Biomedical subjects

M Milders

Publications and source records attributed to M Milders.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2003

Differential deficits in expression recognition in gene-carriers and patients with Huntington's disease.

Previous studies in symptomatic patients and asymptomatic gene-carriers of Huntington's disease (HD) reported a differential deficit in the recognition of facial expressions of disgust. This impairment may point to involvement of the basal ganglia in the recognition of disgust. In this study, we compared the performance of 20 patients with symptoms of HD, 20 gene-carriers of HD and 20 healthy controls on two tests of facial expressions in order to further investigate the role of the basal ganglia in disgust recognition. Recognition of fear, rather than disgust, was most severely impaired in the patients, who were also impaired at recognising expressions of anger, disgust and sadness. Direct testing for a differential deficit in disgust at the group level (and at the level of individual HD cases) revealed that the patients were in fact significantly more impaired on the other negative expressions than on disgust. The gene-carriers were not impaired on any expression, although there was a trend for the gene-carriers to be poorer at recognising fearful faces than the controls. We argue that the expression recognition performance of the patients and gene-carriers simply reflects differences in task difficulty, rather than dysfunction of any mechanisms dedicated to specific emotions. In contrast to previous studies in patients or gene-carriers of HD, our findings provide no evidence for a role of the basal ganglia in the recognition of disgust and cast doubt on whether results from HD patients and gene-carriers can be used in support of a double dissociation between recognition of disgust and fear.

Adult↗

PubMed2001

Attention induced motion blindness.

Recent studies have shown evidence for modulation of cortical activity by attention in visual areas involved in motion processing. Behavioural effects of this modulation have only been reported for high-order, but not for luminance-based motion. We show that attentional load can even affect the perception of a first-order motion inducing a short-termed motion blindness. The detection of transient coherent motion embedded in a rapid serial visual presentation was severely impaired if colour features were to be processed simultaneously. The findings reported here show attentional requirements can affect motion perception. This effect can not be explained by motion adaptation or priming and may instead arise from the suppression of irrelevant stimuli.

Analysis of Variance↗

PubMed2000

Naming famous faces and buildings.

Reports of a dissociation between impaired retrieval of people's names and spared retrieval of other categories of proper names have led to the suggestion that there are separate brain mechanisms for processing different categories of proper names. An alternative explanation states that geographical proper names (e.g. cities, countries) may be spared in patients with proper name anomia because they are easier to retrieve than people's names. Unlike people's names, geographical names are also used as adjectives. However, this explanation can not explain why retrieval of proper names that are never used as adjectives (e.g. buildings) was spared in some patients. This study investigated whether retrieving people's names is equally difficult as retrieving the names of buildings. Results from normal subjects and closed-head injured patients revealed no differences between retrieval of people's names and buildings' names, and suggested that both categories of proper names are equally vulnerable to brain injury.

Adult↗

PubMed1998

Learning people's names following severe closed-head injury.

Although problems remembering people's names rank highly among the subjective complaints of patients with closed-head injuries, very few studies have examined their memory for people's names by objective measurements. An experiment is reported in which patients with severe closed-head injuries and normal controls learned the same set of words, either as names or as possessions, for unfamiliar faces. Name learning proved to be impaired in the patients. Patient recall of meaningless names and possessions which were described by nonwords was equally poor. The patients, but not the controls, recalled significantly fewer names than possessions if these items were described by concrete nouns. This last finding suggests that the patients' problems with learning people's names can not be fully explained by a general verbal learning impairment.

Adult↗

PubMed1998

Rehabilitation of memory for people's names.

In a training study, memory-impaired patients were taught strategies to improve the learning of new names and the retrieval of familiar people's names. To improve new name learning, the patients were encouraged to give more meaning to a person's name, without requiring an explicit association between the face and the name. Strategies to improve retrieval of familiar names mainly concerned ways to resolve tip-of-the-tongue states. Learning names to faces improved following training on one of the two target tests and this improvement was maintained six months following training. Retrieval of familiar people's names also improved immediately following the training, although the improvement disappeared at the six-month follow-up. Two control memory tests and a group of normal subjects, who received no training, were used to discriminate an effect of training from the effects of repeated testing and the extensive attention received by the trained group.

Adult↗