Impaired episodic memory is the primary feature of early Alzheimer's disease (AD), but not all memories are equally affected. Patients with AD and amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment (aMCI) remember pictures better than words, to a greater extent than healthy elderly. We investigated neural mechanisms for visual object recognition in 30 patients (14 AD, 16 aMCI) and 36 cognitively unimpaired healthy (19 in the "preclinical" stage of AD).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA view that has been gaining prevalence over the past decade is that the human conceptual system is malleable, dynamic, context-dependent, and task-dependent, that is, flexible. Within the flexible conceptual representation framework, conceptual representations are constructed ad hoc, forming a different, idiosyncratic instantiation upon each occurrence. In this review, we scrutinize the neurocognitive literature to better understand the nature of this flexibility.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn previous work investigating the relationship between domain knowledge (of the fictional world of Harry Potter) and sentence comprehension, domain knowledge had a greater impact on electrical brain potentials to words which completed sentences about fictional "facts" participants reported they did not know compared to facts they did. This suggests that individuals use domain knowledge continuously to activate relevant/related concepts as they process sentences, even with only partial knowledge. As that study relied on subjective reports, it may have resulted in response bias related to an individual's overall domain knowledge.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSensing with undetected photons allows access to spectral regions with simultaneous detection of photons of another region and is based on nonlinear interferometry. To obtain the full information of a sample, the corresponding interferogram has to be analyzed in terms of amplitude and phase, which has been realized so far by multiple measurements followed by phase variation. Here, we present a polarization-optics-based phase-quadrature implementation in a nonlinear interferometer for imaging with undetected photons in the infrared region.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFor any research program examining how ambiguous words are processed in broader linguistic contexts, a first step is to establish factors relating to the frequency balance or dominance of those words' multiple meanings, as well as the similarity of those meanings to one other. Homonyms-words with divergent meanings-are one ambiguous word type commonly utilized in psycholinguistic research. In contrast, although polysemes-words with multiple related senses-are far more common in English, they have been less frequently used as tools for understanding one-to-many word-to-meaning mappings.
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