• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.481-506
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• 2009

The purpose of the present research was to examine whether the attention mechanism employs physical or represented location of the cue and target. To achieve this, we have employed the paradigm of facilitation of response as well as inhibition of return. In the experiments, valid and invalid conditions were defined by the position consistency of the cue and the target in the aspect of either physical or represented location. We used auditory cue and visual target in Experiment 1 while visual cue and auditory target in Experiment 2. As a results, in Experiment 1, effect of facilitation of response in valid condition was found when the valid/invalid conditions were defined in the aspect of represented location. In Experiment 2, effect of facilitation of response in valid condition was found when the valid/invalid conditions were defined in the aspect of represented location. In all the other conditions, no effect was found when the conditions were defined in the aspect of physical location. No effects of inhibition of return were found in Experiment 2. These results imply the possibility that attention mechanism operates based on objects' represented location rather than on their physical location. More importantly, the present research suggests that it is necessary to separate represented location from physical location of the target and the cue in the experiment of facilitation of response and inhibition of return in the future.

• Journal of Families and Better Life
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.105-120
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• 2001

The main purpose of this study was to investigate preschoolers understanding whether thinking influences emotion with cognitive cueing. The subjects were 75 preschoolers of the J, Y, & K kindergartens located in Taegu. They were 4-(12 boys and 13 girls), 5-(12 boy and 13 girls), and 6-years(13 boys and 12 girls) old. The instruments were 4 stories and 11 pictures per a story used in Lagattuta, Wellman & Flavell(1997). The responses given from preschoolers were classified in terms of cognitive cueing response. The major results showed that an initial understanding of cognitive cueing in some preschoolers revealed the evidence of significantly developmental changes during the preschool years. Cognitive cueing responses were significantly different according to thinking prompt which is the question to help preschoolers explanations. This result suggested that the instruments of measurement for preschoolers should be improved as possible as they can understand.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.27 no.4
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• pp.573-597
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• 2016

Recent fMRI and EEG research for neural representations of action concepts insist that processing of action concepts evoke the simulation of sensory-motor information. Moreover, there are several behavioral studies showing that understanding of action verbs or sentences describing actions interfere or facilitate current action performance. However, it is unclear that online interaction between processing of action concepts and current action is based on the simulation of sensory-motor information, or other neural mechanisms. The present research aims to explore the underlying neural mechanism that how the perception of action language influence the performance of current action using high-spacial temporal resolution EEG and multiple source analysis techniques. For this, participants were asked to perform a cued-motor reaction task in which button-pressing hand action and pedal-stepping foot action were required according to the color of the cue, and we presented auditorily action verbs describing the responding actions (i.e., /press/, /step/, /stop/) just before the color cue and examined the interaction effect from the semantic congruency between the action verbs and the current action. Behavioral results revealed consistently a facilitatory effect when action verbs and responding actions were semantically congruent in both button-pressing and pedal-stepping actions, and an inhibitory effect when semantically incongruent in the button-pressing action condition. In the results of EEG source waveform analysis, the semantic congruency effects between action verbs and the responding actions were observed in the Wernicke's area during the perception of action verbs, in the anterior cingulate gyrus and the supplementary motor area (SMA) at the time when the motor-cue was presented, and in the SMA and primary motor cortex (M1) during action execution stage. Based on the current findings, we argue that perceived action verbs evoke the facilitation/inhibition effect by influencing the expectation and preparation stage of following actions rather than the directly activating the particular motor cortex. Finally we discussed the implication on the neural representation of action concepts and methodological limitations of the current research.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.29-52
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• 2006

There has been a claim that Interaction between the cerebral hemispheres could reduce the effect interfering information (Weissman & Banich, 1999). We ran three experiments to show that between-hemisphere separation of target and distractor could be more effective for reducing interference than Interaction between the hemispheres. In experiment 1, a colored box and a rotor name were presented to a single or to separate hemispheres. In experiment 2 and 3, a colored circle (distractor) was presented along with a colored box and a color name which was always printed in black. In experiment 3, a peripheral cue was presented either to the target location(66.7%) or to the distractor location(33.3%) Immediately before the presentation of stimuli. In all experiments, the participants were asked to deride whether the moaning of the color matched the rotor of the box, Ignoring the printed rotor of the word(Exp. 1), or the color of the circle(Exp. 2 & 3). There were three renditions of distractor (congruent, incongruent, and neutral) and two conditions of matching (between- and within-hemisphere matching). If interhemispheric interaction were effective for interference reduction, there should be a decrease in the interference in the between-hemisphere compared to the within-hemisphere matching condition. The results showed that there was no difference in the interference between the two matching conditions in Exp 1. In Exp 2 and in the target-cue renditions of Exp. 3, the amount of interference in the between-hemisphere condition was greater than that in the within-hemisphere condition. These findings are consistent with what we have previously reported (Sohn et al., 1996, Sohn & Lee, 2003). However, when the distractor was precued in Exp. 3, the amount of interference did not differ between the two marching conditions. These results suggest that between-hemisphere separation of target and distractor can be more effective for reducing response interference than interhemispheric communication. It implies a possible role of an interhemispheric shielding mechanism (Merola & Liederman, 1985) to prevent the transfer of task-irrelevant, harmful information across the hemispheres.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.65-90
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• 2017

Rewards or penalties become informative only when contingent on an immediately preceding response. Our goal was to determine if the brain responds differently to motivational events depending on whether they provide feedback with the contingencies effective for learning. Event-related fMRI data were obtained from 22 volunteers performing a visuomotor categorical task. In learning-condition trials, participants learned by trial and error to make left or right responses to letter cues (16 consonants). Monetary rewards (+500) or penalties (-500) were given as feedback (learning feedback). In random-condition trials, cues (4 vowels) appeared right or left of the display center, and participants were instructed to respond with the appropriate hand. However, rewards or penalties (random feedback) were given randomly (50/50%) regardless of the correctness of response. Feedback-associated BOLD responses were analyzed with ANOVA [trial type (learning vs. random) x feedback type (reward vs. penalty)] using SPM8 (voxel-wise FWE p < .001). The right caudate nucleus and right cerebellum showed activation, whereas the left parahippocampus and other regions as the default mode network showed deactivation, both greater for learning trials than random trials. Activations associated with reward feedback did not differ between the two trial types for any brain region. For penalty, both learning-penalty and random-penalty enhanced activity in the left insular cortex, but not the right. The left insula, however, as well as the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex/dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, showed much greater responses for learning-penalty than for random-penalty. These findings suggest that learning-penalty plays a critical role in learning, unlike rewards or random-penalty, probably not only due to its evoking of aversive emotional responses, but also because of error-detection processing, either of which might lead to changes in planning or strategy.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.109-133
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• 2014

Psychological distance refers to the perceived gap between a stimulus and a person's direct experience and its activation influences the decisions and actions that the person makes towards the stimulus. We investigated whether the level of familiarity affects the construction of psychological distance. Specifically, we hypothesized that a familiar stimulus, relative to an unfamiliar stimulus, is perceived to be psychologically closer to the observer and so its perception might be modulated by the perceived spatial distance. The familiarity of stimuli was manipulated in terms of preexposure frequency and preexposure perceptual fluency. In experiments, participants were first exposed with three nonsense words in a lexical decision task. The nonsense words were presented in nonword trials with different levels of frequency (frequent vs. rare, Experiment 1) or with different levels of visibility (less blurred vs. more blurred, Experiment 2). Participants then performed a distance Stroop task with the most familiar and the least familiar nonwords. Each of them appeared in either proximal or distant spatial locations in scenes with clear depth cues. The results showed a significant interaction between the word familiarity and the spatial distance: the familiar word was judged faster in proximal locations but slower in distant locations relative to the unfamiliar word. The current findings suggest that metacognitive evaluation of familiarity could be one of the critical factors that underlie the construction of psychological distance.