John Morton

John Morton
University College London | UCL · Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience

PhD

About

175
Publications
143,543
Reads
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17,274
Citations
Additional affiliations
September 1982 - September 1998
Medical Research Council (UKRI)
Position
  • Managing Director
November 1957 - September 1960
University of Reading
Position
  • Student
October 1998 - present
University College London
Position
  • Professor Emeritus

Publications

Publications (175)
Article
While it is clear that pre-schoolers have episodic memories for unique events, the representation of mundane events is disputed. In three studies we investigated three- and four- year olds' recall of that day's breakfast. In the first study (n = 27), all children discriminated between specific and general questions about their breakfast. However, c...
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Dissociative identity disorder is characterised by the presence in one individual of two or more alternative personality states (alters). For such individuals, the memory representation of a particular event can have full episodic, autonoetic status for one alter, while having the status of knowledge or even being inaccessible to a second alter. Th...
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Introduction: Patients diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder (DID) usually present with alternative personality states (alters) who take separate control of consciousness. Commonly, one alter will claim they have no awareness of events which took place when another alter was in control. However, some kinds of material are transferred acros...
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Seven-digit sequences were recalled in either forward (F) or backward (B) order, with order of recall cued after the stimulus. The stimuli were presented acoustically, and the cue was visual F recall was significantly better than was B recall in contrast to a study by Hinrichs (1968), who used a spoken postcue. It is concluded that the spoken postc...
Article
Following a hypnotic amnesia suggestion, highly hypnotically suggestible subjects may experience amnesia for events. Is there a failure to retrieve the material concerned from autobiographical (episodic) memory, or is it retrieved but blocked from consciousness? Highly hypnotically suggestible subjects produced free-associates to a list of concrete...
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Subjects were presented with a string of digits, following which they were required to judge which of two test digits occurred more recently in the list. As predicted by a trace-decay model, when the earlier of the test digits was repeated, performance was worse than in the control condition.
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An experiment is described which investigates the effects of irrelevant digits interpolated into a list of letters presented for recall. The main result is that when an irrelevant digit follows the final recall item there is a massive serial position effect, with later items in the list being affected more than earlier items. This corresponds to st...
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A word written in Japanese kanji can be single (one kanji character) or compound (more than one character). We investigated the mental representation of single-kanji and two-kanji compound words by means of a long-term facilitation paradigm. Over two experiments, the pattern of results indicated that identification of a target word was facilitated...
Article
Morton & Chambers (1976) showed that the suffix effect - a selective impairment in serial recall on the final serial position of an acoustically presented list - was crucially affected by whether the suffix was a speech sound or a non-speech sound. They also claimed that the classification of a sound as speech-like was determined simply by the acou...
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INVESTIGATES WHETHER THE RELATION BETWEEN THE FREQUENCY OF OCCURRENCE OF A WORD AND ITS SENSORY THRESHOLD CAN PROPERLY BE ASCRIBED TO RESPONSE BIAS. 7 MODELS FOR THE RECOGNITION PROCESS ARE TESTED AGAINST DATA OF C.R. BROWN AND H. RUBENSTEIN (SEE 36:2). THE MODELS ARE OF 2 KINDS: PROBABILISTIC SINGLE-THRESHOLD MODELS AND INFORMATION PROCESSING MODE...
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We compare a variety of theories of panic disorder using a neutral framework: causal modeling. The framework requires identification of key constructs and specification of their interaction. Biological, cognitive, and behavioral elements of the theory have to be clearly distinguished, as do critical past events and current trigger conditions. The t...
Article
A long-awaited book from developmental disorders expert John Morton, Understanding Developmental Disorders: A Causal Modelling Approach makes sense of the many competing theories about what can go wrong with early brain development, causing a child to develop outside the normal range. Based on the idea that understanding developmental disorders req...
Chapter
One thing I do want you to believeReductionismCan we rely on behaviourThe IQ example: a note of cautionWhy cause needs cognition
Chapter
The dyslexia debate: Is there such a thing as dyslexiaThe discrepancy definition of specific reading disabilityTowards a cognitive definitionAn X-type causal model of dyslexiaCompeting theories of dyslexiaNon-biological causesOther biological causes of reading failureHow do we sort among the optionsThe relationship between acquired and developmenta...
Chapter
Representing the effects of environmental factorsCognitive theories of autism
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The serotonin (5-HT) system is considered important for decision-making. However, its role in reward- and punishment-based processing has not yet been clearly determined. The present study examines the effect of 5-HTTLPR genotype and tryptophan depletion on reward- and punishment-related processing, using a task that considers decision-making in si...
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In this study, we examined the impact of goal-directed processing on the response to emotional pictures and the impact of emotional pictures on goal-directed processing. Subjects (N=22) viewed neutral or emotional pictures in the presence or absence of a demanding cognitive task. Goal-directed processing disrupted the BOLD response to emotional pic...
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The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and dorsal anterior cingulate cortices (ACd) are considered important for reward-based decision making. However, work distinguishing their individual functional contributions has only begun. One aspect of decision making that has received little attention is that making the right choice often translates to...
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Previous work has indicated dysfunctional affect-language interactions in individuals with psychopathy through use of the lexical decision task. However, it has been uncertain as to whether these deficits actually reflect impaired affect-language interactions or a more fundamental deficit in general semantic processing. In this study, we examined a...
Article
In this study, we examined decision-making to rewarding or punishing stimuli in individuals with psychopathy (n = 21) and comparison individuals (n = 19) using the Differential Reward/Punishment Learning Task. In this task, the participant chooses between two objects associated with different levels of reward or punishment. Thus, response choice in...
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Frontal lobe and consequent executive dysfunction have long been related to psychopathy. More recently, there have been suggestions that specific regions of frontal cortex, rather than all of frontal cortex, may be implicated in psychopathy. To examine this issue, the authors presented 25 individuals with psychopathy and 30 comparison individuals w...
Article
The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and dorsal anterior cingulate cortices (ACd) are considered important for reward-based decision making. However, work distinguishing their individual functional contributions has only begun. One aspect of decision making that has received little attention is that making the right choice often translates to...
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Full-text available
This study describes a 3-year follow-up investigation of the deterioration of number abilities in a semantic dementia patient (IH). A few studies have previously reported the decline of number knowledge in patients with degenerative disorders, although almost never in semantic dementia (Diesfeldt, 1993; Girelli, Luzzatti, Annoni, & Vecchi, 1999; Gr...
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This study describes a 3-year follow-up investigation of the deterioration of number abilities in a semantic dementia patient (IH). A few studies have previously reported the decline of number knowledge in patients with degenerative disorders, although almost never in semantic dementia (Diesfeldt, 1993; Girelli, Luzzatti, Annoni, & Vecchi, 1999; Gr...
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Now that consciousness is thoroughly out of the way, we can focus more precisely on the kinds of things that can happen underneath. A contrast can be made between dissociation and repression. Dissociation is where a memory record or set of autobiographical memory records cannot be retrieved; repression is where there is retrieval of a record but, b...
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If a clinician has to make decisions on diagnosis and treatment, he or she is confronted with a variety of causal theories. In order to compare these theories a neutral terminology and notational system is needed. The Causal Modelling framework involving three levels of description - biological, cognitive and behavioural - has previously been used...
Article
A variant of the non-nutritive habituation/dishabituation sucking method was used to test 2-month-old English infants’ perception of languages. This method tests for the spontaneous interest of the baby to a change in the stimulus. English and Japanese were clearly discriminated. The difference between French and Japanese was equally clearly not of...
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Pascalis, de Schonen, Morton, Deruelle, and Fabre-Grenet (1995) showed that while 4-day-old infants looked longer at their mother's face than at a stranger's, they did not do so if both women were wearing headscarves. In the present experiment, we obtained similar results for infants of 19–25 days. In contrast, a group of 35- to 40- day-old infants...
Article
The recency effect found in free recall can be accounted for almost entirely in terms of the recall of ordered sequences of items. It is such sequences, presented at the end of the stimulus list but recalled at the very beginning of the response protocol, which produce a recency effect. Such sequences are recalled at the beginning of the response p...
Article
The Current State Buffer has been proposed to account for our ability to keep track of significant stimuli in our immediate environment. The three experiments reported here were designed to test the independence of the Current State Buffer from the established components of Working Memory. Pre-schoolers were used in order to minimize the possible i...
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Two experiments are reported that consider the role of rime as the content of Precategorical Acoustic Storage (PAS). It was hypothesised that with auditory presentation of lists the rime component of the final item (the final vowel and, optionally, terminal consonant cluster of a word) was preserved in PAS and this served as a recall cue to identif...
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To report descriptive data on memory recovery of traumatic material including: degree of prior amnesia, triggers to recovery, qualities of the memory and length of time taken to recover different types of memory. British Psychological Society practitioners who reported having clients with recovered memories in a previous large-scale survey were con...
Article
The work reported provides an information processing account of young children's performance on the Smarties task (Perner, J., Leekam, S.R., & Wimmer, H. 1987, Three-year-olds' difficulty with false belief: the case for a conceptual deficit. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 5, 125-137). In this task, a 3-year-old is shown a Smarties tub...
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There are concerns that memories recovered during therapy are likely to be the result of inappropriate therapeutic techniques. To investigate systematically these concerns. One-hundred and eight therapists provided information on all clients with recovered memories seen in the past three years, and were interviewed in detail on up to three such cli...
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Explanations of the misinformation effect were considered in an experiment using a reversed eyewitness suggestibility design (Lindsay & Johnson, 1989b). Forty-eight subjects read a narrative describing a photograph that they subsequently viewed. For half the subjects, the narrative contained misinformation. Recognition tests for objects appearing i...
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The final report of the American Psychological Association Working Group on Investigation of Memories of Childhood Abuse (J. L. Alpert et al, see record 2000-13581-002) reflects the tensions within the profession over the status to be accorded to recovered memories. As British researchers and clinicians involved in the debate, the authors of this...
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The final report of the American Psychological Association Working Group on Investigation of Memories of Childhood Abuse (J. L. Alpert et al, see record 2000-13581-002) reflects the tensions within the profession over the status to be accorded to recovered memories. As British researchers and clinicians involved in the debate, the authors of this a...
Article
In previous papers (Sims, Henderson, Hulme, & Morton, 1996a; Sims, Henderson, Morton, & Hulme, 1996b) we have found that the motor skills of clumsy children are capable of significant improvement following relatively brief interventions. Most remarkably, this included a 10-minute intervention while testing the kinaesthetic acuity of the children us...
Article
If hypnosis was to be considered a state, one would expect that entering or leaving it would lead to spontaneous state-dependent effects on free recall (e.g. Tulving and Thompson, 1973; Eich, 1980). In apparent support of the contrary view, that hypnosis does not provide state-cues that facilitate free recall, Kihlstrom, Brenneman, Pistole and Shor...
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In celebrating 50 years of EPS involvement in memory, I have taken a personal line rather than trying to achieve even coverage. Accordingly, the paper is in three parts. In the first, some early papers that have resonance for today's debates are described. Their framework was Bartlettian, with versions of schema theory as the guiding principles, an...
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We examined the accounts of 27 survivors of the Marchioness ferry sinking, using cross-validation of accounts to search for instances of motivated forgetting. In order to identify objective items that could be validated, we focused the analysis on subjects' statements of whom they were with at various stages of the disaster. We compared these findi...
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The effectiveness of a kinaesthetic training programme proposed by Laszlo for children with movement difficulties was evaluated by comparing two groups of 10 “clumsy‘ children matched pairwise on age, IQ and sex as well as degree of kinaesthetic and motor impairment. Tests of kinaesthetic ability, using the Parameter Estimation by Sequential Testin...
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The remediation of clumsiness ‐II: Is kinaesthesis the answer? The paper reports the second of two studies designed to evaluate the effectiveness of the Kinaesthetic Training Programme (Laszlo and Bairstow, 1985) for children with movement difficulties. Three groups of 12 children were matched on age, IQ and sex as well as degree of kinaesthetic ar...
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Nature is the international weekly journal of science: a magazine style journal that publishes full-length research papers in all disciplines of science, as well as News and Views, reviews, news, features, commentaries, web focuses and more, covering all branches of science and how science impacts upon all aspects of society and life.
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A rhyming and short-term memory task with visually presented letters were used to study brain activity in five compensated adult developmental dyslexics. Their only cognitive difficulty was in phonological processing, manifest in a wide range of tasks including spoonerisms, phonemic fluency and digit naming speed. PET scans showed that for the dysl...
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We make three suggestions with regard to Mealey's work. First, her lack of a cognitive analysis of the sociopath results in underspecified mappings between sociobiology and behavior. Second, the developmental literature indicates that Mealey's implicit assumption, that moral socialisation is achieved through punishment, is invalid. Third, we advanc...
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Previous experimenters have found that 4-day-old neonates look longer at their mother's face than at a stranger's face. We have replicated this finding under conditions where the infants are only provided with visual information on identity, with all the usual stimuli associated with the presence of the mother's face absent. The structure responsib...
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There are strong parallels between recovered memories and multiple personality disorder, both are associated with child sexual abuse and both involve dense amnesia of one kind of another. Recovered memory is inherently unstable. Since it is relatively stable, the properties of multiple personality disorder have been investigated experimentally in o...
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[discusses] early infant preferences for looking at faces and face-like stimuli / [presents a theory] that there are two mechanisms operating to control infants' attention with respect to faces / CONSPEC constrains structural information concerning the visual characteristics of conspecifics / [CONLERN] refers generically to mechanisms devoted to le...
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Ce colloque (qui est la suite d’un séminaire dirigé par François Bresson et Liliane Sprenger-Charolles à l’EHESS de 1990 à 1992) avait pour but de présenter un état des recherches sur l’acquisition de la lecture-écriture dans les écritures alphabétiques. Sont reproduits les chapitres les plus importants. - Compréhension, décodage et acquisition de...
Book
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Sélection des contributions publiées dans l'ouvrage: "Lecture/écriture: Acquisition (Les actes de la Villette)": - Compréhension/décodage et acquisition de la lecture, José Morais, 10-21; - Approche de la dyslexie développementale par la modélisation causale, John Morton & Uta Frith, 38-56; - Conscience phonologique et apprentissage de la lecture,...
Book
This volume contains the proceedings of a NATO Advanced Research Workshop (ARW) on the topic of "Changes in Speech and Face Processing in Infancy: A glimpse at Developmental Mechanisms of Cognition", which was held in Carry-Ie-Rouet (France) at the Vacanciel "La Calanque", from June 29 to July 3, 1992. For many years, developmental researchers have...
Article
The authors examined infant hearing and vision screening tests for a group of children subsequently diagnosed as autistic and compared them with a group of children suffering from non‐specific developmental delay, as well as with a random sample of records. Four categories (motor, vision, hearing and language, social) were investigated at three age...
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The role of internal feature movement on 1-, 3- and 5-month-old infants' preferences for schematic face-like patterns was studied using an infant control testing procedure. Internal feature movement had a significant effect on the preferences of the 5-month-old group, but not the younger infants.
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This article summarizes recent evidence indicating that individuals suffering from autism have a specific problem in understanding intentions and beliefs. We propose that this problem arises because they are incapable of forming a special kind of mental representation. A single cognitive deficit defines what is common to all autistic individuals. I...
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Goren, Sarty, and Wu (1975) claimed that newborn infants will follow a slowly moving schematic face stimulus with their head and eyes further than they will follow scrambled faces or blank stimuli. Despite the far-reaching theoretical importance of this finding, it has remained controversial and been largely ignored. In Experiment 1 we replicate th...
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Evidence from newborns leads to the conclusion that infants are born with some information about the structure of faces. This structural information, termed CONSPEC, guides the preference for facelike patterns found in newborn infants. CONSPEC is contrasted with a device termed CONLERN, which is responsible for learning about the visual characteris...
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Several disagreements with M. R. Banaji and R. G. Crowder's (see record 1990-00387-001) work on everyday memory are presented. Psychology is no longer a young science. The progress of research in memory is being impeded not by the everyday memory movement, but by an excessively restricted theoretical base. First, the key notion of generalizability...
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Kleiner (1987) carried out a study to examine whether or not the linear systems model (LSM) of infants' visual preferences could predict neonates' preferences among facelike and abstract patterns. Her data showed that for one crucial comparison this model did not predict the data. Despite this discrepancy, claims are being made that Kleiner's data...
Article
Nature is the international weekly journal of science: a magazine style journal that publishes full-length research papers in all disciplines of science, as well as News and Views, reviews, news, features, commentaries, web focuses and more, covering all branches of science and how science impacts upon all aspects of society and life.
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point to some relationships between acquired and developmental dyslexics by examining the information-processing implications of Frith's framework for reading acquisition / these relationships will then be derived through comparisons of processes rather than behavior [Uta] Frith's (1985) framework has been used as the basis of a preliminary infor...
Article
To learn to use an interactive system, a person typically has to acquire a good deal of new knowledge. The ease of learning will depend on the extent to which the design of the task and the interface capitalizes on the user's pre-existing knowledge and his or her cognitive capabilities for learning. This paper explores the nature of both design dec...
Chapter
This paper introduces a notation for discussing development. A Developmental Contingency Model (DCM) focusses on the representations and processes that are necessary for a particular piece of behaviour to emerge. The idea is to trace the contingencies (mostly internal) for the presence of such representations back in the developmental history of th...
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The effects of two therapy methods in the treatment of picture naming problems are compared, using a within-patient design with 12 adult patients with chronic acquired aphasia. We contrast techniques that require the patient to process the meaning corresponding to the picture name (semantic treatment) with those that provide the patients with infor...
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A commentary on Human Memory and Amnesia, edited by L. A. Cermak. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc. 1982, ISBN 0-89859-095-7, £41.65, $50.00.This book is notionally the record of a meeting, held in 1979, which was intended to bridge the gap between researchers working on normal memory processing and those studying the amnesic syndrome. Mo...
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It is proposed that our memory is made up of individual, unconnected Records, to each of which is attached a Heading. Retrieval of a Record can only be accomplished by addressing the attached Heading, the contents of which cannot itself be retrieved. Each Heading is made up of a mixture of content in more or less literal form and context, the latte...
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A series of four experiments are described investigating the effects of a number of treatments on the ability of aphasic patients to retrieve picture names, at some time after the treatment is applied. Auditory word-to-picture matching, visual word-to-picture matching and semantic judgements are found to have effects lasting for up to 24 hours. It...
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An experiment that investigated facilitation of recognition of spoken words presented in noise IS described, Prior to the test session, the subjects either read words or heard them spoken in one of two. voices while making a semantic judgment upon them. There was a large effect of auditory priming on word recognition that did not depend upon the vo...
Article
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Nature is the international weekly journal of science: a magazine style journal that publishes full-length research papers in all disciplines of science, as well as News and Views, reviews, news, features, commentaries, web focuses and more, covering all branches of science and how science impacts upon all aspects of society and life.
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