Biomedical subjects

S Brédart

Publications and source records attributed to S Brédart.

11 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2001

An 'other-race' effect in age estimation from faces.

Previous studies have shown that, in person-recognition tasks, people perform better for faces belonging to their own race than for those belonging to another race. Recently, however, this 'other-race' effect has also been found in a sex-discrimination task (O'Toole et al, 1996 Perception 25 669-676). In the present study, we investigated whether this finding extends to age perception. Caucasian and African participants were asked to estimate the age of Caucasian and African faces. The main result of this experiment was a significant 'race of subject' x 'race of face' interaction showing that Caucasian participants performed better at evaluating Caucasian faces than African faces. However, African participants performed equally with both type of faces. This result is explained by the Africans' time of residence in Belgium. The implication of this 'other-race' effect for age estimation is discussed with respect to eyewitness reports.

Adult↗

PubMed2000

When false memories do not occur: not thinking of the lure or remembering that it was not heard?

The aim of the present study was to evaluate two explanations for the non-occurrence of false memories in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm. One explanation was that a critical lure is not recalled because the list failed to evoke it in the participant's mind. Another possible explanation was that the participant would identify the critical lure and would remember, at the time of recall, that the lure was not produced by an external source. In order to explore these two possible explanations for the non-occurrence of false memories, an experimental phase was added to the usual DRM paradigm: participants were asked to recall items they thought of but did not recall because these items were not members of the list presented by the experimenter. Among participants who did not recall the critical lure during the standard recall task, those who recalled the critical lure during the additional phase outnumbered those who did not recall it. This result is more consistent with the second explanation than with the first one.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1998

Descriptiveness and proper name retrieval.

Cohen (1990) hypothesised that the retrieval of proper names is particularly difficult because proper names convey little information about their bearers' attributes. In the present study, this hypothesis was evaluated by using a face naming task. Faces were those of cartoon and comic-strip characters bearing either arbitrary names or descriptive names. Results unequivocally showed that retrieval blocks occurred more often in naming characters bearing arbitrary names than in naming characters bearing descriptive names. Moreover, retrieving arbitrary names that were also common names was as difficult as retrieving arbitrary names that were not common names. These results support Cohen's claim that arbitrariness plays a significant role in the relative vulnerability of proper name retrieval.

Adult↗

PubMed1995

Personal name anomia: a single case study.

A case presenting an anomia specific for person proper names but no naming impairment either for other types of proper names or for common names is reported. The deficit was equally present both in face-naming and in naming upon definition and was not affected by the descriptiveness of the labels borne by the individuals. The patient had no semantic processing impairment either for faces or names. The results are discussed in terms of impaired access to intact phonological representations.

Anomia↗

PubMed1995

Developmental disturbance of access to biographical information and people's names: a single-case study.

The paper describes the case of a person (GB) without any clinical evidence of cerebral disease who showed a specific impairment in the retrieval of biographical information, including names, about famous people. This deficit appeared while GB scored normally in different long-term memory tasks, and in object naming tasks. Moreover, he showed no impairment in the structural encoding and the recognition of faces. His specific impairment is interpreted both in terms of Bruce and Young's (1986) functional model of person recognition and in terms of the more recent Burton et al. (1990) interactive activation version of the Bruce and Young model.

Adult↗

PubMed1995

An interactive activation model of face naming.

Burton and Bruce's (1992) model of face naming predicts a "fan effect", in which naming of famous people about whom many descriptive properties are known should be slower than naming of celebrities about whom few properties are known. An experiment is reported that showed that, contrary to this prediction, knowledge of many descriptive properties facilitated face-naming latency. An alternative architecture for an interactive activation model is proposed in which descriptive properties are represented in separate pools of units for each domain of information and in which names are represented by a separate pool of lexical output units. Computer simulations showed that this model could simulate the previously available empirical data as effectively as Burton and Bruce's (1992) original model. However, the proposed model could also simulate the effect of the number of known descriptive properties upon face-naming latency observed in the experiment reported. The new architecture also has the advantage of being more compatible with current models of speech production, and it allows preserved access to unique semantic properties in the context of impaired face naming as reported in the neuropsychological literature.

Adult↗

PubMed1994

Age-related differences in updating working memory.

Age-related differences in updating working memory were investigated in two experiments using a running memory task. In the first experiment, the task of the young and elderly subjects was to watch strings of four to 10 consonants and then to recall serially the four most recent items. Results revealed no age effect. A second experiment was then carried out using a memory load that was close to memory span: lists of six to 12 consonants were presented and subjects had to recall the last six items. Age interacted with list length but not with serial position. This dissociation is discussed in terms of Baddeley's (1986) model.

Adult↗

PubMed1993

Retrieval failures in face naming.

Several authors have reported that the incidence of retrieval failures is higher for people's names than for object names. The first aim of the paper was to evaluate the role of one factor that might contribute to making face naming difficult. Face naming usually requires the retrieval of one specific label: the name of the seen individual. Object naming is less restricting. First, object names may have synonyms. Second, labels available from different levels of categorisation of an object may be appropriate to name that object (e.g. trousers, jeans, Levis). Such a degree of freedom does not exist in naming faces. The hypothesis that face naming is made difficult by the simple fact that people have only one name was tested by studying faces having the exceptional property of bearing two names: faces of actors playing nameable characters (e.g. Harrison Ford playing Indiana Jones). Consistent with the hypothesis, data from two experiments showed that when bypassing a block is possible by producing another name that is known for a face, the incidence of blocks falls dramatically. The other aim of the paper was to test the reversed frequency effect in person naming reported previously in several diary studies, in an experimental setting. A direct frequency effect rather than a reversed frequency effect was obtained in the present study.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1992

From Monroe to Moreau: an analysis of face naming errors.

Functional models of face recognition and speech production have developed separately. However, naming a familiar face is, of course, an act of speech production. In this paper we propose a revision of Bruce and Young's (1986) model of face processing, which incorporates two features of Levelt's (1989) model of speech production. In particular, the proposed model includes two stages of lexical access for names and monitoring of face naming based on a "perceptual loop". Two predictions were derived from the perceptual loop hypothesis of speech monitoring: (1) naming errors in which a (correct) rare surname is erroneously replaced by a common surname should occur more frequently than the reverse substitution (the error asymmetry effect); (2) naming errors in which a common surname is articulated are more likely to be repaired than errors which result in articulation of a rare surname (the error-repairing effect). Both predictions were supported by an analysis of face naming errors in a laboratory face naming task. In a further experiment we considered the possibility that the effects of surname frequency observed in face naming errors could be explained by the frequency sensitivity of lexical access in speech production. However, no effect of the frequency of the surname of the faces used in the previous experiment was found on face naming latencies. Therefore, it is concluded that the perceptual loop hypothesis provides the more parsimonious account of the entire pattern of the results.

Adult↗

PubMed1991

Word interruption in self-repairing.

Levelt (1983) proposed that the reason why speakers often do not interrupt an erroneous word before self-repairing is a lack of trouble detection before the end of that word. However, this explanation does not apply to merely inappropriate words. According to Levelt, this latter kind of word is completed for pragmatic reasons. In the present paper, a new corpus containing 1225 repairs is analyzed. From Levelt's theoretical framework, it was predicted that for erroneous words the longer the reparandum the higher the amount of word interruptions. Another prediction was that this decrease across word length should be slighter for nonerroneous words than for erroneous ones. Both predictions were confirmed. Results were consistent with Levelt's hypothesis and especially with the idea that erroneous word completion is not a real exception to the main interruption rule in speech self-repairing.

Attention↗

PubMed1988

Mean length of utterance of children with Down syndrome.

Mean length of utterance (MLU) of children with Down syndrome was examined and found to correlate highly with chronological age, r = .87, p less than .001, despite the children's language delays. The correlation was reliable at least up to MLU 3.00. In the 1.00 to 3.50 range, MLU also predicted grammatical complexity.

Child↗