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Biomedical subjects

E A Maylor

Publications and source records attributed to E A Maylor.

18 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1992

Linear and nonlinear effects of aging on categorizing and naming faces.

Subjects aged 54-84 performed 5 separate tasks involving various aspects of face processing: structural decisions (1), familiarity decisions (2), semantic decisions (3), first-name decisions (4), and name retrieval (5). For the categorization tasks (1-4), the mean reaction times for the older subjects (over 65) were plotted against the corresponding means for the younger subjects (under 65). This produced a linear function (slope greater than 1, intercept less than 0), providing only partial support for a simple, multiplicative model of cognitive slowing with age. Reaction time distributions were also plotted for each of the 5 tasks (older vs. younger subjects). The resulting functions were almost perfectly linear, with the exception of name retrieval, which was exponential with respect to age. This was attributed to the increased probability of a tip-of-the-tongue state with age caused by insufficient activation at the level of the name information (the final state of face identification).

Aged↗
PubMed1992

Effects of alcohol, practice, and task complexity on reaction time distributions.

The effects of alcohol (1.0 ml/kg body weight) and practice (2 sessions) were investigated in 2-, 4-, and 8-choice reaction time (RT) tasks with 24 male subjects. The number of errors increased with alcohol, practice, and increasing task complexity (choice). Mean RT decreased with practice, but increased with alcohol and complexity. Both the alcohol and practice effects on mean RT increased as complexity increased. The effects of alcohol, practice, and complexity were all larger for the higher percentiles of the RT distributions than for the lower percentiles. RT distributions were further analysed at each level of choice by plotting percentiles (5th, 10th, ... , 95th) for alcohol conditions against corresponding percentiles for no-alcohol conditions, and percentiles obtained early in practice (Session 1) against those obtained later in practice (Session 2). These plots revealed that whereas at all levels of choice the effect of alcohol could be expressed as a simple linear transformation of all RTs, the effect of practice required a more complex curvilinear transformation. Thus, alcohol produces a general slowing of all RTs, whereas practice produces a disproportionate improvement at the slower end of the RT distribution.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1991

Recognizing and naming tunes: memory impairment in the elderly.

Subjects over the age of 50 listened to theme tunes of remote, recent, and frequent television programs. If they recognized the tune, they were asked for the name of the program and for as much information about the program as possible. From the responses to a subsequent questionnaire, it was possible to divide the data according to whether or not the subjects watched the programs. There was no effect of age on the recognition and naming of programs subjects never watched. For programs they watched (a true test of memory), older subjects recognized fewer tunes as familiar and were less able than younger subjects to name the programs with familiar tunes. Neither the amount of exposure nor the delay since exposure had a significant influence on the recognition and naming impairments with age. Older subjects reported less information about programs they watched than younger subjects. In multiple regression analyses, age was a better predictor of performance than measures of current cognitive ability. The results are compared with the effects of age on the recognition and naming of famous faces (Maylor, 1990a). It is argued that the studies together support the view that the information processing rate decreases with age; therefore the elderly are poor at speeded tasks, the most dramatic effects appearing for later components of sequential processes.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed1990

Age and prospective memory.

This paper reports an investigation into the effects of age, intelligence, and retrospective memory on performance in a prospective memory task in which subjects aged between 52 and 95 were required to telephone once a day either between two times or at an exact time. The most important influence on performance was how subjects chose to remember to make the telephone calls. The best performance was from subjects who telephoned either in conjunction with another routine event or engaged in some form of advanced planning of the daily schedule. The worst performance was from those who relied on internal cues from their own memory. Performance was intermediate from those who used external cues such as notes or diary entries. Subjects in the between condition were less likely to choose internal cues than those in the exact condition, possibly because the task appeared more difficult, and this resulted in their showing superior performance. The effect of age was influenced by the cue used. For subjects using internal cues, those who forgot were older than those who remembered, whereas for subjects using the other cues, those who forgot were younger than those who remembered. Regardless of cue, self-ratings of cognitive failures were related to performance such that those who reported more minor everyday mistakes were indeed more likely to forget to telephone. While there was some indirect effect of general intelligence on performance in the task, there was no relationship between retrospective memory scores and whether or not subjects remembered to telephone.

Aged↗
PubMed1990

Recognizing and naming faces: aging, memory retrieval, and the tip of the tongue state.

Subjects over the age of 50 were presented with famous and nonfamous male faces. If they recognized the face, they were asked for his name and for as much information about the person as possible. For recognition, older subjects were less sensitive (lower d-prime) and more cautious (higher beta) than younger subjects. The number of "tip of the tongue" (TOT) naming responses as a proportion of faces recognized increased with age, while the number of responses where the right name was produced correspondingly decreased with age. Following responses of No, TOT, and Yes to "Do you know his name?", older subjects reported fewer correct semantic features than younger subjects in all three cases; but as proportions of the number of correct semantic features following Yes responses, there were no age effects (.21 and .59 for No and TOT responses, respectively). In multiple regression analyses, age surprisingly was often a better predictor of performance than measures of current cognitive ability. The results are interpreted as evidence of impairment with age associated with at least three stages in the face recognition process as identified by Bruce and Young (1986).

Aged↗
PubMed1990

Age, blocking and the tip of the tongue state.

This article reports the results of a laboratory study of tip of the tongue (TOT) experiences using a blocking technique (Jones & Langford, 1987). Subjects aged between 52 and 78 years were presented with definitions of rare words and were asked to generate the target word. Following the definition, a potential blocking word was presented which was either phonologically related to the target or not, and either semantically related to the target or not. There were more TOTs when the potential blocking word was phonologically related to the target than when it was not but the effect decreased with increasing age. Furthermore, the mean number of features of the target word reported in the TOT state declined with age. Together these results suggest that the elderly may have particular difficulty in accessing and using phonological information.

Aged↗
PubMed1990

Comparing the effects of alcohol and intelligence on text recall and recognition.

Forty male subjects were divided into two groups on the basis of their scores on a computerized intelligence test administered in a preliminary session. They then participated in a text recall and recognition experiment in which they received alcohol (1.0 ml/kg body weight) in one session and no alcohol in another session (the order being counterbalanced). Subjects were required to read a short passage, immediately recall as much of it as possible and then select from sets of four sentences the ones that appeared in the original passage (recognition). Although two different passages were used, and subjects knew about the memory tasks in advance, there was nevertheless a significant practice effect: subjects recalled 10.6 per cent more propositions on the second occasion than on the first, but this could be at least partly explained by the fact that they spent 10.0 per cent longer reading the second passage. There was also a significant 7.8 per cent slowing of reading time due to alcohol. Practice did not interact with either intelligence or alcohol on any measure of performance. Alcohol impaired the performance of high intelligence test scorers more than low scorers. The effects of intelligence and alcohol on free recall were quantitatively similar: high intelligence test scorers recalled 8.7 more propositions than low scorers; with alcohol, subjects recalled 8.3 fewer propositions than without alcohol. However, the effects were qualitatively different. The effect of intelligence was primarily on the recall of lower level propositions, whereas alcohol impaired the recall of both higher and lower level propositions. Furthermore, while there was no effect of intelligence on recognition, alcohol impaired performance such that more incorrect sentences were erroneously recognized, particularly those which altered the meaning of the original sentence, rather than merely its surface structure. In terms of Kintsch & van Dijk's (1978) model of text processing, the results are interpreted as suggesting that, while both intelligence and alcohol affect the capacity of the short-term memory buffer, there is an additional impairment with alcohol in the ability to select between higher and lower level propositions prior to filling the buffer.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1990

Effects of alcohol and extended practice on divided-attention performance.

The effects of alcohol and extended practice on divided attention were investigated using a visual tracking task and an auditory detection task. Subjects performed the tasks with and without alcohol, under single-task (S) and dual-task (D) conditions, both before and after they had received extended practice under single-task conditions without alcohol. Tracking accuracy improved with practice and was impaired under divided-attention conditions but was not affected by alcohol. Speed of detection was impaired by alcohol, improved by practice, and impaired by divided attention. Extended practice did not reduce the influence of alcohol. The effects of both alcohol and practice on speed of detection were significantly greater under dual-task conditions than under single-task conditions. Analysis of detection-task reaction times in terms of relative divided-attention costs, (D-S)/S, showed no effect of alcohol, but a highly significant reduction in costs with extended practice. It is concluded that (1) alcohol and practice can have quantitatively, but not qualitatively, similar effects on speeded performance, and (2) the effect of alcohol is not influenced by the attentional requirements of the task.

Alcohol Drinking↗
PubMed1989

Rate of processing and judgment of response speed: comparing the effects of alcohol and practice.

Both alcohol and practice affect choice reaction time. The present study was conducted to investigate the possibility that impairment from alcohol and improvement with practice could be attributed to changes in the efficiency of control mechanisms (Rabbitt, 1979a), some of which depend upon the ability to judge response speed accurately. Twenty subjects participated in a four-choice reaction time experiment in which they received no alcohol (NA) in Session 1 and either no alcohol (10 subjects) or 0.8 ml alcohol (A) per kilogram of body weight (10 subjects) in Session 2. The task was to respond as fast and as accurately as possible to each stimulus. In addition, subjects were required to press a fifth key after any response that they considered to be both fast and accurate. Subjects had no difficulty in performing this task: (1) there was a significant difference of 122 msec between the mean response time for correct responses indicated as fast and that for correct responses not indicated as fast, and (2) subjects indicated 1 in 4 correct responses but only 1 in 64 errors. Alcohol increased all response times by approximately 40 msec. In contrast, practice decreased response times less for correct responses not indicated as fast than for correct responses indicated as fast. The ability to distinguish between fast and slow responses was thus unaffected by alcohol, but was improved by practice. Responses indicated as "fast" were significantly faster than errors, and appeared to occur without warning (unlike errors, which tended to end a sequence of increasingly fast correct responses). The results suggest that alcohol and practice influence choice reaction time in qualitatively different ways: Alcohol impairs overall response speed but has no effect on the ability to judge response speed, whereas practice improves both.

Adult↗
PubMed1988

Effects of alcohol on lexical access.

Two experiments investigated the effect of alcohol on retrieval of lexical information. In each, volunteers received alcohol (1 ml per kg body weight) in one session and no alcohol in another in counterbalanced order. Experiment 1 was a computerised version of the Mill Hill vocabulary test in which subjects were required to define words by making multiple choice responses as fast as possible. As expected, correct decision time increased with item difficulty and tended to increase with alcohol, but there was no interaction between these effects. Experiment 2 was a lexical decision task involving words of low, medium and high frequency. Alcohol significantly increased correct response time but this did not interact with word frequency. In both experiments, decision times for individual items varied, indicating that lexical access is more difficult for rare than for frequent items. However, alcohol slowed easy and difficult decisions equally, which suggests that its locus of effect is not primarily on speed of access to semantic information, but rather on other aspects of the decision process.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1987

Effect of alcohol on rate of forgetting.

The effect of alcohol (1 ml per kg body weight) on the rate of forgetting was investigated using a continuous recognition memory paradigm. Subjects were required to make a speeded old/new response to each of 200 items presented sequentially on a computer screen. Ninety-five items appeared twice. The numbers of items intervening between the first and second occurrence were 1, 4, 9, 19 and 49 (19 of each). With alcohol, subjects were less sensitive (decreased d-prime) and more conservative (increased beta). Recognition speed and accuracy were both impaired by alcohol and by increasing numbers of intervening items. In addition, an interaction between the effects of alcohol and of delay on recognition accuracy indicates that the impairment of memory with alcohol can be at least partly attributed to faster forgetting.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1987

Effects of repetition on the facilitatory and inhibitory components of orienting in visual space.

Three experiments are reported which investigate the possibility of habituation of externally-controlled covert orienting with repetition. A brief event in the visual field (for example, a luminance change) can speed the detection response to a target if it occurs in the same location within approx. 100 msec and can bias temporal order judgments in the absence of eye movements. This early facilitatory component is seen as the result of an externally-controlled covert orienting response, that is, the realignment of attention, but not the eyes, with the location of the initial event. However, after approx. 300 msec, the response to a target appearing in the same location is slower than to one appearing elsewhere (the inhibitory component). Experiment 1 employed a cue-target procedure, the subject's task being to ignore each non-informative cue but to respond as quickly as possible to the onset of each target. Three conditions were investigated which differed according to the number of consecutive cues presented in the same location [1, 5, 30]. Facilitatory and inhibitory components were present in all three, indicating that under these conditions, externally-controlled covert orienting does not habituate with repetition and occurs to non-random as well as random sequences of cues. In addition, there was evidence that the inhibitory component is larger for a response to a target appearing in the same location as the cue and the previous target than in the same location as the cue only. In order to investigate this further, a continuous target-target procedure was used in experiments 2 and 3 (simple and choice reaction time, with 3 and 1 response-stimulus intervals respectively), which demonstrated that inhibition does not build up over successive repetitions of targets appearing in the same location, but actually decreases. The results are discussed in relation to the possible functions of the facilitatory and inhibitory components in maintaining selectivity in visual space.

Arousal↗
PubMed1987

Effects of alcohol on word categorization and recognition memory.

Thirty-six subjects were given no alcohol on one day and 1 ml alcohol/kg body weight on another (the order of administration being counterbalanced across subjects). In both sessions, they performed a word categorization task involving surface and semantic processing of lists of 50 words followed by a recognition task (the presentation of those words in addition to an equal number of new words for speeded recognition). For categorization, subjects were slower and less accurate with alcohol than without. For recognition, alcohol resulted in a decrease in d' and an increase in beta. Categorization was slower and recognition more accurate for semantic processing than for surface processing. There was no evidence that the detrimental effects of alcohol on recognition memory can be reduced by deeper processing of the to-be-remembered items.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1985

Inhibitory component of externally controlled covert orienting in visual space.

Four experiments are reported that investigate an inhibitory effect associated with externally controlled orienting and first identified by Posner and Cohen (1980, 1984). The effect takes the form of an inability to respond quickly to a stimulus appearing in the same location in the visual periphery as a previous one that produced covert orienting. Several characteristics of the effect are revealed that eliminate possible explanations in terms of response inhibition, masking, and sensory habituation. The inhibitory component of orienting occurs whether or not the first stimulus requires a response (Experiment 1), lasts at least a second (Experiments 1, 2, and 3), affects not only the originally stimulated location but also nearby locations (Experiment 2), is determined by environmental coordinates (Experiment 3), and occurs both in the periphery and at the fovea (Experiment 4). It is concluded that inhibition may act together with an early facilitatory component (Posner & Cohen, 1984) in directing the attention and eye movement systems in order to maintain efficient spatial sampling.

Form Perception↗