Salvador Algarabel

The university of Valencia's computerized word pool

This paper presents the University of Valencia’s computerized word pool. This is a database that includes 16,109 Spanish words, together with 11 psychological variables for limited groups of items. The purpose behind the creation of this database was to have available a large quantity of verbal stimuli in a well-controlled system, ready for automatic selection. The description includes a summary of statistics on each of the 11 psychological variables, together with a correlational and factor analysis of them. This statistical analysis produces results close to those obtained for equivalent English material.

Familiarity-based recognition in the young, healthy elderly, mild cognitive impaired and Alzheimer's patients.

This study investigates the possible existence of deficits in familiarity in five samples of participants spanning a broad range of ages and cognitive states. Five groups of 16 participants with a diagnosis of multi-domain cognitive impairment with a slight or no deficit in memory, 16 multi-domain amnestic, and 16 Alzheimers disease patients were compared in a recognition test with equivalent samples of old and young healthy participants. In one of the tests, participants studied words extracted from a restricted set of letters of the alphabet that were later mixed with new words from a different set. The unconscious use of the fluency produced by the repeated use of the set of letters was compared with a condition in which the same letter set did not play a role. Results indicated that amnestic mild cognitive impaired and Alzheimers patients were unable to use letter fluency to improve recognition. However, young and old controls did not differ among themselves, whereas the multi-domain sample, whose memory performance was almost at the same level as that of controls showed slight levels of deficit in familiarity in the forced choice test but not in the recognition test. These results contrast sharply with those reported by Westerberg et al. [Westerberg, C. E., Paller, K. E., Holdstock, J. S., Mayes, A. R., & Reber, p. J. (2006). When memory does not fail: Familiarity-based recognition in mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimers disease. Neuropsychology, 20, 193-205] and Anderson et al. [Anderson, N. D., Ebert, P. L., Jennings, J. M., Grady, C. L., Cabeza, R., & Graham, S. J. (2008). Recollection- and familiarity-based memory in healthy aging and amnestic mild cognitive impairment. Neuropsychology, 22, 177-187], who concluded that there were no deficits in familiarity in these types of pre-dementia and dementia patients.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis of the White Bear Suppression Inventory and the Thought Control Questionnaire

The White Bear Suppression Inventory (WBSI) was developed to assess chronic thought suppression, whereas the Thought Control Questionnaire (TCQ) measures different strategies to suppress unpleasant intrusive thoughts. The present study examines the latent factor structure of these instruments in a sample of 540 normal subjects using confirmatory factor analyses (CFA). Regarding the WBSI, the CFAs indicated that the tested models did not provide a good fit for the data. Data analysis showed that the TCQ with five factors and 30 items did not reach a reasonable fit. Therefore, in order to present a five-factor structure with an adequate fit, those items with problematic factor loadings were eliminated. Correlational analyses indicated that the WBSI had a significant association with depression, obsessive-compulsive symptoms, and pathological worry, whereas only two TCQ subscales, punishment and worry, were related to these psychopathological symptoms.

Recognition memory deficits in mild cognitive impairment

ABSTRACT There is no agreement on the pattern of recognition memory deficits characteristic of patients diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Whereas lower performance in recollection is the hallmark of MCI, there is a strong controversy about possible deficits in familiarity estimates when using recognition memory tasks. The aim of this research is to shed light on the pattern of responding in recollection and familiarity in MCI. Five groups of participants were tested. The main participant samples were those formed by two MCI groups differing in age and an Alzheimers disease group (AD), which were compared with two control groups. Whereas one of the control groups served to assess the performance of the MCI and AD people, the other one, composed of young healthy participants, served the purpose of evaluating the adequacy of the experimental tasks used in the evaluation of the different components of recognition memory. We used an associative recognition task as a direct index of recollection and a choice task on a pair of stimuli, one of which was perceptually similar to those studied in the associative recognition phase, as an index of familiarity. Our results indicate that recollection decreases with age and neurological status, and familiarity remains stable in the elderly control sample but it is deficient in MCI. This research shows that a unique encoding situation generated deficits in recollective and familiarity mechanisms in mild cognitive impaired individuals, providing evidence for the existence of deficits in both retrieval processes in recognition memory in a MCI stage.

Recognition by Familiarity Is Preserved In Parkinson's Without Dementia and Lewy-Body Disease

OBJECTIVE The retrieval deficit hypothesis states that the lack of deficit in recognition often observed in patients with Parkinsons disease is because of the low retrieval requirements of the task, given that these patients have retrieval and not encoding deficits. To test this hypothesis we investigated recognition memory by familiarity in Parkinsons patients and in patients with Lewy Bodies disease and Parkinson with dementia. METHOD We analyzed to what extent the experimental groups were able to recognize by familiarity in a typical yes/no recognition memory task. The experimental groups were patients with early nondemented Parkinsons disease, advanced nondemented Parkinsons disease, demented Parkinsons patients, and patients with dementia with Lewy Bodies. We compared their performance with a group of young and another group of old healthy participants. The estimation of familiarity was made by analyzing recognition of word targets and distractors consisting of combinations of different letters in comparison with a condition in which targets and distractors were composed of similar letters, even though subjects were unaware of the independent variable. RESULTS The results indicate that familiarity was used at the same level by controls, patients with early Parkinsons disease and patients with dementia with Lewy Bodies. Although late Parkinson patients also used familiarity, its effect was only marginally significant. Patients with Parkinsons disease and dementia were not capable of using familiarity in recognition memory. CONCLUSIONS Our results support the retrieval deficit hypothesis as Parkinsons patients without dementia show no deficit in a situation in which the retrieval requirements are minimal.

A voice-activated key for the Apple Macintosh computer

An interface circuit to connect a microphone to an Apple Macintosh computer is described. The Apple Macintosh mouse port is used as the input port, and the microphone activation simulates a mouse press.

Explorations of familiarity produced by words with specific combinations of letters

We explore familiarity-based recognition using a paradigm devised by Parkin et al. (2001). The task consists of the creation of two lists of words written with one of two different subsets of letters of the alphabet. We manipulated study time (50, 100, 200, 500 ms per word) of words with different letter probabilistic structure to those originally used by Parkin et al. Letter-based familiarity responding was robust and present even at rates producing otherwise chance performance. A second experiment and structural equation modelling led us to interpret the results from the point of view of a theory that takes into account the processing of similarities and differences (Hunt & MacDaniel, 1993). Finally, our data indicate that the experimental procedure devised by Parkin et al. is an excellent tool with which to study familiarity, once the structure of probabilities of individual letters is considered as the key factor in inducing the effect.

Repetition increases false recollection in older people

Aging is accompanied by an increase in false alarms on recognition tasks, and these false alarms increase with repetition in older people (but not in young people). Traditionally, this increase was thought to be due to a greater use of familiarity in older people, but it was recently pointed out that false alarms also have a clear recollection component in these people. The main objective of our study is to analyze whether the expected increase in the rate of false alarms in older people due to stimulus repetition is produced by an inadequate use of familiarity, recollection, or both processes. To do so, we carried out an associative recognition experiment using pairs of words and pairs of images (faces associated with everyday contexts), in which we analyzed whether the repetition of some of the pairs increases the rate of false alarms in older people (compared to what was found in a sample of young people), and whether this increase is due to familiarity or recollection (using a remember-know paradigm). Our results show that the increase in false alarms in older people due to repetition is produced by false recollection, calling into question both dual and single-process models of recognition. Also, older people falsely recollect details of never studied stimuli, a clear case of perceptual illusions. These results are better explained in terms of source-monitoring errors, mediated by peoples retrieval expectations.

Effect of retention interval on the simultaneous cognate-noncognate and remember-know mirror effects.

Recognition memory for Spanish-Catalan cognate and noncognate words was tested at retention intervals of 30 minutes, 3 days, and 7 days using a remember/know response procedure. We observed a clear mirror effect for the cognate-noncognate stimulus class and a remember-know response categorisation at the immediate retention interval. However, the cognate and noncognate mirror was still observed at 3 and 7 days, whereas the remember-know mirror disappeared at both retention intervals. Also, we ran a repeated testing condition to be able to carry out a sequential item analysis and observe the fate of the original remember and know responses 3 or 7 days later. The analysis supported the idea that there was a loss of contextual information that was at the root of the disappearance of the remember-know mirror effect. These results provide support to the idea that it is the imbalance between recollection and familiarity that is the most likely cause of the mirror effect.

Exploring recollection and familiarity impairments in Parkinson’s disease

There is conflicting evidence on whether patients diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease (PD) have cognitive deficits associated with episodic memory and particularly with recognition memory. The aim of the present study was to explore whether PD patients exhibit deficits in recollection and familiarity, the two processes involved in recognition. A sample of young healthy participants (22) was tested to verify that the experimental tasks were useful estimators of recognition processes. Two further samples—one of elderly controls (16) and one of PD patients (20)—were the main focus of this research. All participants were exposed to an associative recognition test aimed at estimating recollection followed by a two-alternative forced-choice (2AFC) test designed to estimate familiarity. The analyses showed a deficit in associative recognition in PD patients and no difference between elderly controls and PD patients in the 2AFC test. By contrast, young healthy participants were better than elderly controls and PD patients in both components of recognition. Further analyses of results of the 2AFC test indicated that the measure chosen to estimate conceptual familiarity was adequate.