• Science of Emotion and Sensibility
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.151-164
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• 2018

The appropriate interpretation of social cues is a crucial ability for everyday life. While processing socially relevant information, beyond the low-level physical features of the stimuli to emotional information is known to influence human cognition in various stages, from early perception to later high-level cognition, such as working memory (WM). However, it remains unclear how the influence of each type of emotional information on cognitive processes changes in response to what has occurred in the processing stage. Past studies have largely adopted face stimuli to address this type of research question, but we used a unique class of socially relevant motion stimuli, called biological motion (BM), which depicts various human actions and emotions with moving dots to exhibit the effects of anger, happiness, and neutral emotion on task performance in perceptual and working memory. In this study, participants determined whether two BM stimuli, sequentially presented with a delay between them (WM task) or one immediately after the other (perceptual task), were identical. The perceptual task showed that discrimination accuracies for emotional stimuli (i.e., angry and happy) were lower than those for neutral stimuli, implying that emotional information has a negative impact on early perceptual processes. Alternatively, the results of the WM task showed that the accuracy drop as the interstimulus interval increased was actually lower in emotional BM conditions than in the neutral condition, which suggests that emotional information benefited maintenance. Moreover, anger and happiness had distinct impacts on the performance of perception and WM. Our findings have significance as we provide evidence for the interaction of type of emotion and information-processing stage.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.487-515
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• 2012

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of the individual differences in cognitive processes on paragraph comprehension. To do so, the lexical decision task and the pattern comparison task were used to measure the low-level cognitive processes. Digit span task was used to test the phonological loop capacity. The individual differences of the central executive processing capacity were measured by operational span task. Reading span task was used to test the working memory capacity related with the sentence processing. Reading times and accuracies of the logically valid inferences and logically void inferences were tested to measure the high-level cognitive processes. Reading times and accuracies for the target sentences with and without prior explicit causal sentence were measured to test individuals' paragraph comprehension abilities. The results showed that the speed of the low-level cognitive processes was related with the speed of the high-level cognitive processes. Also, the accuracy of the low-level cognitive processes was related with the accuracy of the high-level cognitive processes while there was no significant correlation between the speed and the accuracy in any measures of the cognitive processes. Working memory capacity was related with the accuracy of the cognitive processes while it was not significantly correlated with the speed of the cognitive processes. Most importantly, the speed of low-level cognitive processes significantly affected the speed of the paragraph comprehension while the working memory capacity and the high-level cognitive processes had influences on the accuracies of the paragraph comprehension. The speed of the paragraph comprehension had no influence on the accuracies of the paragraph comprehension.

• Science of Emotion and Sensibility
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.11-22
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• 2022

As social beings, we need to understand others' actions as quickly and accurately as possible. Action understanding can occur at many levels. We sometimes grasp others' intentions unintentionally. Other times, however, we have to expend effort to draw inferences about their goals. In the context of joint action, the joint Simon effect demonstrates that actors are influenced by the unintended representation of a co-actor's actions. This effect has been described as quasi-automatic, but it is unclear if the effect is automatic enough to be immune to cognitive load. Thus, we asked participants to complete a joint Simon task with or without a concurrent working memory task. One group of participants maintained a single digit in their mind during working memory load blocks (low-load group), while the other group maintained five digits (high-load group). As a result, the low-load group showed a joint Simon effect both during no-load and low-load blocks. In contrast, the high-load group had no joint Simon effect during either no-load or high-load blocks. These results suggest that the joint Simon effect is not an automatic phenomenon given that it requires cognitive resources. Actors in a joint task may represent a co-actor's actions in their task set, but only when cognitive resources are available.

• Journal of the Korean Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.130-138
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• 2016

Objectives: The aim of this study was to develop auditory-verbal and visual-spatial memory tasks using smart devices for children aged 8 to 10 years and examine their validity. Methods: One-hundred and fourteen school-aged children were recruited through internet advertising. We developed memory tasks assessing auditory-verbal memory, visual-spatial memory, and working memory, and then examined their construct validity by examining the developmental trend of the children's mean scores with age. In order to examine the concurrent validity of the tasks, we conducted correlation analyses between the children's scores on the newly developed auditory-verbal, visual-spatial memory and working memory tasks and their scores on well-known standardized tests of memory and working memory, including the auditory-verbal memory subtests of the Korean Luria-Nebraska Neuropsychological Battery for Children, Korean Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure Test, digit span and arithmetic subtest of Korean Educational Development Institute Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children Revised, and Corsi block test. Results: The memory and working memory scores measured by the newly developed tasks tended to increase with age. Further, there were significant correlations between the scores of the four cognitive tasks and the corresponding scores of the standardized assessment tools. Conclusion: This study revealed promising evidence for the validity of the memory tasks using smart devices, suggesting their utility for school-aged children in research and clinical settings.

• Journal of Oriental Neuropsychiatry
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.19-35
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• 1998

Some oriental medicine turned out to have a significant clinical effect on the cure for dementia. Therefore, thorough scientific tests for physiological effect of oriental medicne are needed. This study is aimed at doing experimental studies on the effects of two medicines, Jowiseungcheongtang and hyungbangjihwangtang, on the cure for dementia.For the demonstration of the effect of the two medicines on aged rats, we perfomed a radial arm medicines on aged rats, water maze task, known for their proper learning paradigm for behavior.Previous studies on aging and dementia show that aged rats displayed significant impariments in the learning of the radial arm maze task compared with younger rats. As in experiment 1, we found that the learning of the radial arm maze task compared with younger rats. As in experiment 1, we found that the learning deficits aged rats exhibit in radial arm maze task were improved with the application of each medicine. The resutls suggest that these two medicine can be effective to patients whose working or shortterm memory is impaired. In experiment 2 we studied the effect of the two medicines on the deficit of the aged rats with the Morris water maze task known for measuring long-tern memory. We did not find significant results between the performance of the ages rats and the younger ones. Considered the different results previous studies have reported, more thorough studies are needed to investigate the effect of the medicines on long-term memory.In conclusion, the results we found in experiment 1 and 2 suggest that Jowisengcheongtang and hyungbangjihwangtang can have useful effects for the cure of age-related memory (especially for short-term memory)deficits. Recent interests in dementia urges researchers concerned to explore the effect of oriental medicine on the disease. As there have been relatively few behavioral or scientific studies on dementia using oriental medicine to date, further studies are expected are expected to continue to elucidate 'what the wisdom of the oriental medicine tells about dementia'.

• Animal cells and systems
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.279-286
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• 2011

Hypoxic ischemia injury is a common cause of functional brain damage, resulting from a decrease in cerebral blood flow and oxygen supply to the brain. The main problems associated with hypoxic ischemia to the brain are memory impairment and dopamine dysfunction. Hypothermia has been suggested to ameliorate the neurological impairment induced by various brain insults. In this study, we investigated the effects of hypothermia on memory function and dopamine synthesis following hypoxic ischemia to the brain in rats. For this purpose, a step-down avoidance task, a radial eight-arm maze task, and immunohistochemistry for tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) and 5-bromo-2'-deoxyuridine (BrdU) were performed. The present results indicated that the hypoxic ischemia-induced disturbance of the animal's performances and spatial working memory was associated with a decrement in TH expression in the substantia nigra and striatum, and an increase in cell proliferation in the hippocampal dentate gyrus. Hypothermia treatment improved the animals' performance and spatial working memory by suppressing the decrement in TH expression in the substantia nigra and striatum and the increase in cell proliferation in the dentate gyrus. We suggest that hypothermia can be an efficient therapeutic modality to facilitate recovery following hypoxic ischemia injury to the brain, presumably by modulating the dopaminergic cell loss.

• Investigative Magnetic Resonance Imaging
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.47-53
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• 2009

Purpose : Although it's been known for half a century that unique structures have evolved in the cerebellum and they then became greatly enlarged in the human brain, the function of these structures still remains unknown. The purpose of this study was to assess cerebellar activation during motor, sensory, word generation, listening comprehension, and working memory tasks with using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Materials and Methods : Eleven healthy right-handed subjects (Male: female, 6:5, mean age: 27.4years) were imaged on a Siemens 1.5T scanner. Whole brain functional maps were acquired using BOLD EPI sequences in the axial plane. Each paradigm consisted of five epochs of activation vs. the control condition. The activation tasks consisted of left finger complex movement, sensory stimulation of the left hand, word generation, listening comprehension, and working memory tasks. The reference function was a boxcar waveform. The activation maps were thresholded at p = 0.001. SPM 5 evaluated the activated areas and responses within the cerebellum. Results : Cerebellar activation was observed on motor task, word generation task, and working memory task. There were 949 activated areas and the mean fitted and adjusted response was 0.68 during the motor task. There were 319 activated areas and the mean fitted and adjusted response was 0.15 during the word generation task. There were 330 activated areas and the mean fitted and adjusted response was 0.26 during the working memory task. Conclusion : Our results suggest that the cerebellum is involved in a variety of functional tasks, including motor, word generation, and working memory tasks. However, during the motor task, the cerebellum showed a large activated area and a high response. Cerebellar function can be evaluated by fMRI.

• Investigative Magnetic Resonance Imaging
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.9-16
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• 2004

Purpose : The purpose of this study was to assess supplementary motor area (SMA) activation during motor, sensory, word generation, listening comprehension, and working memory tasks using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Materials and Methods : Sixteen healthy right-handed subjects (9M, 7F) were imaged on a Siemens 1.5T scanner. Whole brain functional maps were acquired using BOLD EPI sequences in the axial plane. Each paradigm consisted of five epochs of activation vs. the control condition. The activation tasks consisted of left finger complex movement, hot sensory stimulation of the left hand, word generation, listening comprehension, and working memory. The reference function was a boxcar waveform. Activation maps were thresholded at an uncorrected p=0.0001. The thresholded activation maps were placed into MNI space and the anatomic localization of activation within the SMA was compared across tasks. Results : SMA activation was observed in 16 volunteers for the motor task, 11 for the sensory task, 15 for the word generation task, 5 for the listening comprehension task, and 15 for the working memory task. The rostral aspects of the SMA showed activity during the word generation and working memory tasks, and the caudal aspects of the SMA showed activity during the motor and sensory tasks. Right (contralateral) SMA activation was observed during the motor and sensory tasks, and left SMA activation during the word generation and memory tasks. Conclusion : Our results suggest that SMA is involved in a variety of functional tasks including motor, sensory, word generation, and working memory. The results obtained also support the notion that functionally specific subregions exist within the region classically defined as the SMA.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.57-65
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• 2017

The current study explored how Korean-speaking children processed the multiple acoustic cues (VOT and f0) for the stop laryngeal contrast (/t'/, /t/, and /$t^h$/) and examined whether individual perceptual strategies could be related to a general cognitive ability performing executive functions (EF). 15 children (aged from 7 to 8) participated in the speech perception task identifying the three Korean laryngeal stops (3AFC) on listening to the auditory stimuli of C-/a/ with synthetically varying VOT and f0. They completed a series of EF tasks to measure working memory, inhibition, and cognitive shifting ability. The findings showed that children used the two cues in a highly correlated manner. While children utilized VOT consistently for the three laryngeal categories, their use of f0 was either reduced or enhanced depending on the phonetic categories. Importantly, the children's processing strategies of a f0 suppression for a tense-aspirated contrast were meaningfully associated with children's better cognitive abilities such as working memory, inhibition, and attentional shifting. As a preliminary experimental investigation, the current research demonstrated that listeners with inefficient processing strategies were poor at the EF skills, suggesting that cognitive skills might be responsible for developmental variations of processing sub-phonemic information for the linguistic contrast.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.63-70
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• 2019

This study investigated individual variability of L2 learners' categorical judgments of L2 stops by exploring English learners' perceptual processing of two acoustic cues (voice onset time [VOT] and f0) and working memory capacity as sources of variation. As prior research has reported that English speakers' greater use of the redundant cue f0 was responsible for gradient processing of native stops, we examined whether the same processing characteristics would be observed in L2 learners' perception of Korean stops (/t/-/t^h/). 22 English learners of L2 Korean with a range of L2 proficiency participated in a visual analogue scaling task and demonstrated variable manners of judging the L2 Korean stops: Some were more gradient than others in performing the task. Correlation analysis revealed that L2 learners' categorical responses were modestly related to individuals' utilizations of a primary cue for the stop contrast (VOT for L1 English stops and f0 for L2 Korean stops), and were also related to better working memory capacity. Together, the current experimental evidence demonstrates adult L2 learners' top-down processing of stop consonants where linguistic and cognitive resources are devoted to a process of determining abstract phonemic identity.