We investigated the effect of aptness in the comprehension of copular metaphors (e.g., Lawyers are sharks) by Alzheimer's Disease (AD) patients. Aptness is the extent to which the vehicle (e.g., shark) captures salient properties of the topic (e.g., lawyers). A group of AD patients provided interpretations for metaphors that varied both in aptness and familiarity. Compared to healthy controls, ...

Although our ability to remember future simulations conveys an adaptive advantage, enabling us to better prepare for upcoming events, the factors influencing the memorability of future simulations are not clear. In this study, participants generated future simulations that combined specific people, places and objects from memory, and for each trial, made a series of phenomenological ratings abo...

The mere exposure phenomenon refers to improvement of one's attitude toward an a priori neutral stimulus after its repeated exposure. The extent to which such a phenomenon influences evaluation of a priori emotional stimuli remains under-investigated. Here we investigated this question by presenting participants with different odors varying in a priori pleasantness during different sessions spa...

BACKGROUND Developmental prosopagnosia is a disorder of face recognition that is believed to reflect impairments of visual mechanisms. However, voice recognition has rarely been evaluated in developmental prosopagnosia to clarify if it is modality-specific or part of a multi-modal person recognition syndrome. OBJECTIVE Our goal was to examine whether voice discrimination and/or recognition ar...

................................................................................................................................... 2 Summary of Past Accomplishments ........................................................................................ 3 Local-Scale Model Evaluation Studies ................................................................................ 3 Studies of the Tapaj...

This work aims at measuring familiarity to contribute to the formalization of trust. Trust has always been bundled with familiarity to become a popular topic in the areas of psychology, sociology and computer science. Correlation between familiarity and trust has been explored and proved by many studies from different perspectives. A new model of trust has been proposed by Carter and Ghorbani t...

selecting an effective project plan is a significant area in the project management. the present paper introduces a technique to identify the project plan efficient frontier for assessing the alternative project plans and selecting the best plan. the efficient frontier includes two criteria: the project cost and the project time. besides, the paper presents a scheme to incorporate directed acyc...