Biomedical subjects

Jens Bölte

Publications and source records attributed to Jens Bölte.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Describing scenes hardly seen.

Knowledge about scene categories, the so-called gist, can be extracted very rapidly, while recognition and naming of individual scene objects is a more effortful process. We investigate this phenomenon by presenting action scenes involving two actors for durations varying between 100 and 300 ms. Incoherence was created by mirroring individual scene actors. Upon masked presentation participants had to report content, actors and objects and to indicate whether the scene was meaningful or not. Scene coherence was judged correctly at all presentation durations. Actors were correctly identified in about one-third of the cases even with presentation durations of 100 ms, and identification rate increased up to 80% with longer durations. Identification depended on scene coherence, on the position of agents in the scene, and on the position of actors relative to the fixation cross. These interdependencies of scene and object perception indicate that the visual system seems to be very sensitive to meaningful interactions of living entities. A series of fixations is not necessary to identify actors of a scene.

Attention↗

PubMed2006

Effects of personal familiarity on early neuromagnetic correlates of face perception.

This study investigated effects of familiarity and orientation on face processing by means of magnetoencephalography. Participants were presented with photographs of personally familiar, famous and unfamiliar faces in both upright and inverted orientation. They had to decide whether faces were familiar by means of manual yes/no responses. Independent of orientation, we observed a clear modulation of the M170 by familiarity, with personally familiar faces evoking larger amplitudes than unknown faces. The M170 was also sensitive to orientation, with larger amplitudes for inverted than upright faces. Moreover, the M170 exhibited larger amplitudes over the right than over the left hemisphere, but this asymmetry was present for upright faces only. The present data suggest that at least for personally familiar faces, neural correlates of identification start no later than approximately 170 ms, and underline a special role of the right hemisphere for faces in their typical upright orientation.

Adult↗

PubMed2005

Pre-attentive detection of syntactic and semantic errors.

This magnetoencephalographic study tested whether magnetic fields evoked by syntactic and semantic errors differ in their time course and magnitude from fields evoked by phonemic differences. An oddball design, using German sentences with embedded critical words was applied: The error condition (with the standard word RASEN, lawn, in 70% of the trials, and the syntactic and semantic errors ROSEN, roses and RIESEN, giant as deviants) was compared with a neutral, correct phonemic condition. Mismatch responses were significantly larger for syntactic and semantic errors as compared to mere phonemic deviations. The semantic error elicited higher mismatch responses than the syntactic error. This error-sensitive component is interpreted as a very early detector for semantic and syntactic errors.

Attention↗

PubMed2004

When is all understood and done? The psychological reality of the recognition point.

Using lexical decision, the effects of primes of different length on spoken word recognition were evaluated in three partial repetition priming experiments. Prime length was determined via gating (Experiments 1a and 2a). It was shorter than, equivalent to, or longer than the recognition point (RP), or a complete word. In Experiments 1b and 1c, priming increased with prime length and was independent of reaction time. The influence of sensory information following the RP was investigated in Experiment 2b. Latencies decreased with increasing prime length, but priming decreased only for complete words. RP and complete words have a special status. Lexical representations are activated to different degrees at the RP and at word offset.

Cognition↗

PubMed2004

Grammatical gender in spoken word recognition in German.

The role of grammatical gender for auditory word recognition in German was investigated in three experiments and two sets of corpus analyses. In the corpus analyses, gender information reduced the lexical search space as well as the amount of input needed to uniquely identify a word. To test whether this holds for on-line processing, two auditory lexical decision experiments (Experiments 1 and 3) were conducted using valid, invalid, or noise-masked articles as primes. Clear gender-priming effects were obtained in both experiments. Experiment 2 used phoneme monitoring with words and with pseudowords deviating from base words in one or more phonological features. Contrary to the lexical decision latencies, phoneme-monitoring latencies showed no influence of gender but did show similarity mismatch effects. We argue that gender information is not utilized early during word recognition. Rather, the presence of a valid article increases the initial familiarity of a word, facilitating subsequent responses.

Adult↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Where and how morphologically complex words interplay with naming pictures.

Two picture-word experiments are reported in which a delay of 7 to 10 was introduced between distractor and picture. Distractor words were either derived words (Experiment 1) or compounds (Experiment 2), morphologically related to the picture name. In both experiments, the position of morphological overlap between distractor (e.g., rosebud vs tea-rose) and picture name (rose) was manipulated. Clear facilitation of picture naming latencies was obtained when pictures were paired with morphological distractors, and effects were independent of distractor type and position of overlap. The results are evaluated against "full listing" and "decomposition" approaches of morphological representation.

Humans↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Is phonological information mapped onto semantic information in a one-to-one manner?

Spoken word recognition models have to explain the influence of mismatching information on lexical activation. The effect of mismatching information is usually addressed with cross-modal semantic priming experiments using priming effects as a measure of the degree of lexical activation. Pseudowords phonologically related to a semantic associate of the target, e.g., *domato-PAPRIKA, serve as primes. Mismatch effects at the word form level are supposed to percolate unaltered to the semantic level. We show that cross-modal semantic priming might underestimate activation at the word form level. Targets (e.g., PAPRIKA) were preceded by either phonologically related pseudoword primes (e.g., *baprika) or semantically related pseudoword primes (e.g., *domato). Different priming and RT patterns were obtained for the two priming relations.

Cognition↗

PubMedDate not supplied

The impact of semantic transparency of morphologically complex words on picture naming.

We examined the contribution of semantic similarity to morphological priming effects, using the immediate (Exp. 1 and 3) and the delayed variant (Exp. 2) of picture-word interference. Distractor words were either compounds morphologically related to the picture name, but differing with respect to their semantic transparency (hummingbird, jailbird (Exp. 1); butterfly, butter dish (Exp. 3)), or form-related non-compound words (e.g., trombone). All three experiments revealed strong facilitation of picture naming due to morphologically related distractors. Form-related distractors facilitated picture naming in the immediate variant only, and to a lesser degree than compounds. Interestingly, the size of the morphemic effect was almost identical for semantically transparent and opaque complex words, which suggests that they share morphemic representations. These results suggest that morphological complexity in speech production is coded at the level of form representations, independent of semantic transparency.

Humans↗