Cognitive Psychology

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Yaïr Pinto Cognitive Psychology

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A side, sliced and top-view of four points in the brain: Blue shows the areas that are more active during the familiar condition and red those areas that are more active during the unfamiliar condition.

<p>Center of gravity coordinates (MNI reference system) are shown below each slice. The left picture shows the side view of the brain (s indicates the top of the brain, I the bottom, p the back, and a the front). The middle picture shows a sliced view of the brain (r denotes the rights side of the brain, l the left side). The right picture shows a top view of the brain. For more brain slices: see <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0042929#pone.0042929.s001" target="_blank">Appendix S1</a>.</p

An example of the experimental design.

<p>The experiment consisted of six runs. In each run ¼ of the trials were viewing trials (were participants watched a centrally presented picture), ¾ were tracking trials. Familiar and unfamiliar runs were intertwined. Presented stimuli throughout a run were either buildings, objects or faces. In a familiar trial both targets and distractors remained the same from trial to trial, whereas in an unfamiliar run target-identities changed from trial to trial. Familiar runs consisted of 96 trials, unfamiliar runs of 36 trials. These 6 runs were followed by a localizer task, in which the participant watched faces, buildings or objects.</p

This is a clockwise depiction of a tracking trial.

<p>First highlights indicated what the targets are. Then all objects move around for 2–6 seconds. Then all objects are masked, one masked item is highlighted, and the subject indicates if the highlighted item is the same as the centrally depicted probe.</p