Objective: Superficial siderosis (SS) is a neurodegenerative condition due to the long-term effects of hemosiderin deposition on the surface of the brain, cerebellum, brainstem, and spinal cord. SS symptoms include sensorineural hearing loss, ataxia and upper motor neuron signs. SS was diagnostically evasive until magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) became available.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Prostate cancer is the most commonly diagnosed non-melanoma cancer among men. Androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) has been the core therapy for men with advanced prostate cancer. It is only in recent years that clinicians began to recognize the cognitive-psychosocial side effects from ADT, which significantly compromise the quality of life of prostate cancer survivors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe present an overview of a new multidisciplinary research program that focuses on haptic processing of human facial identity and facial expressions of emotion. A series of perceptual and neuroscience experiments with live faces and/or rigid three-dimensional facemasks is outlined. To date, several converging methodologies have been adopted: behavioural experimental studies with neurologically intact participants, neuropsychological behavioural research with prosopagnosic individuals, and neuroimaging studies using fMRI techniques.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAm J Med Genet C Semin Med Genet
August 2007
Adults with fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) and the subsets of individuals with attenuated phenotype subsumed under the umbrella term of fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) provide clinicians with a challenge. Compounding this, FASD is different from most genetic syndromes since a specific diagnostic biological test is not available. The diagnosis first needs to be suspected and confirmation requires a diagnostic assessment that is best carried out in the context of a multi-disciplinary team approach.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe examined whether a face-inversion effect occurs when participants explore faces by touch. We used a haptic version of the inversion paradigm with 3-D clay facemasks and non-face control objects (teapots) moulded from real objects. Young, neurologically intact, blindfolded participants performed a temporally unconstrained haptic same/different task in each of four stimulus conditions: upright facemasks, inverted facemasks, upright teapots, and inverted teapots.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLittle is known about the neural substrates that underlie difficult haptic discrimination of 3-D within-class object stimuli. Recent work [A.R.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMany studies in visual face recognition have supported a special role for the right fusiform gyrus. Despite the fact that faces can also be recognized haptically, little is known about the neural correlates of haptic face recognition. In the current fMRI study, neurologically intact participants were intensively trained to identify specific facemasks (molded from live faces) and specific control objects.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCases of cross-modal influence have been observed since the beginning of psychological science. Yet some abilities like face recognition are traditionally only investigated in the visual domain. People with normal visual face-recognition capacities identify inverted faces more poorly than upright faces.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe distinction between the processing of musical information and segmental speech information (i.e., consonants and vowels) has been much explored.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe investigated participants' ability to identify and represent faces by hand. In Experiment 1, participants proved surprisingly capable of identifying unfamiliar live human faces using only their sense of touch. To evaluate the contribution of geometric and material information more directly, we biased participants toward encoding faces more in terms of geometric than material properties, by varying the exploration condition.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAt the turn of the 20th century, European psychologists found themselves in conflict situations with respect to the role that private mental states should play in a scientific psychology. Out of this conflict arose 3 of the best-known schools of the 20th century: psychoanalysis, behaviorism, and Gestalt psychology. Each of these schools is discussed with respect to two characteristics.
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