The effect of Parkinson’s disease subgroups on verbal and nonverbal fluency

BACKGROUND: Parkinson’s disease (PD) leads to deficits in executive function, including verbal and nonverbal fluency, as a result of compromised frontostriatal circuits. It is unknown whether deficits in verbal and nonverbal fluency in PD are driven by certain subgroups of patients, or how strategy use may facilitate performance. PARTICIPANTS: Sixty-five nondemented individuals with PD, including 36 with right-body onset (RPD; 20 with tremor as their initial symptom, 16 nontremor) and 29 with left-body onset (LPD; 14 with tremor as their initial symptom, 15 nontremor), and 52 normal control participants (NC) took part in the study. MEASUREMENTS: Verbal fluency was assessed using the FAS and Animals tests. Nonverbal fluency was assessed using the Ruff Figural Fluency Test. RESULTS: Both RPD and LPD were impaired in generating words and in using clustering and switching strategies on phonemic verbal fluency, whereas different patterns of impairment were found on nonverbal fluency depending on the interaction of side of onset and initial motor symptom (tremor vs. nontremor). Strategy use correlated with number of correct responses on verbal fluency in LPD, RPD, and NC. By contrast, on nonverbal fluency, strategy use correlated with correct responses for RPD and LPD, but not for NC. CONCLUSION: Our findings demonstrate the importance of considering subgroups in PD and analyzing subcomponents of verbal and nonverbal fluency (correct responses, errors, and strategies), which may depend differently on the integrity of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, inferior frontal cortex, and anterior cingulate cortex.Published versio

Body odor quality predicts behavioral attractiveness in humans

Growing effort is being made to understand how different attractive physical traits co-vary within individuals, partly because this might indicate an underlying index of genetic quality. In humans, attention has focused on potential markers of quality such as facial attractiveness, axillary odor quality, the second-to-fourth digit (2D:4D) ratio and body mass index (BMI). Here we extend this approach to include visually-assessed kinesic cues (nonverbal behavior linked to movement) which are statistically independent of structural physical traits. The utility of such kinesic cues in mate assessment is controversial, particularly during everyday conversational contexts, as they could be unreliable and susceptible to deception. However, we show here that the attractiveness of nonverbal behavior, in 20 male participants, is predicted by perceived quality of their axillary body odor. This finding indicates covariation between two desirable traits in different sensory modalities. Depending on two different rating contexts (either a simple attractiveness rating or a rating for long-term partners by 10 female raters not using hormonal contraception), we also found significant relationships between perceived attractiveness of nonverbal behavior and BMI, and between axillary odor ratings and 2D:4D ratio. Axillary odor pleasantness was the single attribute that consistently predicted attractiveness of nonverbal behavior. Our results demonstrate that nonverbal kinesic cues could reliably reveal mate quality, at least in males, and could corroborate and contribute to mate assessment based on other physical traits

THE COMPONENTS OF NONVERBAL COMMUNICATION IMPORTANT FACTORS IN THE TEACHING PROCESS

The act of teaching is a predominantly verbal. Nevertheless communication during the teaching process equally depends on the paraverbal and nonverbal components, that are meant to reinforce the formative interaction between the teacher, as traditional transmitter, and the student as receiver of information. Given the importance of nonverbal communication in career and life, the authors of the paper, aware of the fact that the issue is not part of all school syllabi, made a study on two groups of students in order to test their knowlege on the topic as well as to find out their reactions towards the professorss’ sundry nonverbal means of communication.mimics, gestures, communicative behavior, nonverbal communication, body language, accuracy of communication

Do Embodied Conversational Agents Know When to Smile?

We survey the role of humor in particular domains of human-to-human interaction with the aim of seeing whether it is useful for embodied conversational agents to integrate humor capabilities in their models of intelligence, emotions and interaction (verbal and nonverbal) Therefore we first look at the current state of the art of research in embodied conversational agents, affective computing and verbal and nonverbal interaction. We adhere to the 'Computers Are Social Actors' paradigm to assume that human conversational partners of embodied conversational agents assign human properties to these agents, including humor appreciation

Nonverbal communication in EFL teaching

XXI Jornades de Foment de la Investigació de la Facultat de Ciències Humanes i Socials (Any 2016)In recent years a number of researchers have stressed the importance of nonverbal communication – especially Kinesics – in the teaching and learning of languages (Bernsen, 2002; Jung, 2003; González, 2004; Querol-Julián and Belles-Fortuño, 2010; Surkamp, 2014). This paper aims to investigate the importance of gestures in the communication process and how the appropriate use of nonverbal communication enhances classroom interaction and contributes to conveying meaning. EFL language teaching can benefited from nonverbal communication when this is used in an effective way. The paper examines a small corpus of two videos taken from YouTube in which EFL teachers’ discourse and co-speech gestures (McNeill, 1992) were analysed. Results suggest that teachers used primarily iconic hand movements, which in turn enhanced students’ acquisition of the target language (TL). Finally, a section of pedagogical implications will focus on the appropriate use of gestures in a number of interactive activities

Distributional effects and individual differences in L2 morphology learning

Second language (L2) learning outcomes may depend on the structure of the input and learners’ cognitive abilities. This study tested whether less predictable input might facilitate learning and generalization of L2 morphology while evaluating contributions of statistical learning ability, nonverbal intelligence, phonological short-term memory, and verbal working memory. Over three sessions, 54 adults were exposed to a Russian case-marking paradigm with a balanced or skewed item distribution in the input. Whereas statistical learning ability and nonverbal intelligence predicted learning of trained items, only nonverbal intelligence also predicted generalization of case-marking inflections to new vocabulary. Neither measure of temporary storage capacity predicted learning. Balanced, less predictable input was associated with higher accuracy in generalization but only in the initial test session. These results suggest that individual differences in pattern extraction play a more sustained role in L2 acquisition than instructional manipulations that vary the predictability of lexical items in the input