Biomedical subjects

M M Marcell

Publications and source records attributed to M M Marcell.

10 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2001

Online data collection with special populations over the World Wide Web.

The quick ascendance of the World Wide Web as the dominant vehicle for internet communication has recently made experimentation in a multimedia environment feasible on the Internet. Although web sites containing online psychology demonstrations and experiments for non-handicapped individuals have appeared in recent years (especially in the areas of cognitive and social psychology), there appear to have been few attempts to conduct online experimentation with special populations. We recently completed two online pilot studies of families with Down syndrome or Williams syndrome members: a) A survey that asks (via Likert rating scales, adjective checklists, multiple-choice style questions, and text-entry boxes) about family background, computer use, and temperament of the special needs family member; and b) An experiment (completed by an individual with special needs) that includes auditory and visual digit span tasks and a memory-for-orientation task in which responses are entered via mouse clicks. Recruiting began with e-mail announcements to representative Down syndrome and Williams syndrome discussion groups, listserves, and bulletin boards, and submission of the project's URL (http://www.cofc.edu/~marcellm/testaw.htm) and key indexing terms to selected search engines. This paper reviews technical aspects of developing the online programmes as well as the strengths and weaknesses of online vs. traditional laboratory-based research in relation to issues such as experimental control, delivery of instructions, experimenter bias, participant recruitment, sample heterogeneity, generalization, attrition, privacy, financial costs, data integrity, and ethics. We conclude by offering our thoughts on two ways of implementing online experimentation with special populations: a) Using a remote parent 'helper' as a proxy to work with the target individual; and b) Collaborating with professional colleagues in Web-based projects conducted in traditional laboratory settings.

Child, Preschool↗

PubMed2000

Confrontation naming of environmental sounds.

The development of a set of everyday, nonverbal, digitized sounds for use in auditory confrontation naming applications is described. Normative data are reported for 120 sounds of varying lengths representing a wide variety of acoustic events such as sounds produced by animals, people, musical instruments, tools, signals, and liquids. In Study 1, criteria for scoring naming accuracy were developed and rating data were gathered on degree of confidence in sound identification and the perceived familiarity, complexity, and pleasantness of the sounds. In Study 2, the previously developed criteria for scoring naming accuracy were applied to the naming responses of a new sample of subjects, and oral naming times were measured. In Study 3 data were gathered on how subjects categorized the sounds: In the first categorization task - free classification - subjects generated category descriptions for the sounds; in the second task - constrained classification - a different sample of subjects selected the most appropriate category label for each sound from a list of 27 labels generated in the first task. Tables are provided in which the 120 stimuli are sorted by familiarity, complexity, pleasantness, duration, naming accuracy, speed of identification, and category placement. The. WAV sound files are freely available to researchers and clinicians via a sound archive on the World Wide Web; the URL is http://www.cofc.edu/~marcellm/confront.htm.

Acoustic Stimulation↗

PubMed1998

Confrontation naming of familiar sounds and pictures by individuals with Down syndrome.

We investigated whether adolescents and young adults with Down syndrome experience difficulty in finding words to name familiar objects. In Experiment 1, IQ- and MA-matched individuals with Down syndrome and with mental retardation due to other causes orally identified familiar pictures and sounds. Results showed no evidence of syndrome-specific word-finding difficulty in accuracy or speed. Although both groups identified auditory stimuli less accurately and more slowly than visual stimuli, results of Experiments 2 and 3 confirmed that young children without mental retardation and college students showed the same pattern. Although previous researchers have shown expressive speech deficits among people with Down syndrome, these results suggest that adolescents and young adults with Down syndrome show no syndrome-specific difficulty in finding words to label familiar nonverbal sounds or pictures.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1995

Sentence imitation by adolescents and young adults with Down's syndrome and other intellectual disabilities.

Sentence imitation performance was evaluated longitudinally in 26 adolescents and young adults with Down's syndrome (DS), and 26 age- and IQ-matched non-DS individuals with other causes of intellectual disability (ID). In each of three annual assessments, the DS group began sentence repetitions more slowly and imitated sentences less accurately than the ID group. DS sentence repetition accuracy was equivalent to the ID group only for two-word sentences and was poorer for every other sentence length. Comparisons of sentence imitation and auditory digit span scores suggested that only ID subjects benefitted from the additional meaning and structure provided by sentences. Correlational analyses performed between each year's sentence imitation score and a set of language, memory and hearing measures revealed that sentence imitation was related to grammatical comprehension, auditory short-term memory and IQ in both groups, and to expressive language ability, speed of spoken word processing, speech discrimination and acoustic reflexes in the DS group only. A significant relationship between sentence imitation and middle-ear functioning was further supported by a categorical analysis in which DS subjects with bilateral abnormal tympanograms tended to perform more poorly on sentence imitation tasks than DS subjects with at least one normal tympanogram. It was concluded that sentence imitation is a task that is sensitive to the auditory-perceptual, cognitive and expressive difficulties evidenced by individuals with DS.

Acoustic Impedance Tests↗

PubMed1988

An attempt to improve auditory short-term memory in Down's syndrome individuals through reducing distractions.

Down's syndrome (DS) individuals, relative to nonretarded individuals, have greater difficulty remembering brief sequences of verbal information presented auditorily. Previous research suggests at least two possible attentional explanations of their difficulty: They are especially susceptible to both auditory distraction and off-task glancing during laboratory tasks. DS, non-DS mentally retarded and nonretarded persons listened to, looked at, and attempted to remember sequences of digits. Although the three groups did not differ in their recall of visually-presented stimuli, DS subjects showed significantly poorer recall of auditorially-presented stimuli than the other two groups (which did not differ). Furthermore, the poor auditory memory of DS subjects did not improve under testing conditions designed to minimize auditory and visual distractions. It was suggested that poor auditory short-term memory for verbal information is tied more closely to Down's syndrome than to low intelligence and does not seem to be caused by a special susceptibility of Down's syndrome individuals to attentional distractors.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1988

Short-term memory difficulties and Down's syndrome.

Nonretarded (NR) individuals typically show better short-term memory for brief sequences of auditory than visual information (the modality effect). The present study attempted to determine whether the failure of Down's syndrome (DS) individuals to show the modality effect is due to the verbal-expressive demands of oral responding in memory tasks. DS, NR and MR (non-DS mentally retarded) subjects listened to or looked at increasingly long sequences of digits and attempted to recall them either orally or manually (through placement of items). Analyses suggested the following: (1) manual responding failed to enhance auditory recall in either DS or any other subjects; and (2) difficulty in recalling auditory stimuli was greater for DS mentally retarded subjects. An additional assessment of DS, MR and NR subjects on a standardized auditory short-term memory test requiring a nonverbal pointing response replicated the above findings.

Acoustic Stimulation↗

PubMed1985

Identification of vocally expressed emotions by mentally retarded and nonretarded individuals.

Nonretarded, TMR, and EMR individuals matched on MA attempted to identify the emotional states (happy, angry, sad, or fearful) of tape-recorded voices speaking in an unfamiliar language by pointing to one of four stick-figure depictions of the emotions. Although analyses indicated that TMR subjects were less accurate overall than were EMR and nonretarded subjects, all three groups were able to identify each of the emotions well above chance expectation. Of the four emotions, fear was judged least accurately by each group. Correlational analyses revealed that accuracy in decoding emotional passages was positively related to IQ and CA. Generally, the experimental and correlational findings indicated few important differences in patterns of emotion identification among the groups and were consistent with results obtained in other studies of nonverbal decoding by nonretarded individuals.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1982

Auditory and visual sequential memory of Down syndrome and nonretarded children.

The study was designed to investigate auditory and visual sequential memory of mentally retarded individuals. Experiment 1, conducted with Down syndrome children and adolescents, replicated previous findings of poor auditory sequential memory on the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities. In Experiment 2, nonretarded kindergarteners showed superior recall of auditory items on a more comparable set of auditory and visual tasks. These same tasks, administered to the Down syndrome sample in Experiment 3, supported the earlier finding that retarded individuals have difficulty recalling auditorially presented verbal material. Their difficulty, however, did not appear to be linked to the sequential nature of recall. We suggested that the auditory-visual recall difference evidenced by nonretarded but not by retarded subjects may have been due to the differential use of information in echoic memory.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1978

Memory effects and sensory integration: an examination of sensory modality translation models of intersensory functioning.

The sensory modality of a task and the modality of a retroactive interfering activity were systematically covaried in order to test Connolly and Jones' and Pick's translation models of intersensory functioning. Forty 10-year-old boys and girls were asked to recall distance and location cues of length under intrasensory and intersensory task conditions (visual and kinesthetic). Visual and kinesthetic interpolated activities were used in an attempt to provide modality specific interference with the recall of length under the various sensory task conditions. Results of the data analyses provided no support for the Connolly and Jones model of modality specific storage with translation. Rather, the findings of the study were interpreted as supportive of Pick's hypothesis which emphasizes the coding of stimulus information (regardless of modality of input) into a form specific to whatever modality is specialized for detection of the information.

Child↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Hearing abilities of Down syndrome and other mentally handicapped adolescents.

Down syndrome (DS) individuals are prone to auditory processing difficulties in a variety of audiological, short-term memory, and language tasks. The present study explored: (a) the hearing capabilities of DS adolescents and young adults relative to a sample of non-DS mentally handicapped (MH) individuals, and (b) the relationship between hearing ability and performance on several cognitive tasks. Samples of 26 DS and 26 MH trainable mentally handicapped individuals were matched on IQ and chronological age (CA). Audiometric data revealed greater hearing losses in DS than in MH individuals at five of the six tested frequencies, more DS conductive and mixed hearing losses, and particularly high DS losses in the high-frequency range. Measurement of the speech reception threshold revealed poorer reception of speech by the DS than the MH group. Classification of tympanograms indicated fewer normal ears and twice as many DS ears with middle ear problems reflecting no mobility or retraction of the tympanic membrane. Presence of DS middle ear difficulties was also confirmed by poorer elicitation of the acoustic (stapedius) reflex in DS subjects. Correlation of hearing variables with seven cognitive tasks administered on the same day revealed only one significant relationship after the statistical removal of the effects of CA and IQ: DS subjects with poorer hearing identified fewer words in a task in which a masking noise quickly followed a spoken word. This result suggests that group findings of DS auditory-verbal processing difficulties stem, in part, from subjects with hearing difficulties needing more time to identify spoken words.

Adolescent↗