Organic amnesia is typically associated with lesions in either the diencephalic or medial tempora... more Organic amnesia is typically associated with lesions in either the diencephalic or medial temporal regions of the brain. However, amnesia can result from other kinds of lesions, in particular those resulting from an aneurysm of the anterior communicating artery (ACoA). In the present study, 7 patients who became amnesic following a ruptured and operated ACoA aneurysm were comparated neuropsychologically with 11 patients with ruptures but no cognitive complaints and 18 normal control subjects. They were submitted to explicit and implicit memory tests and to tests claimed to be sensitive to frontal lobe dysfunction. The performance of the 11 ACoa patients without cognitive complaints revealed evidence for a functional frontal dysfunction (test of Stroop) and a partial deficit of explicit memory (free recall and long-term recall). The performance of the 7 ACoa amnesics revealed evidence for a functional frontal dysfunction and a deficit of explicit memory (safe in recognition). Anosogn...
Emotional processing deficits are key features in major depressive disorder (MDD). Neuroimaging s... more Emotional processing deficits are key features in major depressive disorder (MDD). Neuroimaging studies indicate that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) plays a pivotal role in both depressive symptoms and emotional processing. Recently, transcranial Direct Current Stimulations (tDCS) applied over the DLPFCs have held the promise to alleviate the symptoms in patients with MDD, but the effect on emotional processing in the patients is unclear. Here, we investigated the effect of a single session of tDCS over the DLPFCs on the emotional processing in patients with treatment-resistant MDD. In a randomized sham-controlled study, 35 patients received a single 30 min session of either active (2 mA, n = 18) or sham tDCS (n = 17). The anode was placed over the left and the cathode over the right DLPFC. Emotional processing accuracy was measured by a facial emotion recognition (FER) task. We observed an overall improvement in FER performance after the active tDCS, but not the sham tD...
(Canada) CHAPTER III-The role of cognition in team functioning: A matter of information sharing a... more (Canada) CHAPTER III-The role of cognition in team functioning: A matter of information sharing and coordination among team members……p.22
L'acouphene consiste en la perception de bruits dans une oreille, les deux, ou encore dans la... more L'acouphene consiste en la perception de bruits dans une oreille, les deux, ou encore dans la tete, en l'absence de toute stimulation exterieure correspondante. Comme tout stimulus constant, ce signal fait normalement l'objet d'une adaptation se traduisant par une habituation des reactions du patient a celui-ci, puis, de sa perception meme. Ceci s'observe dans environ 75 % des cas, mais, pour les autres, des processus de sensibilisation s'opposent a cette habituation. Les travaux de cette these visaient a identifier certains au moins des facteurs cognitifs qui, chez ces 25 %, contrarient le processus normal d'habituation. Dans ce but, nous avons recherche la possibilite pour l'acouphene 1/ d'engendrer d'eventuelles modifications de l'organisation cerebrale fonctionnelle, 2/ de favoriser la detection et le traitement du signal de l'acouphene a travers une focalisation de l'attention sur lui 3/ d'etre entretenu par un renforcement de son caractere aversif suite a des biais de negativite dans le traitement des stimulations auditives environnementales. Les donnees ont ete recueillies chez des patients acoupheniques, des sujets soumis pendant les tests a une stimulation simulant un acouphene et des controles sans acouphene. Nos resultats apportent des arguments en faveur de l'existence, chez ces patients, d'une reorganisation des fonctions auditives du langage ainsi que d'une focalisation attentionnelle sur l'oreille portant l'acouphene, perturbant le deplacement et l'engagement de l'attention. En revanche, la presence de reactions exacerbees aux stimulations auditives emotionnelles negatives n’a pas ete demontree chez les patients invalides par leur symptome. Les resultats rapportes dans cette these viennent conforter les modeles d'acouphenes dans lesquels le systeme nerveux central, par l'intermediaire de ses sous-systemes responsable 1/des traitements auditifs et 2/ des mecanismes attentionnels, joue un role determinant pour le devenir, pathologique ou non, du symptome.
The Component Process Model (CPM, Scherer, 2001) posits that attention is an appraisal-driven mec... more The Component Process Model (CPM, Scherer, 2001) posits that attention is an appraisal-driven mechanism guided by the relevance of a stimulus toward the goals and needs of an individual (Sander, Grandjean & Scherer, 2005). The CPM also suggests that the appraisal of relevance is a multilevel and dynamic mechanism that implies low-level and automatic processes (van Reekum & Scherer, 1997). In that perspective, the main goal of the present study was to test the hypothesis that attention can be modulated by a stimulus appraised as relevant, even if that stimulus is not consciously perceived. We also aimed to test the hypothesis that such a mechanism is dynamic by manipulating the relevance of a stimulus within the same group of individuals. To do so, twenty-four participants (twelve women) performed a non-conscious relevance manipulation procedure. First, participants performed 120 trials of a non-conscious detection task in which they had to indicate as quickly as possible when a squa...
abduction action activation/inhibition ageing animal cognition artificial life aspect attention a... more abduction action activation/inhibition ageing animal cognition artificial life aspect attention autism automatism belief cate gorization causality, mental causation cognitive development cognitive psychiatry cognitivism communication competence, performance complexity computational analysis concept connectionism consciousness constrai nt constructivism context and situation control counterfactual creativity desire d ifferentiation discourse distributed intelligence domain specificity dualism, monism emergence emotion epiphenomenalism epistemic epistemology experience explanation expressiveness ex ternalism, internalism foetal cognition frame problem function functional neuroimaging functionalism fuzzy goal-directed behaviour grammar holism identity individualism infa nt cognition information inheritance intentionality inte raction interpretation introduction (of Dictionary) introspection knowledge acquisition knowledge base language language of thought learning lexicon localization of function logic logicism, psychologism meaning memory mental imagery metacognition mind modality model modularity morphology naturalization neural Darwinism neural network neuropsychology normativity number object or al pattern recognition perception phenomenalism physicalism prag matics problem solving propositional attitude propositional format psychophysics qualia qualitative physics reading realism reasoning and rationality reductionism relevance representational r obotics schizophrenia semantic case, thematic relation semantic network semantics semiotics sense sense, reference sign social cognition space subdoxastic supervenience symbol syn tax text theory of mind time and tense truth Turing machine type, token validation will writing
Tactual extinction was examined in a 43-yr-old left-handed male patient (MM) with a hematoma in t... more Tactual extinction was examined in a 43-yr-old left-handed male patient (MM) with a hematoma in the trunk of the corpus callosum sparing the genu and the ventral part of the splenium as well as the cerebral hemispheres. Experiments I and II showed no deficit in tactual perception nor in the inter-hemispheric transfer of tactual information. In Experiment III, MM palpated stimuli differing in their association value, and responded vocally or manually. There was no difference in performance between the hands in unimanual control conditions, but in a dichhaptic condition an overall right-hand advantage was observed, depending on the kind of stimulus and on the mode of response: such results were not observed in control subjects. Results showed that MM's left-hand performance reached right-hand levels after specific modifications in the allocation of attention between the hands or the load of information in haptic memory (Experiment IV). Experiment V revealed a major deficit in the matching of left-and right-hand information only for the dichhaptic procedure. The results are discussed with a view of cerebral mechanisms as dynamic rather than structurally determined: it is suggested that extinction phenomena aresensitive to cognitive strategies and attentional factors and that the cornus callosum olavs a critical role in the lateral control of. , attention to tactual as well as to auditory and visual information.
We studied the influence on memory of three temporal schedules of repetitions of vocabulary pairs... more We studied the influence on memory of three temporal schedules of repetitions of vocabulary pairs. Pairs were presented on Day 1, 7, and 13 in a Uniform schedule; on Day 1, 2, and 13 in an Expanding schedule; and on Day 1, 12, and 13 in a Contracting schedule, with schedule as a within-subject factor. Retention was tested with a cued-recall task performed on Day 15, 19 (Experiment 1), or 26 (Experiment 2). Cued recall did not differ as a function of the schedule on Day 15, whereas the Expanding schedule led to the best performance on Day 19 and 26. We interpreted this new finding of a modulation of the effect of schedule as a function of the retention interval within the frame of a model based on the study-phase retrieval theory that accounts for different forgetting curves for different schedules.
Schizophrenia is a disease that constitutes a particularly relevant way to investigate emotional ... more Schizophrenia is a disease that constitutes a particularly relevant way to investigate emotional processing. Indeed, major clinical signs of emotional disturbance (eg, anhedonia) suggest that some emotional mechanisms are defective in patients with schizophrenia. Evaluation can be considered as a fundamental component of the emotional system (28) and the first aim of the present study was to test the polarity hypothesis according to which different mechanisms are involved in the evaluation of positive vs negative emotional events. The second aim was to disentangle a -paradox emerging from the schizophrenia literature. On one hand, the tendency that schizophrenic patients have to under-evaluate the level of unpleasantness of negative stimuli suggests a deficit in the evaluation of negative events. For instance, it was proposed that patients with schizophrenia show a major deficit in the recognition of negative emotions, but a preserved recognition of positive emotions. On the other h...
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 1995
Computational models in psychology play an increasingly important role in characterizing theoreti... more Computational models in psychology play an increasingly important role in characterizing theoretical distinctions, understanding empirical results, and formulating new predictions. However, the proper use of models is subject to debate and interpretation, as Cook, Friih, and Landis (1995) have demonstrated in a critique of neural network simulations reported by Kosslyn, Chabris, Marsolek, and Koenig (1992). These simulation results supported a distinction between two types of spatial relations encoding. Cook et al. argue that Kosslyn et al.'s models did not process "spatial" representations and that input-output correlations rather than properties of spatial relations encoding processes explain the performance of the models. This article provides conceptual and analytic rebuttals of those criticisms. Humans rely on vision for numerous purposes, some of which make contradictory demands on our informationprocessing systems. For example, to reach for objects and navigate among them, one needs to know their precise distances; to recognize and identify objects, however, it is better to ignore this information. In contrast, abstract spatial relations (such as "connected to") among the parts of an object can be important for recognition and identification but not for reaching and navigation. Such considerations led Kosslyn, Chabris, Marsolek, and Koenig (1992) to propose that the brain represents spatial information in more than one way, with different types of spatial representations being useful in different circumstances (see also Jacobs & Kosslyn, 1994; Kosslyn, 1987). Specifically, we have argued that categorical spatial relations, such as abovebelow, left-right, or on-off, group a set of relative positions into an equivalence class. These representations are useful during object recognition and identification because they can specify invariant relations among parts (e.g., the fact that the forearm remains "connected to" the upper arm even when the arm is bent in different positions). In contrast, coordinate spatial relations specify precise metric distance;
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 1992
Results of 4 sets of neural network simulations support the distinction between categorical and c... more Results of 4 sets of neural network simulations support the distinction between categorical and coordinate spatial relations representations: (a) Networks that were split so that different hidden units contributed to each type of judgment performed better than unsplit networks; the reverse was observed when they made 2 coordinate judgments, (b) Both computations were more difficult when finer discriminations were required; this result mirrored findings with human Ss. (c) Networks with large, overlapping "receptive fields" performed the coordinate task better than did networks with small, less overlapping receptive fields, but vice versa for the categorical task; this suggests a possible basis for observed cerebral lateralization of the 2 kinds of processing, (d) The previously observed effect of stimulus contrast on this hemispheric asymmetry could reflect contributions of more neuronal input in high-contrast conditions.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 1989
Analyses of human object recognition abilities led to the hypothesis that 2 kinds of spatial rela... more Analyses of human object recognition abilities led to the hypothesis that 2 kinds of spatial relation representations are used in human vision. Evidence for the distinction between abstract categorical spatial relation representations and specific coordinate spatial relation representations was provided in 4 experiments. These results indicate that Ss make categorical judgments--on/off, left/right, and above/below--faster when stimuli are initially presented to the left cerebral hemisphere, whereas they make evaluations of distance--in relation to 2 mm, 3 mm, or 1 in. (2.54 cm)--faster when stimuli are initially presented to the right cerebral hemisphere. In addition, there was evidence that categorical representations developed with practice.
Organic amnesia is typically associated with lesions in either the diencephalic or medial tempora... more Organic amnesia is typically associated with lesions in either the diencephalic or medial temporal regions of the brain. However, amnesia can result from other kinds of lesions, in particular those resulting from an aneurysm of the anterior communicating artery (ACoA). In the present study, 7 patients who became amnesic following a ruptured and operated ACoA aneurysm were comparated neuropsychologically with 11 patients with ruptures but no cognitive complaints and 18 normal control subjects. They were submitted to explicit and implicit memory tests and to tests claimed to be sensitive to frontal lobe dysfunction. The performance of the 11 ACoa patients without cognitive complaints revealed evidence for a functional frontal dysfunction (test of Stroop) and a partial deficit of explicit memory (free recall and long-term recall). The performance of the 7 ACoa amnesics revealed evidence for a functional frontal dysfunction and a deficit of explicit memory (safe in recognition). Anosogn...
Emotional processing deficits are key features in major depressive disorder (MDD). Neuroimaging s... more Emotional processing deficits are key features in major depressive disorder (MDD). Neuroimaging studies indicate that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) plays a pivotal role in both depressive symptoms and emotional processing. Recently, transcranial Direct Current Stimulations (tDCS) applied over the DLPFCs have held the promise to alleviate the symptoms in patients with MDD, but the effect on emotional processing in the patients is unclear. Here, we investigated the effect of a single session of tDCS over the DLPFCs on the emotional processing in patients with treatment-resistant MDD. In a randomized sham-controlled study, 35 patients received a single 30 min session of either active (2 mA, n = 18) or sham tDCS (n = 17). The anode was placed over the left and the cathode over the right DLPFC. Emotional processing accuracy was measured by a facial emotion recognition (FER) task. We observed an overall improvement in FER performance after the active tDCS, but not the sham tD...
(Canada) CHAPTER III-The role of cognition in team functioning: A matter of information sharing a... more (Canada) CHAPTER III-The role of cognition in team functioning: A matter of information sharing and coordination among team members……p.22
L'acouphene consiste en la perception de bruits dans une oreille, les deux, ou encore dans la... more L'acouphene consiste en la perception de bruits dans une oreille, les deux, ou encore dans la tete, en l'absence de toute stimulation exterieure correspondante. Comme tout stimulus constant, ce signal fait normalement l'objet d'une adaptation se traduisant par une habituation des reactions du patient a celui-ci, puis, de sa perception meme. Ceci s'observe dans environ 75 % des cas, mais, pour les autres, des processus de sensibilisation s'opposent a cette habituation. Les travaux de cette these visaient a identifier certains au moins des facteurs cognitifs qui, chez ces 25 %, contrarient le processus normal d'habituation. Dans ce but, nous avons recherche la possibilite pour l'acouphene 1/ d'engendrer d'eventuelles modifications de l'organisation cerebrale fonctionnelle, 2/ de favoriser la detection et le traitement du signal de l'acouphene a travers une focalisation de l'attention sur lui 3/ d'etre entretenu par un renforcement de son caractere aversif suite a des biais de negativite dans le traitement des stimulations auditives environnementales. Les donnees ont ete recueillies chez des patients acoupheniques, des sujets soumis pendant les tests a une stimulation simulant un acouphene et des controles sans acouphene. Nos resultats apportent des arguments en faveur de l'existence, chez ces patients, d'une reorganisation des fonctions auditives du langage ainsi que d'une focalisation attentionnelle sur l'oreille portant l'acouphene, perturbant le deplacement et l'engagement de l'attention. En revanche, la presence de reactions exacerbees aux stimulations auditives emotionnelles negatives n’a pas ete demontree chez les patients invalides par leur symptome. Les resultats rapportes dans cette these viennent conforter les modeles d'acouphenes dans lesquels le systeme nerveux central, par l'intermediaire de ses sous-systemes responsable 1/des traitements auditifs et 2/ des mecanismes attentionnels, joue un role determinant pour le devenir, pathologique ou non, du symptome.
The Component Process Model (CPM, Scherer, 2001) posits that attention is an appraisal-driven mec... more The Component Process Model (CPM, Scherer, 2001) posits that attention is an appraisal-driven mechanism guided by the relevance of a stimulus toward the goals and needs of an individual (Sander, Grandjean & Scherer, 2005). The CPM also suggests that the appraisal of relevance is a multilevel and dynamic mechanism that implies low-level and automatic processes (van Reekum & Scherer, 1997). In that perspective, the main goal of the present study was to test the hypothesis that attention can be modulated by a stimulus appraised as relevant, even if that stimulus is not consciously perceived. We also aimed to test the hypothesis that such a mechanism is dynamic by manipulating the relevance of a stimulus within the same group of individuals. To do so, twenty-four participants (twelve women) performed a non-conscious relevance manipulation procedure. First, participants performed 120 trials of a non-conscious detection task in which they had to indicate as quickly as possible when a squa...
abduction action activation/inhibition ageing animal cognition artificial life aspect attention a... more abduction action activation/inhibition ageing animal cognition artificial life aspect attention autism automatism belief cate gorization causality, mental causation cognitive development cognitive psychiatry cognitivism communication competence, performance complexity computational analysis concept connectionism consciousness constrai nt constructivism context and situation control counterfactual creativity desire d ifferentiation discourse distributed intelligence domain specificity dualism, monism emergence emotion epiphenomenalism epistemic epistemology experience explanation expressiveness ex ternalism, internalism foetal cognition frame problem function functional neuroimaging functionalism fuzzy goal-directed behaviour grammar holism identity individualism infa nt cognition information inheritance intentionality inte raction interpretation introduction (of Dictionary) introspection knowledge acquisition knowledge base language language of thought learning lexicon localization of function logic logicism, psychologism meaning memory mental imagery metacognition mind modality model modularity morphology naturalization neural Darwinism neural network neuropsychology normativity number object or al pattern recognition perception phenomenalism physicalism prag matics problem solving propositional attitude propositional format psychophysics qualia qualitative physics reading realism reasoning and rationality reductionism relevance representational r obotics schizophrenia semantic case, thematic relation semantic network semantics semiotics sense sense, reference sign social cognition space subdoxastic supervenience symbol syn tax text theory of mind time and tense truth Turing machine type, token validation will writing
Tactual extinction was examined in a 43-yr-old left-handed male patient (MM) with a hematoma in t... more Tactual extinction was examined in a 43-yr-old left-handed male patient (MM) with a hematoma in the trunk of the corpus callosum sparing the genu and the ventral part of the splenium as well as the cerebral hemispheres. Experiments I and II showed no deficit in tactual perception nor in the inter-hemispheric transfer of tactual information. In Experiment III, MM palpated stimuli differing in their association value, and responded vocally or manually. There was no difference in performance between the hands in unimanual control conditions, but in a dichhaptic condition an overall right-hand advantage was observed, depending on the kind of stimulus and on the mode of response: such results were not observed in control subjects. Results showed that MM's left-hand performance reached right-hand levels after specific modifications in the allocation of attention between the hands or the load of information in haptic memory (Experiment IV). Experiment V revealed a major deficit in the matching of left-and right-hand information only for the dichhaptic procedure. The results are discussed with a view of cerebral mechanisms as dynamic rather than structurally determined: it is suggested that extinction phenomena aresensitive to cognitive strategies and attentional factors and that the cornus callosum olavs a critical role in the lateral control of. , attention to tactual as well as to auditory and visual information.
We studied the influence on memory of three temporal schedules of repetitions of vocabulary pairs... more We studied the influence on memory of three temporal schedules of repetitions of vocabulary pairs. Pairs were presented on Day 1, 7, and 13 in a Uniform schedule; on Day 1, 2, and 13 in an Expanding schedule; and on Day 1, 12, and 13 in a Contracting schedule, with schedule as a within-subject factor. Retention was tested with a cued-recall task performed on Day 15, 19 (Experiment 1), or 26 (Experiment 2). Cued recall did not differ as a function of the schedule on Day 15, whereas the Expanding schedule led to the best performance on Day 19 and 26. We interpreted this new finding of a modulation of the effect of schedule as a function of the retention interval within the frame of a model based on the study-phase retrieval theory that accounts for different forgetting curves for different schedules.
Schizophrenia is a disease that constitutes a particularly relevant way to investigate emotional ... more Schizophrenia is a disease that constitutes a particularly relevant way to investigate emotional processing. Indeed, major clinical signs of emotional disturbance (eg, anhedonia) suggest that some emotional mechanisms are defective in patients with schizophrenia. Evaluation can be considered as a fundamental component of the emotional system (28) and the first aim of the present study was to test the polarity hypothesis according to which different mechanisms are involved in the evaluation of positive vs negative emotional events. The second aim was to disentangle a -paradox emerging from the schizophrenia literature. On one hand, the tendency that schizophrenic patients have to under-evaluate the level of unpleasantness of negative stimuli suggests a deficit in the evaluation of negative events. For instance, it was proposed that patients with schizophrenia show a major deficit in the recognition of negative emotions, but a preserved recognition of positive emotions. On the other h...
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 1995
Computational models in psychology play an increasingly important role in characterizing theoreti... more Computational models in psychology play an increasingly important role in characterizing theoretical distinctions, understanding empirical results, and formulating new predictions. However, the proper use of models is subject to debate and interpretation, as Cook, Friih, and Landis (1995) have demonstrated in a critique of neural network simulations reported by Kosslyn, Chabris, Marsolek, and Koenig (1992). These simulation results supported a distinction between two types of spatial relations encoding. Cook et al. argue that Kosslyn et al.'s models did not process "spatial" representations and that input-output correlations rather than properties of spatial relations encoding processes explain the performance of the models. This article provides conceptual and analytic rebuttals of those criticisms. Humans rely on vision for numerous purposes, some of which make contradictory demands on our informationprocessing systems. For example, to reach for objects and navigate among them, one needs to know their precise distances; to recognize and identify objects, however, it is better to ignore this information. In contrast, abstract spatial relations (such as "connected to") among the parts of an object can be important for recognition and identification but not for reaching and navigation. Such considerations led Kosslyn, Chabris, Marsolek, and Koenig (1992) to propose that the brain represents spatial information in more than one way, with different types of spatial representations being useful in different circumstances (see also Jacobs & Kosslyn, 1994; Kosslyn, 1987). Specifically, we have argued that categorical spatial relations, such as abovebelow, left-right, or on-off, group a set of relative positions into an equivalence class. These representations are useful during object recognition and identification because they can specify invariant relations among parts (e.g., the fact that the forearm remains "connected to" the upper arm even when the arm is bent in different positions). In contrast, coordinate spatial relations specify precise metric distance;
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 1992
Results of 4 sets of neural network simulations support the distinction between categorical and c... more Results of 4 sets of neural network simulations support the distinction between categorical and coordinate spatial relations representations: (a) Networks that were split so that different hidden units contributed to each type of judgment performed better than unsplit networks; the reverse was observed when they made 2 coordinate judgments, (b) Both computations were more difficult when finer discriminations were required; this result mirrored findings with human Ss. (c) Networks with large, overlapping "receptive fields" performed the coordinate task better than did networks with small, less overlapping receptive fields, but vice versa for the categorical task; this suggests a possible basis for observed cerebral lateralization of the 2 kinds of processing, (d) The previously observed effect of stimulus contrast on this hemispheric asymmetry could reflect contributions of more neuronal input in high-contrast conditions.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 1989
Analyses of human object recognition abilities led to the hypothesis that 2 kinds of spatial rela... more Analyses of human object recognition abilities led to the hypothesis that 2 kinds of spatial relation representations are used in human vision. Evidence for the distinction between abstract categorical spatial relation representations and specific coordinate spatial relation representations was provided in 4 experiments. These results indicate that Ss make categorical judgments--on/off, left/right, and above/below--faster when stimuli are initially presented to the left cerebral hemisphere, whereas they make evaluations of distance--in relation to 2 mm, 3 mm, or 1 in. (2.54 cm)--faster when stimuli are initially presented to the right cerebral hemisphere. In addition, there was evidence that categorical representations developed with practice.
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Papers by Olivier Koenig