Biomedical subjects

M J Guylee

Publications and source records attributed to M J Guylee.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMedDate not supplied

Handedness and depression in university students: a sex by handedness interaction.

Previous research has indicated that there is an increased incidence of left-handedness in samples of depressed individuals. We administered the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) to a sample of 541 undergraduate students. Left-handed males showed significant elevation of BDI scores. It is unlikely that this result is due to decreased right hemisphere activity or sex-role conflicts. However, one possibility is that known differences in male steroid hormones levels between right- and left-handers contributed to this effect. Press

Adult↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Superior single dimension relative to "exclusive or" categorization performance by a patient with category-specific visual agnosia: empirical data and an ALCOVE simulation.

ELM, a patient with category-specific visual agnosia, was tested on a single-dimension categorization problem, and the "exclusive or" (XOR) categorization problem. Stimuli were computer-generated shapes in which exemplars within a shape set shared values across two visual dimensions (curvature and thickness). In single-dimension categorization only curvature was relevant, and ELM performed as well as normal participants. In the XOR problem, categorization depended on being able to extract from memory values on curvature AND thickness for each exemplar, and ELM was significantly impaired on this task. A computer simulation using ALCOVE (Kruschke, 1992) reproduced ELM's behavior by changing a single (specificity) parameter related to how easily proximate objects within a multidimensional shape space could be disambiguated.

Agnosia↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Tactile gap detection and language lateralization.

Recent work suggests that hemispheric language lateralization might be related to the fine-grained temporal discriminations that are required for linguistic processing (Nicholls, 1996). Studies concerning tactile processing have also shown a significant left-hemisphere (L-H) advantage for tactile gap detection (Nicholls & Whelan, 1997). We hypothesized that language and tactile processing are both preferentially processed by the left hemisphere because it is specialized for tasks requiring fine-grained temporal resolution. Thirty-two participants (16 right and 16 left handers) were tested for both linguistic processing (using the Fused Dichotic Words Test (FDWT)) and tactile gap detection. Both right and left handers showed a significant L-H advantage for both language processing and tactile gap detection. The present study supports recent claims that language lateralization is attributable to the left hemisphere's better suitability to process tasks that require fine-grained temporal resolution.

Female↗