TY - JOUR A1 - Herbert, Cornelia A1 - Kübler, Andrea T1 - Dogs Cannot Bark: Event-Related Brain Responses to True and False Negated Statements as Indicators of Higher-Order Conscious Processing N2 - The present study investigated event-related brain potentials elicited by true and false negated statements to evaluate if discrimination of the truth value of negated information relies on conscious processing and requires higher-order cognitive processing in healthy subjects across different levels of stimulus complexity. The stimulus material consisted of true and false negated sentences (sentence level) and prime-target expressions (word level). Stimuli were presented acoustically and no overt behavioral response of the participants was required. Event-related brain potentials to target words preceded by true and false negated expressions were analyzed both within group and at the single subject level. Across the different processing conditions (word pairs and sentences), target words elicited a frontal negativity and a late positivity in the time window from 600–1000 msec post target word onset. Amplitudes of both brain potentials varied as a function of the truth value of the negated expressions. Results were confirmed at the single-subject level. In sum, our results support recent suggestions according to which evaluation of the truth value of a negated expression is a time- and cognitively demanding process that cannot be solved automatically, and thus requires conscious processing. Our paradigm provides insight into higher-order processing related to language comprehension and reasoning in healthy subjects. Future studies are needed to evaluate if our paradigm also proves sensitive for the detection of consciousness in non-responsive patients. KW - Psychologie Y1 - 2011 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-74907 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Halder, Sebastian A1 - Hammer, Eva Maria A1 - Kleih, Sonja Claudia A1 - Bogdan, Martin A1 - Rosenstiel, Wolfgang A1 - Birbaumer, Nils A1 - Kübler, Andrea T1 - Prediction of Auditory and Visual P300 Brain-Computer Interface Aptitude N2 - Objective: Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) provide a non-muscular communication channel for patients with late-stage motoneuron disease (e.g., amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)) or otherwise motor impaired people and are also used for motor rehabilitation in chronic stroke. Differences in the ability to use a BCI vary from person to person and from session to session. A reliable predictor of aptitude would allow for the selection of suitable BCI paradigms. For this reason, we investigated whether P300 BCI aptitude could be predicted from a short experiment with a standard auditory oddball. Methods: Forty healthy participants performed an electroencephalography (EEG) based visual and auditory P300-BCI spelling task in a single session. In addition, prior to each session an auditory oddball was presented. Features extracted from the auditory oddball were analyzed with respect to predictive power for BCI aptitude. Results: Correlation between auditory oddball response and P300 BCI accuracy revealed a strong relationship between accuracy and N2 amplitude and the amplitude of a late ERP component between 400 and 600 ms. Interestingly, the P3 amplitude of the auditory oddball response was not correlated with accuracy. Conclusions: Event-related potentials recorded during a standard auditory oddball session moderately predict aptitude in an audiory and highly in a visual P300 BCI. The predictor will allow for faster paradigm selection. Significance: Our method will reduce strain on patients because unsuccessful training may be avoided, provided the results can be generalized to the patient population. KW - Psychologie Y1 - 2013 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-77992 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Haering, Carola A1 - Kiesel, Andrea T1 - Mine is earlier than yours: Causal beliefs influence the perceived time of action effects N2 - When a key press causes a stimulus, the key press is perceived later and the stimulus earlier than key presses and stimuli presented independently. This bias in time perception has been linked to the intention to produce the effect and thus been called intentional binding (IB). In recent studies it has been shown that the IB effect is stronger when participants believed that they caused the effect stimulus compared to when they believed that another person caused the effect (Desantis et al., 2011). In this experiment we ask whether causal beliefs influence the perceived time of an effect when the putative effect occurs temporally close to another stimulus that is also an effect. In our study two participants performed the same task on connected computers with separate screens. Each trial started synchro- nously on both computers. When a participant pressed a key, a red and a yellow stimulus appeared as action effects simultaneously or with a slight delay of up to 50 ms. The partic- ipants’ task was to judge the temporal order of these two effect stimuli. Participants were either told that one participant caused one of the two stimuli while the other participant seated at the other computer caused the other stimulus, or each participant was told that he/she caused both stimuli. The different causal beliefs changed the perceived time of the effects’ appearance relative to each other. When participants believed they each caused one effect, their “own” effect was perceived earlier than the other participant’s effect. When the participants believed each caused both effects, no difference in the perceived temporal order of the red and yellow effect was found. These results confirm that higher order causal beliefs change the perceived time of an action effect even in a setting in which the occurrence of the putative effect can be directly compared to a reference stimulus. KW - Psychologie KW - intentional binding KW - causal belief KW - causality KW - temporal order judgments KW - TOJ KW - agency Y1 - 2012 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-76229 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Gerdes, Antje B. M. A1 - Wieser, Matthias J. A1 - Mühlberger, Andreas A1 - Weyers, Peter A1 - Alpers, Georg W. A1 - Plichta, Michael M. A1 - Breuer, Felix A1 - Pauli, Paul T1 - Brain activations to emotional pictures are differentially associated with valence and arousal ratings N2 - Several studies have investigated the neural responses triggered by emotional pictures, but the specificity of the involved structures such as the amygdala or the ventral striatum is still under debate. Furthermore, only few studies examined the association of stimuli’s valence and arousal and the underlying brain responses. Therefore, we investigated brain responses with functional magnetic resonance imaging of 17 healthy participants to pleasant and unpleasant affective pictures and afterwards assessed ratings of valence and arousal. As expected, unpleasant pictures strongly activated the right and left amygdala, the right hippocampus, and the medial occipital lobe, whereas pleasant pictures elicited significant activations in left occipital regions, and in parts of the medial temporal lobe. The direct comparison of unpleasant and pleasant pictures, which were comparable in arousal clearly indicated stronger amygdala activation in response to the unpleasant pictures. Most important, correlational analyses revealed on the one hand that the arousal of unpleasant pictures was significantly associated with activations in the right amygdala and the left caudate body. On the other hand, valence of pleasant pictures was significantly correlated with activations in the right caudate head, extending to the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) and the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. These findings support the notion that the amygdala is primarily involved in processing of unpleasant stimuli, particularly to more arousing unpleasant stimuli. Reward-related structures like the caudate and NAcc primarily respond to pleasant stimuli, the stronger the more positive the valence of these stimuli is. KW - Psychologie KW - emotional pictures KW - amygdala KW - caudate KW - valence KW - arousal Y1 - 2010 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-68153 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Gaultney, Jane F. A1 - Bjorklund, David F. A1 - Schneider, Wolfgang T1 - The role of children's expertise in a Strategie memory task N2 - In a study intended to replicate and extend the findings from a recent experiment by Schneider and Bjorklund (1992), the expert/novice paradigm was used with second- and fourth-grade children in a sort/recall task. Children were classified as experts or novices for their knowledge of baseball, then given two sort/recall tasks, with a list consisting of either baseball or nonbaseball terms. Experts recalled more than novices on the baseball list only. While both groups used organizational strategies at sorting on the nonbaseball list, experts were marginally more strategic than novices on the baseball list, and no differences were found between the groups on either list for clustering. Baseball experts used more adultlike categories, suggesting that their enhanced levels of recall were attributed in part to strategy use, although there was also evidence that most of the substantial recall difference between the groups was attributed to item-specific effects associated with a more elaborated knowledge base. A second experiment using fifth-grade children on a multitrial sort/recall task using the baseball list also found increased recall by experts, and also found evidence of strategic behavior at the sort phase for trials 3 and 4. KW - Psychologie Y1 - 1992 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-62190 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ellgring, Johann Heinrich T1 - Facial expression as a behavioral indicator of emotional states N2 - This article gives an overview of possibilities for the assessment offacial behavior. With regard to validity, results from a longitudinal study of 36 depressed patients and nine controls as weil as often schizophrenic patients and their relatives will be referred to. These results are used to illustrate the following principles which have to be taken into account when studying facial behavior: a) communication strongly facilitates facial expression, b) activation of facial behavior follows the "principle of least effort", and c) the principle of individual specificity applies to the association of nonverbal behavior and mood states. Making allowance for these principles has, among others, consequences a) for situations or conditions under which to asses behavior (specifically conditions of communication), b) for data analysis (e.g., dealing with frequent and rare events), and c) for empirical or experimental strategies (e.g., aggregation of single-case longitudinal comparisons). From the results on facial behavior during depression it can be concluded that the nonverbal reaction tendencies of endogenous and neurotic depressed patients differ. Moreover, the differential behavioral pattems observed cast doubt on the assumption of a homogeneity of affects in depression. Taking into account the conditions which govern it, facial behavior has proved to be a valid and, especially, a differential indicator for pathoIogic affective states and their changes. Given the fact that a psychiatric illness generally incorporates emotional problems it is more than surprising that little attention has been paid to the systematic study of emotional behavior. Some of the reasons for this will be clarified in the following. N2 - Dieser Beitrag gibt eine Übersicht über die Möglichkeiten zur Erfassung mimischen Verhaltens. Zur Bewertung der Validität werden Ergebnisse aus einer Verlaufsuntersuchung an 36 depressiven Patienten und neun Kontrollpersonen sowie von zehn schizophrenen Patienten und ihren Angehörigen herangezogen. Diese Ergebnisse sollen die folgenden Prinzipien, die bei der Untersuchung mimischen Verhaltens zu berücksichtigen sind, illustrieren: a) Kommunikation erleichtert in hohem Maße das Auftreten mimischen Ausdrucks, b) die Aktivierung mimischen Verhaltens folgt dem "Prinzip des geringsten Aufwandes", und c) auf die Beziehung zwischen nonverbalem Verhalten und Stimmungszuständen trifft das Prinzip der Individuenzpezifität zu. Aus diesen Prinzipien ergeben sich Konsequenzen a)für die Situationen oder Bedingungen, unter denen Verhalten zu erfassen ist (speziell Bedingungen der Kommunikation), b) für die Datenanalyse (z. B. die statistische Behandlung häufiger und seltener Ereignisse) und c) für empirische oder experimentelle Strategien (z. B. die Aggregation von Einzelfall-Verlaufsbeobachtungen). Aus den Ergebnissen zum mimischen Verhalten in der Depression kann geschlossen werden, daß sich endogen und neurotisch depressive Patienten hinsichtlich ihrer nonverbalen Reaktionstendenzen unterscheiden. Darüber hinaus stellen die differentiellen Verhaltensmuster die Annahme einer Affekthomogenität in der Depression in Frage. Berücksichtigt man die Bedingungen, die das mimische Verhalten steuern, so erweist es sich als valider und insbesondere differentieller Indikator für pathologische affektive Zustände und deren Veränderungen. Angesichts der Tatsache, daß eine psychiatrische Erkrankung im allgemeinen emotionale Probleme beinhaltet, so ist es mehr als erstaunlich, daß bisher dem Studium des unmittelbaren emotionalen Ausdrucksverhaltens so wenig Aufmerksamkeit geschenkt wurde. Einigen Gründen hierfür wollen wir im folgenden nachgehen. KW - Psychologie Y1 - 1989 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-58753 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Carr, Martha A1 - Schneider, Wolfgang T1 - Long-term maintenance of organizational strategies in kindergarten children N2 - The goal of the present study was to determine whether 4- and 5-year-old kindergarten children could be trained to maintain an organizational strategy over 2- and 8 week periods through an elaborate training program. A second goal was to assess the effects of the training program on strategy awareness. Twenty-eight kindergarten children were pretested on two sort-recall tasks and their awareness of the use of the clustering strategy was assessed through a protocol type procedure. Half the children received seven half-hour sessions of individual training in the clustering strategy and half the children participated in a control group. Both groups were post-tested on two sort-recall tasks 2 weeks following training and again 8 weeks following training. Strategy awareness, as measured by verbal protocol, was assessed at both post-test points. The elaborate strategy training program was successful in inducing short- and long-term strategy maintenance of the clustering strategy. Trained children’s clustering during sorting and clustering during recall was consistently related to the amount of items correctly recalled. No differences in strategy awareness were found. These findings demonstrate that the elaborate training procedure used in this study can be a very effective memory technique for young kindergarten children. KW - Psychologie Y1 - 1991 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-62157 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Carr, Martha A1 - Kurtz, Beth E. A1 - Schneider, Wolfgang A1 - Turner, Lisa A. A1 - Borkowski, John G. T1 - Strategy acquisition and transfer among American and German children: Environmental influences on metacognitive development N2 - This study explored the differential effects of strategy training on German and American elementaryschool children and assessed the role of parents in the development of their children's strategic behavior and metacognition. 184 German and 161 American children were pretested on memory and metamemory tasks. Children were then assigned to either an organizational strategy training condition or a control condition. All children were tested on the maintenance and far-transfer of the strategy and task-related metamemory 1 week following training. Parents completed questionnaires about strategy instruction in the home. Strategy maintenance and metacognition were reassessed 6 months following training. German children were more strategic than American children. Instructed children performed better than control children. German parents reported more instruction of strategies in the home. These data suggest that formal education is responsible for aspects of cognitive development that have sometimes been viewed as a function of age. KW - Psychologie Y1 - 1989 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-62082 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Borkowski, John G. A1 - Schneider, Wolfgang A1 - Pressley, Michael T1 - The challenges of teaching good information processing to learning disabled students N2 - A MODEL of good information processing is sketched, describing how metacognitive knowledge influences strategy selection and use. Three factors pose particular problems for learning disabled students as they attempt to acquire metacognitive knowledge and to use study strategies productively: neurological impairments; deficiencies in general world knowledge; and negative beliefs, attitudes, and styles that limit self-efficacy. Creating an educational atmosphere that explicitly builds conceptual (domain-specific) knowledge and teaches positive beliefs about learning potential is essential in promoting metacognitively-oriented instruction. KW - Psychologie Y1 - 1989 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-62117 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bjorklund, David F. A1 - Schneider, Wolfgang A1 - Harnishfeger, Katherine Kipp A1 - Cassel, William S. A1 - Bjorklund, Barbara R. A1 - Bernholtz, Jean E. T1 - The role of IQ, expertise, and motivation in the recall of familiar Information N2 - High- and low-IQ children in the first, third, and fifth grades performed two free-recall tasks: a sort-recall task with sets of categorically related pictures, and a class-recall task, with children recalling the current members of their school class. All children were deemed to be experts concerning the composition of their school class, but, unlike experts in other domains, had no special motivation associated with their expertise. Recall and clustering on both tasks were high. The high-IQ children performed better than low-IQ children only on the sort-recall task. IQ was significantly correlated with measures of performance on the sort-recall task but not on the class-recall task. The results reflect the fact that the memory benefits associated with being an expert (here, elimination of IQ effects) are related to the greater knowledge the expert possesses and not to factors of motivation. KW - Psychologie Y1 - 1992 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-62204 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bjorklund, David F. A1 - Schneider, Wolfgang A1 - Cassel, William S. A1 - Ashley, Elizabeth T1 - Training and Extension of a Memory Strategy: Evidence for Utilization Deficiencies in the Acquisition of an Organizational Strategy in High- and Low-IQ Children N2 - 143 9- and 10-year-oId children were classified into high- and Jow-IQ groups and given 4 different sort/recall lists (baseline, training, near [immediate] extension, far [l-week] extension) to assess training and extension of an organizational memory strategy. All children received categorized items of moderate typicality for Phases 1, 3, and 4. For Phase 2, children were assigned to either a training or control group, with half of the children in each group receiving category typical items and the others category atypical items. Levels of recall, sorting, and clustering were greater in Phase 2 for high-IQ children, for the typical lists, and for trained children. Both the high- and low-IQ children trained with typical items continued to show high levels of recall on the near extension phase. No group of subjects maintained high levels of recall after 1 week, although levels of sorting and/or clustering on the extension trials remained high for all groups of subjects except the low-IQ control children. This latter pattern (elevated sorting/clustering with low levels of recall) is an indication of a utilization deficiency, a phase in strategy development when children use a strategy but gain little or no benefit n performance. The results provide evidence for IQ, training, and material effects in the demonstration of a utilization deficiency. KW - Psychologie Y1 - 1994 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-62234 ER -