Unfamiliar Symbols Research Articles

Frontal Midline Theta Reflects Individual Task Performance in a Working Memory Task

Frontal midline (fm-)theta activity has been related to working memory (WM) processes, as it typically increases with WM load. The robustness of this effect, however, varies across studies and subjects, putting limits to its interpretation. We hypothesized that variation in the fm-theta effect may reflect individual differences in task difficulty with increasing WM load as indicated by behavioural responses. We further tested whether effects in the alpha range are robust markers of WM load. We recorded 64-channel EEG from 24 healthy adults while they memorized either 2 or 4 unfamiliar symbols (low vs. high WM load) in a modified Sternberg task. The last 2s of the retention phase were analyzed for WM load-related changes in the theta (5-7Hz) and alpha range (lower: 8-10Hz, upper: 10.5-12.5Hz). Higher WM load led to less accurate and slower responses. The increase of fm-theta with WM load was most pronounced at fm electrodes, localized to anterior cingulate regions, and correlated with the participants' decrease in accuracy due to higher WM load. Alpha peak frequency increased in the high compared to the low WM load condition, corresponding to a decrease in lower alpha range across all channels. The results demonstrate that previously reported variation in fm-theta workload effects can partly be explained by variation in task difficulty indexed by individual task accuracy. Moreover, the results also demonstrate that alpha WM load effects are prominent when separating upper and lower alpha.

Semantic and affective salience: The role of meaning and preference in attentional capture and disengagement.

Emotion appears to have a substantial impact on a wide variety of attentional functions. However, stimuli that elicit affective responses also tend to be meaningful. Here we attempted to disentangle the effects of meaning from the effects of affect on attentional capture by irrelevant distractors. Experiment 1 used a previously unfamiliar distractor stimulus, and manipulated the amount of knowledge provided to observers about the distractor. The results suggested that increases in meaning can reduce attentional capture. Experiments 2 and 3 used both familiar and unfamiliar symbols (baseball logos and flags, respectively) as distractors. Critically, of the two familiar symbols, one was rated as affective-positive and the other was rated as affective-negative. As in Experiment 1, the results showed that unfamiliar distractors can capture attention. In addition, the results also suggested that the two affective distractors captured attention (so long as they were sufficiently intense). This finding suggests that while increased knowledge can reduce capture, affect can restore an item's ability to capture attention. Finally, the results of Experiment 4 showed that observers were slower to disengage from a negative item than from a positive item. This evidence emphasizes the differential roles of semantic knowledge versus affect on attentional capture.

Symbol processing in the left angular gyrus: Evidence from passive perception of digits

Arabic digits are one of the most ubiquitous symbol sets in the world. While there have been many investigations into the neural processing of the semantic information digits represent (e.g. through numerical comparison tasks), little is known about the neural mechanisms which support the processing of digits as visual symbols. To characterise the component neurocognitive mechanisms which underlie numerical cognition, it is essential to understand the processing of digits as a visual category, independent of numerical magnitude processing. The 'Triple Code Model' (Dehaene, 1992; Dehaene and Cohen, 1995) posits an asemantic visual code for processing Arabic digits in the ventral visual stream, yet there is currently little empirical evidence in support of this code. This outstanding question was addressed in the current functional Magnetic Resonance (fMRI) study by contrasting brain responses during the passive viewing of digits versus letters and novel symbols at short (50 ms) and long (500 ms) presentation times. The results of this study reveal increased activation for familiar symbols (digits and letters) relative to unfamiliar symbols (scrambled digits and letters) at long presentation durations in the left dorsal Angular gyrus (dAG). Furthermore, increased activation for Arabic digits was observed in the left ventral Angular gyrus (vAG) in comparison to letters, scrambled digits and scrambled letters at long presentation durations, but no digit specific activation in any region at short presentation durations. These results suggest an absence of a digit specific 'Visual Number Form Area' (VNFA) in the ventral visual cortex, and provide evidence for the role of the left ventral AG during the processing of digits in the absence of any explicit processing demands. We conclude that Arabic digit processing depends specifically on the left AG rather than a ventral visual stream VNFA.

Reflections: The Man Who Swam Out of History: Spain

Reflections:The Man Who Swam Out of History: Spain Robert A. Rosenstone (bio) This essay is an excerpt from a work-in-progress entitled The Man Who Swam Out of History, in which Robert A. Rosenstone reflects on his own scholarly trajectory, projects, and books as the result of an interaction between personal desires and experience and larger social forces. ~ Part 1 ~ For the man who swims out of it, History begins in Spain. This was a surprise. It was supposed to be Literature. I first went to Europe because of Hemingway. 1958. I didn't see any swimming pools on this trip, but I was not yet a swimmer. What pulled me to Spain was The Sun Also Rises. The characters in that book didn't swim. They worked in Paris. They drank after hours at small bistros on the Left Bank. They went on vacation and fished for trout in the mountain streams of Navarre. In July they went to Pamplona for the Fiesta de San Fermin. Here they watched bullfights. They sat in the café Irun, drinking too much and making smart remarks. Once in a while one of them beat up somebody or got beaten up. Pamplona was for me a holy site, the Fiesta de San Fermin an important pilgrimage. Not that I would have used those terms. I was going to emulate my literary hero. I was going to gather material for a novel I had begun to write in Paris, where I had hung around the Latin Quarter for three months. It would have to be a short novel. I was not in Pamplona for the seven days of the festival. I was there for twenty-four hours and never saw a bullfight, the bull ring, or a bull. Hollywood had released its second version of The Sun Also Rises earlier that year and no hotel rooms were available. Cafés overflowed with American college students who engaged in lengthy discussions on the relative merits of Bermuda shorts and the new short shorts. On the first afternoon I bought a bota and drank a lot of cheap wine as I shuffled through the streets behind various marching bands. In the evening I tried to sleep with my head on the table of an outdoor café. Nausea began at midnight, diarrhea [End Page 641] a little later. The remainder of my time in Pamplona was spent squatting over a foul hole in the cement floor of the public restroom under the main plaza. When the early morning rocket announced the running of the bulls, I was dragging myself to the railroad station to catch the early train to the border. It took three days in Biarritz to recover my health. History in the form of the Spanish Civil War came to me while touring Spain in the ten days before the fiesta. My traveling companion, Leon Frankel, had hung around the office of the UCLA Folk Song Club, next door to The Daily Bruin, where I spent three years writing editorials denouncing fraternities and sororities and railing against the iniquities of the school administration. Out of school for a year and working with the Los Angeles City planning department, Leon had just bought a new Austin-Healey Sprite in London. It carried us to the continent (on a ferry) and then down from Paris to Spain. Our first day in the country, somewhere between Burgos and Madrid, we pass two military types in green uniforms with odd, patent leather hats, one walking on each side of the highway. Leon raises his left arm, bent at the elbow in what I can only describe as the Italian fuck you, then accelerates. Guardia civil, he says. Who? I ask. National police. Used for centuries to control the population and suppress revolt. They patrol the highways in Spain. In a small town Leon points to an unfamiliar symbol stenciled on the side of a building facing the plaza. The yoke and the arrows. The symbol of the Falange. The what? The Falange Espanol. What's the Falange? My ignorance lets Leon deliver a series of lectures on Spanish history. He has taken several political science courses from...

Creating Illusions of Past Encounter Through Brief Exposure

Titchener (1928) suggested that briefly glancing at a scene could make it appear strangely familiar when it was fully processed moments later. The closest laboratory demonstration used words as stimuli, and showed that briefly glancing at a to-be-judged word increased the subject's belief that it had been presented in an earlier study list (Jacoby & Whitehouse, 1989). We evaluated whether a hasty glance could elicit a false belief in a prior encounter, from a time and place outside of the experiment. This goal precluded using word stimuli, so we had subjects evaluate unfamiliar symbols. Each symbol was preceded by a brief exposure to an identical symbol, a different symbol, or no symbol. A brief glance at an identical symbol increased attributions to preexperimental experience, relative to a glance at a different symbol or no symbol, providing a possible mechanism for common illusions of false recognition.

Exploring action dynamics as an index of paired-associate learning.

Much evidence exists supporting a richer interaction between cognition and action than commonly assumed. Such findings demonstrate that short-timescale processes, such as motor execution, may relate in systematic ways to longer-timescale cognitive processes, such as learning. We further substantiate one direction of this interaction: the flow of cognition into action systems. Two experiments explored match-to-sample paired-associate learning, in which participants learned randomized pairs of unfamiliar symbols. During the experiments, their hand movements were continuously tracked using the Nintendo Wiimote. Across learning, participant arm movements are initiated and completed more quickly, exhibit lower fluctuation, and exert more perturbation on the Wiimote during the button press. A second experiment demonstrated that action dynamics index novel learning scenarios, and not simply acclimatization to the Wiimote interface. Results support a graded and systematic covariation between cognition and action, and recommend ways in which this theoretical perspective may contribute to applied learning contexts.

Visual novel stimuli in an ERP novelty oddball paradigm: Effects of familiarity on repetition and recognition memory

The orienting response, the brain's reaction to novel and/or out of context familiar events, is reflected by the novelty P3 of the ERP. Contextually novel events also engender high rates of recognition memory. We examined, under incidental and intentional conditions, the effects of visual symbol familiarity on the novelty P3 recorded during an oddball task and on the parietal episodic memory (EM) effect, an index of recollection. Repetition of familiar, but not unfamiliar, symbols elicited a reduction in the novelty P3. Better recognition performance for the familiar symbols was associated with a robust parietal EM effect, which was absent for the unfamiliar symbols in the incidental task. These data demonstrate that processing of novel events depends on expectation and whether stimuli have preexisting representations in long-term semantic memory.

The Effect of the ApoE ϵ4 Allele on Recognition Memory for Olfactory and Visual Stimuli in Patients with Pathologically Confirmed Alzheimer’s Disease, Probable Alzheimer’s Disease, and Healthy Elderly Controls

Episodic recognition memory for odors, faces, and unfamiliar symbols was assessed in apolipoprotein ϵ4 positive and ϵ4 negative individuals with pathologically-confirmed Alzheimer’s disease (AD), individuals diagnosed with probable AD, and healthy age-and gender-matched controls. The analyses revealed significant differences in performance between the AD patients and nondemented elderly controls based on the presence of the ϵ4 allele and the modality of the stimulus to be remembered. Measures of hits did not discriminate among groups but an analysis of false positive errors revealed significant differences, particularly for olfactory stimuli. Nondemented ϵ4 negative controls committed fewer false positive errors for olfactory stimuli compared to all other groups. In contrast, nondemented ϵ4 positive controls committed false positive errors for olfactory stimuli at rates similar to the AD patients. The performance of ϵ4 positive and ϵ4 negative controls was indistinguishable on the visual recognition memory tasks suggesting the particular vulnerability of olfactory memory to the early neuropathology of AD resulting in false positive errors in recognition memory for olfactory stimuli. The results of the present study offer new insight into how recognition memory is affected by AD, the ϵ4 allele, and the modality of the stimulus to be remembered.

Implicit preferences: The role(s) of familiarity in the structural mere exposure effect

In four experiments using an artificial grammar (AG) learning procedure, the authors examined the links between the “classic” mere exposure effect [heightened affect for previously encountered stimulus items ( Bornstein, 1989; Zajonc, 1968)] and the “structural” mere exposure effect [greater hedonic appreciation for novel stimuli that conform to an implicitly acquired underlying rule system ( Gordon & Holyoak, 1983)]. After learning, participants: (a) classified stimuli according to whether they conformed to the principles of the grammar and, (b) rated them in terms of how much they liked them. In some experiments unusual and unfamiliar symbols were used to instantiate the AG, in others highly familiar characters were used. In all cases participants showed standard AG learning. However, whether the two exposure effects emerged was dependent on symbol familiarity. Symbols with high a priori familiarity produced a structural mere exposure effect. Moderately familiar symbols produced only the classic, but not the structural, mere exposure effect. Highly unfamiliar symbols produced neither exposure effect. Results are discussed in the context of implicit learning theory and implications for a general theory of aesthetics are presented.

The graphical forms, visual-verbal resonances, meanings and semiosis of the Red Cross symbols

We investigated the semiosis of pictorial, schematic, and abstract symbols using current and proposed emblems for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. Cross-cultural symbol-referent ratings of correspondence suggested the symbols could all be considered icons and indexes of the referents. Mean comprehensibility estimation scores differed significantly between familiar and unfamiliar symbols. Pictorial graphical form and symbol familiarity did not appear to constrain interpretations in the open-ended comprehension test. Thus at the referent denotation level, the symbols appeared to be simultaneously iconic and indexical, and at the symbol interpretation level, they appeared to be simultaneously iconic and symbolic. The findings suggest that symbol semiosis, rather than graphical form, is a more practical method for deciding the type of symbol one would use to communicate specific types of messages.

Exotic deviance: medicalizing cultural idioms--from strangeness to illness

This is a seminal study of Western psychiatric interpretations of some of the most bizarre behaviours so strange by modern Western standards that they are assumed to be illnesses of disorders - latah, koro, and dance mania. Psychiatrists making these diagnoses draw heavily on Eurocentric values and assumptions. The book examines Otherness with an emphasis on Western understanding and acceptance, explaining that these behaviours are rational outcomes of unfamiliar symbol systems and worldviews and are a testament to the power of human imagination and creativity.

Religious Devoutness Construed as Pathology: the Myth of 'Religious Mania'

Contemporary Eurocentric norms and values continue to be superimposed onto various deviant religious convictions and expressions occurring both transculturally and transhistorically. Value judgments as to what constitutes acceptable forms of emotional expression and worship are often made under the insidious neutral guise of science, which is dominated by narrow, restrictive Western concepts of normality. Western-trained social scientists must be more sensitive to the historical and ethno- graphic records and the caveats of imposing moral proscriptions onto unfamiliar or exotic symbol systems.

Writing without Graphic Motor Patterns: A Case of Dysgraphia for Letters and Digits Sparing Shorthand Writing

This paper reports the case of a patient HP who presents a dysgraphia affecting the production of letters and digits while sparing shorthand writing. HP's writing impairmentis two-fold. On one hand, HP produces systematic lettersubstitutions affecting exclusively lower-case letters b, p, d, and q. Such confusions are also observed in tasks assessing the mental imagery of letters and the processing of visually presented, isolated letters. This deficit is attributed to a circumscribed disruption of allographic representations. On the other hand, HP can write correctly formed letters and digits but the production of these symbols is slow and nonfluent. This disturbance was investigated by using a digitising tablet to record movements performed in grapho-motor production. The results of the analysis of temporal and kinematic indices suggest that graphic motor patterns of letters and digits are no longer available to this patient, whereas motor patterns underlying the production of shorthand seem unaffected. Itis suggested thatthere are two ways forproducing spatially well-formed symbols. One route is mediated by graphic motor patterns and the other by a motor planning system that would be used in other tasks involving the generation of 2D trajectories as in drawing or in tracing unfamiliar symbols.

Location coding with letters versus unfamiliar, familiar, and labeled letter-like forms.

Abstract Errors in reporting a postcued target within a string of several letters more often involve a letter appearing elsewhere in the string (mislocation error) than one not appearing in the string (intrusion error). However, mislocation errors are not more frequent than intrusion errors with strings of relatively unfamiliar symbols or forms, and two experiments were conducted to determine the reason for this difference. The first experiment showed that the difference is not an artifact of different overall accuracy levels or exposure durations for the two character types. The second experiment revealed that, relative to no experience, initial experience with the forms through familiarization or learning labels for them produced mislocation and intrusion frequencies that were more similar to those for letters. This change was related to the development of stored representations for forms that are similar to those for letters and are subject to the same influences that produce mislocation and intrusion patterns for them.Determining relative positions may be more difficult for some types of items than for others. Chastain (1994) presented displays comprised of a row of only letters or only symbols (slashes, parentheses, etc.). One character was cued for report by an indicator presented in the postexposure pattern mask, and the subject responded by pressing a key on a computer keyboard corresponding to that character. Subjects could make two types of errors: (1) indicating an item that was present elsewhere in the display but appeared to be in the postcued position (called a mislocation error), or (2) indicating an item that was not present anywhere in the display (an intrusion error). Mislocation errors were more frequent than intrusion errors for displays containing only letters, but not for displays containing only symbols. More mislocations than intrusions have been observed by others when letters were the stimuli (Butler & Currie, 1986; Butler, Mewhort, & Tramer, 1987; Chastain, 1990). The nature of the mental representations of stimuli producing these results is the focus of the current study.Mewhort and Campbell (1981) proposed a Dual-Buffer model involving both letter identity and location. Information is transferred from an initial spatially faithful precategorical representation (Feature Buffer) to a postcategorical representation (Character Buffer) containing items with identity codes and relative position tags. Separate processing of identity and location information during the transfer from the Feature Buffer to the Character Buffer allows scrambling that produces mislocations (Butler, 1981). Others have proposed that location information merely decays more quickly than identity information, leaving observers less sure of the relative positions of items than of their identities (Dixon, 1986; Dixon & Twilley, 1988). More recently, Driver and Baylis (1991) proposed that letter identities are derived in parallel rather than serially, although letter location information is not automatically produced when letter identity is determined. Encoding location for letters may require that attention be directed to them serially.A study by Mewhort, Campbell, Marchetti, and Campbell (1981) confirmed the proposition that letter location information is fragile. They presented a postexposure mask containing a probe indicating the letter to be reported. Intrusion errors decreased markedly and in a regular fashion with increases in the delay between the offset of the target and the onset of the mask with probe. However, location errors decreased only slightly and erratically. Other research has shown that masking increases location errors far more than intrusion errors (Butler, Mewhort, & Tramer, 1987; Mewhort, Huntley, & Duff-Fraser, 1993).Letters are familiar stimuli with phonemic or name codes that are readily available. Perhaps identity information exists in the Character Buffer in the form of such codes, with location information in the form of a location tag associated with each code. …

The Quest for Transcendence: An Ethnography of UFOs in America

Two case studies involving waves of claims and public discourse about mysterious aerial sightings in the United States over half a century apart are presented. Most evaluations of such episodes by scientists ethnocentrically portray sightings of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) as the product of deviance, irrationality, or psychopathology The emphasis on natural science approaches to understanding the social sciences is primarily responsible for the present erroneous pseudoscientific status of UFOs, as is the failure to recognize or take as problematic the notion of rationality as a cultural category. Consequently, the symbolic significance of UFOs has been obscured. Contemporary interpretations of UFOs serve the unconscious resurrection of the power and function of omnipotent beings during a secular age. A semiotic culture‐as‐text social anthropology approach is more fruitful as it does not treat rationality as an objective given, but emphasizes the social construction of reality and the translation of unfamiliar symbol systems.

Effect of familiarity and category contrast on stimulus and response priming.

In a letter-symbol classification task, flanking incompatible symbols slowed response latencies to letter targets, whereas incompatible letter flankers did not slow the classification of symbol targets. The conditions surrounding this asymmetry in response competition were investigated in five experiments. The results showed that: (1) the asymmetry was not related to the familiarity of the symbol targets or to the prime-target interval; (2) when the classification involved familiar and unfamiliar symbols, the asymmetry remained (i.e., there was less interference associated with the unfamiliar symbol targets), but there was now significant response competition associated with both symbol categories; and (3) with a mixed-category task (i.e., letters and symbols assigned to both responses), the symbol targets continued to be less interfered with by both letter and symbol incompatible flankers. These findings were interpreted as suggesting that response competition can be influenced by both classification decision rules and cohesiveness of exemplars comprising a category.

Sequential versus Simultaneous Processing on the K-ABC: Validity in Predicting Learning Success

The validity of the Mental Processing Scales of the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children (K-ABC) was examined by using two learning tasks as criteria. The learning tasks, which approximated reading instruction using unfamiliar symbols, were constructed and presented in a sequential or a simultaneous manner to 208 first-grade children. Correlations between the learning tasks established that they were distinctly different. Subjects who showed the largest differences between performance on the sequential and simultaneous learning tasks (N = 51) were then administered the Mental Processing Scales of the K-ABC. Correlational and analysis of variance (ANOVA) results indicated that the K-ABC Simultaneous Processing Scale was most strongly related to the sequential learning task. Several possible explanations for these paradoxical results are explored. There is an apparent discrepancy between the sequential and simultaneous measures of the K-ABC and the Kaufmans' proposed remedial instruction strategies. A central determinant of these results may be that although the sequential learning task required rather complex cognitive involvement, the sequential scales of the K-ABC focus only on simple operations of short-term encoding and recall.

Perception and comprehension of some pictorial symbols as a function of familiarity and nature of depicted object.

Familiarity with test material and its effect on performance has been a problem of serious concern to psychologists and educators. Research using a variety of cognitive tasks has indicated deterioration in performance if unfamiliar materials were used for testing (1, 2, 4, 5). Differential effect of familiar~ty on the perception and comprehension of some pictorial symbols was studied here as a function of the nature of depicted objects. Subjects were 160 rural adults assigned in a 2 X 2 randomized factorial design (familiar and unfamiliar materials and concrete and nonconcrete depictions). Eight pictorial symbols (four familiar and four unfamiliar) drawn in appropriate colours (3) were stimuli. Symbols for hospital, school, and railway line, etc. which were displayed within the subjects' visual environment were called familiar. Those not displayed in the subjects' surrounding environment such as symbols for rock falling, keep dry, and the like formed the unfamiliar category. Selection of symbols was purposive rather than representative of the population of symbols. Familiar and unfamiliar symbols were presented in a random order; subjects were asked to identify and interpret each symbol. Each correct interpretation was assigned a score of two, simple identification of the pictorial symbol was given a score of one, and failure to identify the symbol was scored zero. Analysis of variance indicated a significant effect of familiarity (PIJ;~ = 4.67, P < .05) and depiction (PI,IGB = 34.03, p < .01) Comprehension of familiar symbols (1.85, SD = 1.24) appeared better than the unfamiliar (1 50, SD = 1.22). Comprehension of concrete symbols was more accurate (2.15, SD = 1.00) than the non

Analysis of questions teachers ask about teaching modern mathematics in the elementary school

Modern mathematics, ushered into the mathematics curriculum in the latter part of the 1950s and persisting through the decade of the 60s, received much publicity and was vigorously taught, or at least attempted, across the entire country-from the largest city system to the smallest village school. Unfamiliar subjects and symbols were introduced, and expressions and terms were used that were heretofore foreign to the elementary school. Expressions such as commutative, associative, distributive. teaching for understanding. and mod were but a few of the new expressions heard in elementary education circles. Bases other than ten, modulo arithmetic, and set language represent some of the new subjects that made up “modern elementary mathematics.”

EFFECTS OF STIMULUS ABSTRACTNESS AND FAMILIARITY ON LISTENER'S PERFORMANCE IN A COMMUNICATION TASK

GRUSHCOW, ROCHELLE, and GAUTHIER, JOAN PRESTON. Effects of Stimulus Abstractness and Familiarity on Listener's Performance in a Communication Task. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1971, 42, 956-958. Young children performed as listeners in 4 communication tasks requiring them to listen to verbal descriptions and then stack on a peg the 4 correct blocks out of a set of 7. The stimuli in the 4 tasks were familiar animals, unfamiliar animals, familiar symbols, and unfamiliar symbols. A learning effect over 3 trials was observed as well as a significant main effect for animal versus symbol. Previous findings of a novelty effect were interpreted as due to the fact that the novel forms were symbols.