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M Arguin

Publications and source records attributed to M Arguin.

7 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1995

Visual word activation in pure alexia.

A patient with pure alexia (DM) is shown to perform rapid and accurate lexical decisions for common words without the ability to recover their complete identity. We provide evidence using a speeded decision task that DM is not forced to rely on a laborious analysis of individual letter forms when judging the lexical status of orthographic patterns varying in length, though he clearly must use this approach to fully identify a word for explicit report. By contrast, the ability to rapidly classify a word apparently does not extend to judgements of its superordinate category. DM makes semantic decisions for visual words by adopting the same inefficient procedure he uses for verbal report of their identity. The results provide further constraints on the functional deficit responsible for pure alexia. We argue that DM is able to monitor the overall activation of word units without achieving full identification and that such a process may be a characteristic of the normal reading mechanism.

Adult↗
PubMed1994

Pure alexia: attempted rehabilitation and its implications for interpretation of the deficit.

On the basis of data indicating the failure to encode letters as abstract orthographic identities in a pure alexic patient (D.M.) coupled with hypotheses about the effect of such a failure on word reading, an attempt at changing the nature of letter processing in D.M. was conducted. The training procedures failed to produce any fundamental change in the operations used by D.M. to encode isolated letters or words. However, rapid and massive benefits occurred in the overall speed of reading as a result of the training program. These appear to result from an increased rate of letter identification and the faster integration of individual letters into letter combinations. The observations gathered throughout this rehabilitation attempt provided evidence which constrains the range of possible explanations for the characteristic features of pure alexia. It is proposed that the letter-by-letter reading procedure which is the hallmark of the disorder may follow from an incapacity to directly encode visual letters as abstract orthographic types.

Adult↗
PubMed1992

Contribution of articulatory rehearsal to short-term memory: evidence from a case of selective disruption.

We describe a brain-damaged patient with disturbed articulatory rehearsal in whom all predictions derived from a working memory model were fulfilled. The patient showed a reduced verbal span, no word-length effect on immediate recall in both the visual or the auditory modalities, no phonological similarity effect in the visual modality, and no effect of articulatory suppression. A slowed overt articulation rate provided independent evidence for disrupted articulatory rehearsal. The other components of working memory, the visuospatial scratch-pad, phonological storage system, and central executive, were functional. The selectivity of the deficit can be taken as evidence for the specific role of articulatory rehearsal in working memory.

Aphasia↗
PubMed1990

Comparing the cerebral hemispheres on the speed of spatial shifts of visual attention: evidence from serial search.

We compared the speed at which visuo-spatial attention may be shifted from one stimulus to another as a function of the visual hemifield in which the items were displayed in a visual search task requiring serial processing. The increase in response time with the number of items displayed was similar for left- and right-hemifield presentations. This suggests that the rate at which visuo-spatial attention can be shifted from one stimulus to another during visual search does not differ between the cerebral hemispheres.

Adult↗
PubMed1990

Effect of surface medium on visual search for orientation and size features.

By using a visual search task, this study examined the encoding of orientation and size for stimuli defined in five different surface media: luminance, color, texture, relative motion, and binocular disparity. Results indicated a spatially parallel analysis of size and orientation features for all surface media, with the possible exception of binocular disparity. The data also revealed a search rate asymmetry in the orientation task for all media: Parallel or shallow search functions were obtained for oblique targets in vertical distractors, whereas steeper serial search functions were obtained for vertical targets in oblique distractors. No consistent asymmetry was found for the large and small targets in the size task. There seemed to be common principles of coding in all these different media, suggesting either a single analysis of shape features applied to a common representation or multiple analyses, one for each surface medium, with each extracting a similar set of features. The shared coding principles may facilitate the use of redundancy across media to reduce ambiguities in the locations and shapes of contours in the visual scene.

Adult↗
PubMed1989

Interattribute apparent motion.

Apparent motion can be seen between two alternating stimuli even if they are defined with respect to their background by attributes other than luminance (such as color, or texture). We measured motion strength as the maximum separation between two alternating stimuli which produced an impression of motion, for conditions in which the two stimuli were defined by the same attribute (intra-attribute) as well as conditions in which they were defined by different attributes (interattribute). The attributes used to define the stimuli were luminance, color, texture, relative motion, or stereopsis. The results indicate that motion was seen for all the intra-attribute conditions about equally well. The results also show that interattribute motion could be seen for all combinations studied. The motion strength in these cases was about 80% of that for the intra-attribute conditions. The process responsible for this motion perception must therefore be able to combine information from different attributes.

Adult↗