceptual misinformation was less likely to influence negative than neutral recollection errors, providing new evidence that emotion can improve retrieval monitoring accuracy and reduce false memories based on conceptual fluency (i.e., an emotional distinctiveness heuristic). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Semantic interference is not modality specific: Evidence from sound naming with distractor pictures.

In three experiments, participants named environmental sounds (e.g., the bleating of a sheep by producing the word "sheep") in the presence of distractor pictures. In Experiment 1, we observed faster responses in sound naming with congruent pictures (e.g., sheep; congruency facilitation) and slower responses with semantically related pictures (e.g., donkey; semantic interference), each compared with unrelated pictures (e.g., violin). In Experiments 2 and 3, we replicated these effects and used a psychological refractory period approach (combining an arrow decision or letter rotation task as Task 1 with sound naming as Task 2) to investigate the locus of the effects. Congruency facilitation was underadditive with dual-task interference suggesting that it arises, in part, during pre-central processing stages in sound naming (i.e., sound identification). In contrast, semantic interference was additive with dual-task interference suggesting that it arises during central (or post-central) processing stages in sound naming (i.e., response selection or later processes). These results demonstrate the feasibility of sound naming tasks for chronometric investigations of word production. Furthermore, they highlight that semantic interference is not restricted to the use of target pictures and distractor words but can be observed with quite different target-distractor configurations. The experiments support the view that congruency facilitation and semantic interference reflect some general cognitive mechanism involved in word production. These results are discussed in the context of the debate about semantic-lexical selection mechanisms in word production.

Lexical Recognition in Deaf Children Learning American Sign Language: Activation of Semantic and Phonological Features of Signs.

Children learning language efficiently process single words, and activate semantic, phonological, and other features of words during recognition. We investigated lexical recognition in deaf children acquiring American Sign Language (ASL) to determine how perceiving language in the visual-spatial modality affects lexical recognition. Twenty native- or early-exposed signing deaf children (ages 4 to 8 years) participated in a visual world eye-tracking study. Children were presented with a single ASL sign, target picture, and three competitor pictures that varied in their phonological and semantic relationship to the target. Children shifted gaze to the target picture shortly after sign offset. Children showed robust evidence for activation of semantic but not phonological features of signs, however in their behavioral responses children were most susceptible to phonological competitors. Results demonstrate that single word recognition in ASL is largely parallel to spoken language recognition among children who are developing a mature lexicon.

Top-down resolution of lexico-semantic competition in speech production and the role of the left inferior frontal gyrus: an fMRI study

ABSTRACT Recent neurobiological speech production accounts propose the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) resolves lexical competition using top-down control. The current fMRI experiment investigates whether response set membership influences LIFG involvement. In the picture-word interference paradigm target pictures were presented with distractor words that were, or were not, targets on other trials. Production models predict greater LIFG involvement in the high-coactivation trials with response set target-distractor pairs. Surprisingly, we found no effect of response set. Semantic interference elicited activation in the left posterior temporal cortex, similar to previous reports. Pooling data across response set conditions revealed additional significant activation in pars orbitalis of the LIFG, indicating detection benefited from the additional statistical power. Our findings challenge the co-activation assumption and indicate inconsistent LIFG results reported in the literature might reflect a combination of small effect size and low signal-to-noise, thus questioning the prominent role afforded to the LIFG.

Rapid acquisition through fast mapping: stable memory over time and role of prior knowledge.

In recent years, there have been intensive debates on whether healthy adults acquire new word knowledge through fast mapping (FM) by a different mechanism from explicit encoding (EE). In this study, we focused on this issue and investigated to what extent retention interval, prior knowledge (PK), and lure type modulated memory after FM and EE. Healthy young participants were asked to learn novel word-picture associations through both FM and EE. Half of the pictures were from familiar categories (i.e., high PK) and the other half were from unfamiliar categories (i.e., low PK). After 10 min and 1 wk, the participants were tested by forced-choice (FC) tasks, with lures from different categories (Experiment 1) or from the same categories of the target pictures (Experiment 2). Pseudowords were used to denote names of the novel pictures and baseline performance was controlled for each task. The results showed that in both Experiments 1 and 2, memory performance remained stable after FM, while it declined after EE from 10 min to 1 wk. Moreover, the effect of PK appeared at 10 min after FM while at 1 wk after EE in Experiment 2. PK enhanced memory of word-picture associations when the lures were from the same categories (Experiment 2), rather than from different categories (Experiment 1). These results were largely confirmed in Experiment 3 when encoding condition was manipulated as a between-subjects factor, while lure type as a within-subjects factor. The findings suggest that different from EE, FM facilitates rapid acquisition and consolidation of word-picture knowledge, and highlight that PK plays an important role in this process by enhancing access to detailed information.

A novel multi-word paradigm for investigating semantic context effects in language production.

Semantic context modulates precision and speed of language production. Using different experimental designs including the Picture-Word-Interference (PWI) paradigm, it has consistently been shown that categorically related distractor words (e.g., cat) inhibit retrieval of the target picture name (dog). Here we introduce a novel variant of the PWI paradigm in which we present 8 words prior to a to be named target picture. Within this set, the number of words categorically related was varied between 3 and 5, and the picture to be named was either related or unrelated to the respective category. To disentangle interacting effects of semantic context we combined different naming paradigms manipulating the number of competitors and assessing the effect of repeated naming instances. Evaluating processing of the cohort by eye-tracking provided us with a metric of the (implicit) recognition of the semantic cohort. Results replicate the interference effect in that overall naming of pictures categorically related to the distractor set was slower compared to unrelated pictures. However, interference did not increase with increasing number of distractors. Tracking this effect across naming repetitions, we found that interference is prominent at the first naming instance of every picture only, whereby it is stable across distractor conditions, but dissipates across the experiment. Regarding eye-tracking our data show that participants fixated longer on semantically related items, indicating the identification of the lexico-semantic cohort. Our findings confirm the validity of the novel paradigm and indicate that besides interference during first exposure, repeated exposure to the semantic context may facilitate picture naming and counteract lexical interference.

Lung CT Image Classification using Deep Neural Networks for Lung Cancer Detection

In Recent years, image processing strategies are broadly utilized in a few restorative territories for image improvement in prior division and treatment stages, where the time factor is imperative to find the variation from the norm issues in target pictures, particularly in different malignant growth tumors, for example, lung disease. Lung cancer is the most important disease cause high mortality rate. And computer-aided diagnosis can be useful for physicians to accurately identify the cancer cells. Many computer-aided methods have been studied and applied using image processing and machine learning. But, they are not acceptable for a health-based classification models to have high false positive and true negative rates as it they can devastate lives through false diagnosis. To reduce the effect of them in classification, to perform experiments JSRT data set is considered as it is the most widely used benchmark data set. The proper segmentation of lung tumor from X-ray, CT-scan or MRI these are the stepping stone towards automated diagnosis system for lung cancer detection. Our detection is to train this neural network using volumes with tumor size and position. In recent techniques like machine learning can predict lung cancer but this technique is not suitable for predicting segmentation of images in that particular area.

Aging Effects on Phonological and Semantic Priming in the Tip-of-the-Tongue: Evidence From a Two-Step Approach.

The mechanism underlying the age difference in spoken word production remains controversial. We used a two-step approach proposed by Gollan and Brown (2006) to investigate the semantic and phonological retrieval deficits when tip-of-the-tongue occurs in young and older adults. Importantly, we controlled the inhibition ability in both older and young groups. In experiment 1 with a people pictures naming task, older adults produced more TOTs than young adults, and they suffered from phonological retrieval deficit rather than semantic retrieval deficit in speaking. In experiment 2 with a priming paradigm, participants were presented semantically related or phonologically related names before target pictures, which formed semantic or phonological priming conditions for lexical access. Compared with young adults, older adults showed a greater effect of phonological priming on decreasing TOTs occurrence. For semantic retrieval deficit, older adults exhibited a smaller phonological facilitation effect and a larger semantic interference effect than young adults. For phonological retrieval deficit, older adults presented a larger phonological facilitation effect in the first-name related priming condition than the first-syllable related priming condition, whereas young adults showed similar facilitation effects between the two phonological priming conditions. Our findings provide consistent evidence for the transmission deficit hypothesis, and highlight that aging affects bidirectional connections between semantic and phonological nodes in speech production.

The development of dynamic perceptual simulations during sentence comprehension

Based on an embodied account of language comprehension, this study investigated the dynamic characteristics of children and adults’ perceptual simulations during sentence comprehension, using a novel paradigm to assess the perceptual simulation of objects moving up and down a vertical axis. The participants comprised adults (N = 40) and 6-, 8-, and 10-year-old children (N = 116). After listening in experimental trials to sentences implying that objects moved upward or downward, the participants were shown pictures and had to decide as quickly as possible whether the objects depicted had been mentioned in the sentences. The target pictures moved either up or down and then stopped in the middle of the screen. All age groups’ reaction times were found to be shorter when the objects moved in the directions that the sentences implied. Age exerted no developmental effect on reaction times. The findings suggest that dynamic perceptual simulations are fundamental to language comprehension in text recipients aged 6 and older.

Moving Targets: Aggressiveness, Attainment, and Temporal Dynamics in Corporate Carbon Targets

Carbon emissions reduction targets are becoming a de rigueur component of corporate sustainability disclosures. We explore what carbon targets entail and whether they drive firms toward meaningful reductions of carbon emissions by analyzing target data disclosed by firms to CDP at multiple levels. We start by displaying first-order parameters that are directly disclosed by firms and then illustrate implicit, second-order factors derived from the first-order parameters, which provide a fuller picture of carbon targets and the aggressiveness of emissions reductions embodied therein. Further, we examine temporal dynamics by developing a target matching algorithm that enables us to more directly track targets across years since firms often report multiple targets in a given year and change target parameters over time, blurring comparisons and analyses at the firm-year-target level. We demonstrate that firms’ self-reported claims of target attainment frequently contradict our calculations of actual target attainment based on disclosed carbon emissions and firms regularly alter target parameters from year to year with the adjusted targets becoming less aggressive over time.

Stimulating the parietal cortex by transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS): no effects on attention and memory.

Selective attention is relevant for goal directed behavior as it allows people to attend to task-relevant target stimuli and to ignore task-irrelevant distractors. Attentional focus at encoding affects subsequent memory for target and distractor stimuli. Remembering selectively more targets than distractors represents memory selectivity. Brain imaging studies suggest that the superior parietal cortex is associated with the dorsal attentional network supporting top-down control of selective attention while the inferior parietal cortex is associated with the ventral attentional network supporting bottom-up attentional orienting. To investigate the roles of the dorsal and ventral networks in the effect of selective attention during encoding on long-term memory, we stimulated the left superior and the right inferior parietal cortex. Building on previous work, we applied transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) during a study phase where pictures and words were presented simultaneously and participants had to switch between a picture and a word decision. A subsequent recognition test assessed memory for target and distractor pictures and words. We hypothesized that a relative increase in activity in the dorsal network would boost selective attention while increased activity in the ventral network would impair selective attention. We also expected to find corresponding effects on memory. Enhanced selective attention should lead to higher memory selectivity, while impaired selective attention should lead to lower memory selectivity. Our results replicated that task switching reduced memory selectivity. However, we found no significant effects of tDCS. Thus, the present study questions the effectiveness of the present tDCS protocol for modulating attention during task switching and subsequent memory.

The impact of nicotine dose and instructed dose on smokers' implicit attitudes to smoking cues: An ERP study.

It is unclear whether nicotine and perceived nicotine exposure can influence automatic evaluations of cigarette stimuli. In the present study, we investigated the effects of nicotine dose and instructed dose on motivational responses to smoking cues. Forty overnight nicotine-deprived smokers completed an Implicit Association Test (IAT) at each of the four laboratory sessions in a balanced-placebo design that crossed nicotine dose (Given-NIC [given nicotine] vs. Given-DENIC [given denicotinized]) with instructed dose expectancy (Told-NIC [told-nicotine] vs. Told-DENIC. [told-denicotinized]). We measured participants' behavioral performance, including reaction time (RT) and accuracy rate, and the early posterior negativity (EPN) component using the event-related potential (ERP) technique to the target pictures. During congruent trials when the categorization condition was smoking or unpleasant, smokers had greater classification accuracy, shorter RT latency, and greater EPN amplitudes compared to the incongruent trials when the categorization condition was smoking or pleasant. The Given-NIC condition was associated with increased classification accuracy, longer RT latency, and decreased EPN amplitudes compared to the Given-DENIC condition. Similarly, the Told-NIC condition was associated with increased accuracy and decreased EPN amplitudes compared to the Told-DENIC condition, but with shorter RT latency. Cigarette-related pictures produced greater EPN amplitudes than neutral pictures. Both behavioral and ERP results suggest that smokers have negative implicit attitudes toward smoking. While both nicotine dose and expected dose facilitated stimulus categorization, there was no evidence that either factor altered smokers' negative attitudes toward smoking cues. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Online-Processing of Grammatical Gender in Noun-Phrase Decoding: An Eye-Tracking Study With Monolingual German 3rd and 4th Graders.

Like many other languages, German employs a linguistic category called “grammatical gender.” In gender-marking languages each noun is assigned to a particular gender-class (in German: masculine, feminine or neuter) and other words in a sentence which are grammatically controlled by the noun are marked by particular morphemes according to the noun’s gender feature – so called gender agreement. Within psycholinguistic theories of language comprehension, it is often assumed that gender agreement might help to predict the continuation of a sentence on grammatical grounds and to reduce the lexical search space for the next words emerging within the speech signal. Thus, gender agreement relations may provide a means to make the comprehension process more effective and targeted. The aim of the current study was to assess whether monolingual German 3rd and 4th grade primary school children make use of gender agreement in online auditory comprehension and whether different gender cues interact with each other and with semantic information. A language-picture matching task was conducted in which 32 children looked at two pictures while listening to a noun phrase. Due to features of the German gender system, the target picture corresponding with the noun phrase could be predicted shortly after stimulus onset on account of gender agreement relations. The predictive impact of grammatical gender agreement on noun-phrase decoding was investigated by measuring the time course of eye-movements onto the target and distractor pictures. The results confirm and extend previous findings that gender plays a role in predictive online comprehension of gender-marking languages like German, and that even primary school children are able to make use of this grammatical device.

Clinical and non-clinical hallucinations are similarly associated with source memory errors in a visual memory task.

Hallucinations have been found to be associated with various types of source memory failure in both schizophrenia patients and hallucination-prone healthy individuals. We investigated the associations of clinical and non-clinical hallucinations with source memory errors in a visual memory task that involved the remembering of picture presentation context. 59 schizophrenia patients and 61 healthy individuals took part in the study. Pictures were presented either at different locations or in association with different visual stimuli. The participants were required afterwards to recognize the target pictures among distractors, and then to remember their spatial location or the visual stimulus that was associated with them. Liberal response bias in picture recognition was associated with hallucination proneness and auditory-verbal hallucinations in subsamples of participants with significant non-clinical or clinical hallucinations. After controlling for overall memory performance, failure to remember the spatial location of the pictures was associated with visual hallucinations in male patients; failure to remember the associated visual stimulus was related to auditory-verbal hallucinations in female patients and to hallucination proneness in healthy women. The findings suggest that both clinical and non-clinical hallucinations are associated with loss of contextual information relative to the acquisition of events.

Compatibility between response position and either object typical size or semantic category: SNARC- and MARC-like effects in primary school children

In two experiments, we administered two binary classification tasks to third- to fifth-grade students and found that either the conceptual size (Experiment 1) or semantic category (Experiment 2) of the target picture interacted with response position: Participants emitted faster and/or more accurate right- and left-side responses to stimuli referring to typically large and small objects (i.e., a SNARC [spatial–numerical association of response codes]-like effect) or to living and nonliving objects (i.e., a MARC [markedness association of response codes]-like effect), respectively. The effect of either stimulus dimension was present only when this dimension was the task-relevant one. These findings may be accounted for by the polarity compatibility principle. In binary classification tasks, one of the two relevant stimulus values (i.e., the dominant one) and one of the two response values would be coded as having a positive polarity, whereas the other would be coded as having a negative polarity. Response selection would be faster and/or more accurate when stimulus and response polarities are compatible. According to a less parsimonious hypothesis, the polarity principle would only explain the effect of the stimulus semantic category in Experiment 2, whereas the effect of stimulus conceptual size in Experiment 1 might be traced back to the fact that children spatially code the typical size of stimulus referents (even if only when the task requires accessing this stimulus dimension). Small and large objects would be represented relatively on the left and right, respectively, which would result in faster and/or more accurate responses when response position is compatible with the stimulus referent’s position in this spatial representation.