Cognition can be distributed, extended, enacted, embodied and systemic (but does it matter which?)

© 2019 The British Psychological Society.Final Accepted Versio

The concreteness effect in healthy ageing; An attenuation or preservation?

Previous research has shown that adults process concrete words faster when they share a taxonomic (similarity) relationship, and process abstract words faster when sharing a thematic (association) relationship (Crutch, Connell & Warrington, 2009). The current study tested if this dissociation could be replicated with older adults (65+) given conflicting evidence of the attenuation/preservation of the concreteness effect in healthy aging (Borghi & Setti, 2017; Peters & Daum, 2008). Healthy younger (N = 17) and older (N = 17) adults completed the odd-one-out task employed by Crutch et al. using four item sets in which the related words were either concrete or abstract, and related by similarity or association, e.g., Jeep-Taxi-Lorry-Mushroom (concrete-similarity), Crime-Punishment-Theft-Mimic (abstract-association). A significant interaction was found between concept type and semantic relation whereby reaction times were faster for concrete-similarity over concrete-association words, and faster for abstract-association over abstract-similarity words. No age effects were found in processing concrete or abstract concepts. The concreteness effect was found to be present for both younger and older adults suggesting that, contrary to expectation, older adults still show an advantage in processing concrete over abstract concepts with implications for Embodied Cognition.Non peer reviewedDownloa

Assessing the stability of thematic and taxonomic preferences across explicit and implicit measures

Assessments of similarity between objects has shown to draw upon both taxonomic and thematic properties. While cross-task preferences have been demonstrated (Mirman & Graziano, 2012), the current experiment aimed to examine the reliability of such preferences across an extended range of explicit and implicit measures of similarity. In a within-subjects design, 50 participants completed three established measures assessing preferences for taxonomic or thematic relations; a free sort task, a triad task and the Visual World Paradigm, with a further implicit measure developed based upon the single category Implicit Association Task. Preferences were calculated on the basis of choices made on the sorting and triad task, competitor viewing time on the VWP, and response time on the IAT. Across all measures, consistent preferences were not found. Furthermore, no significant correlations were found between the magnitude of preferences for the four measures including no correlations between the two explicit or the two implicit measures. In contrast to previous research demonstrating reliable cross-task preferences, performance on the tasks used here argue against stable individual differences in taxonomic and thematic processing and suggest that, for most people, the use of each processing pathway is flexible and determined by both context and goals.Non peer reviewe

Inhibition in Preschool Children at Risk of Developmental Language Disorder

© The Author(s) 2022. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)It has been hypothesised that executive function deficits, specifically inhibition difficulties, may play a central role in Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). The presented study compared the response inhibition abilities of typically developing preschool children, with monolingual and bilingual preschool children who had already been classed as being at risk of developing DLD. A non-word repetition test and two inhibition tasks were used along with a prospective memory task. The results indicated that children at risk of DLD performed significantly worse than typically developing children on all tasks. The findings suggest that children at risk of DLD are impaired in response inhibition. Educational and therapeutic implications are discussed.Peer reviewe

Rifles, Swords and Water Pistols: Circumstances in Which Action Becomes Influential in an Action-Irrelevant Categorisation Task

An assumption in Cognitive Psychology, which has been challenged in recent years, is that the systems responsible for action and perception work independently of one another. These systems work together during conceptual tasks and research has demonstrated that action knowledge can influence performance even when the task is ‘action-irrelevant’ (Borghi, 2004; Borghi, Flumini, Natraj & Wheaton, 2012; Creem & Proffitt, 2001; Tucker & Ellis, 1998, 2001). However, participants in such tasks are often only asked to make simple category judgements, such as natural versus man made. The research reported in this thesis has shown that, under certain conditions, participants use action knowledge to make ‘complex’ category choices in an action-irrelevant task. The experimental work has predominantly used the forced-choice triad task to assess the circumstances under which participants categorise objects based on shared actions. The triads were designed with a target object and two choice objects matching on either shared actions (rifle + water pistol), shared taxonomic relations (rifle + sword), or both (orange + banana). The context in which the objects were presented was also manipulated so that the objects were either presented on a white background (context-lean) or being used by an agent (context-rich). Participants were most likely to select the choice object that shared both a taxonomic and an action demonstrating that action has an ‘additive’ effect in categorical decisions. Presenting the objects being used by an agent in a functional scenario increased the saliency of the shared actions between the stimuli, and participants were more likely to select the action choice. The subsequent experimental work reported in the thesis sought to eliminate potential confounding variables including perceptual features, object typicality and task instructions. What the experimental work presented here has demonstrated is that action can influence decisions on more complex categories, and judgments of similarity. The research has identified three main circumstances under which knowledge of action becomes influential in the triad task designed for the purpose of this research as follows: (i) when it is presented in conjunction with taxonomic information, (ii) when it is presented with a context, and (iii) when participants are first asked to physically interact with the objects

Concepts and action : where does the embodiment debate leave us?

The behavioural evidence of sensorimotor activity during conceptual processing, along with that from neurological research, ignited the debate around the extent to which concept representations are embodied or amodal. Such evidence continues to fuel the debate but it is open to interpretation as being consistent with a variety of the theoretical positions and so it is possible that further, similar evidence may not lead to its resolution. In this paper we propose that independent value accrues from following this line of research through the enhanced understanding of the factors that influence agents’ conceptual processing of action and how this interacts with the agent’s goals in real environments. This approach is in line with broad principles of embodied cognition and is worthy of pursuit regardless of what the results may (or may not) tell us about conceptual representation

Enhanced magnetoresistance in NiFe/GaAs/Fe hybrid magnon valve

The magnon valve (MV), which consists of a one spacer layer sandwiched between two ferromagnetic layers, is a potential spintronic device. The operation principle of the magnon valve depends on magnon current propagating between the two magnetic layers. More specifically, the magnon current is induced in one ferromagnetic layer and then injects magnons into the other ferromagnetic layer through the spacer layer. During this process, the magnetization of the injected ferromagnetic layer is changed, leading to the different relative magnetic orientations of the two magnetic layers. Here, we investigated the electromagnetic property of the NiFe/GaAs/Fe magnon valve assisted by microwaves with various frequencies. We find that the magnetoresistance (MR) of the magnon valve increases up to 40% when applying an external 3.4GHz microwave. The increase in the magnetoresistance results from the magnon current propagating between the two ferromagnetic layers. The magnons induced by the external microwave share the same phase, and thus the magnon current can penetrate into a 70 μm thick GaAs by coherent propagation

Uterine Rupture by Intended Mode of Delivery in the UK: A National Case-Control Study

A case-control study using UK data estimates the risk of uterine rupture in subsequent deliveries amongst women who have had a previous caesarean section

Translating microarray data for diagnostic testing in childhood leukaemia

BACKGROUND: Recent findings from microarray studies have raised the prospect of a standardized diagnostic gene expression platform to enhance accurate diagnosis and risk stratification in paediatric acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL). However, the robustness as well as the format for such a diagnostic test remains to be determined. As a step towards clinical application of these findings, we have systematically analyzed a published ALL microarray data set using Robust Multi-array Analysis (RMA) and Random Forest (RF). METHODS: We examined published microarray data from 104 ALL patients specimens, that represent six different subgroups defined by cytogenetic features and immunophenotypes. Using the decision-tree based supervised learning algorithm Random Forest (RF), we determined a small set of genes for optimal subgroup distinction and subsequently validated their predictive power in an independent patient cohort. RESULTS: We achieved very high overall ALL subgroup prediction accuracies of about 98%, and were able to verify the robustness of these genes in an independent panel of 68 specimens obtained from a different institution and processed in a different laboratory. Our study established that the selection of discriminating genes is strongly dependent on the analysis method. This may have profound implications for clinical use, particularly when the classifier is reduced to a small set of genes. We have demonstrated that as few as 26 genes yield accurate class prediction and importantly, almost 70% of these genes have not been previously identified as essential for class distinction of the six ALL subgroups. CONCLUSION: Our finding supports the feasibility of qRT-PCR technology for standardized diagnostic testing in paediatric ALL and should, in conjunction with conventional cytogenetics lead to a more accurate classification of the disease. In addition, we have demonstrated that microarray findings from one study can be confirmed in an independent study, using an entirely independent patient cohort and with microarray experiments being performed by a different research team