Biomedical subjects

Rémy Versace

Publications and source records attributed to Rémy Versace.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2003

Word frequency effect on repetition priming as a function of prime duration and delay between the prime and the target.

Two experiments studied the necessary conditions for the occurrence of repetition priming and word frequency effect on priming in a lexical decision task. To examine the role of prime processing duration, the prime was presented either for 50 ms or for 700 ms, and an interfering task was introduced between the prime and the target in order to restrict the time during which the prime was effectively processed and to limit it to exactly 50 ms or 700 ms. The interstimulus interval (ISI) between the prime and the target was 1500 ms or 3000 ms in Expt 1, and 600 ms in Expt 2. With primes presented for 50 ms, repetition priming effects were not dependent on target frequency, decreased with an increase of the ISI, and were no longer significant with an ISI of 3000 ms. With primes presented for 700 ms, repetition priming was systematically larger for low-frequency words than for high-frequency words, and remained reliable even with an ISI of 3000 ms. Thus, a minimum of prime duration was required both for maintaining repetition priming effects over more than some hundreds of milliseconds and for the occurrence of frequency effect on repetition priming. Theoretical interpretations of these results are discussed.

Decision Making↗

PubMed2002

Evidence for a selective deficit in automatic activation of positive information in patients with Alzheimer's disease in an affective priming paradigm.

Using an affective priming paradigm, we studied the automatic and unconscious activation of emotional information in long-term memory. Participants had to judge target words preceded by various primes as positive or negative. The primes were masked and the SOA between the onset of primes and the onset of targets was 50 ms. Our results showed that in patients with dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT), the negativity bias was preserved and the emotional priming effect was perturbed with positive targets. In control participants, this priming effect was restricted to negative targets. These findings are discussed in terms of preserved automatic activation of emotional information in Alzheimer's disease (AD) and in terms of an early deficit of the left hemisphere in AD making positive information more vulnerable to disease.

Aged↗

PubMed2001

Fictitious Academic Expertise and Processing Resources.

A previous study showed that pairs of students interacting in a second language produced more words when they were assigned a fictitious expert position in a specific competence dimension than when they were assigned a nonexpert position. It has also been shown that the usual level of expertise has an impact on the assigned fictitious expertise effect. The present study was designed to determine whether the processing capacity allotted to the current task could partly determine performance. A given position of expertise may demand a large or small attentional capacity. Two experiments were conducted using a dual-task paradigm. As expected, the different expertise positions led to different reaction times on the secondary task. The second experiment showed that the impact of assigning a position of expertise to students depends on their usual academic standing. This study supports the idea that in interactive situations, performance variations as a function of the expertise position can be partially explained by differences in the processing resources allocated to the task. Implications for teaching are discussed. Copyright 2001 Academic Press.

Journal Article↗