28th International Congress of Psychology August 8 ... - U-netSURF

duration, the complexity of the relationship between on-line speaking data and functional models
of cognition, and perhaps unrecognised problems associated with the distributions of pause and
speech duration data. In this review I describe new approaches to the measurement of speech and
pause duration, procedures for characterising individual distributions, and the implications of
recent work in this area for models of language production.
4033 STATE-OF-THE-ART
Chair: Houcan Zhang, China
The cognitive neuroscience of aging, Denise C. Park, The Beckman Institute, The University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
Although performance in many cognitive domains declines with age, the neural activations
underlying long-term and working memory may paradoxically often increase in older adults. The
hypothesis that neural activations are compensatory for declining neural integrity will be evaluated,
with a focus on frontal and hippocampal function.
4034 STATE-OF-THE-ART
Chair: Bruce Overmier, USA
Categorization and concept formation in pigeons: A perspective on comparative cognition,
Masako Jitsumori, Cognitive and Information Sciences, Chiba University, Japan
Categorization is of great relevance for humans and nonhuman animals to cope with various
stimuli in the world. It has been well documented that nonhuman animals, particularly pigeons,
can classify photographs of a variety of natural objects. Most natural categories comprise highly
variable members structured by a criss-crossing of similarities or "family resemblance
(Wittgenstein, 1953)", thus forming an open-ended category identified by an ill-defined fuzzy
boundary. Recent developments in categorization studies in nonhuman animals are illustrated,
focusing on theoretical issues surrounding the structure of natural categories and learning of
functional associations among members of the categories.
4035 STATE-OF-THE-ART
Chair: Saths Cooper, South Africa
Memory and memory disorders: Neuroimaging correlates of organic damage and psychic
disorders, Hans J. Markowitsch, Fakultät für Psychologie und Sportwissenschaft, Universität
Bielefeld, Germany
Time- and contents-based subdivisions of memory are explained and attributed to different
networks in the brain. Results from brain damaged patients and patients with psychogenic amnesia
(due to stress and trauma conditions) and results from functional neuroimaging in both normals
and patients are used to explain normal and pathological functioning of memory. It is concluded
that in part similar brain regions, important for memory encoding or retrieval, can become
dysfunctional either due to manifest tissue damage (organic cause) or - stress and trauma-triggered
- in psychogenic amnesias. For this last group an increased release of stress hormones is seen as
basis for what can be termed 'mnestic block syndrome'.
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