Biomedical subjects

Timo Mäntylä

Publications and source records attributed to Timo Mäntylä.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Time monitoring and executive functioning in children and adults.

This study examined time-based prospective memory performance in relation to individual and developmental differences in executive functioning. School-age children and young adults completed six experimental tasks that tapped three basic components of executive functioning: inhibition, updating, and mental shifting. Monitoring performance was examined in a time-based prospective memory task in which participants indicated the passing of time every 5min while watching a movie. Separate analyses of the executive functioning data yielded a two-factor solution for both age groups, with the updating and inhibition tasks constituting a common factor and the shifting tasks constituting a separate factor. Both children and adults showed accelerating monitoring functions with low rates of clock checking during the early phase of each 5-min interval. However, compared with adults, children needed more clock checks for obtaining the same level of response accuracy. Executive functioning had selective effects on time-based prospective memory performance. In both children and adults, monitoring performance was related to the inhibition and updating components, but not to the shifting component, of executive functioning. We conclude that difficulties in temporary maintenance and updating of working memory contents may create discontinuities in sense of time, leading to an increased reliance on external cues for time keeping.

Adult↗

PubMed2005

Rewarded remembering: dissociations between self-rated motivation and memory performance.

People often claim that they perform better in memory performance tasks when they are more motivated. However, past research has shown minimal effects of motivation on memory performance when factors contributing to item-specific biases during encoding and retrieval are taken into account. The purpose of the present study was to examine the generality of this apparent dissociation by using more sensitive measures of experienced motivation and memory performance. Extrinsic motivation was manipulated through competition instructions, and subjective ratings of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation were obtained before and after study instructions. Participants studied a series of words, and memory performance was assessed by content recall (Experiment 1) and source recall (Experiment 2). Both experiments showed dissociation between subjective ratings of extrinsic motivation and actual memory performance, so that competition increased self-rated extrinsic motivation but had no effects on memory performance, including source recall. Inconsistent with most people's expectations, the findings suggest that extrinsic motivation has minimal effects on memory performance.

Adult↗

PubMed2004

Changing scenes: memory for naturalistic events following change blindness.

Research on scene perception indicates that viewers often fail to detect large changes to scene regions when these changes occur during a visual disruption such as a saccade or a movie cut. In two experiments, we examined whether this relative inability to detect changes would produce systematic biases in event memory. In Experiment 1, participants decided whether two successively presented images were the same or different, followed by a memory task, in which they recalled the content of the viewed scene. In Experiment 2, participants viewed a short video, in which an actor carried out a series of daily activities, and central scenes' attributes were changed during a movie cut. A high degree of change blindness was observed in both experiments, and these effects were related to scene complexity (Experiment 1) and level of retrieval support (Experiment 2). Most important, participants reported the changed, rather than the initial, event attributes following a failure in change detection. These findings suggest that attentional limitations during encoding contribute to biases in episodic memory.

Adult↗

PubMed2003

Glutathione S-transferases and aromatic DNA adducts in smokers' bronchoalveolar macrophages.

Interindividual differences in the expression of carcinogen-metabolizing enzymes in the lung may modify the effective dose of tobacco carcinogens in this organ. We investigated the role of detoxifying glutathione S-transferases (GST) in the formation of aromatic DNA adducts in bronchoalveolar macrophages (BAM) of active smokers. The effect of GSTs on aromatic DNA adducts was studied separately and in combination with the PAH-metabolizing cytochrome P450 enzyme, CYP3A. GSTA, GSTM3, GSTP, and CYP3A protein levels were analyzed by Western blotting, GSTM1 and GSTP1 genotypes were determined by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) based methods, and numbers of aromatic DNA adducts were measured by nuclease P1 enhanced 32P-postlabeling method in BAM of 31 active smokers. No correlation was observed between GSTA or GSTP proteins or GSTM1 or GSTP1 genotypes and the level of aromatic DNA adducts. A high or medium expression level of GSTM3 was associated with a lower level of aromatic DNA adducts in the smokers who smoked less than 20 cigarettes per day, when the effect of GSTM3 was analyzed in combination with CYP3A (regression analysis; F(6,24)=6.3, P<0.001). No protection by GSTM3 was observed in heavy smokers. High CYP3A levels, on the other hand, increased the number of DNA adducts regardless of the amount of smoking.

Adult↗

PubMed2003

Assessing absentmindedness: prospective memory complaint and impairment in middle-aged adults.

In two experiments, metamemorial differences between prospective and retrospective memory performance were examined. Participants in Experiment 1 were recruited through newspaper advertisements and comprised middle-aged women who experienced exceptional problems in prospective remembering. Experiment 2 involved self-reporters and nonreporters of retrospective memory problems, who were selected from a large population-based sample of middle-aged adults. In both experiments, memory performance was assessed by using a variety of tasks, including five retrospective memory tasks and three prospective memory tasks that varied in level of realism and retrieval support. In both experiments, there were selective differences in memory performance, so that participants who experienced (retrospective or prospective) memory problems showed impaired performance in prospective, but not in retrospective, memory tasks. These findings suggest that memory for future intentions provides a more sensitive task criterion than does memory for past events for assessing individual differences in self-reports of episodic memory problems. Task-specific differences in reliance on frontally mediated executive processes might underlie these differences.

Adult↗

PubMed2002

Remembering changes: repetition effects in face recollection.

Two experiments examined effects of repetition and change on states of awareness in face recognition. Participants studied repeatedly presented photographs of faces, with the second presentation following either immediately after the first presentation (massed repetition) or following six intervening items (spaced repetition). To manipulate perceptual change, each repeated face was either identical or a mirror image of the first presentation. Subsequently, when recognising a face, participants indicated whether they consciously recollected its prior occurrence ("remembering") or recognised it on the basis of familiarity ("knowing"). Changes in appearance between repeated faces enhanced remember, but not know, responses, and these effects were accentuated for spaced, rather than massed, repetition. These findings suggest that distinctiveness of encoding supports the phenomenological experience of conscious remembering.

Adult↗