1,721,006 research outputs found
Selective deficit for people's names following left temporal damage: An impairment of domain-specific conceptual knowledge.
No full textAs a consequence of a head trauma, APA presented with selective anomia for the names of familiar people, in the absence of comparable disorders for common names and other proper names. Face recognition was normal; and naming performance was unaffected by stimulus and response types. Selective proper name anomia was not due to effects of frequency of usage or of age of acquisition, or to selective memory/learning deficits for the names of people. Even though APA was able to provide at least some information on many celebrities whom she failed to name, she was clearly impaired in all tasks that required full conceptual information on the same people (but she performed flawlessly in similar tasks that involved common names). This pattern of performance indicates that in our subject the inability to name familiar persons results from damage to conceptual information. It is argued that detailed analyses of conceptual knowledge are necessary before it is concluded that a subject with proper name anomia suffers from a purely output disorder, as opposed to a conceptual disorder. The behaviour observed in APA is consistent with the domain-specific hypothesis of conceptual organisation (Caramazza & Shelton, 1998), and in this framework can be explained by assuming selective damage to knowledge of conspecifics. The anatomo-clinical correlates of our subject's disorder are discussed with reference to recent hypotheses on the neural structures representing knowledge of familiar people
Thematic role assignment in the posterior parietal cortex: A TMS study
No full textVerbs denote relations between entities acting a role in an event. Thematic roles are essential to the correct use of verbs and involve both semantic and syntactic aspects. We used repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS) to study the involvement of three different left parietal sites in the understanding of thematic roles. In a sentence-to-picture matching task, twelve participants were asked to judge whether or not a given picture matched with a written sentence. Pictures represented simple reversible actions, and sentences were in the active or passive diathesis. Whereas both active and passive sentences require the correct encoding of thematic roles, passives also imply thematic reanalysis, as the canonical order of thematic roles is systematically reversed. The experiment was divided in three sessions. In each session a different parietal site (anterior, middle, posterior) was stimulated at 5Hz in an event-related fashion, time-locked to the presentation of visual stimuli. Results showed increased accuracy for passive sentences following posterior parietal stimulation. The effect appeared to be (a) TMS-related, as no effect was observed in a control, no-TMS experiment with eighteen new participants; (b) independent from semantic processes involved in word-picture association, as no TMS-related effects were observed in a picture-word matching task. We interpret the results as showing that the posterior parietal site is specifically involved in the assignment of thematic roles, in particular when the correct interpretation of a sentence requires reanalysis of temporarily encoded thematic roles, as in passive reversible sentences.Verbs denote relations between entities acting a role in an event. Thematic roles are essential to the correct use of verbs and involve both semantic and syntactic aspects.We used repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS) to study the involvement of three different left parietal sites in the understanding of thematic roles. In a sentence-to-picture matching task, twelve participants were asked to judge whether or not a given picture matched with a written sentence. Pictures represented simple reversible actions, and sentences were in the active or passive diathesis. Whereas both active and passive sentences require the correct encoding of thematic roles, passives also imply thematic reanalysis, as the canonical order of thematic roles is systematically reversed. The experiment was divided in three sessions. In each session a different parietal site (anterior, middle, posterior) was stimulated at 5 Hz in an event-related fashion, time-locked to the presentation of visual stimuli.Results showed increased accuracy for passive sentences following posterior parietal stimulation. The effect appeared to be (a) TMS-related, as no effect was observed in a control, no-TMS experiment with eighteen new participants; (b) independent from semantic processes involved in word-picture association, as no TMS-related effects were observed in a picture-word matching task. We interpret the results as showing that the posterior parietal site is specifically involved in the assignment of thematic roles, in particular when the correct interpretation of a sentence requires reanalysis of temporarily encoded thematic roles, as in passive reversible sentences. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Acute auditory agnosia as the presenting hearing disorder in MELAS.
No full textMELAS is commonly associated with peripheral hearing loss. Auditory agnosia is a rare cortical auditory impairment, usually due to bilateral temporal damage. We document, for the first time, auditory agnosia as the presenting hearing disorder in MELAS. A young woman with MELAS (A3243G mtDNA mutation) suffered from acute cortical hearing damage following a single stroke-like episode, in the absence of previous hearing deficits. Audiometric testing showed marked central hearing impairment and very mild sensorineural hearing loss. MRI documented bilateral, acute lesions to superior temporal regions. Neuropsychological tests demonstrated auditory agnosia without aphasia. Our data and a review of published reports show that cortical auditory disorders are relatively frequent in MELAS, probably due to the strikingly high incidence of bilateral and symmetric damage following stroke-like episodes. Acute auditory agnosia can be the presenting hearing deficit in MELAS and, conversely, MELAS should be suspected in young adults with sudden hearing loss
Language assessment in multilingualism and awake neurosurgery
Full text link: Multilingualism has become a worldwide phenomenon that poses critical issues about the language assessment in patients undergoing awake neurosurgery in eloquent brain areas. The accuracy and sensitivity of multilingual perioperative language assessment procedures is crucial for a number of reasons: they should be appropriate to detect deficits in each of the languages spoken by the patient; they should be suitable to identify language-specific cortical regions; they should ensure that each of the languages of a multilingual patient is tested at an adequate and comparable level of difficulty. In clinical practice, a patient-tailored approach is generally preferred. This is a necessary compromise since it is impossible to predict all the possible language combinations spoken by individuals and thus the availability of standardized testing batteries is a potentially unattainable goal. On the other hand, this leads to high inconsistency in how different neurosurgical teams manage the linguistic features that determine similarity or distance between the languages spoken by the patient and that may constrain the neuroanatomical substrate of each language. The manuscript reviews the perioperative language assessment methodologies adopted in awake surgery studies on multilingual patients with brain tumor published from 1991 to 2021 and addresses the following issues: (1) The language selected for the general neuropsychological assessment of the patient. (2) The procedures adopted to assess the dimensions that may constrain language organization in multilingual speakers: age and type of acquisition, exposure, proficiency, and use of the different languages. (3) The type of preoperative language assessment used for all the languages spoken by the patient. (4) The linguistic tasks selected in the intraoperative setting. The reviewed data show a great heterogeneity in the perioperative clinical workup with multilingual patients. The only exception is the task used during language mapping, as the picture naming task is highly preferred. The review highlights that an objective and accurate description of both the linguistic profile of multilingual patients and the specific properties of the languages under scrutiny can profitably support clinical management and decision making in multilingual awake neurosurgery settings
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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