Browsing by Subject "http://www.yso.fi/onto/yso/p23705"
Now showing items 1-3 of 3
-
(2015)Introduction. Previous studies suggest that dyslexic pupils have inordinate difficulties learning foreign languages at school. The present study examined the mismatch negativity (MMN) brain responses elicited by foreign language words and nonwords in dyslexic children compared to typically reading controls. MMN reflects early processing stages in auditory cortex. The aim of this study was to determine whether dyslexic pupils have impaired MMNs for foreign language words or speech stimuli in general, and whether word familiarity has a different effect on the two groups. In addition, the correlations between MMN differences and reading and cognitive skills were analysed. Methods. Participant groups consisted of 14 dyslexic school children, and 14 typically reading controls. Before brain recordings, literacy skills and cognitive functioning were tested. Brain responses to English words (she, shy) and nonwords (shoy), and Finnish words (sai, soi) and nonwords (sii) were measured with electroencephalography (EEG). Results and conclusions. The results suggested that compared to controls, dyslexic children's MMN responses to foreign language were impaired for a familiar word she, but only. However, the groups did not differ in processing speech-sounds in general. In addition, weak MMN responses to the foreign word were associated with poorer reading skills and slower rapid naming in mother language. The results of this study suggest that the establishment, access and activation of memory representations for foreign words is impaired in dyslexia. In addition, the finding that poor performance in native language reading is correlated with the strength of brain responses to foreign language suggests that there are common factors underlying literacy skills and foreign language learning.
-
(2020)Based on previous studies, decision making concerning parental leave is affected by both economic issues and preconditions relating to labor market structures and gendered practices, but also by people’s views about what the appropriate age range for children to be cared for at home by a parent is and which parent is seen as primarily responsible for this care. The discussion surrounding this topic also entails the notion of what is considered “right”, i.e. what is regarded as good parenting or a good childhood. This thesis will examine the way good parenting is defined in argumentations for childcare choices and what kind of subject-positions are formed for parents in the discourse of good parenting. My research data consists of interviews in which four heterosexual couples (mother and father) talk about their own childcare solutions and, from their own perspective and generally, about taking parental leave from work. I use a discursive approach in analyzing the data. Instead of a coherent idea of good parenting, I found many discourses of good parenting, which “activated” in different situations and in which parents sometimes positioned themselves differently based on their sex. The discussion surrounding parenting was also defined by the hectic quality of working life and, among other things, wage structures and pay gaps. Choices were made in negotiating with multiple conflicting discourses and therefore the thesis questioned the issue of the families’ “freedom of choice”. Following the spirit of neoliberalism, the family was conceived as an enterprise that needs to assess risks and maximize profit. In this thesis the relationship between work and parenting was examined from the point of view of parents that represent the heteronormative nuclear family, but in future research the scope should be broadened to involve diverse families.
-
(2016)Social cognitive neuroscience is a novel and fast-growing field. This field studies the neural basis of social behaviour with the tools of cognitive neuroscience. Most of the research topics in social cognitive neuroscience concern social cognition. Social cognition is defined to be cognitive information processing about conspecifics such as other people. This thesis presents a new tool to localize brain regions related to social cognition in a brain imaging experiment using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Named as Social Localizer, this tool is intended to be a pre-experiment protocol to define so-called regions-of-interest (ROIs) based on a rich set of stimuli presented to the subject during the fMRI scanning. The stimuli were videos, pictures and texts related to social cognition, including biological movement, social interaction, faces, theory-of-mind, body parts and action observation. We ran the Social Localizer with eighteen subjects in order to validate the functionality of the localizer in an fMRI experiment. We also used eye-tracking and keypad response with a one-back-task with the stimuli to make sure that subjects were attending to the stimuli. Overall, the results were promising – we succeeded in localizing many areas central to social cognition. However, the amount of data was not enough for the localizer to specify all ROIs in the individual level. Therefore we decided to combine activations from pairs of stimulus-classes to achieve more consistent results across the group of subjects. In addition, we analyzed the empirical group-level results. These group-level results revealed interesting research questions regarding social cognition that deserve further studying in order to be clarified. In conclusion the Social Localizer provides a promissing tool to define multiple regions-of-interest on social-cognitive criteria. In future studies of social cognition, this tool could be combined with other experimental manipulations to address novel questions in well-defined regions-of-interest.
Now showing items 1-3 of 3