Browsing by Person "Della Sala, Sergio"

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Adult developmental trajectories of pseudoneglect in the tactile, visual and auditory modalities and the influence of starting position and stimulus length
(Elsevier, 2016-02-04) Brooks, Joanna L.; Darling, Stephen; Malvaso, Catia; Della Sala, Sergio
Pseudoneglect is a tendency to pay more attention to the left side of space, typically demonstrated on tasks like visuo-spatial line bisection, tactile rod bisection and the mental representation of numbers. The developmental trajectory of this bias on these three tasks is not fully understood. In the current study younger participants aged between 18 and 40 years of age and older participants aged between 55 and 90 years conducted three spatial tasks: 1) visuospatial line bisection - participants were asked to bisect visually presented lines of different lengths at the perceived midpoint; 2) touch-driven tactile rod bisection in the absence of vision - participants were asked to feel the length of a wooden rod with their index finger and bisect the rod at the perceived centre; and 3) mental number line bisection in the absence of vision - participants were asked to listen to a pair of numbers and respond with the numerical midpoint between the pair. The results showed that both younger and older participants demonstrated pseudoneglect (leftward biases) in the visual, tactile and mental number line tasks and that the magnitude of pseudoneglect for each group was influenced by physical or mentally represented starting side (start left versus start right) and stimulus length. We provide an exploration of pseudoneglect in younger and older adults in different tasks that vary in the degree to which mental representations are accessed and argue that pseudoneglect is a result of a right hemisphere attentional orienting process that is retained throughout adulthood. Our results indicate that, contrary to some current models of cognitive ageing, asymmetrical patterns of hemispheric activity may occur in older age.
Behavioural evidence for separating components within visuo-spatial working memory
(Springer, 2007) Darling, Stephen; Della Sala, Sergio; Logie, Robert H.
Several different sources of evidence support the idea that visuo-spatial working memory can be segregated into separate cognitive subsystems. However, the nature of these systems remains unclear. Recently we reported data from neurological patients suggesting that information about visual appearance is retained in a different subsystem from information about spatial location. In this paper we report latency data from neurologically intact participants showing an experimental double dissociation between memory for appearance and memory for location. This was achieved by use of a selective dual task interference technique. This pattern provides evidence supporting the segregation of visuo-spatial memory between two systems, one of which supports memory for stimulus appearance and the other which supports memory for spatial location.
Fly on the right: Lateral preferences when choosing aircraft seats.
(Taylor & Francis, 2017-12-20) Darling, Stephen; Cancemi, Dario; Della Sala, Sergio
A small preference has been observed for people to choose seats on the left of aircraft when booking via an online system. Although this is consistent with pseudoneglect - the known leftward bias in perception and representation - rightward preferences have been commonly observed in seating selection tasks in other environments. Additionally, the previous research in aircraft seating was unable to dissociate a bias to one side of the screen from a bias to one side of the cabin of the aircraft. Here we present a study in which participants were asked to select seats for a range of fictional flights. They demonstrated a preference for seats on the right of the cabin, irrespective of whether the right of the cabin appeared to either the right or the left of the screen, a preference for seats towards the front of the aircraft and a preference to favour window and aisle seats. This suggests, in contrast to previous research, that participants demonstrated a rightward lateral bias to representations of an aircraft. These results may have implications for our understanding of asymmetries in cognition as well as having potentially important practical implications for airlines.
Imaging the future: Does a qualitative analysis add to the picture?
(2010) McKinlay, Andy; McVittie, Chris; Della Sala, Sergio
Various studies report that patients with dense amnesia experience difficulties in simulating future events. It is argued that this resembles an inability to remember past episodes in that both indicate a deficit in mental scene construction. Such findings, however, rely upon quantitative content-based analyses of participants' verbal reports. Here, samples of verbal reports produced by participants with hippocampal lesions are subjected to a qualitative, discourse analysis of how participants and researchers negotiated the status of these reports. This shows that failure in mental scene construction can be viewed as an interactional achievement rather than the mere reporting of mental events. A multidisciplinary perspective which combines qualitative analysis with other forms of analytic technique may explain subtle differences between participants with hippocampal lesions and control participants. 2010 The British Psychological Society.
Items on the left are better remembered
(2010-05) Della Sala, Sergio; Darling, Stephen; Logie, Robert H.
Neurologically intact individuals show a spatial processing bias in perception tasks, specifically showing a bias towards the left in bisecting lines. We present evidence for a novel finding that a leftwards bias occurs in short-term memory for recently presented arbitrary bindings of visual features. Three experiments are reported, two of which involve a total of over 60,000 participants with a small number of trials for each. Experiment 3 involved a larger number of trials for each of 144 participants. Participants reproduced from immediate memory arrays of shape-colour-location bindings. In all three experiments, significantly more errors were observed in reproduction of items presented on the right of the array than on the left. Results could not be accounted for by perceptual errors, or by order of presentation or order of reproduction. Findings suggest that items presented on the left are better remembered, indicating a spatial asymmetry in forming or retrieving feature bindings in visual short-term memory.
Neuropsychological evidence for separating components of visuo-spatial working memory
(2006-02) Darling, Stephen; Della Sala, Sergio; Logie, Robert H.; Cantagallo, A.
There is increasing evidence to support the idea that visuo-spatial working memory can be segregated into separate cognitive subsystems. However, the nature of these systems remains unclear. In this paper we report data from two brain injured patients suggesting that information about visual appearance is retained in a different subsystem from information about spatial location, and that this differential processing can be observed when the style of presentation (sequential or simultaneous) is controlled.
Putative functions of the prefrontal cortex: Historical perspectives and new horizons.
(Erlbaum, 1998) Darling, Stephen; Della Sala, Sergio; Gray, C.; Trivelli, C.; Mazzoni, G.; Nelson, T. O.
Representational pseudoneglect in line bisection
(Psychonomic Society, 2012-10) Darling, Stephen; Logie, Robert H.; Della Sala, Sergio
Representational pseudoneglect refers to a bias towards the left side of space that occurs when visual information is remembered. Recently there have been a number of demonstrations of such representational pseudoneglect. In the current paper we report an experiment where we adopted the classic line bisection paradigm to study representational pseudoneglect. Participants bisected horizontal lines that were shown in extra-personal space. When lines were visible on the screen, there was no evidence of any leftward bias. However, when lines were bisected from memory, participants demonstrated a clear bias to the left. This is the first demonstration of a leftward bias in bisection of remembered visually presented lines.
Representational pseudoneglect: A review
(Springer, 2014-01-12) Brooks, Joanna L.; Della Sala, Sergio; Darling, Stephen
Pseudoneglect, the tendency to be biased towards the left-hand side of space, is a robust and consistent behavioural observation best demonstrated on the task of visuospatial line bisection, where participants are asked to centrally bisect visually presented horizontal lines at the perceived centre. A number of studies have revealed that a representational form of pseudoneglect exists, occurring when participants are asked to either mentally represent a stimulus or explore a stimulus using touch in the complete absence of direct visuospatial processing. Despite the growing number of studies that have demonstrated representational pseudoneglect there exists no current and comprehensive review of these findings and no discussion of a theoretical framework into which these findings may fall. An important gap in the current representational pseudoneglect literature is a discussion of the developmental trajectory of the bias. The focus of the current review is to outline studies that have observed representational pseudoneglect in healthy participants, consider a theoretical framework for these observations, and address the impact of lifespan factors such as cognitive ageing on the phenomenon.
The cumulative semantic interference effect in normal and pathological ageing
(2014-12) Mulatti, Claudio; Calia, Clara; De Caro, Maria Fara; Della Sala, Sergio
People affected by mild cognitive impairment (MCI), a precursor of Alzheimer's Disease, present with impairments in picture naming, a lexical/semantic task which rests on the activation of perceptual, semantic, and phonological representations. The poor performance of MCI individuals in picture naming has been accounted for in terms of deficits of either the perceptual, semantic, or phonological stages. To disentangle the source of this deficit we compared the cumulative semantic interference effect (Howard et al., 2006. Cognition. 100, 464-482.) and the repetition priming effect of a group of people with MCI to that of a group of healthy elderly participants and with a group of healthy young participants. The cumulative semantic interference effect defines a linear increase in the picture naming reaction times which is function of the already named pictures belonging to the same semantic category to which the named picture belongs. The repetition priming effect refers to an increase in performance for repeated items compared to unrepeated items. Results showed that whereas the cumulative semantic interference effect was present in the healthy elderly and young samples, it was absent in the MCI sample; instead, all groups showed comparable repetition priming effects. This pattern of results suggests that the impairment in picture naming exhibited by MCI individuals is due to an inefficient semantic access.
The dog that didn't growl: The interactional negotiation of momentary confabulations
(Taylor & Francis, 2014-10) McVittie, Chris; McKinlay, Andy; Della Sala, Sergio; MacPherson, Sarah E.
We examine from a discursive perspective momentary confabulations generated by patients in clinical interviews based on confabulation questionnaires. Commonly, neuropsychology treats such confabulations solely as evidence of patients' inabilities or deficits. Here we argue that patients' descriptions indicate the interaction of memory deficits with preserved interactional skills. More than this, however, patients' descriptions can be seen in part to arise out of the interviews themselves, in that the interviewer's turns (a) signal agreement rather than disagreement or challenge, and (b) lead to further development of descriptions instead of marking these out as problematic. These features mark out the clinical interviews as different from (i) everyday conversation, and (ii) other clinical settings such as the administration of verbal memory tests, and as a result the interviews allow scope for patients to develop unchallenged autobiographical narratives. Thus, ironically, interviews that rely on the standard use of confabulation questionnaires can provide settings that are especially conducive to the generation of the momentary confabulations that they aim to study. 2013 Taylor & Francis.
Transient involuntary mirror writing triggered by anxiety
(2015-08) Della Sala, Sergio; Calia, Clara; De Caro, Maria Fara; McIntosh, Robert D.
Mirror writing (MW) has mainly been observed in left-hemisphere-damaged patients writing with the left hand. This study evaluated the presence of MW in 24 patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). We found that MW is not a typical feature of MCI. However, one woman (FC), mislabeled initially with MCI but in fact affected by anxiety, showed florid MW when writing with her left hand, which resolved as her anxiety receded. This case study supports anecdotal reports of MW triggered by anxiety, and the features of FC's performance indicate a motor rather than a perceptual basis for the phenomenon.