New study on Parkinson's disease accepted for publication in Neuropsychology

Congratulations to Antonia and Pilar for their latest publication on facial emotional recognition in patients with Parkinson’s disease. the study will be published in Neuropsychology.

The study compared patients with Parkinson’s Disease (PD) and control participants in a task measuring the ability to recognize emotions from facial expressions. The results suggests that patients with PD present with a relative deficit in the recognition of emotions from facial expressions and that this deficit is related to an alteration of inhibitory functions.

Reference: Siquier, A., & Andrés, P. (2022).  Facial emotion recognition in Parkinson’s disease: the role of executive and affective domains. Neuropsychology, in press.

Abstract: Objective. The ability to recognize emotions from facial expression (FER) may be impaired in Parkinson’s disease (PD). We aimed to explore FER in PD patients by using a dynamic presentation of emotions across different intensities and to examine the extent to which executive and affective alterations contributed to FER deficits. Methods. Fifteen PD patients and 15 healthy controls were assessed on the Emotion Recognition Task (ERT). FER performance was tested for correlations and regression analyses with affective and neuropsychological tests to identify and quantify which factors best predicted ERT accuracy. Results . PD patients showed poorer performance on the ERT, specifically on angry expressions, but they benefited from increased intensity as much as controls did. Differences were also found for apathy, depression and executive tests, especially in the inhibition domain. Importantly, differences between groups on the ERT disappeared when controlling for inhibition and the affective symptoms. A significant effect of inhibition dysfunction was also observed on the ERT performance. Conclusions . Our findings demonstrate the presence of emotion recognition deficits of morphed facial expressions in patients with PD. Moreover, they suggest that inhibition dysfunctions may act as an important factor negatively influencing FER. The present study highlights the complex nature of emotion processing and its relation with emotional-affective  

Watch Fabrice's talk at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society

The talk presented at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society (November, 2021) is noW available to watch on YouTube.

Reference:
Parmentier, F. B. R., & Gallego, L. (2021). Is Deviance Distraction Immune to the Prior Sequential Learning of Stimuli and Responses? Talk presented at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, 4-7 November.

Abstract:
Unexpected auditory stimuli presented in the context of an otherwise repeated standard sound capture participants’ attention away from a focal task and yield distraction. While making such sounds predictable reduces distraction, the effect of making target stimuli and responses predictable is unknown. Using a modified serial reaction time task, we installed the learning of a sequence of target stimuli before testing the impact of unexpected sounds on performance. In the learning phase, participants pressed response buttons corresponding to visual cues appearing in one of four spatial locations arranged horizontally. Unbeknownst to participants, the sequence of locations followed a pattern during several blocks before being replaced by a new pattern. The data provided solid evidence of sequence learning for the repeated sequence. In the auditory distraction phase, auditory distractors were presented immediately before each visual target. Unexpected sounds lengthened response times compared to the standard sound (novelty distraction), equally for learned and new sequences. We conclude that the anticipation of target stimuli and responses does not shield participants from deviance distraction.

Fabrice Parmentier becomes moderator of the Open Sesame Forum

After many years programming experiments in E-Prime, we are starting to develop tasks using Open Sesame and its browser-oriented version OSWeb.

E-Prime is a great tool and has been Fabrice Parmentier’s go-to experiment programming software for several years. It will most likely remain a feature of the Cognitive Psychology Lab, but it is expected that Open Sesame, a free and open program, will progressively become our main software for experimental studies (online and lab-based) in the future.

Fabrice began exploring Open Sesame and its suitability for online experiments back in March 2021, leading him to become increasingly active in Open Sesame’s official forum site, helping other users to solve their task programming problems. This was noticed by Open Sesame’s creator and administrator of the forum, Prof. Sebastiaan Mathôt (University of Groningen, Netherlands), who has just invited Fabrice to join the team of moderators.

Open Sesame-s reference:
Mathôt, S., Schreij, D., & Theeuwes, J. (2012). OpenSesame: An open-source, graphical experiment builder for the social sciences. Behavior Research Methods, 44(2), 314-324. doi:10.3758/s13428-011-0168-7

Neuropsychology and Cognition Group running its own JATOS service

JATOS ready for duty!

Our group now counts with its own server and the JATOS service capable of running online studies programmed in jsPsych, lab.js, OSWeb/OpenSesame, PsyToolkit or any HTML/Javascript/CSS code. This service supports experiments on mobile devices, desktops and lab computers that run a browser.

Fabrice Parmentier is managing JATOS for the group.

Project proposal on distraction by unexpected sounds is awarded national funding

The research project, approved for funding by the Agencia Estatal de Investigación (State Research Agency), will study auditory distraction.

The project will be led by Fabrice Parmentier with the participation and support of a number of distinguished collaborators: János Horváth (Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology, Research Centre for Natural Sciences, Budapest, Hungary), Martin Vasilev and Julie Kirkby (Bournemouth University, UK), and Alicia Leiva (University of the Balearic Islands).

The project, entitled “Extending our knowledge of distraction by unexpected sounds” will officially start in September 2021 and run for 4 years. The original work plan includes 22 empirical experiments that will investigate several aspects of auditory distraction, ranging from fundamental cognitive mechanisms to contextual variables and motoric aspects.

The project was highly rated by 4 expert reviewers and received average scores of 93.64% for quality and feasibility, 92.5% for the project leader ‘s and collaborators’ track record, and 91.97% for expected impact. The overall project score is 93/100.

The project is to be funded to the tune of 145,200 Euros and will include, in addition, one PhD studentship (estimated value of about 91,000).