Keith Richard Laws

..In particular, they suggest that the greater proportion of living than nonliving deficits reported in the literature may be an artifact of the methods used...

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..The latter findings indicate that the semantic-phonemic fluency discrepancy measure often reported as an important distinguishing characteristic of AD patients may be an exaggerated normal tendency...

..This suggests that perceived executive dysfunction is pre-morbidly present and may become evident in test performance only with the onset of schizophrenia itself...

..27). Indeed, our analyses indicate that visual memory may be affected more by concurrent cannabis use. Finally, we found that the total lifetime number of ecstasy tablets consumed did not significantly predict memory performance...

..In contrast, effect sizes were not significantly related to dementia severity, patient age, the number of stimuli, years of education, or the number of matching variables controlled...

..The implications of this category bias is discussed in relation to relevant models of category specificity...

..2003), no study has investigated whether such deficits differentially affect specific categories of information (as they sometimes do in neurological cases)...

..The implications for category-specific object recognition deficits are discussed...

..We propose that delusional-style thinking may be underpinned by an orbitofrontal-based reversal learning difficulty affecting the flexibility to adapt responses to changing contingencies and external pressure...

..Finally, because nonliving things have multiple representations in the real world, this may lower the probability of finding impaired naming and recognition in this category...

..The findings support the notion that increased inhibition underpins the disorganised access to semantic memory in patients with FTD...

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..e. rejecting previously seen words) high confidence responses than the ND group...

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..These stimuli provide a useful corpus for experimental and clinical researchers...

..Finally, AD patients showed widespread and significant impairment on tasks of visual functioning, and low-level visual impairment was predictive of patient naming...

..We conclude that purely bottom-up visual characteristics can explain some important features of category-specific phenomena...

..g., color and line-drawn versions). Taken as a whole, these experiments show that the ease with which people categorize items maps strongly onto the ease with which they name them...

..Taken together, these findings indicate that while AD naming is, of course, quantitatively worse than that of controls, it does not qualitatively differ -- that is, it is an exaggerated normal profile...

..With a specified error rate of 5%, actual error rates as high as 14.31% and 9.96% were observed for z and Crawford and Howell's method respectively. Potential solutions to the problem of non-normal data are evaluated...

..Finally, EO correlated significantly with error rates (PB and IPC did not). These findings contradict existing notions that line drawings of living things have greater visual similarity than nonliving things...

..These findings accord with the notion of a general association between visual imagery and picture naming, but provide no support for more specific links between modality-specific imagery vividness and naming in different categories...

..These counter-intuitive findings accord with patient data and thus, provide evidence for the psychological reality and utility of ED...

..This suggests that similarity of edge information is more influential than similarity of surface characteristics for naming and for categorically separating living and nonliving things (be they line drawings or greyscale images)...

..Finally, subject ratings correlated significantly with the computational measures indicating that the neural model represents structural properties of the objects that are psychologically meaningful...

..We conclude that the category effect in Alzheimer's disease is no larger than is expected in the healthy brain and may even represent a small diminution of the normal profile...

..Single case analysis suggested that patients with schizophrenia have a selective deficit affecting object recognition and identification, with a pattern similar to visual associative agnosia in neurological patients...

..These findings accord with the notion that serotonergic mechanisms are important determinants of both the cognitive and the social effects of the atypical antipsychotics...

..Although name relearning induced some significant gains in naming, these were short-term and reflect episodic rather than semantic reinstatement of representations. Implications for cognitive remediation are discussed...

..The findings have significant implications for how we determine category effects and, more generally, for the methods used to document double dissociations across individual cases in this literature...

..This study accords with the presence of executive processing deficits in schizophrenia that are stable across time...

..Nevertheless, FTD is associated with additional lexical-semantic difficulties that are quantitatively different to those seen in patients without FTD, and which may reflect disorganized semantic access...

..This suggests that, although category effects in AD patients do not reflect intrinsic variables, the size and direction of the category effect are not different from those in elderly controls...

..We propose that the lower NART IQ in older patients reflects a lower 'starting point' and that this may be related to lower educational opportunities in older patients...

..The results also show that ceiling effects may inflate the number of living thing deficits and hence, distort the reported ratio of living to nonliving cases...

..As a potential solution, certain minimal criteria are proposed that might aid with the attempt to document category effects that are more methodologically convincing...