Coherence, cohesion, and declarative memory: Discourse patterns in patients with hippocampal amnesia

Research on discursive cohesion and coherence has focused on patient groups with diffuse damage and widespread cognitive impairment (e.g.,TBI, dementia). Consequently, attempts to attribute discourse deficits to a particular cognitive domain has proven difficult. The current study capitalizes on a rare patient group with selective and severe anterograde hippocampal amnesia to investigate the contribution of declarative memory to discourse cohesion and coherence across a range of discourse genres. This research contributes to our understanding of the interdependent relationship between language and memory and promises to inform clinical decision making for individuals with complex cognitive-communication disorders following TBI and dementia

A mind free to wander: neural and computational constraints on spontaneous thought

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Social Neuroscience: Leveraging Social Media to Increase Student Engagement and Public Understanding of Neuroscience

Neuroscience is young and still developing. It is quickly adapting to a number of emerging changes in science and education. Not only have neuroscientists been at the forefront of the open access publishing movement, but many prominent neuroscientists continue to push towards making science more accessible and understandable to the broader public. Social media is a global phenomenon that is changing the way that we talk about research and education. Researchers, students, and the public alike can leverage social media to find updates in research and higher education. Social media also provides pathways to connect with experts and non-experts in a way never been seen before. Two major trends are appearing in education and social media: 1) providing more engaging teaching activities, and 2) providing opportunities for community engagement using teaching activities that leverage social media. In this article, we describe a semester long teaching activity that challenged students to use social media in their learning process. We provide initial evaluation and feedback from the students on their social media experience in class, and suggestions for how to improve the project in future implementations

Narratives and lessons from Traumatic Brain Injury

<div>Kurczek, J. (2013, April). Narratives and lessons from traumatic brain injury. <i>Oral presentation at the Jakobson Conference</i>, Iowa City, IA.</div><div><br></div>Explores the problems of TBI funding and understanding. Proposes a new way to study TBI

Lexical decision and the diffusion model: An investigation into the mental lexicon

<div> <div> <div> <div> <p>The lexical decision task is one of the most widely used tasks in psychology (Ratcliff, McKoon, & Gomez, 2004). Through the years, it has generally been used to investigate memory and lexical access (psycholinguistics). The lexical decision task is one way to study the organization and properties of the mental lexicon, how words are stored in the brain. The general assumption underlying the lexical decision task is that the speed and accuracy of responding to word stimuli indicate the efficiency with which word representations are activated or retrieved from lexical memory (Wangermakers, Zeelenberg, Steyvers, Shiffrin, Raaijmakers, 2004). </p> <p>By manipulating the variables by which words themselves differ or the ways in which they are presented, we can begin to shed light on these cognitive processes by analyzing and interpreting how these manipulations affect a subject’s reaction time and accuracy in classifying a string of letters as a word or not a word. Based on the data that is collected, models can be used to represent how these manipulations affect the cognitive processes and certain theoretical inferences can be made, specifically related to the metal representation of words in the mind and how words are categorized and stored in the mind (i.e. the mental lexicon). </p> <p>The factors that influence lexical access include word frequency, recency, and the presence of semantically related words and are all addressed in both types of models (search and network). By controlling and changing the variables of words or how they are presented, we can examine how these changes affect the timing of responses, which allows us to theorize about how these changes affect the processing in the mental lexicon. In three studies we manipulate the properties of words themselves, as well as manipulating conditions under which words are seen (priming) while subjects are performing a lexical decision task. We then fit the data from these investigations to the EZ Diffusion Model (Wagenmakers, van der Maas, & Grassman, 2007). By fitting the EZ diffusion to the results of the lexical decision task, do we gain insight to the cognitive processes of facilitation? The EZ diffusion may lend psychological plausibility of describing a response to manipulations of the lexical decision task. </p> </div> </div> </div> </div

Stability and consistency of narrative production across time in hippocampal amnesia

<div> <div> <div> <div> <p>Kurczek, J., & Duff, M.C. (2016, April). Stability and consistency of narrative production across time in hippocampal amnesia <i>Poster presentation at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society Meeting.</i> New York, New York.</p><p> The critical role of the hippocampus and related medial temporal lobe regions in the formation of new enduring memories (i.e., long-term memory) and in their subsequent retrieval is well established. </p> <p>• Hippocampal dependent declarative (relational) memory has two hallmark features; relational (or associative) memory binding and the flexible expression of memory (Eichenbaum & Cohen, 2001). </p> <p>• An important aspect of memory is its ability to be flexibly and constructively recalled in novel contexts. Here we measure episodic and semantic memories in two contexts, one in which the same narratives were told and retold over the course of a month and a second in which the same narratives were told from different perspectives. </p> <p>• Few studies have investigated the role of damage to the hippocampus in telling memories/narratives over time. Evidence from individuals with depression (Semkovska et al., 2012) suggests that individuals with hippocampal damage will be less consistent when retrieving memories and retelling narratives. </p> <p>• We rarely just tell the same story in the same way. Different contextual demands (e.g., people, setting, purpose) drives telling different versions of memories. Findings here may address how damage to the hippocampus affects integrating both past (i.e., having told the stories previously) and current demands (i.e. updating the story to tell a new perspective) when attempting to re-construct both personal (episodic) and semantic narratives. </p> </div> </div> </div> </div

Referential processing places high demands on hippocampal declarative memory

<div> <div> <div> <div> <p>Duff, M.C., & Kurczek, J. (2012, October). Referential processing places high demands on hippocampal declarative memory. <i>Poster presentation at the Society for the Neurobiology of Language Conference</i>, San Sebastian, Spain.</p><p>• In a preliminary study of referential processing in patients with bilateral hippocampal damage and severe and selective declarative memory impairment we reported disruptions; these patients produced fewer cohesive ties, the adequacy of their ties were more often judged to be incomplete, and ratings of their local coherence were consistently lower than comparison participants (Kurczek & Duff, 2011) </p> <p>• Here we extend this line of work by performing a more extensive examination of discourse cohesion and coherence in patients with hippocampal amnesia across a variety of narrative tasks </p> </div> </div> </div> </div

Evaluating the Impact of Spatial Frequencies on the Perception of Gender

Kurczek, J. & Ohnesorge, C. (2010, August). Evaluating the Impact of Spatial Frequencies on the Perception of Gender. <i>Poster presentation at the Annual Summer Interdisciplinary Conference (ASIC)</i>, Bend, OR.<div> <div> <div> <div> <p><br></p><p>Face perception is fundamentally important for judging the characteristics of individuals, such <br> as identification of their gender, age, ethnicity or expression (Webster, Kaping, Mizokami, &<br> Duhamel, 2004). It has been hypothesized that gender perception takes place in higher level visual processing areas. Little, DeBruine, & Jones (2005) suggest that distinct neural<br> populations may code for subcategories of faces for which expertise-derived configural<br> processing is equivalent (i.e. male and female faces). They suggest that visual after-effects<br> are thought to reflect changes in the responses of neural mechanisms underlying face<br> processing and cannot be attributed to retinal (i.e. lower level) adaptations, as the after-effects<br> are robust to difference in the retinal location and size of faces at exposure and post-exposure<br> testing (Little, DeBruine, & Jones, 2005). In a study by Webster et al. (2004) categorical<br> perception of faces was examined based on gender, ethnicity and expression. Observers<br> made forced choice responses to categorize images along the continuum, for example<br> responding to whether a face from a gender morph appeared “female” or “male.” The<br> boundary for gender represents an androgynous image intermediate to the female and male<br> exemplars and could be set consistently by observers. However, after adapting to a male<br> face, the previously ambiguous image appeared distinctly feminine. Conversely, adaptation to<br> the female face induced the opposite changes. This effect is similar to results found in visual<br> after-effect studies. In a different investigation by Cellarino, Borghetti, and Sartucci (2004), the effect of pixilation on gender identification was conducted. As the photos became more pixilated the male faces were identified correctly more frequently than the female faces. This can be inferred to mean that male faces are composed of more lower frequencies since the pixilation wipes out the higher frequencies. The combination of these findings may suggest that the perception of gender can be influenced by lower level processes such as spatial frequency processing. </p></div></div> </div> </div

Use of the historical present in the narratives of patients with hippocampal amnesia

<div> <div> <div> <div> <p>Kurczek, J. & Duff, M.C. (2013, November). Use of the historical present in the narratives of patients with hippocampal amnesia. <i>Poster presentation at the Society for Neuroscience Conference</i>, San Diego, CA.</p><p>Indeed, systematic study of the narratives of patients with memory impairments has been a powerful tool in documenting and characterizing the nature of declarative memory impairment in amnesia (e.g., Hassabis et al., 2007; Duff et al., 2007; Race et al., 2011; Duff & Kurczek, 2013). " </p> <p>Park and colleagues (2011) examined the use of the linguistic construct historical present (HP) in the narratives of individuals with unilateral TLE. Historical present is the use of a present tense verb when clearly referring to a past event. They found not only fewer instances of the HP in narratives of TLE patients in comparison to matched healthy participants, but also a relationship between HP and measures of recollection for past narratives. Thus, HP is thought to reflect the conscious experiencing of recollection." </p> <p>Here, we extend the study of the HP to the narratives of patients with bilateral hippocampal damage and, in addition narratives of past events, also examine narratives for future events. Based on work by Park and colleagues and our proposal that the hippocampus is a key contributor to language use and processing (Duff & Brown-Schmidt, 2012), we predict that hippocampal damage and relational memory impairment will disrupt the use of the HP in past and future narratives." </p> </div> </div> </div> </div