George A. Michael

George A. Michael
Université Lumiere Lyon 2 | UL2 · EMC - Laboratoire d’Etude des Mécanismes Cognitifs

PhD in Neuropsychology & Neuroscience

About

122
Publications
24,421
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1,368
Citations
Introduction
Additional affiliations
September 2004 - present
Université Lumiere Lyon 2
Position
  • Professor (Full)
September 2002 - August 2003
Université de Franche-Comté
Position
  • Research and Teaching Fellow

Publications

Publications (122)
Article
Full-text available
Cognitive and neural models have proposed the existence of a single inhibitory process that regulates behavior and depends on the right frontal operculum (rFO). The aim of this study was to make a contribution to the ongoing debate as to whether inhibition is a single process or is composed of multiple, independent processes. Here, within a single...
Article
Cognitive and computational models assume that visual attention is directed to the most salient stimulus in a given scene, and physiological models suggest the attribution of salience might depend on the extrageniculate pathway, involving the superior colliculus and pulvinar. Empirical findings support these models. Another assumption is that atten...
Article
When attention is involuntarily drawn in a direction different to that of the target, slower motor response times are observed (i.e. the meridian effect). Previous data suggested that the thalamus might participate in the generation of visual salience. What may be the role of the thalamus in the capture by luminance transients when attentional cont...
Article
The processing of a target is degraded when noise is present in proximity, and performance increases as the target-noise distance increases. We tested a group of healthy volunteers and a group of patients, who suffered strokes in the posterior thalamus, in a task where the target-noise distance was manipulated. Whilst controls exhibited the expecte...
Article
Full-text available
The authors tested a patient suffering from a circumscribed lesion of the right frontal operculum (FO) in 3 experiments of visual attention involving spatial orienting, maintenance of task-relevant priorities, and control of interference from new and old task-irrelevant items. The authors found that spatial orienting and active maintenance of prior...
Article
Among other bodily signals, the perception of sensations arising spontaneously on the skin with no external triggers contributes to body awareness. The topic of spontaneous sensations (SPS) being quite recent in the literature, there is still a debate whether this phenomenon is elicited by peripheral cutaneous units' activity underlying tactile per...
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Table permettant les analyses statistiques décrites dans l'article suivant: Michael G.A. Trois visages de l’analyse statistique prétest-posttest du cas unique et la proposition d’un qua- trième, omnibus. Rev Neuropsychol 2023 ; 15 (3) : 199-204. doi:10.1684/nrp.2023.0761
Article
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Gaze directed at the observer (direct gaze) is a highly salient social signal. Despite the existence of a preferential orientation toward direct gaze, none of the studies carried out so far seem to have explicitly studied the time course of information processing during gaze direction judgment. In an eye direction judgment task, participants were p...
Article
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Le challenge pour toute personne qui s’intéresse à l’évo- lution dans le temps des performances d’un patient est de mettre en évidence un changement. Un constat fréquent est que l’utilisation des statistiques dans le cadre de l’évaluation de l’évolution des performances s’arrête à la comparaison du score du patient à une norme. Or, montrer une évol...
Article
Objective: The study aimed to present relevant norms for the evaluation of pathological aging in the French population over a 20-year period, utilizing the "PROgnostic OF cardiovascular and cerebrovascular events" test and questionnaire. Methods: Three neuropsychological evaluations were administered over 20 years with 929 participants at the fi...
Article
This study aimed to develop a new scale, the Early Psychotic Symptoms screening scale (EPSy), to assess the prodromes of psychotic symptoms in children aged 4 to 13 years. Two versions were proposed: one to assess the child's current behavior and one to assess the child's behavior when he/she was 2 years old. The second aim of this study was to inv...
Article
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When the body is attended to and viewed, it appears that only a subset of bodily sensations enters awareness. Some of these sensations can be felt on the skin even though no stimulation triggers their perception: They are commonly referred to as spontaneous sensations (SPS). It is hypothesized that inhibition and the management of cognitive resourc...
Article
Body awareness may arise in the total absence of sensory input, as suggested by the spontaneous occurrence of normal and pathological (i.e., hallucinatory) bodily sensations. These phenomena may arise due to back-projections from higher-order cortical areas to the primary (SI) and secondary (SII) somatosensory cortices, and would appear to be refle...
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Aim: Lower interoceptive abilities are a characteristic of chronic pain conditions. Social support plays an important role in chronic low back pain (cLBP) but social cognitive skills have rarely been investigated. This study aimed to characterize interoceptive and social cognitive abilities in cLBP and to study the relationship between both domains...
Article
Spontaneous sensations (SPS) are bodily sensations that can be perceived even in the absence of any external trigger and are related to self-referential and self-awareness processes. In this study, we investigated whether music, and in particular its emotional arousal dimension, could act as an external stimulus with the ability to modulate SPS. Th...
Article
Although many researchers have studied interruptions and how detrimental they can be for performance, only a small number of studies have successfully identified the cognitive processes involved in the resumption of the primary task after an interruption. We carried out two experiments in which the complexity and the timing of interruption were man...
Article
The eyes and the gaze are important stimuli for social interaction in humans. Impaired recognition of facial identity, facial emotions, and inference of the intentions of others may result from difficulties in extracting information relevant to the eye region, mainly the direction of gaze. Therefore, a review of these data is of interest. Behaviora...
Article
The individual differences determining the ability to detect lies are poorly understood. This study investigated the predictive power of self-monitoring, lexical access, lexico-semantic processes, emotional prosody perception, discourse comprehension, mental imagery and attention on the ability to discriminate lies from truth and on response tenden...
Article
Aim: Body awareness arises when attending to and maintaining awareness of visuospatial body representations. By the same token, focussing on representations transfers them to working memory. Body awareness and working memory seemingly rely on similar processes and recruit common parietal areas involved in perception. Therefore, we asked whether vis...
Article
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Aims Negative and Positive urgency are emotion-related impulsivity traits that are thought to be transdiagnostic factors in psychopathology. However, it has recently been claimed that these two traits are closely related to each other and that considering them separately might have limited conceptual and methodological value. The present study aime...
Article
Forty French gendarmes from the Gendarmerie Nationale, and 40 laypersons completed two experiments to assess how they make inferences from testimonies. The first experiment targeted how inferences are made when the critical information on which a judgment has to be made is explicitly stated in the testimony or it is implicit and has to be inferred....
Article
Introduction Interruptions are mostly related to negative outcomes and researchers already found that the complexity or the length of interruptions modulate their deleterious effect on performance. However, none of them investigated the effect of the pleasantness of interruptions. Objective The objective of the study is to evaluate the impact of t...
Article
Distortions of body representation have been reported in Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS). The perception of sensations arising without external triggers (spontaneous sensations or SPS) was assessed here as a means of investigating distortions of body representation and awareness in CRPS. To avoid confounds between CRPS symptoms and SPS, lower...
Article
Interruptions are known to be pervasive and harmful for concentration. It is also known that many factors can influence their effect, such as the complexity of the interrupting task. Less, however, is known about the processes underlying the resumption of the primary task, especially if the interrupting task is complex. Many hypotheses have been pr...
Article
While the literature regarding the existence of difficulties in inhibition in schizophrenia is relatively consistent, it is not clear whether these difficulties reflect any specific deficit in an inhibitory control process or whether they are the result of deficits in the systems that regulate inhibitory control, such as attentional resources. This...
Article
Acquérir et intégrer de nouvelles connaissances et de nouvelles stratégies de résolution de problèmes sont autant d’activités qui ont besoin de l’attention. Celle-ci permettrait de se centrer ponctuellement ou longuement sur les informations importantes et de diminuer l’impact de bruits et voix de fond dans une classe. Cependant, rester attentif n’...
Article
People principally deceive others about opinions, actions and emotions. In two Experiments, this study examined the ability to detect these three types of lies. In Experiment 1, participants had to judge whether actors (50% females and 50% males) were telling the truth (50%) or lying (50%), whereas in Experiment 2, another sample of participants wa...
Article
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Impairments in social cognition have been frequently described in 22q11.2 deletion syndrome (22q11.2DS) and are thought to be a hallmark of difficulties in social interactions. The present study addresses aspects that are critical for everyday social cognitive functioning but have received little attention so far. Sixteen children with 22q11.2DS an...
Article
Introduction Les sensations spontanées, sensations ressenties en l’absence de stimulation externe, joueraient un rôle important dans la constitution d’une conscience physique du corps. Celles qui émergent sur la paume de la main sont modulées par la vision. La généralisation à la plante du pied, rarement en interaction avec la vision, est questionn...
Article
This review discusses the findings in the literature on pain and distraction tasks according to their sensory modality. Distraction tasks have been shown to reduce (experimentally induced) acute pain and chronic pain. This can be influenced by nature and by the sensory modalities used in the distraction tasks. Yet the effect on reducing pain accord...
Article
Lies are notoriously difficult to detect. But it appears that some people are better at accomplishing this task than others even though the factors contributing to deception detection accuracy are not well understood. This study explored the influence of empathy on the detection of deception as a function of the detectors’ gender while dark persona...
Article
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This study aims to determine whether response inhibition shows the same degree of effectiveness for two sources of motor complexity: (1) Movement complexity, which is measured through two actions with different motor requirements (simple lifting action vs. complex reaching action), and (2) Movement type selection, which is measured in movements per...
Article
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RÉSUMÉ La théorie de l’esprit (TdeE) est définie comme la capacité de reconnaître les états cognitifs et émotionnels d’autres personnes que soi. Les études évaluant la TdeE chez les personnes âgées en santé et celles atteintes de la maladie d’Alzheimer font état de résultats contradictoires. Cependant, il est reconnu que l’âge avancé (Ruffman, Henr...
Article
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Visual attention progresses from the most to the least salient item until a target is found. We explored whether and how the extrageniculate pathways participate in this progression when salience is built on motion signals. Because there is a disynaptic extrageniculate pathway that conveys motion signals to the cortex and because recent studies sug...
Article
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Introduction This study investigated interoception in fibromyalgia (FM), a disorder characterized by chronic pain accompanied by mood deregulation. Based on observations on the relationship between somatosensory processing and pain in FM and considering the affective symptoms of this disorder, we tested in FM three dimensions of interoception: inte...
Article
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We have all experienced that time seems stretched during unpleasant situations. While there is evidence of subjective time overestimation when perceiving external unpleasant stimuli, no study has measured the dilation of time when individuals experience an unpleasant situation in their own body. Here we measured the time dilation induced by a painf...
Article
Sensations and thoughts have been described as potentially related to self-awareness. We therefore asked whether sensations that arise in the absence of external triggers, i.e., spontaneous sensations (SPS), which were shown to relate to interoception and perception of the self, vary as a function of the individual propensity to generate spontaneou...
Article
Objective: To compare children with Neurofibromatosis type 1 and associated ADHD symptomatology (NF1 + ADHD) with children having received a diagnosis of ADHD without NF1. The idea was that performance differences in tasks of attention between these two groups would be attributable not to the ADHD symptomatology, but to NF1 alone. Method: One gr...
Article
Interruptions of ongoing activities have spread since the development of and global increase in technology use and the general speeding in pace we all experience every day. Their negative effects are well known: decline in performance and emotional distress. However, the literature still needs to shed light on the exact cognitive mechanisms involve...
Article
Dans le contexte clinique, l’attention est classiquement évaluée par des tâches qui ne prennent pas en compte certains aspects théoriquement importants, tels que l’orientation sur la base de la saillance pendant la recherche visuelle. Le but de cette étude était de développer une épreuve papier-crayon chronométrée pour une utilisation clinique fond...
Article
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Over the past few decades, evidence has accumulated showing that, at subcortical levels, visual attention depends partly on the extrageniculate neural pathways, that is, those pathways that bypass the lateral geniculate nucleus and circumvent the primary visual cortex. Working in concert with neuroscience, experimental psychology has contributed co...
Article
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During the past decades, animal and human physiological studies have suggested that subcortical structures that are part of the extrageniculate pathways have an important role to play in the attentive selection of targets and the filtering of distractors. However, not much has been done to investigate the filtering of distractors in purely behaviou...
Article
Full-text available
This study investigates whether both the perception of somesthetic sensations arising spontaneously on the hand and their modulation by attention are subject to change with advancing age and sex. Participants aged between 50 and 68 (N = 24), and younger (19-27; N = 24), with an equal sex ratio in each group, described the spontaneous sensations the...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
More and more studies have shown that highly demanding work environment have negative effects on attention. It was suggested that repeated exposure to a stressful workplace could generate a new occupational disease that starts during adulthood, entirely caused by the environment, the Attention Deficit State (ADS). ADS mimics the symptoms of Attenti...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Interruptions of ongoing activities can sometimes have severe consequences, causing life-threatening situations. However, this phenomenon is not entirely explained by a single cognitive model. We propose a new five-stage model, the DETOUR (Decision, Encoding, Task switching, Operating & Updating, Resumption), that takes into account the main curren...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
According to Kinsbourne, visuospatial tasks produce a contralateral attentional bias toward the left visual field (right hemisphere activation) and verbal tasks toward the right visual field (left hemisphere activation). Furthermore, he proposed that consciousness emerges from the highest activated neural networks. The goal of this study was to obs...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Attention progresses from the most to the least salient item in a given scene. The attentional effect of salience can be assessed through hand movement paradigms since attention and motor action share common mechanisms. Yet, little is known about the relation between those mechanisms, and especially about the influence of attention on different ste...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Motion attracts attention, and attention progresses through the visual field (VF) in a salience-based fashion. Yet little is known on how attention progresses in search of a motion signal among others, and whether such a progression can also be based on salience. Studies from different domains also suggest that there are different processing channe...
Article
In a visual search task, visual attention progresses from the most to the least salient item until a target is found. The time course of such salience-based progression remains unclear although the temporal deployment seems as crucial as the spatial deployment. The present study investigated how the general hierarchical pattern takes place. Healthy...
Article
Full-text available
Several behavioural cues have been described in the literature as betraying deception. Yet, the conclusions of dozens of studies are unequivocal and even contradicting on whether such cues truly reveal lies. One possible reason is that the effects on these cues of gender and personality were rarely examined simultaneously despite some scarce eviden...
Article
Parking manoeuvring was studied in a driving simulator. Younger and older participants were classified according to the extent of their visual and attentional fields of view. The manoeuvres were made either in the presence of a spatial reference on the adjacent pavement (a pedestrian or a parking meter) or with no reference. It was found that the l...
Article
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The Master Activation model of attention (Michael, Vairet, and Fernandez, Capture attentionnelle en vision: La saillance, la pertinence, et la balance cortico-sous-corticale. In: G. A. Michael (ed), Neuroscience cognitive de l'attention visuelle [Cognitive Neuroscience of Visual Attention], Solal, Marseille, pp. 165-201, 2007; Michael, Lété, and Du...
Article
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There are hypotheses that traumatic brain injury (TBI) and schizophrenia might exhibit similar patterns of cognitive disorders in attention, executive function and memory. Yet, empirical studies comparing directly the two populations are extremely rare. The aim of this exploratory study was to compare performance of patients with TBI and schizophre...
Article
Visual attention has been shown to progress from the most to the least salient item in a given scene. Cognitive and physiological models assume that this orienting of covert attention relies on the collicular pathway, involving the superior colliculus and the pulvinar. Recent studies questioned this statement as they described attentional capture b...
Article
Full-text available
Abstract Movement is known to attenuate the perception of tactile stimuli delivered on the moving part of the body, and this gating diminishes the greater the distance from the moving part. However, does it influence the perception of sensations occurring spontaneously without external triggers? In Experiment 1, participants were asked to focus on...
Article
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The aim of the present study was to assess orienting, inhibition and central resources in head injury, adult attention-de ficit/hyperactivity disorder and schizophrenia. The same experimental protocole was used throughout the study in order to warant a transnosographic comparison. The results suggest that each one of these three pathologies is char...
Article
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Objective: Deficits in multiple aspects of attention are a hallmark of the cognitive impairments found with neurofibromatosis type I (NF1). Given, however, that some attention components are hierarchically organized, it is possible that sustained attention, flexibility, and resistance to interference deficits observed in NF1 may be because of weak...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Objectif. La sensibilisation centrale renvoie à un dysfonctionnement des voies nociceptives et serait à l’origine des douleurs dans la fibromyalgie (FM) en l’absence ou en présence d’un stimulus de faible intensité. Dit autrement, on peut supposer une modification de la perception douloureuse dans la FM. Les individus souffrant de douleur chronique...
Chapter
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L'Art est une forme de mystère. Il habite l'humain depuis la nuit des temps sous toutes les latitudes et dans toutes les cultures. Cet ouvrage collectif réunissant chercheurs et cliniciens est le fruit d'un Forum de la Société de Neuropsychologie de Langue Française consacré à ce thème pour deux raisons. Tout d'abord, la nécessité de faire le point...
Article
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Objective: To highlight the impact of the increasing attentional load on performance of both normal drivers and drivers with traumatic brain injury. Background: Patients with brain injury have a higher accident risk than people with no brain injury [1], probably as a result of persistent attention disorders. Method: Ten patients and 10 paired...
Article
The aim of this study is to establish whether the thumb is represented independently of the palm. An exogenous spatial cueing paradigm was used, where participants had to detect a tactile stimulus that could appear on the proximal and distal phalanges or metacarpus of the thumb (thenar area; Experiment 1) and the metacarpus of the thumb or hypothen...
Article
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Visual input and attention enhance tactile perception. But do they influence the perception of spontaneous sensations (SPS) arising in the absence of any external stimulus? We have investigated this by requiring subject to focus attention on each hand while orienting overtly toward it (convergent focusing) or away (divergent focusing) and to subseq...
Article
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We examined emotional memory enhancement (EEM) for negative and positive pictures while manipulating encoding and retrieval conditions. Two groups of 40 participants took part in this study. Both groups performed immediate implicit (categorization task) and explicit (recognition task) retrieval, but for one group the tasks were preceded by incident...