Cue Words Research Articles

Exposure to relaxing words during sleep promotes slow-wave sleep and subjective sleep quality.

Our thoughts alter our sleep, but the underlying mechanisms are still unknown. We propose that mental processes are active to a greater or lesser extent during sleep and that this degree of activation affects our sleep depth. We examined this notion by activating the concept of “relaxation” during sleep using relaxation-related words in 50 healthy participants. In support of our hypothesis, playing relaxing words during non-rapid eye movement sleep extended the time spent in slow-wave sleep, increased power in the slow-wave activity band after the word cue, and abolished an asymmetrical sleep depth during the word presentation period. In addition, participants reported a higher sleep quality and elevated subjective alertness. Our results support the notion that the activation of mental concepts during sleep can influence sleep depth. They provide a basis for interventions using targeted activations to promote sleep depth and sleep quality to foster well-being and health.

Top-down and bottom-up guidance in normal aging during scene search.

Age-related differences in visual search have been extensively studied using simple item arrays, showing an attentional decline. Little is known about how aging affects attentional guidance during search in more complex scenes. To study this issue, we analyzed eye-movement behavior in realistic scene search. We examined age-related differences in top-down guidance, manipulating target template specificity (picture vs. word cue) and target-scene semantic consistency (consistent vs. inconsistent), and in bottom-up guidance, manipulating perceptual salience (high vs. low) of targets and distractors. Compared to young adults (YA), older adults (OA) were overall slower, from the first saccade in the scene. They showed a smaller benefit of a specific target template, suggesting that precision of visual information in working memory may decrease with age. The benefit of semantic consistency did not depend on age, suggesting a preserved ability in OA to use knowledge about object occurrence in scenes. OA showed greater bottom-up search facilitation due to target's high salience, which may depend on reduced selection of low-salience stimuli. Attentional capture by distractors was greater in OA than YA, with respect to engagement (probability of distractor fixation), but only following a picture cue, and disengagement (fixation duration on distractors) in all conditions. Overall, our study shows that age-related differences in visual selection of targets and distractors depend on specific task demands in terms of top-down and bottom-up guidance. It also indicates that scene search difficulties in OA can be limited by cognitive and perceptual forms of environmental support. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

A deep learning approach for identifying biomedical breakthrough discoveries using context analysis

Breakthrough research in scientific fields usually comes as a manifestation of major development and advancement. These advances build to an epiphany where new ways of thinking about a problem become possible. Identifying breakthrough research can be useful for cultivating and funding further innovation. This article presents a new method for identifying scientific breakthroughs from research papers based on cue words commonly associated with major advancements. We looked for specific terms signifying scientific breakthroughs in citing sentences to identify breakthrough articles. By setting a threshold for the number of citing sentences (“citances”) with breakthrough cue words that peer scholars often use when evaluating research, we identified articles containing breakthrough research. We call this approach the “others-evaluation” process. We then shortlisted candidates from the selected articles based on the authors’ evaluations of their own research, found in the abstracts. This we call the “self-evaluation” process. Combining the two approaches into a dual “others-self” evaluation process, we arrived at a sample of 237 potential breakthrough articles, most of which are recommended by the Faculty Opinions. Based on the breakthrough articles identified, using SVM, TextCNN, and BERT to train the models to identify abstracts with breakthrough evaluations. This automatic identification model can greatly simplify the process of others-self-evaluation process and promote identifying breakthrough research.

Autobiographical Memory and Episodic Specificity Across Different Affective States in Bipolar Disorder

Autobiographical memory is essential to ground a sense of self-identity, contributing to social functioning and the development of future plans, and being an essential source for the psychiatric interview. Previous studies have suggested loss of autobiographical episodic specificity in unipolar depression, but relatively fewer investigations have been conducted in bipolar disorder (BD) patients, particularly across different mood states. Similarly, there is a scarcity of systematic investigations about mood-congruent and mood-dependent memory in relation to autobiographical memory in BD. Considering this, a total of 74 patients with BD (24 in euthymia, 26 in mania, and 24 in depression) responded with autobiographical memories to cue words belonging to four categories: mania, depression, BD, and neutral. Episodic specificity was scored according to the Autobiographical Interview, with high intra- and inter-rater reliability. Results indicated that patients in mania generally re-experience more episodic details than those in depression. Depressed bipolar patients reported fewer details of perception and less time integration of memories than those in euthymia or mania. Words linked to depression and BD induced greater episodic re-experiencing than neutral words, just as words about BD provided greater episodic re-experiencing and more details of emotion/thoughts than words about mania. Words linked to depression provoked more time details about the recalled episodes than words on BD or neutral themes. No mood-congruent or mood-dependent effects were observed. Current findings may improve the ability of clinicians to conduct psychiatric interviews and the diagnosis of BD, with special attention to how memory details are generated across different mood states of the condition. Additionally, interventions to foster autobiographical recollection in BD may be developed, similar to what has already been done in the context of schizophrenia.

046 Sleep-dependent prospective memory consolidation is impaired with aging

Abstract Introduction Existing literature suggests that sleep-dependent memory consolidation is impaired in older adults but may be preserved for personally relevant information. Prospective memory (PM) involves remembering to execute future intentions in a timely manner and has behavioural importance. As previous work suggests that N3 sleep is important for PM in young adults, we investigated if the role of N3 sleep in PM consolidation would be maintained in older adults. Methods 49 young adults (mean age±SD: 21.8±1.61 years) and 49 healthy older adults (mean age±SD: 65.7±6.30 years) were randomized into sleep and wake groups. After a semantic categorization task, participants encoded intentions comprising 4 related and 4 unrelated cue-action pairs. They were instructed to remember to perform these actions in response to cue words presented during a second semantic categorization task 12h later that encompassed either daytime wake (09:00-21:00) or overnight sleep with polysomnography (21:00-09:00). Results The significant condition x age group x relatedness interaction suggested that the sleep benefit on PM intentions varied according to age group and relatedness (p=0.01). For related intentions, sleep relative to wake benefitted young adults’ performance (p<0.001) but not older adults (p=0.30). For unrelated intentions, sleep did not improve PM for either age group. While post-encoding N3 was significantly associated with related intentions’ execution in young adults (r=0.43, p=0.02), this relationship was not found for older adults (r=-0.07, p=0.763). Conclusion The age-related impairment of sleep-dependent memory consolidation extends to prospective memory. Our findings add to an existing body of work suggesting that the link between sleep and memory is functionally weakened in older adulthood. Support (if any) This work was supported by the National Medical Research Council, Singapore (NMRC/STaR/015/2013) and the National Research Foundation, Singapore (NRF2016_SOL002).

Take Your Word or Tone for It? European American and Chinese Children's Attention to Emotional Cues in Speech.

Cultural experiences can influence how people attend to different emotional cues. Whereas semantic content explicitly describes feelings, vocal tone conveys implicit information regarding emotions. This cross-cultural study examined children's attention to emotional cues in spoken words. The sample consisted of 121 European American (EA) and 120 Chinese children (4-9years old). Each child played two computer games in which they listened to spoken words and judged the pleasantness of either the word meaning (Word game) or the vocal tone (Tone game) while ignoring the other aspect. Chinese children paid more spontaneous attention to vocal tones and less to word meanings than did EA children. These findings shed critical light on the role of culture in shaping affective cognitive processes during development.

Altered activation and functional connectivity in individuals with social anhedonia when envisioning positive future episodes.

Anticipatory pleasure deficits are closely correlated with negative symptoms in schizophrenia, and may be found in both clinical and subclinical populations along the psychosis continuum. Prospection, which is an important component of anticipatory pleasure, is impaired in individuals with social anhedonia (SocAnh). In this study, we examined the neural correlates of envisioning positive future events in individuals with SocAnh. Forty-nine individuals with SocAnh and 33 matched controls were recruited to undergo functional MRI scanning, during which they were instructed to simulate positive or neutral future episodes according to cue words. Two stages of prospection were distinguished: construction and elaboration. Reduced activation at the caudate and the precuneus when prospecting positive (v. neutral) future events was observed in individuals with SocAnh. Furthermore, compared with controls, increased functional connectivity between the caudate and the inferior occipital gyrus during positive (v. neutral) prospection was found in individuals with SocAnh. Both groups exhibited a similar pattern of brain activation for the construction v. elaboration contrast, regardless of the emotional context. Our results provide further evidence on the neural mechanism of anticipatory pleasure deficits in subclinical individuals with SocAnh and suggest that altered cortico-striatal circuit may play a role in anticipatory pleasure deficits in these individuals.

Learning new verbs with known cue words: The relative effects of noun and adverb cues

Research has shown that learning a known-and-unknown word combination leads to greater learning than learning an unknown word alone (Kasahara, 2010, 2011). These studies found that attaching a known adjective to an unknown noun can help learners remember the unknown noun. Kasahara (2015) found that a known verb can serve as an effective cue to remember an unknown noun in a known-and-unknown combination. To examine useful cues to learn unknown verbs, this study compared verb (unknown) + noun (known) combinations to verb (unknown) + adverb (known) combinations. Additionally, we explored how learners’ vocabulary size would affect the known-and-unknown two-word combination learning to deepen our understanding of the characteristics of students who benefit from combination learning. The participants in each group learned 18 two-word combinations consisting of the same unknown target verbs and different known cues (nouns or adverbs). The participants were provided with a five-minute learning phase and two immediate recall tests: a Single Word Test, to write down the L1 meanings of the targets, and a Combination Test, to write down the L1 meanings of the combinations. The same two tests were administered one week later. The results showed that known nouns were better cues for learning unknown verbs than known adverbs. It was also found that participants with a larger vocabulary size benefited more from two-word combination learning.

The valence and the functions of autobiographical memories: Does intensity matter?

Autobiographical memories serve psychosocial functions in daily life and the use of memories is related to their valence. In the present study, we examined whether functions are also related to the intensity of positive and negative memories. Our sample included 110 participants (57–89 years of age). Memories were prompted with 30 emotionally neutral cue words. Participants rated the emotional quality of each memory and indicated how frequently they had recalled it for self-continuity, directing behavior, social-bonding, and mood-enhancement. We used multilevel modeling to test whether individual differences in the use of memories can explain why individuals recall different numbers of positive and negative memories as well as memories high or low in intensity. Each function revealed its specific pattern regarding valence and intensity but also regarding within-person and between-person effects. Mood-enhancement showed the strongest relations, which points to the importance of considering emotion regulation as a function of autobiographical memory.

Sleep-dependent prospective memory consolidation is impaired with aging.

Study ObjectivesExisting literature suggests that sleep-dependent memory consolidation is impaired in older adults but may be preserved for personally relevant information. Prospective memory (PM) involves remembering to execute future intentions in a timely manner and has behavioral importance. As previous work suggests that N3 sleep is important for PM in young adults, we investigated if the role of N3 sleep in PM consolidation would be maintained in older adults.MethodsForty-nine young adults (mean age ± SD: 21.8 ± 1.61 years) and 49 healthy older adults (mean age ± SD: 65.7 ± 6.30 years) were randomized into sleep and wake groups. After a semantic categorization task, participants encoded intentions comprising four related and four unrelated cue-action pairs. They were instructed to remember to perform these actions in response to cue words presented during a second semantic categorization task 12 h later that encompassed either daytime wake (09:00 am–21:00 pm) or overnight sleep with polysomnography (21:00 pm–09:00 am).ResultsThe significant condition × age group × relatedness interaction suggested that the sleep benefit on PM intentions varied according to age group and relatedness (p = 0.01). For related intentions, sleep relative to wake benefitted young adults’ performance (p < 0.001) but not older adults (p = 0.30). For unrelated intentions, sleep did not improve PM for either age group. While post-encoding N3 was significantly associated with related intentions’ execution in young adults (r = 0.43, p = 0.02), this relationship was not found for older adults (r = −0.07, p = 0.763).ConclusionsThe age-related impairment of sleep-dependent memory consolidation extends to PM. Our findings add to an existing body of work suggesting that the link between sleep and memory is functionally weakened in older adulthood.

Development of a Structured Interview to Explore Interpersonal Schema of Older Adults Living Alone Based on Autobiographical Memory

With a growing public interest in the social health of older adults, studies focusing on social networks and interpersonal relationships of older adults are needed. The present study was conducted to develop a structured interview to evaluate the interpersonal schema based on Self-Defining Memory of older adults. First, the word cues that the older adults often report on interpersonal events were confirmed. Next, the indices and scoring rules were prepared, including Relationship frequency (RF), Conflict frequency (CF), Dominance mean (Dm), and Warmth mean (Wm). Healthy older adults living alone (mean age = 71.81, SD = 3.95) were interviewed. Finally, the correlation between each index and Short form of Korean Inventory of Interpersonal Problems Circumplex Scales (KIIP-SC) was analyzed for criterion validity. The inter-rater reliability was substantial (Kappa = 0.61~0.66). Based on the analysis of criterion validity, the indices of CF, Dm, and Wm indices showed an appropriate level of criterion validity. This study developed a structural interview based on a novel system of reporting autobiographical memory and established indices with appropriate validity to evaluate interpersonal relationships. The interview is expected to identify the characteristics of interpersonal relationships of the older adults and contribute to the establishment of the older adults’ community accordingly.

EEG Correlates of Long-Distance Dependency Formation in Mandarin Wh-Questions.

Event-related potential components are sensitive to the processes underlying how questions are understood. We use so-called “covert” wh-questions in Mandarin to probe how such components generalize across different kinds of constructions. This study shows that covert Mandarin wh-questions do not elicit anterior negativities associated with memory maintenance, even when such a dependency is unambiguously cued. N = 37 native speakers of Mandarin Chinese read Chinese questions and declarative sentences word-by-word during EEG recording. In contrast to prior studies, no sustained anterior negativity (SAN) was observed between the cue word, such as the question-embedding verb “wonder,” and the in-situ wh-filler. SANs have been linked with working memory maintenance, suggesting that grammatical features may not impose the same maintenance demands as the content words used in prior work.

Wisdom of crowds benefits perceptual decision making across difficulty levels

Decades of research on collective decision making has claimed that aggregated judgment of multiple individuals is more accurate than expert individual judgement. A longstanding problem in this regard has been to determine how decisions of individuals can be combined to form intelligent group decisions. Our study consisted of a random target detection task in natural scenes, where human subjects (18 subjects, 7 female) detected the presence or absence of a random target as indicated by the cue word displayed prior to stimulus display. Concurrently the neural activities (EEG signals) were recorded. A separate behavioural experiment was performed by different subjects (20 subjects, 11 female) on the same set of images to categorize the tasks according to their difficulty levels. We demonstrate that the weighted average of individual decision confidence/neural decision variables produces significantly better performance than the frequently used majority pooling algorithm. Further, the classification error rates from individual judgement were found to increase with increasing task difficulty. This error could be significantly reduced upon combining the individual decisions using group aggregation rules. Using statistical tests, we show that combining all available participants is unnecessary to achieve minimum classification error rate. We also try to explore if group aggregation benefits depend on the correlation between the individual judgements of the group and our results seem to suggest that reduced inter-subject correlation can improve collective decision making for a fixed difficulty level.

Tarvajeh: Word Association Norms for Persian Words.

In recent years, word associations have played a key role in cognitive research. The goal of this study is to propose a new system called Tarvajeh to construct and analyze the association norms found in the Persian language. In this paper, we present Tarvajeh, a data set for Persian words in a continuous word association task. For data collection, cue words have been categorized into groups and then, 30 of them were presented to each participant in two phases. Afterward, the participants were asked to write the first three words that are related to the initial cue words. After data collection, Tarvajeh included 240 frequent Persian cues and more than 20,000 different responses. Furthermore, we also propose a method that allows participants to compare their responses as well as their subconscious mind with those of their peers using a unique graph that is tailored to their responses and is displayed to them. Finally, we compared our data with those of associated words in other languages. The comparison reveals that, for some cues, most associated words are the same, while for others, the most frequent responses are unique within each data set. In addition, some gender-related differences were observed with male participants spending more time on their responses than female participants.

Real-time road transportation safety risk evaluation model based on data-mining

Aiming at the shortcoming of the massive amount of manual work required and the result relay on the cognitive level of experts the process cannot be implemented dynamically. A real-time road transportation safety risk evaluation model based on data-mining is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the pre-processing of unstructured text contains process of adding custom item dictionary, deletion of stop words, word segmentation of text at the beginning process, then dynamic risk factors identification using TF-IDF on processed text. Secondly, accident chains extraction by cue words and causal sentence structure construction. Thirdly, the relevance mining among risk factors or accident states through Apriori-algorithm. Finally, real-time risk assessment is realised by classification of the product of obtained probability and severity degree result using K-means. Experiments are conducted on text data set, and the result shows that the accuracy of proposed model is 88%, which is an effective safety risk evaluation model.

Manual Responses Are Verbally Mediated in Stroop Identification Tasks

In a typical Stroop experiment, participants view a color word written in a color that is either congruent or incongruent with the word’s meaning and identify either the target’s color (Stroop condition) or meaning (reverse Stroop condition). Incongruent words generally interfere with identifying the target color more than incongruent colors interfere with identifying the target word. A common explanation for this classic asymmetry asserts that vocally identifying the target’s color or meaning relies on a verbal code, which biases attention to the target’s meaning over its color. However, the asymmetry also occurs with nonverbal keypress responses, so participants may covertly map verbal codes onto keys to remember which key represents each color. To verify this verbal mediation hypothesis, we presented Stroop color-word targets along with 4 cues to help participants remember which key represented each color. In one condition the cues were color words, and in the other the cues were color patches. We hypothesized that the word cues would elicit the classic asymmetry and color cues would abolish this asymmetry. The results supported our hypotheses; for word cues the Stroop effect was larger than the reverse Stroop effect, p &lt; .001, ηp2 = .64, and color cues abolished this difference, p &lt; .001, ηp2 = .31. This study is the first to provide direct confirmation of the verbal mediation hypothesis and suggests that task demands are more important than the response modality (vocal versus manual) for biasing processing toward one of the Stroop target’s features.

Deep Learning Approach for Negation Handling in Sentiment Analysis

Negation handling is an important sub-task in Sentiment Analysis. Negation plays a significant role in written text. Negation terms in sentence often changes the polarity of entire sentence from positive to negative or vice versa, resulting in the opposite meaning of the sentence than what is observed by the machine learning based linguistic model. As automatic opinion mining has become very important in this digital era, proper handling of negation term is the need of the hour. In any natural language negations can be formulated both explicitly or implicitly while their use is very much domain-specific. Existing negation handling techniques follow rule-based approach and mainly used in medical domain. Due to the complex syntactic structure of negation, it is hard to build general purpose machine learning based negation handling model on user review or conversational text data. In this paper, we investigate negation components i.e., cue and scope in a sentence which determine the polarity shift in sentence. We propose LSTM based deep neural network model for negation handling task where the model automatically learns the negation features from labeled input training dataset. We used <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">ConanDoyle</i> story corpus for model training and testing, which is pre-annotated with negation information. The proposed model first identify negation cues in each sentence and then using bidirectional LSTM extracts the relationship between cue and other words to identify scope of the cue in sentences. We derived word level features for model training to determine correct polarity of the sentence. Result shows that the LSTM based nonlinear language models perform comparatively better than the traditional state of the art SVM, HMM or CRF based models. BiLSTM achieved best result, F1 measures 93.34%, outperform traditional rule based model in negation handling task.

Relationship Between Attention Bias and the Prognosis of Male Patients with Alcohol Dependence

<i>Background</i>: long term drinking in alcohol dependent patients seriously affects their physical and mental health. Abstinence treatment is very important, but there is no appropriate prediction method for the effect of abstinence in the past. <i>Objective</i>: In this study, we investigated word-cue attentional bias among male patients with alcohol dependence and its correlation with relapse after abstinence. <i>Methods</i>: Fifty male patients with alcohol dependence (ADs) and 50 male health controls (HCs) completed the Chinese version of the emotional Stroop task to assess attentional bias. The participants were evaluated at the beginning of the task using the Self-Rating Anxiety Scale (SAS) and Self-Rating Depression Scale (SDS). <i>Results</i>: The reaction times of ADs for neutral, negative, and alcohol-related words were significantly higher than those of HCs. The error index of ADs for neutral and negative words is worse than that of HCs. The period of maintained abstinence among ADs was positively correlated with the reaction time to negative words and the error index for negative and alcohol-related words. Linear regression showed the error index of alcohol-related words to be an import factor in terms of relapse. <i>Conclusion</i>: The number of errors in alcohol-related attentional bias cue words may be a predictor of the effect of abstinence.

Autobiographical Memory Specificity for Religious and Nonreligious Cues

The aim of this study is to investigate religious autobiographical memories by having self-reported atheist, Christian, and religiously uncommitted Swedes perform the Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT) with added religious word blocks. The specific aims are to investigate (1) possible group differences in memory specificity, (2) whether positive or negative cue words evoked a larger number of specific memories, and (3) whether participants produced a larger number of specific memories in response to religious or nonreligious cue words. Sisty participants were included, with twenty in each group (atheists, uncommitted, and Christians). No group differences in memory specificity were found. However, positive and nonreligious cue words were associated with a larger number of specific memories. The possibility of using AMT to study cultural differences is discussed.

Does verb transitivity influence word association responses?

Abstract Although several studies have investigated the influence of the grammatical class of cue words on response patterns in the word association task, relatively little is known about the influence of more fine-grained distinctions such as cue transitivity. The present study tests two predictions, made in existing studies, of the influence of this variable. The first is that cue transitivity would influence the grammatical class of responses; the second, that it would affect the directionality of position-based, or syntagmatic, responses. English language associative responses to 49 transitive and 49 intransitive cues were gathered from 53 English L1 respondents. These responses were then analysed according to their grammatical class and categorical designation. Results suggested that cue transitivity influences both of these measurements: transitive cues yielded more noun responses and more associations classified as likely to follow the cue in text than did intransitives, while transitives received more verb responses and more associations likely to precede the cue. These results are discussed in the light of contiguity-based and semantic theories of the determinants of word association.