Abstract

TORREALVA, Víctor M. Patiño  and  SANTILLAN, Elizabeth Rodríguez. Category-specific effect in healthy young and aged individuals: response time advantage for animals over manipulable objects in a semantic decision task. Neuropsicologia Latinoamericana [online]. 2011, vol.3, n.3, pp. 1-11. ISSN 2075-9479.  http://dx.doi.org/10.5579/rnl.2011.0063.

Category-specific semantic effects among healthy individuals have been studied during the last decades. Laws & Neve (1999) and Laws (1999; 2000) reported this effect in favor of living items using naming and verbal fluency tasks. The present study aimed to prove the existence of this category effect using a semantic decision task, and to verify whether this effect is modified by aging. Twenty healthy young and twenty healthy aged individuals, matched for education, participated in this study. The experimental task included 30 trials, each presenting the names of an animal or a manipulable object, a superordinate category, a concrete and an abstract feature. Word frequency, morphological word complexity, and exemplar familiarity and typicality were controlled. Participants provided yes-no responses about semantic word congruency. An ANOVA with bootstrap resampling evidenced no group, category or typicality effect, nor an interaction between these variables on the number of correct responses. A similar analysis on response time (RT) evidenced only a category effect. Both groups had lower RT's for animals than objects. These results support the hypothesis according to which semantic processing of living items is performed faster and more accurately than that of non-living items. Additionally, the data evidence that aging does not modify this effect. These results are methodologically relevant for the analysis of studies on category effects in brain damaged cases.

Keywords : Semantic memory; Category-specific; Aging.

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