Daniel Bub

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Papers by Daniel Bub

Grasp representations depend on knowledge and attention

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, Feb 1, 2018

Seeing pictures of objects activates the motor cortex and can have an influence on subsequent gra... more Seeing pictures of objects activates the motor cortex and can have an influence on subsequent grasping actions. However, the exact nature of the motor representations evoked by these pictures is unclear. For example, action plans engaged by pictures could be most affected by direct visual input and computed online based on object shape. Alternatively, action plans could be influenced by experience seeing and grasping these objects. We provide evidence for a dual-route theory of action representations evoked by pictures of objects, suggesting that these representations are influenced by both direct visual input and stored knowledge. We find that that familiarity with objects has a facilitative effect on grasping actions, with knowledge about the object's canonical orientation or its name speeding grasping actions for familiar objects compared to novel objects. Furthermore, the strength of contributions from each route to action can be modulated by the manner in which the objects are attended. Thus, evocation of grasping representations depends on an interaction between one's familiarity with perceived objects and how those objects are attended while making grasp actions.

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Is the loss of diagnosticity of the eye region of the face a common aspect of acquired prosopagnosia?

Journal of Neuropsychology, Mar 1, 2009

Ar ecent study published in this journal has shown an abnormal performance at discriminating diff... more Ar ecent study published in this journal has shown an abnormal performance at discriminating differences with respect to the eyes of unfamiliar faces in two acquired prosopagnosic patients, but preserved processing of the mouth region. Here we extend these findings by showing asimilar lack of sensitivity to the eyes in the verysame face matching experiment for the prosopagnosic patient PS, who also showed normal performance for detecting differences in the mouth region. These results complement previously published evidence that the patient PS presents al ack of sensitivity to diagnostic information located on the eyes of familiar faces during individual face recognition tasks. More generally,they indicate that the impaired processing of the eyes of faces is af undamental aspect of acquired prosopagnosia that can arise following damage to different brain localizations.

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Featural and Configural Properties in Face Perception: Comparing Apples and Oranges

PsycEXTRA Dataset, 2007

Cognitive Control in Children

Psychological Science, Apr 1, 2006

The development of cognitive control and its relationship to overcoming Stroop interference was a... more The development of cognitive control and its relationship to overcoming Stroop interference was assessed in a sample (N = 65) of elementary school children. Subjects alternately performed Stroop color naming trials and word reading trials. In separate blocks, the colored Stroop items were noncolor words (incongruent condition) or rows of asterisks (neutral condition). Younger children showed both larger Stroop interference and a greater slowing of word reading in the incongruent condition. We conducted an analysis of response time distributions that assessed the degree of word reading suppression applied by younger and older children. Surprisingly, these analyses indicated that younger children engaged in stronger suppression than older children. We propose that greater Stroop interference among younger children is not due to lack of ability to suppress word reading, but instead is the result of a failure to consistently maintain the task set of color naming.

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Dynamic evocation of hand action representations during sentence comprehension

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2013

When listening to a sentence describing an interaction with a manipulable object, understanding t... more When listening to a sentence describing an interaction with a manipulable object, understanding the actor's intentions is shown to have a striking influence on action representations evoked during comprehension. Subjects performed a cued reach and grasp response while listening to a context sentence. Responses were primed when they were consistent with the proximal intention of an actor ("John lifted the cell phone. . ."), but this effect was evanescent and appeared only when sentences mentioned the proximal intention first. When the sentence structure was changed to mention the distal intention first ("To clear the shelf. . ."), priming effects were no longer context specific and actions pertaining to the function of an object were clearly favored. These results are not compatible with a straightforward mental-simulation account of sentence comprehension but instead reflect a hierarchy of intentions distinguishing how and why actions are performed.

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On the nature of hand-action representations evoked during written sentence comprehension

Cognition, Sep 1, 2010

We examine the nature of motor representations evoked during comprehension of written sentences d... more We examine the nature of motor representations evoked during comprehension of written sentences describing hand actions. We distinguish between two kinds of hand actions: a functional action, applied when using the object for its intended purpose, and a volumetric action, applied when picking up or holding the object. In Experiment 1, initial activation of both action representations was followed by selection of the functional action, regardless of sentence context. Experiment 2 showed that when the sentence was followed by a picture of the object, clear context-specific effects on evoked action representations were obtained. Experiment 3 established that when a picture of an object was presented alone, the time course of both functional and volumetric actions was the same. These results provide evidence that representations of object-related hand actions are evoked as part of sentence processing. In addition, we discuss the conditions that elicit context-specific evocation of motor representations.

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Preservation of mouth region processing in two cases of prosopagnosia

Journal of Neuropsychology, Mar 1, 2008

Although most adults are considered experts in face recognition, brain trauma can produce a selec... more Although most adults are considered experts in face recognition, brain trauma can produce a selective loss in this ability, a condition referred to as prosopagnosia. This study examined the processing strategies of prosopagnosic patients LR and HH using the Face Dimensions Test. In this test, featural and configural information in the upper and lower halves of the face was parametrically varied and sensitivity to these changes measured. We found that relative to age-matched control participants, LR and HH exhibited an impaired ability to discriminate differences in the eye region, but a preserved ability to detect featural and configural differences in the mouth region. This pattern of impairment and sparing was demonstrated in tests of direct perception and immediate memory. The obtained findings demonstrate that prosopagnosia does not necessarily cause a global impairment to face perception, but a selective impairment to the perception of information in the upper half of the face.

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Spatially restricted perceptual expertise for faces in a case of prosopagnosia

Journal of Vision, Mar 17, 2010

Perceptual Expertise: Bridging Brain and Behavior

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Preservation and impairment of featural and configural processing for faces as a result of prosopagnosia

Journal of Vision, Mar 17, 2010

This research examines the effects of prosopagnosia on the processing of featural and configural ... more

On the methodology of single-case studies in cognitive neuropsychology

Cognitive Neuropsychology, Sep 1, 1988

Caramazza&#39;s hypothetico-deductive analysis of the role of single-patient studies as relev... more Caramazza&#39;s hypothetico-deductive analysis of the role of single-patient studies as relevant evidence for models of normal cognitive function is contrasted with an alternative account based on the bootstrapping model of Glymour (1980). We show how these two accounts differ in their analyses of the evidential relevance of associations of deficits and dissociations in performance. We clarify the logic applicable to

Task-dependent motor representations evoked by spatial words: Implications for embodied accounts of word meaning

Journal of Memory and Language, Feb 1, 2017

Embodied accounts contend that word meaning is grounded in sensorimotor representation. In suppor... more Embodied accounts contend that word meaning is grounded in sensorimotor representation. In support of this view, research has found rapid motor priming effects on vertical movements for words like eagle or shoe, which differ as to whether they are typically associated with an up or down spatial direction. These priming effects are held to be the result of motor representations evoked as an obligatory part of understanding the meaning of a word. In a series of experiments, we show that prime words associated with up or down spatial locations produce vertical perturbations in the horizontal movements of a computer mouse, but that these effects are contingent either on directing conscious attention to the spatial meaning of the word, or on the inclusion of the primed spatial direction in the response set, and that this is true even for strongly spatial words such as up and down. These results show that the motor representations associated with such words are not automatically evoked during reading. We discuss implications for claims that spatial representations reflect our embodied perception of the world.

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Motor Priming As a Result of Inferences in Sentence Comprehension

PsycEXTRA Dataset, 2007

Effects of sentence context on the priming of motor representations

Dynamic evocation of hand action representations during sentence comprehension

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), Dec 20, 2012

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Interference from related items in object identification

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 2001

Interference between related items in the identification of objects was examined using a postcue ... more Interference between related items in the identification of objects was examined using a postcue procedure. Pairs of objects were presented as differently colored line drawings followed by a color cue to indicate which object to name. Naming latencies were longer when both objects were from the same superordinate category than when they were unrelated. This interference effect was replicated when subjects were cued to report the color of a drawing rather than its name. Interference was greatly reduced when more distinctive attributes were used to distinguish members of a pair, both when the task required naming an object and when it required report of an object&#39;s attribute. These results challenge accounts of interference in the postcue paradigm that are based on competitive interactions in the activation of phonological representations by semantics and instead implicate object-attribute integration in memory as the source of interference.

The role of cognitive control and top-down processes in object affordances

Attention, perception & psychophysics, Mar 26, 2021

A widely held though debatable claim is that the picture of an object like a frying pan automatic... more A widely held though debatable claim is that the picture of an object like a frying pan automatically elicits features of a left/righthanded grasp action even in perceptual tasks that make no demands on the observer to consider the graspable properties of the depicted object. Here, we sought to further elucidate this claim by relying on a methodology that allowed us to distinguish between the influence of motor versus spatial codes on the selection of a left/right-handed response while electroencephalographic data were recorded. In our experiment, participants classified images of frying pans as upright or inverted using a left/ right key press or by making a left/right-handed reach-and-grasp action towards a centrally located response element while we recorded electroencephalographic (EEG) data. In line with previous evidence (Bub, Masson, & van Noordenne, Journal of Experiment Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 47(1), 53-80, 2021), these two modes of responding generated distinct correspondence effects on performance induced by the same set of images. In terms of our EEG data, we found that neither motor (the lateralized readiness potential) nor visual (N100 and P100) potentials were sensitive to handle-response hand correspondence. However, an exploratory theta analysis revealed that changes in frontal theta power mirrored the different correspondence effects evoked by the image on key press responses versus reach and grasp actions. Importantly, our results provide a link between these disparate effects and the engagement of cognitive control, highlighting a possible role of top-down control processes in separating motor features from the task-irrelevant features of an object, and thus in claims regarding object affordances more generally.

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Components of action representations evoked when identifying manipulable objects

Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, Feb 6, 2015

We examined the influence of holding planned hand actions in working memory on the time taken to ... more We examined the influence of holding planned hand actions in working memory on the time taken to visually identify objects with handles. Features of the hand actions and position of the object's handle were congruent or incongruent on two dimensions: alignment (left vs. right) and orientation (horizontal vs. vertical). When an object was depicted in an upright view, subjects were slower to name it when its handle was congruent with the planned hand actions on one dimension but incongruent on the other, relative to when the object handle and actions were congruent on both or neither dimension. This pattern is consistent with many other experiments demonstrating that a cost occurs when there is partial feature overlap between a planned action and a perceived target. An opposite pattern of results was obtained when the depicted object appeared in a 90 • rotated view (e.g., a beer mug on its side), suggesting that the functional goal associated with the object (e.g., drinking from an upright beer mug) was taken into account during object perception and that this knowledge superseded the influence of the action afforded by the depicted view of the object. These results have implications for the relationship between object perception and action representations, and for the mechanisms that support the identification of rotated objects.

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Mind Over Motion: Cognitive Context Influences Reach and Grasp Trajectory

PsycEXTRA Dataset

Priming of reach and grasp actions by irrelevant objects

PsycEXTRA Dataset

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