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Product design, semantics and emotional response.

This paper explores theoretical issues in ergonomics related to semantics and the emotional content of design. The aim is to find answers to the following questions: how to design products triggering "happiness" in one's mind; which product attributes help in the communication of positive emotions; and finally, how to evoke such emotions through a product. In other words, this is an investigation of the "meaning" that could be designed into a product in order to "communicate" with the user at an emotional level. A literature survey of recent design trends, based on selected examples of product designs and semantic applications to design, including the results of recent design awards, was carried out in order to determine the common attributes of their design language. A review of Good Design Award winning products that are said to convey and/or evoke emotions in the users has been done in order to define good design criteria. These criteria have been discussed in relation to user emotional responses and a selection of these has been given as examples.

Affect↗

PubMed1992

Null effect of mood as a semantic prime.

Semantic tasks, such as lexical decision making and word recognition, have not produced a mood priming effect. Earlier studies have been criticized because they included (a) mood induction techniques that required instruction to feel the mood, and (b) the use of overlearned tasks that did not require controlled processing. In this pair of experiments, the authors attempted to address these criticisms. However, the results of this study did not demonstrate a mood priming effect for happy and sad subjects who appraised sentence content as being happy or sad. The results of this study supported the dissociation of semantic and episodic memory.

Adult↗

PubMed1977

Personality correlates of semantic habits in the deaf.

The relationships between personality characteristics and semantic habits were explored with use of The Sixteen Personality Factory Questionnaire, Form E, and a measure of semantic habits. Ss were 102 deaf male and female college students. The results, analyzed separately by sex, showed a few significant relationships. Deaf males who were emotionally less stable and affected by feelings tended to prefer positive and negative evaluations. Relaxed, tranquil, and unfrustrated deaf males tended to neglect positive and negative evaluations and to prefer categorical responses to detail ones. Serious and sober deaf females tended to neglect negative evaluations.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1986

Biasing of alcoholic Korsakoff patients' semantic memory.

The extent to which the spelling of ambiguous words could be biased and the length of time this biasing could be maintained were investigated in three studies. Biasing occurred for amnesic Korsakoff patients but the effect was consistently more fragile than the biasing pattern of alcoholic control patients. Between-group differences were due to the differential dependency of amnesics' biasing upon the activation of semantic memory. The spelling bias of the alcoholic control patients appeared to be based on both semantic activation and episodic retention.

Adult↗

PubMed1987

Semantic (verbal) and figural memory impairment in alcoholics.

In two separate studies, episodic semantic (verbal) and figural-memory abilities as measured by the Wechsler Memory Scale (Russell Method) are compared in middle-aged detoxified male alcoholics and controls. Both studies gave rise to similar findings. Alcoholics recalled significantly less verbal and figural material at both immediate recall and 30-min delayed recall than did the controls. Contrary to expectation, compared to controls, alcoholics did not have a greater differential deficit for the figural material as compared with the verbal or a greater differential deficit on delayed than on immediate memory. The percentage of material recalled at the delayed testing, when taken as a function of the amount of material recalled immediately, did not differ for the two groups on the semantic or figural tasks in either study. Thus, rates of forgetting were equivalent in alcoholics and controls suggesting that the alcoholics' deficit lies in the initial acquisition process. Whether that deficit is in encoding or initial retrieval processes remains to be investigated. Implications for future research are given.

Adult↗

PubMed1987

Episodic and semantic memory: a comparison of amnesic and demented patients.

Episodic (recall of passages) and semantic (letter and category fluency) memory tasks were administered to Alzheimer's Disease (early stages), Huntington's Disease (HD), and alcoholic Korsakoff patients matched for overall severity of dementia. Although all three patient groups were severely (and equally) impaired on memory for passages, only the Alzheimer and Korsakoff patients emitted numerous intrusion errors. On the fluency tasks, the performance of the mild Alzheimer patients was distinguishable from that of the other two patient groups. On both fluency tasks, the HD and Korsakoff patients demonstrated severe and moderate deficits, respectively, whereas the mild Alzheimer patients were impaired only on the category fluency task. As with the episodic memory test, the Alzheimer and Korsakoff patients made more perseverative errors than did the HD patients on letter fluency. These findings suggest that Alzheimer and HD patients' impairments on episodic and semantic memory tasks reflect different underlying processes. The performance of Alzheimer patients is affected by their language dysfunction and an increased sensitivity to proactive interference; the deficits of the HD patients appear due to a general retrieval problem. Similarities in the error patterns (i.e., perseveration errors) of Alzheimer and Korsakoff patients are discussed with regard to recent neuropathological findings.

Adult↗

PubMed1991

Implicit, explicit, and semantic memory functions in Alzheimer's disease and Huntington's disease.

A priming task involving a word-stem completion paradigm was administered to patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD), patients with Huntington's disease (HD), and normal control subjects. The task was done under conditions of both implicit and explicit recall. Explicit and implicit recall were positively correlated in all three groups. After controlling for explicit recall ability through ANCOVA, AD patients were found to be normally susceptible to the effects of priming on implicit recall. HD patients, however, exhibited significantly increased susceptibility to priming, suggesting that they may have carried out the implicit task in a manner different from that of normals and AD patients. In a second experiment, AD patients were found to supply words of significantly lower association strength than the other two groups in a "free association" task using words from a published list of word association norms. This apparent degradation of semantic memory was found to be strongly correlated with explicit recall performance, suggesting that explicit, implicit, and semantic memory functions decline in parallel in AD. Results are discussed with respect to the difficulties inherent in attempts to demonstrate selective impairments of conceptually distinct forms of memory.

Aged↗

PubMed1994

Increased semantic priming in patients with dementia of the Alzheimer's type.

Semantic priming on a lexical decision task(LDT) was examined in 50 patients with mild to moderate dementia of the Alzheimer's Type(DAT), and 25 normal age-matched controls. DAT patients were slower in their responses, and showed significantly greater priming effects (mean 54 ms vs. 27 ms in controls). The size of the priming effect correlated with the speed of response on the LDT task for the individual DAT patients but not for controls. Twenty of the DAT patients (vs. one control) showed priming greater than 60 ms. This subgroup of DAT patients with "hyperpriming" was slower than the nonhyperpriming group on "yes" responses to targets preceded by unassociated prime words and more impaired on tests of clock drawing and verbal fluency. Slowing of responses alone, however, seems unable to account for the presence of increased priming in DAT patients. Its presence may reflect semantic memory deficits, as well as impaired attentional processing and supervisory control systems. The exact mechanism of this increased priming remains to be established.

Aged↗

PubMed1995

Episodic and semantic memory in Alzheimer's disease and progressive supranuclear palsy: a comparative study.

We compared 13 patients with dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT) and 9 progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP) patients, matched by age, sex, education, and the overall level of cognitive deterioration, measured by using the Dementia Rating Scale, and 12 normal controls. The results of this study confirm that the pattern of cognitive deterioration of PSP patients differs from that of DAT patients. While episodic memory is severely affected early in the course of DAT, it appears to be relatively spared in PSP. In contrast to previous suggestions, we found no evidence for differentially rapid forgetting in DAT, although we did confirm relatively preserved recognition memory in PSP. We had predicted that the performance of the DAT group on tests of semantic memory (the Boston Naming Test, the ADA Synonym Judgement Test, and the Pyramids and Palm Trees Test) would be worse than that of the PSP group. However, there was, in fact, no difference on any of these measures, except that the PSP patients showed a significantly greater deficit on the Synonym Judgement Test. We suggest that the underlying cause of the semantic memory impairment might, however, be different in the two pathologies.

Aged↗

PubMed1996

Late cognitive brain potentials, phonological and semantic classification of spoken words, and reading ability in children.

Event-related potential (ERP), reaction time, and response accuracy measures were obtained during rhyming and semantic classification of spoken words in 10 average (mean age 11.64 years) and 9 impaired reading (mean age 12.10 years) children. The behavioral measures of classification did not distinguish the groups. In the ERPs, rhyme processing produced more pronounced group differences than did semantic processing at about 480 ms, with a relatively more negative distribution for the impaired readers at centroparietal sites. At about 800 ms in both classification tasks, the impaired readers displayed a late positivity that was delayed in latency and of larger amplitude at frontal sites than that for the average readers. The ERP findings suggest that the categorization of spoken words for meaning and sound result in increasingly more aberrant correlates of these processing demands in reading-impaired children.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2000

Phonemic and semantic fluencies in traumatic brain injury patients with focal frontal lesions.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of focal frontal lesions, identified by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), in a group of traumatic brain injured (TBI) patients, in order to clarify the sensitivity of phonemic and semantic fluency tasks as tests of frontal lobe functioning. Thirteen TBI patients were included and matched with a normal control group of 26 subjects. Frontal lobe patients produced significantly fewer words than the control group in the phonemic fluency condition. Semantic performance correlated with lesion size, but phonemic performance did not, corroborating the idea that the two have different brain-based substrates. Although, as a group effect, frontal lesions impaired fluency, not all patients were impaired, even in the presence of large bilateral frontal lesions.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2004

Evidence for disproportionate dual-task costs in older adults for episodic but not semantic memory.

Previous research demonstrates that older adults are poor at dual tasking, but there is less agreement on whether their decrement is worse than that predicted from single-task performance. This study investigated whether task domain moderates dual-task costs in old age. In two experiments, young and older adults retrieved either previously learned associates (episodic retrieval) or overlearned category members (semantic retrieval) under single or working-memory load conditions, using cued recall (Experiment 1) and recognition (Experiment 2) procedures. In both experiments the proportional costs of dual tasking were age invariant for semantic retrieval but were particularly marked for episodic retrieval, although the size of the age effect was reduced in recognition compared to cued recall. The data suggest that age effects in dual tasking may be domain specific.

Adult↗

PubMed1978

Aging and semantic memory: structural age differences.

The objective of this research was to investigate age differences in the structure of semantic memory. The tasks employed (i.e., vocabulary, word fluency by conceptual category cueing and word fluency by initial consonant cueing) were representative of different age trends in quantitative test scores. Matching across age levels (young versus middle-aged) was in terms of family membership. Results showed a greater intra-individual variability and lower relationships between aspects of semantic memory by the time of middle-age. The results were viewed from process-oriented and environment-oriented explanatory perspectives.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1983

The effects of aging and degree of association on the semantic priming of lexical decisions.

Adults completed a lexical decision task in which they saw two strings of letters on each trial and were asked to respond "yes" only if both strings were words. Later, participants were tested for incidental free recall and incidental forced-choice recognition of the words presented in the lexical decision task. These tasks were given to 20 young (mean age = 31.1 years) and 20 old (mean age = 69.5 years) non-student adults in Experiment 1, and to 20 young college students in Experiment 2. In both experiments, semantic priming occurred, i.e., lexical decisions were faster when the words within a pair were related than when they were not. For the college students in Experiment 2, but not for the non-students in Experiment 1, this effect was greater for high-dominance pairs (e.g., BIRD-ROBIN) than for low (e.g., BIRD-DUCK). Experiment 1 revealed no age differences in priming, but significant age differences favoring the young in both free recall and recognition. The results are interpreted in light of theories that distinquish between automatic and effortful activation of semantic memory.

Adult↗

PubMed2006

Individual differences in children's memory and reading comprehension: an investigation of semantic and inhibitory deficits.

Three experiments compared the verbal memory skills of children with poor reading comprehension with that of same-age good comprehenders. The aims were to determine if semantic and/or inhibitory deficits explained comprehenders' problems on measures of verbal short-term memory and verbal working memory. In Experiment 1 there were no group differences on word- and number-based measures of short-term storage and no evidence that semantic knowledge mediated word recall. In Experiment 2 poor comprehenders were impaired on word- and number-based assessments of working memory, the greatest deficit found on the word-based task. Error analysis of both word-based tasks revealed that poor comprehenders were more likely to recall items that should have been inhibited than were good comprehenders. Experiment 3 extended this finding: Poor comprehenders were less able to inhibit information that was no longer relevant. Together, these findings suggest that individual differences in inhibitory processing influence the ability to regulate the contents of working memory, which may contribute to the differential memory performance of good and poor comprehenders.

Child↗

PubMed2004

Surface dyslexia in semantic dementia: a comparison of the influence of consistency and regularity.

This study addressed the question of exactly which aspects of spelling-sound consistency influence accuracy of reading aloud in surface dyslexic patients with semantic dementia. Oral reading data were obtained from twelve patients on three sets of words that varied in regularity (defined according to grapheme-phoneme correspondences) and consistency (defined according to the pronunciation of word body neighbours). The patients were less accurate for irregular/inconsistent words, which they commonly pronounced in line with sound-spelling regularities, as expected in surface dyslexia. They produced plausible but incorrect responses for some regular as well as many irregular words, suggesting that their reading performance was influenced by sound-spelling relationships not captured by grapheme-phoneme correspondences. On a set of items that varied consistency and regularity independently, the patients showed a large effect of regularity and a smaller but significant effect of consistency in reading aloud. In addition, there was a correlation between degree of semantic impairment and level of reading accuracy for inconsistent items. These findings are discussed in terms of two influential models of reading: the dual-route-cascaded model (Coltheart et al., 2001) and the triangle model (Plaut et al., 1996). It is argued that the triangle model provides a more straightforward account of the relationship between word comprehension and consistency effects in reading.

Aged↗

PubMed2005

Knowledge of living, nonliving and "sensory quality" categories in semantic dementia.

This article reports the findings from 3 patients with semantic dementia (SD) who were given a novel battery of 33 items from sensory quality categories (SQCs) as previously described by Borgo and Shallice (2001; 2003) and Laiacona, Capitani and Caramazza (2003). Their performance on three tasks (two naming, one word-to-picture matching) was compared with performance on similar tasks using a conventional semantic battery. At the group level, patients performed worse than age-matched controls overall, but neither group showed any differences in performance between domains (i.e., living, nonliving and SQCs). Individual patient analyses, however, showed contrasting profiles in the three patients. The results are discussed in terms of the SFT (Warrington & Shallice, 1984) and individual differences (Lambon-Ralph et al., 2003) accounts of category-specificity in SD.

Aged↗

PubMed2005

Semantic activation within and across the cerebral hemispheres: what's left isn't right.

This study examined differences in the spread of semantic activation within and between the cerebral hemispheres. A lateralised lexical decision task using indirect priming was presented to 58 undergraduates with primes and targets separated by 215 or 750 milliseconds (ms). Prime and target words were presented to the same or opposite visual fields and were either directly related (book-read), indirectly related (lion-[tiger]-stripes), or unrelated (cup-street). At 215 ms participants exhibited significant priming effects to directly related words in all conditions except when primes and targets were both presented to the right hemisphere (RH). In contrast, priming to indirectly related words was effective only when primes and targets were presented to opposite hemispheres. At 750 ms, significant priming occurred for directly related words in all conditions, and for indirectly related words when primes were presented to the RH. Results suggest that priming for directly and indirectly related concepts occurs unilaterally in each hemisphere before 215 ms. Both prime types activate semantic networks in the RH within 750 ms, whereas the LH processes information in a more focused manner. This suggests that activation spreads contralaterally from each hemisphere first to directly and then to indirectly related concepts, indicating the importance of incorporating contralateral priming contrasts in lexical decision tasks.

Adolescent↗