Datasets:

morteza

/

cogtext

like 0

10.1002/ajmg.b.30379

American journal of medical genetics. Part B, Neuropsychiatric genetics : the official publication of the International Society of Psychiatric Genetics

Am J Med Genet B Neuropsychiatr Genet

Schizophrenic-like neurocognitive deficits in children and adolescents with 22q11 deletion syndrome.

22q11.2 Deletion Syndrome (22q11DS) is the most common genetic microdeletion syndrome affecting humans. The syndrome is associated with general cognitive impairments and specific deficits in visual-spatial ability, non-verbal reasoning, and planning skills. 22q11DS is also associated with behavioral and psychiatric abnormalities, including a markedly elevated risk for schizophrenia. Research findings indicate that people with schizophrenia, as well as those identified as schizoptypic, show specific cognitive deficits in the areas of sustained attention, executive functioning, and verbal working memory. The present study examined such schizophrenic-like cognitive deficits in children and adolescents with 22q11DS (n = 26) and controls (n = 25) using a cross-sectional design. As hypothesized, 22q11DS participants exhibited deficits in intelligence, achievement, sustained attention, executive functioning, and verbal working memory compared to controls. Furthermore, deficits in attention and executive functioning were more pronounced in the 22q11DS sample relative to general cognitive impairment. These findings suggest that the same pattern of neuropsychological impairment seen in patients with schizophrenia is present in non-psychotic children identified as at-risk for the development of schizophrenia based on a known genetic risk marker.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1093/brain/awl199

Brain : a journal of neurology

Brain

Neuropsychological and neuroanatomical correlates of perseverative responses in subacute stroke.

Patients with left-sided neglect frequently show repetitive behaviour on the ipsilesional side, such as re-markings on cancellation tasks or extensive elaboration on drawings. It is unclear whether these perseverative responses occur as a symptom of hemi-neglect or inattention in general, and/or whether they are related to anatomical brain correlates such as lesion location, lesion side or volume. In a first study, we examined the prevalence and neuropsychological correlates of perseverative responses in 206 subacute stroke patients and 63 healthy controls. Perseverative responses were considered present when there was at least one re-marking on the Star Cancellation, and both the degree and spatial distribution of re-markings were examined. A distinction was made between hemi-neglect and non-lateralized inattention. Spatial and verbal working memory were assessed with the Corsi Block Span and the Digit Span. Verbal and non-verbal executive function was assessed with the Visual Elevator and Letter Fluency. Stroke patients without inattention demonstrated re-markings that were related to executive performance, and the degree of perseveration was equally distributed across the sheet. Hemi-neglect patients but not patients with generalized inattention demonstrated more re-markings than controls, suggesting that a lateralized spatial attention bias triggers the perseverative responses. Patients with left and right hemi-neglect showed the same prevalence of perseveration, but the distribution of re-markings was more lateralized towards the ipsilesional side in patients with right-hemispheric stroke. The degree of perseveration in patients with hemi-neglect was related to the severity of the neglect. The goal of the second study on a subset of patients (n = 127) was to determine the neuroanatomical correlates of perseverative responses in the early phase of stroke. Lesion anatomy was administered by indicating involvement of frontal, parietal, temporal, occipital lobe, caudate nucleus, lenticular nucleus and/or thalamus. Lesion volume was calculated using a manual tracing technique. Lesion analyses indicated that perseverative behaviour is strongly associated with lesions involving the caudate nucleus or the lenticular nucleus, independent of lesion volume. The caudate nucleus was an important correlate of perseveration independent of the presence of hemi-neglect. No association was found between lesion side and perseverative responses, in contrast to previous studies. In conclusion, a stroke involving the basal ganglia and the presence of (left- or right-sided) hemi-neglect are two important associates of perseverative responses in the subacute phase of stroke.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1016/j.schres.2006.05.019

Schizophrenia research

Schizophr Res

Neural correlates of verbal and nonverbal working memory deficits in individuals with schizophrenia and their high-risk siblings.

Impaired working memory and functional brain activation deficits within prefrontal cortex (PFC) may be associated with vulnerability to schizophrenia. This study compared working memory and PFC activation in individuals with schizophrenia, their unaffected siblings and healthy comparison participants. We administered a "2back" version of the "nback" task. Functional MRI (fMRI) was used to measure brain activity. Nineteen individuals with DSM-IV schizophrenia, 18 of their siblings, and 72 healthy comparison participants underwent fMRI scans while performing word and face "nback" working memory tasks. Repeated trials (items whose prior presentation was not in the correct nback position) allowed us to assess group differences in the ability to code the temporal order of items. Individuals with schizophrenia and their siblings performed worse than controls on repeated lure trials, suggesting an association between schizophrenia and impairments in the coding of temporal order within working memory. Both individuals with schizophrenia and their siblings also demonstrated abnormal brain activation in PFC, such that both groups had hyperactivation in response to word stimuli and hypoactivation in response to face stimuli. These results provide further evidence that individuals with schizophrenia and their siblings are impaired in their ability to encode the temporal order of items within working memory and that disturbances in working memory and PFC activation may be genetic markers of the vulnerability to schizophrenia.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1007/s11055-006-0078-9

Neuroscience and behavioral physiology

Neurosci Behav Physiol

The role of the cognitive activity context in the conservatism of unconscious visual sets.

Studies in healthy adults were performed to compare measures of the rigidity of a verbal set in three series of experiments: in series 1, pseudowords were presented at the set-forming stage of the experiment, while common words were presented in the test stage; series 2 used the pseudoword/word conditions of series 1 with the additional task of identifying the position of a target stimulus in a matrix, requiring discrimination from other symbols in terms of two characteristics; in series 3, the pseudoword/word test was followed by an initial task consisting of identifying the matrix position of a target stimulus in conditions in which the need to discriminate was minimized. The results supported the hypothesis that the rigidity of a visual set depends on the cognitive activity context. This property is significantly dependent on the loading applied to working memory and the cognitive tasks solved by the subject, particularly the ratio of involvement of the ventral and dorsal visual systems in the cortical processing of sequentially acting verbal and non-verbal visual stimuli. The cognitive set paradigm serves as a model for experimental studies of the roles of the ventral and dorsal visual systems in organizing recognition functions.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1016/j.schres.2006.04.021

Schizophrenia research

Schizophr Res

Mixed handedness is associated with the Disorganization dimension of schizotypy in a young male population.

Within the ASPIS (Athens Study of Psychosis Proneness and Incidence of Schizophrenia) we sought out to examine in accordance with previous reports if a deviation from dextrality is associated with an augmented endorsement of self rated schizotypal personality traits in a large population of 1129 young male army recruits. Schizotypal traits were assessed using the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire and hand preference membership was determined by applying stringent criteria derived from the Annett Handedness Questionnaire and the Porac-Coren questionnaire of lateral preferences. By adopting three different definitions of hand preference membership, we confirmed an association between mixed handedness and increased schizotypal personality traits, and in particular with Disorganization schizotypy that encompasses aspects of self perceived difficulties in verbal communication. Non-verbal cognitive ability, as indexed by measurement of non-verbal IQ, sustained attention and working memory was not associated with hand preference. We argue that a deviation from normal cerebral lateralization, as indexed by mixed handedness, is associated with mild sub clinical language dysfunction, rather than non-verbal cognitive ability, and this might be relevant to the expression of psychosis phenotype.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1212/01.wnl.0000216273.94142.84

Neurology

Neurology

Effect of lamotrigine on cognition in children with epilepsy.

Lamotrigine does not affect cognition in healthy adult volunteers or adult patients with epilepsy, but its effect on cognition in children is uncertain. To compare the effect of lamotrigine and placebo on cognition in children with well-controlled or mild epilepsy. In a double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover study, 61 children with well-controlled or mild epilepsy were randomly assigned to add-on therapy with either lamotrigine followed by placebo or placebo followed by lamotrigine. Each treatment phase was 9 weeks, the crossover period 5 weeks. A neuropsychological test battery was performed during EEG monitoring at baseline and at the end of placebo and drug phases. The paired Student' t test was used for statistical analysis for neuropsychological data (two tailed) with a p value of 0.01 considered significant. Carryover and period effect were analyzed with generalized linear modeling (SPSS 10). Forty-eight children completed the study. Seizure frequency was similar during both treatment phases. No significant difference was found in continuous performance, binary choice reaction time, verbal and nonverbal recognition, computerized visual searching task, verbal and spatial delayed recognition, and verbal and nonverbal working memory between placebo and lamotrigine treatment phase. There was no significant carryover and period effect when corrected for randomization. Lamotrigine exhibits no clinically significant cognitive effects in adjunctive therapy for children with epilepsy.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

Revista de neurologia

Rev Neurol

[Executive function disorders].

To review the development, anatomy and physiology of executive functions (EF) in normal and pathological conditions. EF consist of several internal mental process design to solve mental and environmental complex problems in an efficient and acceptable way to the person and the society. EF include inhibition of behavior and irrelevant information, nonverbal working memory, verbal working memory, self-regulation of affect, motivation and arousal, planning, decision making, self monitoring of the entire solving problem process and self evaluation of the results of the action taken. The anatomical substrate is at the prefrontal lobe cortex and its afferent and efferent structures. Neurotransmitters involved in activation of neurons at the prefrontal cortex are dopamine and norepinephrine and in less degree acetylcholine and serotonine. Disorders of one or more of the EF in children and adolescents are found in attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, Tourette syndrome, bipolar disease, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorders, autism and traumatic brain injury.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1093/brain/awh711

Brain : a journal of neurology

Brain

Neuropsychological sequelae of bacterial and viral meningitis.

Survivors of meningitis often complain about neurological and neuropsychological consequences. In this study, the extent of these sequelae was quantified and correlated to MRI findings. Neurological, neuropsychological and neuroradiological examinations were performed with adult patients younger than 70 years, 1-12 years after recovery from bacterial meningitis (BM; n = 59), or from viral meningitis (VM; n = 59). Patients with other potential causes for neuropsychological deficits (e.g. alcoholism) were carefully excluded. Patients were compared to 30 healthy subjects adjusted for age, gender and length of school education. With the exception of attention functions, both patient groups showed more frequently pathological results than the control group for all domains examined. Applying an overall cognitive sum score, patients after BM did not differ significantly in their performance from patients after VM. Separate analyses of various cognitive domains, however, revealed a higher rate of persistent disturbances in short-term and working memory after BM than after VM. Moreover, patients after BM exhibited greater impairment of executive functions. Associative learning of verbal material was also reduced. These deficits could not be ascribed to impaired alertness functions or decreased motivation in BM patients. Applying a logistic regression model, the neuropsychological outcome was related to the neurological outcome. Patients with a Glasgow Outcome Scale (GOS) of <5 had more frequently impaired test results for non-verbal learning and memory. GOS was also correlated with performance in executive functions. Brain volume was lower and ventricular volume was higher in the bacterial than in the VM group, and cerebral volume and the amount of white matter lesions of patients after BM were negatively correlated with short-term and working memory. In conclusion, patients after both BM and VM with favourable outcome showed affected learning and memory functions. More patients after BM than after VM displayed pathological short-term and working memory. BM resulted in poorer performance in executive functions, language, short-term memory and verbal learning/memory tests. As a result of neurological and neuropsychological sequelae, BM with a GOS > or = 4 led to decreased activities of daily living but only a minority of patients were disabled in a way that social functions were affected. The extent of neuropsychological sequelae of BM might have been overestimated in earlier studies which often had not been controlled for comorbidity factors such as alcoholism.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1186/1744-9081-1-20

Behavioral and brain functions : BBF

Behav Brain Funct

EEG correlates of verbal and nonverbal working memory.

Distinct cognitive processes support verbal and nonverbal working memory, with verbal memory depending specifically on the subvocal rehearsal of items. We recorded scalp EEG while subjects performed a Sternberg task. In each trial, subjects judged whether a probe item was one of the three items in a study list. Lists were composed of stimuli from one of five pools whose items either were verbally rehearsable (letters, words, pictures of common objects) or resistant to verbal rehearsal (sinusoidal grating patterns, single dot locations). We found oscillatory correlates unique to verbal stimuli in the theta (4-8 Hz), alpha (9-12 Hz), beta (14-28 Hz), and gamma (30-50 Hz) frequency bands. Verbal stimuli generally elicited greater power than did nonverbal stimuli. Enhanced verbal power was found bilaterally in the theta band, over frontal and occipital areas in the alpha and beta bands, and centrally in the gamma band. When we looked specifically for cases where oscillatory power in the time interval between item presentations was greater than oscillatory power during item presentation, we found enhanced beta activity in the frontal and occipital regions. These results implicate stimulus-induced oscillatory activity in verbal working memory and beta activity in the process of subvocal rehearsal.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1080/13682820400027750

International journal of language & communication disorders

Int J Lang Commun Disord

Spatio-visual memory of children with specific language impairment: evidence for generalized processing problems.

Children with Specific language Impairment (SLI) have problems with verbal memory, particularly with tasks that have more processing demands. They also have slower speeds of responding for some tasks. To identify the extent to which young children with SLI would differ in performance from age-matched non-impaired children on a set of spatio-visual memory tasks. It was predicted that if memory limitations of children with SLI extend beyond the verbal domain to other domains, their performance would be significantly poorer on the spatio-visual tasks than that of the comparison group. It was also predicted that they would be slower in responding. Six spatio-visual tasks were used to compare the performance of 21 children with SLI, with a mean age of 54.1 months, and 21 age-matched non-impaired children. The tasks ranged in difficulty from simple recall to a search-based working memory task. All tasks were administered though a laptop computer and responses were non-verbal using a touch screen. The children with SLI were not significantly slower than the comparison group. However, they were significantly less accurate than the comparison group in recalling patterns, but not in recalling locations. The accuracy for both groups was lower on spatial recall than on pattern recall. The children with SLI were also significantly less able to learn to associate a particular pattern with a particular location, and to have a shorter spatial span. However, on a spatial search task testing working memory, the groups did not differ significantly. The results indicate that the memory limitations of children with SLI are not restricted to verbal memory, and this fact has implications for its aetiology. Intervention programmes for young children with SLI need to extend beyond language in order to help them develop strategies for processing information in different situations.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1177/1073191105276796

Assessment

Assessment

The construct validity of the stanford-binet 5 measures of working memory.

This study examines the validity of the measures of verbal and nonverbal working memory on the Stanford-Binet Fifth Edition (SB5). The validity evidence included Rasch-based, criterion-referenced item mapping, correlations with other clinical measures of memory, and prediction of reading and mathematics scores. The item mapping clearly demonstrates a parallel between increasing item difficulty and a progression of item characteristics that placed increasing demands on verbal and nonverbal working memory. The higher correlations of the SB5 verbal and nonverbal working memory subtests with other measures of verbal and nonverbal memory, respectively, and lower correlations with nonverbal and verbal memory measures, respectively, clearly show convergent and divergent validity. The higher correlations between SB5 verbal working memory and reading skills and between SB5 nonverbal memory and mathematics skills are consistent with past research.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1037/0894-4105.19.4.446

Neuropsychology

Neuropsychology

Neuropsychological correlates of ADHD symptoms in preschoolers.

The authors examined the neuropsychological status of 22 preschoolers at risk for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and 50 matched control children, using measures of nonverbal working memory, perceptual and motor inhibition, and memory for relative time. All tasks included paired control conditions, which allowed for the isolation of discrete executive function constructs. Group differences were evident on several measures of neuropsychological functioning; however, after accounting for nonexecutive abilities, no deficits could be attributed to specific functions targeted by the tasks. Performance on executive measures was not related to objective indices of activity level or ratings of ADHD symptoms. Yet, the fact that at-risk preschoolers were highly symptomatic casts doubt on whether executive function deficits and/or frontostriatal networks contribute etiologically to early behavioral manifestations of ADHD.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1081/13803390490918633

Journal of clinical and experimental neuropsychology

J Clin Exp Neuropsychol

The children's size-ordering task: a new measure of nonverbal working memory.

We present a new measure of nonverbal working memory for children, entitled the Children's Size-Ordering Task (CSOT). Two separate studies were conducted to test the utility of and partially validate this measure. Three specific hypotheses were investigated, namely that: (1) CSOT performance would correlate with age; (2) the CSOT would correlate with established measures of working memory; and (3) children with ADHD would exhibit weaker performance on the CSOT relative to typically developing community control children. Participants across both studies included 50 children with ADHD and 50 control children matched by age and gender. Collectively, the results of both studies supported all three hypotheses. These findings lend support to the CSOT as a valid and effective measure of nonverbal working memory.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2005.01.010

Neuropsychologia

Neuropsychologia

Self-ordered pointing in children with autism: failure to use verbal mediation in the service of working memory?

This study tested the hypothesis that children with autism are impaired in using verbal encoding and rehearsal strategies in the service of working memory. Participants were 24 high-ability, school-age children with autism and a comparison group matched on verbal and non-verbal IQ, receptive and expressive vocabulary, and visual memory. Working memory was assessed using verbal and non-verbal variants of a non-spatial, self-ordered pointing test [Petrides, M., & Milner, B. (1982). Deficits on subject-ordered tasks after frontal- and temporal-lobe lesions in man. Neuropsychologia, 20, 249-262] in which children had to point to a new stimulus in a set upon each presentation without repeating a previous choice. In the verbal condition, the stimuli were pictures of concrete, nameable objects, whereas in the non-verbal condition, the stimuli were not easily named or verbally encoded. Participants were also administered a verbal span task to assess non-executive verbal rehearsal skills. Although the two groups were equivalent in verbal rehearsal skills, the autism group performed significantly less well in the verbal, but not the non-verbal, self-ordered pointing test. These findings suggested that children with autism are deficient in the use of verbal mediation strategies to maintain and monitor goal-related information in working memory. The findings are discussed in terms of possible autistic impairments in episodic memory as well as working memory.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1111/j.1467-8624.2005.00872.x

Child development

Child Dev

The development of nonverbal working memory and executive control processes in adolescents.

The prefrontal cortex modulates executive control processes and structurally matures throughout adolescence. Consistent with these events, prefrontal functions that demand high levels of executive control may mature later than those that require working memory but decreased control. To test this hypothesis, adolescents (9 to 20 years old) completed nonverbal working memory tasks with varying levels of executive demands. Findings suggest that recall-guided action for single units of spatial information develops until 11 to 12 years. The ability to maintain and manipulate multiple spatial units develops until 13 to 15 years. Strategic self-organization develops until ages 16 to 17 years. Recognition memory did not appear to develop over this age range. Implications for prefrontal cortex organization by level of processing are discussed.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1348/000709905X27696

The British journal of educational psychology

Br J Educ Psychol

Patterns of language impairment and behaviour in boys excluded from school.

High levels of behaviour problems are found in children with language impairments, but less is known about the level and nature of language impairment in children with severe behavioural problems. In particular, previous data suggest that at primary age, receptive impairments are more closely related to behaviour problems, whereas expressive language has a closer link at a later age. The study assessed expressive and receptive language problems in boys excluded from primary and secondary schools, to investigate the extent of impairment, the pattern of relations between age, receptive and expressive language, and relations with different aspects of behaviour. Nineteen boys (8 - 16 years of age) who had been excluded from school and 19 non-excluded controls matched for age and school participated. The sample was given assessments of: receptive language from the British Picture Vocabulary Scale (BPVS), and Wechsler Objective Language Dimensions (WOLD); expressive-language evaluations from the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC); auditory working memory evaluations from the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals (CELF); verbal reasoning (from the WISC); and non-verbal IQ assessments Raven's matrices. Teachers completed behaviour ratings using the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ). Excluded boys were significantly poorer than controls on expressive measures but similar on receptive language and non-verbal IQ. Boys excluded from primary school were poorer than controls on auditory working memory. Expressive problems were linked with high levels of emotional symptoms. Many of the excluded boys had previously unidentified language problems, supporting the need for early recognition and assessment of language in boys with behaviour problems. Expressive problems in particular may be a risk factor.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1111/j.1469-7610.2004.00355.x

Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines

J Child Psychol Psychiatry

Non-verbal cognitive development and language impairment.

Specific language impairment (SLI) is currently partly defined by the presence of non-verbal IQ scores in the normal range. However, not only is there a debate concerning where 'normal thresholds' should be, but increasing information about the presence of processing deficits in SLI have led some researchers to question the use of IQ criteria in clinical diagnosis. In particular, little is known about the longitudinal and developmental patterns of cognitive performance in this population. Data from a long-term follow-up study of SLI was examined in 82 children defined at original participation as having SLI who had IQ measurements at 7, 8, 11 and 14 years. Analyses revealed a significant fall between 7 and 14 years of over 20 IQ points. This fall took place mainly between 8 and 11 years but was still continuing between 11 and 14 years. Further investigation revealed different groups of children showing different developmental patterns in IQ, even after controlling for baseline measurement. These groups also showed significantly different language outcomes at 14 years. Analyses controlling for IQ at 7 were also performed that suggested a dynamic process between language and cognitive development. These findings appear to be in agreement with a model of impairment that views 'Residual Normality' as unlikely (Karmiloff-Smith, 1998; Thomas & Karmiloff-Smith, 2002). The implications are therefore discussed in relation to the dynamic development of systems along with the possible cognitive mechanisms (such as working memory) that might interact with language to create an SLI profile.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

Revista de neurologia

Rev Neurol

[The neuropsychological phenotype of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: are there differences among subtypes?].

Recent studies suggest that the ADHD subtypes would be best conceptualized as separate clinical entities, based on their epidemiology, central and associate symptomatology. To determine the differences and similarities between subtypes in its associate symptomatology, specifically in the neuropsychological phenotype of executive dysfunction. A group of children between 6 and 14 years of age with a diagnosis of ADHD-innattentive subtype (DESAT, n = 20) and another with ADHD-combined subtype (COMB, n = 39). Overall, the COMB subject sample displayed lower performance than DESAT group. Statistically significant differences were found in Kaufman-ABC-hands movement subtest, Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST)-total error and WCST-conceptual level. The subtypes differ significantly in measures or non verbal working memory, hindsight, foresight, and motor control. Both groups share a deficit in response output speed and verbal working memory. We hypothesized areas of cognitive superiority for each subtype: spatial memory for the inattentive and gestaltic composition for the combined. Results provide evidence to support quantitative and qualitative differences in the neuropsychological profile between the ADHD-innatentive and combined subtypes.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1207/s15374424jccp3401_14

Journal of clinical child and adolescent psychology : the official journal for the Society of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, American Psychological Association, Division 53

J Clin Child Adolesc Psychol

Time estimation and performance on reproduction tasks in subtypes of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

This study compared Hispanic children (ages 7 to 11) with combined type (CT, n=33) and inattentive type (IT, n=21) attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and a control group (n=25) on time-estimation and time-reproduction tasks. The ADHD groups showed larger errors in time reproduction but not in time estimation than the control group, and the groups did not differ from each other on their performance on this task. Individual differences could not be accounted for by oppositional-defiance ratings and low math or reading scores. Although various measures of executive functioning did not make significant unique contributions to time estimation performance, those of interference control and nonverbal working memory did so to the time-reproduction task. Findings suggest that ADHD is associated with a specific impairment in the capacity to reproduce rather than estimate time durations and that this may be related to the children's deficits in inhibition and working memory.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1007/s00213-004-2083-4

Psychopharmacology

Psychopharmacology (Berl)

Effect of ecstasy use on neuropsychological function: a study in Hong Kong.

Previous studies on the effects of ecstasy on neuropsychological performance have often recruited small sample sizes. The present study was conducted to validate previous findings regarding the effects of ecstasy consumption on neuropsychological performance. A comprehensive neuropsychological investigation was conducted in 100 abstinent ecstasy users and 100 matched non-user counterparts on standardized measures of working memory, verbal and non-verbal memory, verbal and figural fluency, and selective and switching attention. Abstinent ecstasy users were impaired on verbal and non-verbal memory, complex attention, and verbal fluency, but not on working memory, relative to their non-user counterparts. Of particular interest was the fact that abstinent ecstasy users performed better on figural fluency relative to their non-user counterparts. In addition, only cumulative ecstasy consumption correlated with neuropsychological performances among abstinent ecstasy users. Canonical discriminant analysis yielded verbal and visual memory, switching attention, and verbal fluency as potential core neuropsychological variables for differentiating abstinent ecstasy users from non-users. Levels of depression and general non-verbal intelligence, as measured by the Beck Depression Inventory and the test of non-verbal Intelligence, respectively, were not likely to affect these findings, since these measures were matched between ecstasy users and non-users. These findings suggest that previous ecstasy consumption can affect a wide range of neuropsychological performance, though figural fluency may be subsequently enhanced as a result of the phenomenon of "cortical disinhibition." Furthermore, measures of verbal and visual memory, switching attention, and verbal fluency may be particularly useful for differentiating abstinent ecstasy users from non-users.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1136/jnnp.2003.018093

Journal of neurology, neurosurgery, and psychiatry

J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry

Evidence for distinct cognitive deficits after focal cerebellar lesions.

Anatomical evidence and lesion studies, as well as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies, indicate that the cerebellum contributes to higher cognitive functions. Cerebellar posterior lateral regions seem to be relevant for cognition, while vermal lesions seem to be associated with changes in affect. However, the results remain controversial. Deficits of patients are sometimes still attributed to motor impairment. We present data from a detailed neuropsychological examination of 21 patients with cerebellar lesions due to tumour or haematoma, and 21 controls matched for age, sex, and years of education. Patients showed deficits in executive function, and in attentional processes such as working memory and divided attention. Further analysis revealed that patients with right-sided lesions were in general more impaired than those with left-sided lesions. Those hypotheses that suggest that lesions of the right cerebellar hemisphere lead to verbal deficits, while those of the left lead to non-verbal deficits, have in part been confirmed. The generally greater impairment of those patients with a right-sided lesion has been interpreted as resulting from the connection of the right cerebellum to the left cerebral hemisphere, which is dominant for language functions and crucial for right hand movements. Motor impairment was correlated with less than half of the cognitive measures, with no stronger tendency for correlation with cognitive tests that require motor responses discernible. The results are discussed on the basis of an assumption that the cerebellum has a predicting and preparing function, indicating that cerebellar lesions lead to a "dysmetria of thought."

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2004.04.027

Neuropsychologia

Neuropsychologia

Theory of mind after traumatic brain injury.

This study investigated whether people with severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) demonstrate a specific impairment on tasks requiring them to make inferences about others' mental states (theory of mind tasks). Participants with severe TBI were compared to a healthy group on verbal first-order and second-order theory of mind (ToM) tasks, non-verbal ToM tasks and on verbal and non-verbal tasks requiring them to make general (non-mental) inferences (NMIs). The clinical group performed more poorly than controls on both ToM and NMI tasks. This performance was not completely accounted for by the working memory or implicit language demands of the tasks. Multiple regression analyses suggested that patients with TBI have a general weakness in inference-making that, combined with linguistic and working memory limitations, impairs their performance on both non-verbal and second-order ToM tasks. However, a specific ToM impairment may underlie their poor performance on verbal first-order tasks. Implications of this finding for the possibility of a separate cognitive module of ToM are discussed, as well as for the rehabilitation of social deficits after TBI.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1016/j.schres.2003.07.007

Schizophrenia research

Schizophr Res

Nonverbal working memory deficits in schizophrenia patients: evidence of a supramodal executive processing deficit.

Although there have been several investigations of spatial working memory performance in schizophrenia patients, there have been considerably fewer studies of object working memory. The purpose of the present investigation was to evaluate the domain specificity of nonverbal working memory impairment in schizophrenia patients. Delayed match-to-sample tasks involving spatial, identity and affective information were administered to schizophrenia and schizophrenia-spectrum patients (n=36) and normal controls (n=29). Using visual stimuli that can be considered prototypical of object vision, namely, faces we observed that schizophrenia patients perform poorly on working memory tasks that are based on the identity and/or features of the stimulus (i.e., object-based working memory tasks) as well as on a working memory task based on the spatial location of the stimulus. We observed significant associations between global ratings of negative symptoms and working memory performance. These data demonstrate that the working memory deficit displayed by schizophrenia and schizophrenia-spectrum patients extends to nonspatial visual domains.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1080/13682820310001616985

International journal of language & communication disorders

Int J Lang Commun Disord

Sentence comprehension in children with specific language impairment: effects of input rate and phonological working memory.

Many children with specific language impairment (SLI) exhibit sentence comprehension difficulties. In some instances, these difficulties appear to be related to poor linguistic knowledge and, in other instances, to inferior general processing abilities. Two processing deficiencies evidenced by these children include reduced linguistic processing speed and diminished phonological working memory (PWM) capacity. While providing children with SLI a slower input rate appears to facilitate their immediate (real-time) processing of language; it is not known whether such a manipulation might also promote better offline (conventional) sentence comprehension. Complicating the potential benefits of a slower input rate on these children's offline comprehension is that a slower input rate might negatively interact with their PWM deficit. That is, a slower presentation rate may have the unintended consequence of placing too great a temporal burden on these children's vulnerable PWM system, thereby leading to even poorer comprehension. That is, a slower input rate presumably requires the listener to store previously processed information for a longer period while new, incoming material is being processed. To investigate the interaction of input rate and PWM capacity on the sentence comprehension of children with SLI. It was hypothesized that if a slower input rate negatively affects the PWM functioning of children with SLI, these children would comprehend significantly fewer sentences presented at a slower rate versus sentences presented at a normal rate. It was also hypothesized that input rate should have no differential effect on the typically developing control children. A group of 12 school-age children with SLI, a group of 12 age-matched children (CA), and a group of 12 receptive syntax-matched (RS) children (all with normal-range non-verbal IQ and hearing) completed a conventional picture-pointing sentence comprehension task. Sentences were presented at a normal speaking rate and a slower rate (25% time expanded). Children also completed a non-word repetition task, which served as an index of PWM capacity. Results of the PWM task revealed that the children with SLI repeated fewer three- and four-syllable non-words than both the CA and RS children, suggesting they had reduced PWM capacity. On the sentence comprehension task, a significant group by input rate interaction emerged. The children with SLI yielded significantly poorer comprehension of normal-rate sentences compared with both the CA and RS children. Whereas input rate had no differential effect on CA and RS children's comprehension, the comprehension of the children with SLI improved to the level of RS children in the slow-rate condition. Correlational analyses showed no significant association between PWM and sentence comprehension in either rate condition for any of the groups. Together, these findings suggest that the simple manipulation of altering speaking rate to children with SLI indeed can facilitate sentence comprehension, with no apparent detrimental effect on the operations of their PWM system.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1080/02699050210147220

Brain injury

Brain Inj

Subject ordered pointing task performance following severe traumatic brain injury in adults.

The utility of a non-verbal, untimed subject ordered pointing task for identifying memory deficit in adult patients with TBI was tested. Using a cross-sectional design, the working memory performance of 70 adults with severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) and 45 uninjured adults was investigated on a computerized, self-paced, non-verbal subject ordered pointing task. Persons with severe TBI were impaired on measures of working memory relative to the control subjects. In addition, the task appeared to be sensitive to severity of injury as measured by the Glasgow Coma Scale, even within a truncated range of severity (GCS scores 3-8). It was concluded that the subject ordered pointing task is useful in identifying memory deficits in persons with brain injury.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

Aging clinical and experimental research

Aging Clin Exp Res

Changes in cognitive functioning from 75 to 80 years of age: a 5-year follow-up in two Nordic localities.

The purpose of the study was to analyze changes and stability in cognitive functions among older persons aged from 75 to 80 years, as well as differences in this development between two Nordic localities. The number of subjects taking part in the follow-up phase was 188 in Jyväskylä, Finland, and 184 in Göteborg, Sweden. Cognitive functions were assessed using conventional memory tests (Digit Span Forward and Backward for assessing primary working memory; Visual Reproduction for visual memory) and intelligence tests (Digit Symbol for assessing psychomotor speed; Word Fluency for verbal ability; Raven's Matrices for non-verbal reasoning). With few exceptions, the mean test scores declined significantly among the retested men and women in both localities. Analyses showed that generally over half of the subjects maintained their level of performance over the 5-year period, while a part of the deteriorating minority had a steep decline. There were significant differences in the test performance between the localities both at the baseline and follow-up assessments, but few differences between women and men. On the whole, however, the groups of older women and men from the two Nordic localities had a similar pattern of cognitive development from 75 to 80 years of age.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1016/s0165-1781(02)00236-6

Psychiatry research

Psychiatry Res

Changes in cognitive functioning following comprehensive treatment for first episode patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders.

The course of cognitive functioning over a 1-year period was examined among a community cohort of individuals presenting with first episode schizophrenia spectrum psychosis. Data were obtained for 83 outpatients at entry to an early intervention program and 12 months later on the National Adult Reading Test, Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scales-Third Edition, Wechsler Memory Scales-Third Edition, Paced Auditory Serial Addition Task, Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, Stroop Colour and Word Test, Trail Making Test, Continuous Performance Task and Thurstone Word Fluency Test. Paired sample t-tests indicated significant and positive changes in verbal and non-verbal intelligence, auditory and visual memory, working memory and some aspects of executive functioning. Processing speed also improved though remained an area of relative weakness for this sample. Findings indicated generally average performance at both assessment periods. Neither gender nor duration of untreated psychosis were related to the degree of change in cognitive functioning for this sample. The implications of these findings and the impact of early intervention with this population are discussed.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1046/j.1440-1614.2002.01093.x

The Australian and New Zealand journal of psychiatry

Aust N Z J Psychiatry

Neuropsychological functioning in children with DSM-IV combined type Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

To compare the global cognitive functioning and frontal lobe functioning of children with and without DSM-IV combined type Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Participants were 6 to 10 year old, clinic-referred children diagnosed with combined type ADHD, who were medication naïve; and an age (+/- 3 months) and sex matched group of children without behaviour problems. The performance of the two groups were compared on measures of intellectual functioning and tests designed to assess the functions of the frontal lobes (verbal and-non-verbal fluency, reasoning, problem solving, spatial working memory, attention). The children with ADHD obtained significantly lower Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-third edition IQ scores than controls and performed more poorly across the range of frontal lobe tests. Group differences on these tests were attenuated when IQ scores were included in the analyses as a covariate. Children with combined type ADHD have mild to moderate global cognitive impairment together with some impairment of functions subserved by the frontal lobes. Longitudinal studies are required to determine if the deficit in global cognitive functioning is a primary deficit or secondary to the deficit in frontal lobe functioning. The importance of neuro-psychological assessment and follow-up for children with ADHD is stressed. Study limitations relate to the generalizability of the findings and the absence of a psychiatric control group.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1037/0033-295x.109.4.729

Psychological review

Psychol Rev

Does a prosocial-selfish distinction help explain the biological affects? Comment on Buck (1999).

R. Buck (1999) argued that a conceptual distinction between prosocial and selfish motivation is necessary to understand the biological affects (consciously experienced feelings and desires having an innate neurochemical basis). However, at a biological level of analysis, a prosocial-selfish distinction is doubtful empirically and conceptually. For this reason, Buck's proposed typology of biological affects is unclear. Moreover, a prosocial-selfish distinction is not necessary to explain hemispheric differences in brain activity associated with affect. In contrast, an approach-withdrawal distinction explains some data uniquely well, although numerous exceptions imply that simple models are inadequate. To extend hemispheric models of experienced emotion, a prosocial-selfish distinction is unlikely to be explanatory, whereas an alternative account based on a distinction between verbal and nonverbal working memory may be useful.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1016/s0304-3940(02)00429-9

Neuroscience letters

Neurosci Lett

Delay modulates spectral correlates in the human EEG of non-verbal auditory working memory.

Studies using neuroimaging and electro- and magnetoencephalographic techniques have begun to identify the brain structures and dynamics that underlie auditory working memory. However, past research has not clearly characterized how the neural dynamics varies with the delay over which auditory information must be maintained. We used electroencephalogram band power as a measure of relative neuronal synchrony during a non-verbal auditory working memory task. Comparing the working memory task with a control recognition task, the relative synchrony in bilateral theta and alpha bands was unchanged using a two second delay. However, five and ten second delays produced increases and decreases in relative synchrony, respectively. The memory task also induced greater synchronization in beta and gamma bands over the right temporal cortex during the two and five second delays. The results suggest that the cortical dynamics that underlie auditory working memory are highly dependent upon a duration-dependent encoding strategy.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1111/1469-7610.00052

Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines

J Child Psychol Psychiatry

Young adult academic outcomes in a longitudinal sample of early identified language impaired and control children.

The long-term academic consequences of childhood language impairment are both theoretically and clinically important. An unbiased appraisal of these outcomes, however, requires carefully designed, longitudinal research. A group of children first identified as having speech and/or language impairment in a community-based, longitudinal study at 5 years of age and matched controls were re-examined during young adulthood (age 19). A comprehensive battery of speech and language, cognitive and achievement tests, psychiatric interviews, and questionnaires were completed by subjects, their parents and teachers. While children with early speech problems showed only a few academic differences from controls in young adulthood, early language impaired (LI) young adults lagged significantly behind controls in all areas of academic achievement, even after controlling for intelligence. Further, rates of learning disabilities (LD) were significantly higher in the LI group than both the controls and community base rates. Concurrent individual difference variables, including phonological awareness, naming speed for digits, non-verbal IQ, verbal working memory, and executive function, all contributed unique variance to achievement in specific areas. Early LI rather than speech impairment is clearly associated with continued academic difficulties into adulthood. These results speak to the need for intensive, early intervention for LI youngsters.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1016/s0165-1781(02)00024-0

Psychiatry research

Psychiatry Res

Neuropsychological performance in medicated vs. unmedicated patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

To date, there have been no formal investigations of neuropsychological performance in patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) taking psychotropic medications. The purpose of this study was to determine whether medicated and unmedicated patients with OCD demonstrate differences in neuropsychological functioning. Fifty-two patients with a primary DSM-IV diagnosis of OCD participated in the study; 28 were taking serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SRIs), and 24 were treatment-naïve (n=8) or had finished a washout period prior to their inclusion in other studies (n=16). The groups were well matched with regard to demographic and clinical variables, including symptom severity. Each group was administered a comprehensive neuropsychological battery to assess general intelligence, attention, verbal and non-verbal working memory, declarative and procedural learning, visuo-constructive skills, and executive functions. SRI-medicated did not differ from SRI-free patients on any neuropsychological measure. Benzodiazepines seemed to improve the patients' functioning on a semantic verbal fluency test. In addition, there were significant interactions between SRIs and benzodiazepines on the perseverative errors of the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test and on reaction times. SRI-medicated patients with OCD are able to perform on cognitive functioning tests at a comparable level with that of SRI-free patients, and these results have positive implications for OCD patients who respond to SRIs. The interactions between SRIs and benzodiazepines and their effect on cognition in OCD are likely to be complex and deserve further study.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1007/s00213-001-0987-9

Psychopharmacology

Psychopharmacology (Berl)

Investigation into the significance of task difficulty and divided allocation of resources on the glucose memory facilitation effect.

Memory for a list of 20 words can be enhanced by preceding learning with consumption of 25 g glucose rather than an equally sweet aspartame solution. In previous studies, participants performed a secondary hand-movement task during the list-learning phase. The present placebo-controlled, double-blind study examined whether the additional cognitive load created by a secondary task is a crucial feature of the glucose memory facilitation effect. The effect of glucose administration on word recall performance in healthy young participants was examined under conditions where the primary memory task and a secondary task were competing for cognitive resources (across a range of secondary tasks), and where task difficulty was increased but dual task-mediated competition for cognitive resources did not exist. Measures of non-verbal and working memory performance were also compared under the different glycaemic conditions (glucose versus aspartame drinks). In the present study, a beneficial effect of glucose on memory was detected after participants encoded a 20-word list while performing a secondary task, but not when participants encoded the list without a secondary task, nor when the 20 target words were intermixed with 20 non-target words (distinguished by gender of speaker). In addition, glucose significantly enhanced performance on spatial and working memory tasks. The data indicate that possible "depletion" of episodic memory capacity and/or glucose-mediated resources in the brain due to performing a concomitant cognitive task might be crucial to the demonstration of a glucose facilitation effect. Possible implications regarding underlying cognitive and physiological mechanisms are discussed in this article.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1037//0894-4105.16.1.74

Neuropsychology

Neuropsychology

A profile of neuropsychological deficits in alcoholic women.

Neuropsychological deficits, most notable in executive, visuospatial, and functions of gait and balance, are detectable in alcoholic men even after a month of sobriety. Less well established are the severity and profile of persisting deficits in alcoholic women. The authors used an extensive test battery to examine cognitive and motor functions in 43 alcoholic women who were sober, on average, for 3.6 months. Functions most severely affected in alcoholic women involved visuospatial and verbal and nonverbal working memory processes as well as gait and balance. Areas of relative sparing were executive functions, declarative memory, and upper-limb strength and speed. The authors found that lifetime alcohol consumption was related to impairment severity on Block Design (Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised, D. Wechsler, 1981) and verbal and nonverbal working memory, suggesting a dose effect of alcohol abuse. The alcohol-related deficits in working memory, visuospatial, and balance implicate disruption of prefrontal, superior parietal, and cerebellar brain systems.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1111/1467-9450.00259

Scandinavian journal of psychology

Scand J Psychol

Memory deficits in young schizophrenics with normal general intellectual function.

The aim of the present study was to examine different dimensions of memory functioning in young schizophrenics with normal general intellectual abilities. Thirty-three patients with schizophrenia and 33 healthy controls were included in the study. The results suggest that immediate short-term memory is intact, though there emerged a working memory deficit in the schizophrenia group. Deficient encoding of verbal material was observed in some, but not in other, testing conditions. There also seemed to be a retrieval deficit for verbal material in schizophrenia, though no storage deficit was indicated. Impaired memory for non-verbal material was also revealed. These results occurred in a context of intact executive functioning as measured by the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test. The results indicate that temporal and frontal structures, as well as their interconnections, may be compromised in schizophrenia.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1007/s002130100771

Psychopharmacology

Psychopharmacology (Berl)

Glucose facilitation of cognitive performance in healthy young adults: examination of the influence of fast-duration, time of day and pre-consumption plasma glucose levels.

Previous investigations have demonstrated increased performance after the administration of a glucose-load on certain aspects of cognitive functioning in healthy young adults. Generally these studies have used a procedure where participants were tested in the morning after an overnight fast. The aim of the present study was, for the first time, to investigate the glucose cognitive facilitation effect under more natural testing times and with shorter duration of the previous fast. Measures of verbal and non-verbal memory performance were compared under different fasting intervals (2-h fast versus overnight fast), times (morning versus afternoon) and glycaemic conditions (glucose versus aspartame drinks) in healthy young participants. There was a significant glucose facilitation effect on long-term verbal memory performance. In addition, glucose significantly enhanced long-term spatial memory performance. The effect of glucose was essentially equivalent whether it was given after an overnight fast or a 2-h fast following breakfast or lunch. There was no effect of drink and time of day on working memory performance. The results of this study further support the hypothesis that glucose administration can enhance certain aspects of memory performance in healthy young adults. More significantly, the findings indicate that this cognitive facilitation effect persists under more naturalistic conditions of glucose administration and is not restricted to long fast durations or morning administration.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1037//0894-4105.15.2.211

Neuropsychology

Neuropsychology

Executive functioning and olfactory identification in young adults with attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder.

Young adults with attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD; N = 105) were compared with a control group (N = 64) on 14 measures of executive function and olfactory identification using a 2 (group) X 2 (sex) design. The ADHD group performed significantly worse on 11 measures. No Group X Sex interaction was found on any measures. No differences were found in the ADHD group as a function of ADHD subtype or comorbid oppositional defiant disorder. Comorbid depression influenced the results of only 1 test (Digit Symbol). After IQ was controlled for, some group differences in verbal working memory, attention, and odor identification were no longer significant, whereas those in inhibition, interference control, nonverbal working memory, and other facets of attention remained so. Executive function deficits found in childhood ADHD exist in young adults with ADHD and are largely not influenced by comorbidity but may be partly a function of low intelligence.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1046/j.1365-2788.2001.00298.x

Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR

J Intellect Disabil Res

Working memory and everyday cognition in adults with Down's syndrome.

A number of previous studies have suggested that young people with Down's syndrome (DS) have a specific deficit of the phonological loop component of the working memory. However, there have also been studies which have proposed a specific deficit of the central executive component of working memory and suggested similarities of working memory functioning with patients with Alzheimer's disease. Fifteen middle-aged people with DS were matched for their individual scores of non-verbal intelligence to 15 individuals with mixed aetiology of intellectual disability. A versatile range of tasks was used in order to evaluate the functioning of working memory components. In addition, several everyday cognition skills were assessed. The subjects with DS performed significantly more poorly in all tasks assessing the phonological loop. Performance in other working memory tasks and compound variables representing different working memory components was equal in the groups. In addition, both groups had equal everyday cognition skills. The functioning of the phonological loop seems to be clearly deficient in people with DS. Interestingly, the deficit does not seem to affect the vocabulary or other everyday cognition skills in individuals with DS. No signs of specific deficit of the central executive component of working memory were found.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1002/1097-0029(20001001)51:1<85::AID-JEMT9>3.0.CO;2-0

Microscopy research and technique

Microsc Res Tech

Neuroanatomical and cognitive correlates of adult age differences in acquisition of a perceptual-motor skill.

The objective of this study was to examine age differences in procedural learning and performance in conjunction with differential aging of central nervous system (CNS) structures. Sixty-eight healthy volunteers (age 22-80) performed a pursuit rotor task (four blocks of 20 15-second trials each). Volumes of the cerebellar hemispheres, neostriatum, prefrontal cortex, and hippocampus were measured from Magnetic Resonance (MR) images. Improvement in pursuit rotor performance was indexed by increase in time on target (TOT). A general improvement trend was evident across the blocks of trials. Overall, younger participants showed significantly longer TOT. The rate of improvement was age-invariant during the initial stages of skill acquisition but became greater in middle-aged participants as the practice progressed. When the influences of regional brain volumes were taken into account, the direct age effect on mean TOT measured during the first day of practice disappeared. Instead, reduced volumes of the cerebellar hemispheres and the putamen and poorer performance on nonverbal working memory tasks predicted shorter TOT. In contrast, neither the volume of the caudate and the hippocampus, nor verbal working memory showed association with motor performance. Pursuit rotor performance at the later stages of practice was unrelated to the reduction in putamen volume and was affected directly by age, cerebellar volume, and nonverbal working memory proficiency. We conclude that in a healthy population showing no clinical signs of extrapyramidal disease, age-related declines in procedural learning are associated with reduced volume of the cerebellar hemispheres and lower nonverbal working memory scores. During initial stages of skill acquisition, reduced volume of the putamen is also predictive of poorer performance.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1017/s0012162200000682

Developmental medicine and child neurology

Dev Med Child Neurol

Specific language impairment with or without hyperactivity: neuropsychological evidence for frontostriatal dysfunction.

A neuropsychological investigation of the association between specific language impairment (SLI) and hyperactivity was conducted on four groups of 6-year-old children. The groups, each consisting of five boys and five girls, were: children with SLI alone, hyperactivity alone, both SLI and hyperactivity, and neither disorder (controls). Cognitive functioning was examined using selected non-verbal tests from the Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery. SLI was not associated with significantly reduced performance on any of the neuropsychological measures. However, hyperactivity was associated with deficits on a test of attentional set shifting previously demonstrated to be sensitive to frontostriatal dysfunction. Further, hyperactive children showed significantly reduced spatial spans on a test of spatial working memory thought to measure parietal lobe functioning. There were no substantial differences between the groups on tests of frontal lobe function except for reduced performance on a task of attention in the hyperactive group. There were no significant interactions between hyperactivity and SLI on any of the neuropsychological measures. The pattern of neuropsychological deficits shown by children with attention-deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) suggests relatively specific problems in inhibitory control of attentional selection. This cognitive deficit implicates brain areas including basal ganglia and ventro-lateral prefrontal cortical areas in ADHD, thus providing evidence for disruption of frontostriatal functional loops. SLI and hyperactivity can occur as comorbid syndromes or symptom complexes and this should be noted when interpreting results of tests measuring cognitive performance. The findings suggest that these two groups of disorders have different cognitive correlates.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1080/136828200247278

International journal of language & communication disorders

Int J Lang Commun Disord

Limitations in working memory: implications for language development.

In this study, the proposal that individual differences in spoken language acquisition may be due to limitations in short-term memory abilities was investigated within a working memory framework. The relationship speech production skills and working memory abilities was examined in two groups of 4-year-old children, matched for non-verbal ability but who had either relatively good or poor non-word repetition skills. Children with better non-word repetition skills produced speech that comprised a wider repertoire of words, on average longer utterances and a greater range of syntactic constructions than did children with relatively poor non-word repetition skills. The significant association found between these indices of language development and verbal short-term memory span assessed with non-spoken recall, suggested that this relationship was not merely due to the common output requirements of the language and memory tasks. Inconsistent associations between language performance and two tasks of visuo-spatial short-term memory precluded firm conclusions being drawn regarding the specificity of the relationship to the phonological domain. Cognitive mechanisms that may underlie the association between spoken language development and working memory skills are discussed.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1046/j.1440-1819.2000.00662.x

Psychiatry and clinical neurosciences

Psychiatry Clin Neurosci

Declining of memory functions of normal elderly persons.

Two studies examined the declining of memory functions in normal elderly persons using the Yokota memory test (YMT), which includes 15 items concerning verbal and non-verbal memory functions. In the first study, 552 subjects over 40 years of age in five age groups were examined. Factor analysis revealed that YMT consisted of two factors pertaining to short-term/working memory, and two factors pertaining to long-term memory. It is suggested that the former was more affected than the latter, with aging. In the second study, YMT was examined in relation to the revised version of Hasegawa dementia scale (HDS-R), which was the most popular intelligence scale for the elderly in Japan. As a result, memory functions differentially declined with the decreasing score of HDS-R, which suggests that memory functions differentially declined with progressive risk of dementia.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1017/s0012162299001140

Developmental medicine and child neurology

Dev Med Child Neurol

Neurobehavioral evidence for working-memory deficits in school-aged children with histories of prematurity.

Cognitive performance in 7- to 9-year-old preterm neonatal intensive-care survivors was compared with that in age-matched control children. Non-verbal memory span, spatial working-memory abilities, planning, set-shifting, and recognition memory for both spatial and patterned stimuli were assessed using the Cambridge Neuropsychological Testing Automated Battery. Relative to children in the control group, neonatal intensive-care unit (NICU) survivors demonstrated 25% more memory errors on the spatial working-memory task. Their use of strategy on this task was similar to a control group of 5-year-olds. Planning times on 'Tower of London' problems were long relative to those of term controls. NICU survivors demonstrated poorer pattern recognition as well as a shorter spatial memory span. The groups did not differ in visual-discrimination learning or in spatial-recognition memory. No specific neonatal risk factor accounted for the observed differences, although scores on the Neurobiological Risk Score (NBRS), a composite measure of neonatal risk, did predict several aspects of later task performance. Whether these data reflect a developmental delay in brain maturation in NICU survivors or the presence of a permanent information-processing deficit due to adverse neonatal events must be assessed through continued follow-up.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1136/jnnp.67.2.163

Journal of neurology, neurosurgery, and psychiatry

J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry

Basal forebrain amnesia: does the nucleus accumbens contribute to human memory?

To analyse amnesia caused by basal forebrain lesions. A single case study of a patient with amnesia after bleeding into the anterior portion of the left basal ganglia. Neuropsychological examination included tests of attention, executive function, working memory, recall, and recognition of verbal and non-verbal material, and recall from remote semantic and autobiographical memory. The patient's MRI and those of other published cases of basal forebrain amnesia were reviewed to specify which structures within the basal forebrain are crucial for amnesia. Attention and executive function were largely intact. There was anterograde amnesia for verbal material which affected free recall and recognition. With both modes of testing the patient produced many false positive responses and intrusions when lists of unrelated words had been memorised. However, he confabulated neither on story recall nor in day to day memory, nor in recall from remote memory. The lesion affected mainly the nucleus accumbens, but encroached on the inferior limb of the capsula interna and the most ventral portion of the nucleus caudatus and globus pallidus, and there was evidence of some atrophy of the head of the caudate nucleus. The lesion spared the nucleus basalis Meynert, the diagnonal band, and the septum, which are the sites of cholinergic cell concentrations. It seems unlikely that false positive responses were caused by insufficient strategic control of memory retrieval. This speaks against a major role of the capsular lesion which might disconnect the prefrontal cortex from the thalamus. It is proposed that the lesion of the nucleus accumbens caused amnesia.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1016/s0028-3932(98)00128-6

Neuropsychologia

Neuropsychologia

Genetically dissociated components of working memory: evidence from Down's and Williams syndrome.

Wang and Bellugi [J clin exp Neuropsychol 1994;16:317 22] have suggested that Down's and Williams syndrome might be associated with specific and contrasting working memory deficits; with impaired verbal short-term memory in Down's syndrome, and a visuo-spatial short-term memory deficit in Williams syndrome. In two studies we examine whether these apparent deficits might simply be a consequence of the general pattern of learning difficulties associated with these disorders. Experiment 1 compared verbal and visuo-spatial short-term memory abilities in these groups, using analysis of covariance to control for mental age differences. In Experiment 2 individuals with Williams syndrome were matched to control groups for non-verbal mental age, and the short-term memory abilities of these matched groups were compared. The results of both experiments are broadly consistent with those reported by Wang and Bellugi, and support the view that working memory can be dissociated into separate subsystems.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1093/brain/122.4.657

Brain : a journal of neurology

Brain

Humour appreciation: a role of the right frontal lobe.

Humour occupies a special place in human social interactions. The brain regions and the potential psychological processes underlying humour appreciation were investigated by testing patients who had focal damage in various areas of the brain. A specific brain region, the right frontal lobe, most disrupted the ability to appreciate humour. The individuals with damage in this brain region also reacted less, with diminished physical or emotional responses (laughter, smiling). Performance on the humour appreciation tests used were correlated in a distinct pattern with tests assessing cognitive processes. The ability to hold information in mind (working memory) was related to both verbal (jokes) and non-verbal (cartoon) tests of humour appreciation. In addition, the demands of the specific type of humour test were related in a logical manner to cognitive processes, verbal humour being associated with verbal abstraction ability and mental shifting and cartoon humour being related to the abilities to focus attention to details and to visually search the environment. The ability of the right frontal lobe may be unique in integrating cognitive and affective information, an integration relevant for other complex human abilities, such as episodic memory and self-awareness.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1001/jama.281.13.1197

JAMA

JAMA

Effect of estrogen on brain activation patterns in postmenopausal women during working memory tasks.

Preclinical studies suggest that estrogen affects neural structure and function in mature animals; clinical studies are less conclusive with many, but not all, studies showing a positive influence of estrogen on verbal memory in postmenopausal women. To investigate the effects of estrogen on brain activation patterns in postmenopausal women as they performed verbal and nonverbal working memory tasks. Randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover trial from 1996 through 1998. Community volunteers tested in a hospital setting. Forty-six postmenopausal women aged 33 to 61 years (mean [SD] age, 50.8 [4.7] years). Twenty-one-day treatment with conjugated equine estrogens, 1.25 mg/d, randomly crossed over with identical placebo and a 14-day washout between treatments. Brain activation patterns measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging during tasks involving verbal and nonverbal working memory. Treatment with estrogen increased activation in the inferior parietal lobule during storage of verbal material and decreased activation in the inferior parietal lobule during storage of nonverbal material. Estrogen also increased activation in the right superior frontal gyrus during retrieval tasks, accompanied by greater left-hemisphere activation during encoding. The latter pattern represents a sharpening of the hemisphere encoding/retrieval asymmetry (HERA) effect. Estrogen did not affect actual performance of the verbal and nonverbal memory tasks. Estrogen in a therapeutic dosage alters brain activation patterns in postmenopausal women in specific brain regions during the performance of the sorts of memory function that are called upon frequently during any given day. These results suggest that estrogen affects brain organization for memory in postmenopausal women.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1001/archpsyc.55.12.1097

Archives of general psychiatry

Arch Gen Psychiatry

Cortical dysfunction in schizophrenia during auditory word and tone working memory demonstrated by functional magnetic resonance imaging.

Verbal learning and memory deficits are among the most severe cognitive deficits observed in schizophrenia. We have demonstrated that such deficits do not extend to working memory for tones in a substantial number of patients even when verbal working memory is impaired. In this study we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to study the neural basis of this dissociation of auditory verbal and nonverbal working memory in individuals with schizophrenia. While undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging, 12 schizophrenic patients and 12 matched control subjects performed auditory Word Serial Position Task and Tone Serial Position Task. Both tasks produced activation in frontal cortex and temporal and parietal lobes of the cerebrum in both groups. While robust activation was observed in the left inferior frontal gyrus (areas 6, 44, and 45) in the control group during the Word Serial Position Task, activation in the patient group was much reduced in these areas and failed to show the same task-specific activation as in controls. Reduced activation in patients was not confined to the inferior frontal gyrus, but also extended to a medial area during the Tone Serial Position Task and to premotor and anterior temporal lobe areas during both tasks. These findings support the hypothesis that abnormalities in cortical hemodynamic response in the inferior frontal gyrus underlie the verbal working memory deficit in schizophrenia. The relationship of verbal working memory deficits to other cognitive functions suggests that abnormal functioning in the speech-related areas may reflect a critical substrate of a broad range of cognitive dysfunctions associated with schizophrenia.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1016/s0028-3932(98)00019-0

Neuropsychologia

Neuropsychologia

Intensity coding of auditory stimuli: an fMRI study.

The effect of stimulus intensity (sound pressure level, SPL) of auditory stimuli on the BOLD response in the auditory cortex was investigated in 14 young and healthy subjects, with no hearing abnormalities, using echo-planar, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during a verbal and a non-verbal auditory discrimination task. The stimuli were presented block-wise at three different intensities: 95, 85 and 75 dB (SPL). All subjects showed fMRI signal increases in superior temporal gyrus (STG) covering primary and secondary auditory cortex. Most importantly, the spatial extent of the fMRI response in STG increased with increasing stimulus intensity. It is hypothesized that spreading of excitation is associated with the encoding of increasing stimulus intensity levels. In addition, we found bifrontal activation supposedly evoked by the auditory-articulary loop of working memory. The results presented here should assist in the design of optimal activation strategies for studying the auditory cortex with fMRI paradigms and may help in understanding intensity coding of auditory stimuli.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.3758/bf03201139

Memory & cognition

Mem Cognit

Nonverbal working memory of humans and monkeys: rehearsal in the sketchpad?

Investigations of working memory tend to focus on the retention of verbal information. The present experiments were designed to characterize the active maintenance rehearsal process used in the retention of visuospatial information. Rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta; N = 6) were tested as well as humans (total N = 90) because these nonhuman primates have excellent visual working memory but, unlike humans, cannot verbally recode the stimuli to employ verbal rehearsal mechanisms. A series of experiments was conducted using a distractor-task paradigm, a directed forgetting procedure, and a dual-task paradigm. No evidence was found for an active maintenance process for either species. Rather, it appears that information is maintained in the visuospatial sketchpad without active rehearsal.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1093/cercor/8.1.73

Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991)

Cereb Cortex

Right prefrontal activation during encoding, but not during retrieval, in a non-verbal paired-associates task.

Brain imaging studies have shown that episodic encoding into long-term memory preferentially activates the left prefrontal cortex and retrieval activates the right prefrontal cortex. However, it is unclear to what degree verbal analysis contributes to the left prefrontal activation during encoding. The present study was designed to avoid verbal analysis during encoding by using abstract pictures and computer-generated sounds which were difficult to code verbally. Sounds and pictures were grouped into six stimulus-stimulus pairs. When the sound from a pair was presented, the subjects were instructed to recall and visualize the associated picture. After 2.0 s the associated picture and another picture appeared on the screen and the subjects were required to identify the associated picture. Feedback about the choice was then given. Regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) was measured with [15O]butanol and positron emission tomography (PET) in 10 subjects during initial training on the paired-associates task (encoding scan) and after 35 min of training (retrieval scan). Performance during the encoding scan was 59% correct and during the retrieval scan 98% correct, with a mean reaction time of 709 ms during retrieval. The rCBF was also measured during a control condition without any instruction to encode or retrieve. Compared with retrieval, encoding showed significant activation of the posterior part of the right middle frontal gyrus, the right inferior parietal cortex, the cingulate cortex, the left inferior parietal cortex and the left inferior and middle temporal gyri. The rCBF increase during encoding was strongly correlated with the rate of encoding. Retrieval was compared with both encoding and control. In none of these comparisons was there any prefrontal activation. The lack of prefrontal activation during near-perfect performance of the retrieval task suggests that the prefrontal cortex is not necessarily active when retrieval is fast and accurate, or what might be called automatic. Encoding was not associated with more activation of the left than the right prefrontal cortex. This result presents a limitation to the generality of left prefrontal activation during episodic encoding, which has been found in several previous brain imaging studies. Differences between studies in the relative activation of left and right prefrontal cortex during encoding and retrieval might be due to differences in paradigms, the type of stimulus used, and the demand for working memory and verbal analysis.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1037//0894-4105.12.1.95

Neuropsychology

Neuropsychology

Neuroanatomical correlates of cognitive aging: evidence from structural magnetic resonance imaging.

To examine putative brain substrates of cognitive functions differentially affected by age the authors measured the volume of cortical regions and performance on tests of executive functions, working memory, explicit memory, and priming in healthy adults (18-77 years old). The results indicate that shrinkage of the prefrontal cortex mediates age-related increases in perseveration. The volume of visual processing areas predicted performance on nonverbal working memory tasks. Contrary to the hypotheses, in the examined age range, the volume of limbic structures was unrelated to any of the cognitive functions; verbal working memory, verbal explicit memory, and verbal priming were independent of cortical volumes. Nevertheless, among the participants aged above 60, reduction in the volume of limbic structures predicted declines in explicit memory. Chronological age adversely influenced all cognitive indices, although its effects on priming were only indirect, mediated by declines in verbal working memory.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

Journal of developmental and behavioral pediatrics : JDBP

J Dev Behav Pediatr

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, self-regulation, and time: toward a more comprehensive theory.

This article describes the current clinical view of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and suggests a model of prefrontal lobe executive functions that explains better than current theories the cognitive and behavioral deficits associated with ADHD. The model shows how behavioral inhibition is related to and necessary for the proficient performance of four executive functions that subserve self-regulation: nonverbal working memory; the internalization of speech; the self-regulation of affect, motivation, and arousal; and reconstitution. These functions permit the construction, execution, and control of behavior by internally represented information, which removes behavior from control by the immediate context and brings it under the control of time. ADHD disrupts this process and returns control of behavior to the temporal now. A blindness to past, future, and time more generally, as well as an inability to direct behavior toward the future and to sustain it are among many of the deficits predicted by this model for persons with ADHD.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1016/0028-3932(95)00160-3

Neuropsychologia

Neuropsychologia

Verbal working memory components can be selectively influenced by transcranial magnetic stimulation in patients with left temporal lobe epilepsy.

The aim of this study was to investigate whether transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) can be used for a lateralization of verbal and non-verbal memory functions in candidates for epilepsy surgery by inducing focal, material-specific memory deficits. Twenty patients who underwent presurgical epilepsy evaluation with chronically implanted subdural strip electrodes were submitted to focal TMS over the temporal lobes and the vertex while sequences of items of the Digit Span and the Corsi Block test were presented on a computer screen. TMS was applied synchronously or 200 msec following presentation of each item. The effects of TMS on the memory span and the serial position curve were analysed in comparison to baseline levels. The following results were obtained: the quantitative effects on the verbal (Digit Span) and non-verbal (Corsi Block) memory span were not significant, but there were significant qualitative changes of serial position effects. In the group of six patients with left temporal epilepsy, TMS over the left temporal lobe induced a significant recency effect in the Digit Span test, while TMS over the vertex significantly increased the recency errors. The absolute number of errors remained unchanged. No such effects were observed in the group of nine patients with right temporal lobe epilepsy. These results suggest that in the presence of a left temporal lobe focus TMS can induce qualitative, material specific changes in verbal working memory (phonological loop) which become apparent in the serial position curve. The dissociation of TMS effects for temporal and vertex stimulation imply that TMS can selectively influence specific phonological loop components and that the phonological loop has a functionally and neuroanatomically multimodular structure.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1055/s-2007-996372

Fortschritte der Neurologie-Psychiatrie

Fortschr Neurol Psychiatr

[Memory disturbances in schizophrenia].

The recent literature on memory disorders in schizophrenic persons is reanalysed. The present interest in memory disorders as a core symptom of cognitive changes in schizophrenia derives from the fact that brain imaging methods have revealed a reduction of substance in the regions surrounding the lateral ventricles. Given this localisation, schizophrenics should suffer from pronounced memory deficits. The paper addresses (1) the role of memory disorders in an overall view of cognitive losses, (2) the pattern of memory losses (verbal vs non-verbal, short-term memory vs long-term memory, implicit vs explicit memory etc.) and (3) recent investigations based on simultaneous use of imaging procedures (fNMR, PET) and cortical activation during memory tasks. A survey of the literature renders it likely that frontal functions play an essential role in the type of memory deficits found among schizophrenics. Thus, a purely temporal localisation is unlikely. The reduced learning efficiency which accounts for most of the schizophrenics' cognitive problems points to a working memory disturbance. On the basis of these results, a model for the memory disorders of schizophrenics is developed. The model covers recent literature on working memory as well as neural network models of schizophrenic disorders. However, a differential psychopathological symptom and syndrome analysis remains a prerequisite for reducing the great variance of the schizophrenics' performance in memory tasks. The importance of cognitive rehabilitation for sociopsychiatric efforts aimed at re-integrating mentally ill persons should not be underestimated.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1016/0197-4580(95)00074-o

Neurobiology of aging

Neurobiol Aging

Age-related decline in MRI volumes of temporal lobe gray matter but not hippocampus.

The effect of normal aging on the volume of the hippocampus and temporal cortex was assessed cross-sectionally with quantitative Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) in 72 healthy men, spanning 5 decades of the adult age range (21 to 70 years). Neither the hippocampal nor cortical white matter volumes were significantly correlated with age. By contrast, left and right temporal lobe gray matter volumes, exclusive of the hippocampal measures, each decreased with age (p < 0.01). Volumes of temporal lobe sulcal CSF and the ventricular system (temporal horns and lateral and third ventricles) significantly increased with age. Measures of verbal and nonverbal working memory showed age-related declines and were related to enlargement of the three ventricular regions, which may be indicative of age-related atrophy of the adjacent cortex but not the hippocampus, at least up to age 70 years.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

Annales medico-psychologiques

Ann Med Psychol (Paris)

[Short term memory and severe language disorders in the child].

Memory, and particularly short-term memory or "working memory" (Baddeley), is involved in language acquisition in children. We have studied short-term memory, with verbal-and non verbal tests, of 8 children suffering from developmental dysphasia compared with other ones, matched in terms of age and performance I.Q. (W.I.S.C.-R.). The digit span did not significantly differ in the two groups, while the visuo-spatial span was lower in the dysphasic group. The memorization of a list of monosyllabic words by dysphasic children was poor in the absence of visual presentation and improved by it. Differences between dysphasic and control-children are unlikely to be due to speech rate which does not significantly differ from one group to the other one. The results suggest the existence, in language disordered children, of cognitive functions disorders much more important than those directly involved in the speech production.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1080/09658219308258225

Memory (Hove, England)

Memory

A developmental deficit in short-term phonological memory: implications for language and reading.

QU, an eight-year-old boy, was identified from a large scale normative study on the basis of his greatly reduced digit span, combined with normal long-term memory and non-verbal intelligence. Further investigation indicated that his visual STM was normal, but that he was clearly impaired on two verbal STM tests, nonword repetition, and memory span for words. His span showed clear effects of phonological similarity and word-length, suggesting qualitatively normal functioning of the phonological loop component of working memory, despite a quantitative impairment in level of performance. This pattern resembles that found in an earlier study of children with a specific language disorder. We tested QU on measures of vocabulary, syntax, and reading, and found him to be substantially below the age norms on all three. The implications of these findings are discussed for the role of the phonological loop in language development.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1016/0028-3932(92)90004-6

Neuropsychologia

Neuropsychologia

Brain tumors in children and adolescents--III. Effects of radiation and hormone status on intelligence and on working, associative and serial-order memory.

The effects on intelligence and memory of two post-surgical conditions (radiation treatment, hormone deficiency and supplementation) were explored in 46 children and adolescents with tumors in a variety of brain sites. Verbal intelligence, but not non-verbal intelligence, varied positively with age at radiation treatment. Memory for word meanings was unrelated to either radiation history or to hormone status. Severe deficits in serial position memory occurred with impaired hormone function and an older age at tumor onset. Severe deficits in working memory were associated with a history of radiation and a principal tumor site that involved thalamic/epithalamic brain regions. Radiation treatment and hormone status affect later cognitive function in children and adolescents with brain tumors. Although the greater vulnerability of the verbal intelligence of the younger radiated child and the serial order memory of the child with later tumor onset and hormone disturbances remain to be explained, and although the form of the relationship between radiation and tumor site is not fully understood, the data highlight the need to consider the cognitive consequences of pediatric brain tumors according to a set of markers that include maturational rate, hormone status, radiation history, and principal site of the tumor.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1093/brain/114.5.2095

Brain : a journal of neurology

Brain

Cognitive impairment in early, untreated Parkinson's disease and its relationship to motor disability.

Current knowledge of cognitive dysfunction in Parkinson's disease (PD) has largely been obtained from studies of chronically treated patients in whom effects of disease chronicity, treatment, depression and dementia are confounding factors. Studies of untreated patients have examined few cognitive domains and relationships between cognition, depression and motor disability have been incompletely explored. Accordingly, we studied 60 consecutive patients with newly diagnosed, untreated, idiopathic PD and 37 matched, healthy control subjects; no subject had clinical dementia or depression. All subjects received tests of specific processes of memory and cognition, including working memory, verbal and non-verbal short- and long-term memory, language, visuospatial capacity, set-formation and shifting and sequencing. Patients also received quantitative global clinical measures of severity of dementia, depression and motor disability. The PD group as a whole showed deficits in immediate recall of verbal material, language production and semantic fluency, set-formation, cognitive sequencing and working memory and visuomotor construction. However, this group was unimpaired in immediate memory span, long-term forgetting, naming, comprehension and visual perception. Language deficits and more severe frontal lobe impairments were confined to those PD patients scoring abnormally on a Mini Mental State examination. Motor disability correlated strongly with severity of depression but weakly with cognitive impairment. Cognitive sequencing, set-formation and set-shifting deficits tended to associate with depression, but otherwise there was no association between cognition and depression. The results indicate dissociation of cognition and motor control in early PD which suggests that cognitive dysfunction is largely independent of frontostriatal dopamine deficiency underlying motor disability. Some, but not all, of the frontal lobe deficits of chronic disease are detectable in early, untreated PD. The pathogenesis of the cognitive deficits shown here appears to involve extrastriatal dopamine systems or non-dopaminergic pathology. Longitudinal study is necessary to determine whether increasing disease duration exacerbates the early cognitive deficits and affects new cognitive domains, in addition to producing increasing motor disability.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

Schweizer Archiv fur Neurologie und Psychiatrie (Zurich, Switzerland : 1985)

Schweiz Arch Neurol Psychiatr (1985)

Deficit of the "primacy effect" in parkinsonians interpreted by means of the working memory model.

29 Parkinsonians and 29 controls matched for age and schooling were tested for memory by means of a free recall test (serial position curve) and two spans (verbal and non-verbal). The free recall test yields three measures: primacy (item 1); secondary memory (items 2-7) and recency (items 8-12). The Parkinsonians displayed a selective deficit of primacy, which is taken to be evidence of defective functioning of the Central Executive in the Working Memory model.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1111/j.2044-8295.1983.tb01865.x

British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953)

Br J Psychol

Specific reading retardation and working memory: a review.

Research into the memory deficit of retarded readers is examined within a working memory framework. Although much of the evidence in this area is confusing, there is fairly consistent evidence that reading retardation can be associated with a deficit in long-term storage of phonological information. This deficit may affect retarded readers' ability to utilize the articulatory loop, a short-term store which appears to play an important role in certain aspects of normal reading acquisition. On the other hand, there is fairly consistent evidence that retarded readers perform normally at storing non-verbal information and the semantic aspects of verbal information in long-term memory. Problems with current research strategies are discussed and suggestions for future research directions are made.

CognitiveConstruct

NonverbalWorkingMemory

10.1016/j.cortex.2021.06.007

Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior

Cortex

The costs (and benefits) of effortful listening on context processing: A simultaneous electrophysiology, pupillometry, and behavioral study.

There is an apparent disparity between the fields of cognitive audiology and cognitive electrophysiology as to how linguistic context is used when listening to perceptually challenging speech. To gain a clearer picture of how listening effort impacts context use, we conducted a pre-registered study to simultaneously examine electrophysiological, pupillometric, and behavioral responses when listening to sentences varying in contextual constraint and acoustic challenge in the same sample. Participants (N = 44) listened to sentences that were highly constraining and completed with expected or unexpected sentence-final words ("The prisoners were planning their escape/party") or were low-constraint sentences with unexpected sentence-final words ("All day she thought about the party"). Sentences were presented either in quiet or with +3 dB SNR background noise. Pupillometry and EEG were simultaneously recorded and subsequent sentence recognition and word recall were measured. While the N400 expectancy effect was diminished by noise, suggesting impaired real-time context use, we simultaneously observed a beneficial effect of constraint on subsequent recognition memory for degraded speech. Importantly, analyses of trial-to-trial coupling between pupil dilation and N400 amplitude showed that when participants' showed increased listening effort (i.e., greater pupil dilation), there was a subsequent recovery of the N400 effect, but at the same time, higher effort was related to poorer subsequent sentence recognition and word recall. Collectively, these findings suggest divergent effects of acoustic challenge and listening effort on context use: while noise impairs the rapid use of context to facilitate lexical semantic processing in general, this negative effect is attenuated when listeners show increased effort in response to noise. However, this effort-induced reliance on context for online word processing comes at the cost of poorer subsequent memory.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1016/j.neuroimage.2021.118415

NeuroImage

Neuroimage

Frontoparietal pattern similarity analyses of cognitive control in monozygotic twins.

The ability to flexibly adapt thoughts and actions in a goal-directed manner appears to rely on cognitive control mechanisms that are strongly impacted by individual differences. A powerful research strategy for investigating the nature of individual variation is to study monozygotic (identical) twins. Evidence of twin effects have been observed in prior behavioral and neuroimaging studies, yet within the domain of cognitive control, it remains to be demonstrated that the neural underpinnings of such effects are specific and reliable. Here, we utilize a multi-task, within-subjects event-related neuroimaging design with functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate twin effects through multivariate pattern similarity analyses. We focus on fronto-parietal brain regions exhibiting consistently increased activation associated with cognitive control demands across four task domains: selective attention, context processing, multi-tasking, and working memory. Healthy young adult monozygotic twin pairs exhibited increased similarity of within- and cross-task activation patterns in these fronto-parietal regions, relative to unrelated pairs. Twin activation pattern similarity effects were clearest under high control demands, were not present in a set of task-unrelated parcels or due to anatomic similarity, and were primarily observed during the within-trial timepoints in which the control demands peaked. Together, these results indicate that twin similarity in the neural representation of cognitive control may be domain-general but also functionally and temporally specific in relation to the level of control demand. The findings suggest a genetic and/or environmental basis for individual variation in cognitive control function, and highlight the potential of twin-based neuroimaging designs for exploring heritability questions within this domain.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.3389/fpsyt.2021.559401

Frontiers in psychiatry

Front Psychiatry

Reward Processing and Circuit Dysregulation in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.

Past decades have witnessed substantial progress in understanding of neurobiological mechanisms that contribute to generation of various PTSD symptoms, including intrusive memories, physiological arousal and avoidance of trauma reminders. However, the neurobiology of anhedonia and emotional numbing in PTSD, that have been conceptualized as reward processing deficits - reward wanting (anticipation of reward) and reward liking (satisfaction with reward outcome), respectively, remains largely unexplored. Empirical evidence on reward processing in PTSD is rather limited, and no studies have examined association of reward processing abnormalities and neurocircuitry-based models of PTSD pathophysiology. The manuscript briefly summarizes "state of the science" of both human reward processing, and of PTSD implicated neurocircuitry, as well as empirical evidence of reward processing deficits in PTSD. We then summarize current gaps in the literature and outline key future directions, further illustrating it by the example of two alternative explanations of PTSD pathophysiology potentially affecting reward processing via different neurobiological pathways. Studying reward processing in PTSD will not only advance the understanding of their link, but also could enhance current treatment approaches by specifically targeting anhedonia and emotional symptoms in PTSD patients.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1016/j.bbr.2021.113413

Behavioural brain research

Behav Brain Res

Higher functional connectivity between prefrontal regions and the dorsal attention network predicts absence of renewal.

Renewal describes the recovery of an extinguished response when extinction and recall contexts differ, demonstrating the context-dependency of extinction. The unexpected outcome change during extinction presumably directs attention to the context and promotes renewal. Accordingly, studies show that context processing for renewal is modulated by salience of and attention to context. Besides context-processing hippocampus, renewal involves ventromedial prefrontal cortex, orbitofrontal cortex and inferior frontal gyrus, which mediate response processing. Since showing renewal is a trait-like processing tendency, individuals with and without renewal may differ in resting-state functional connectivity of prefrontal regions with networks mediating attentional and salience processing. We analyzed resting-state functional MRI data from healthy participants (n = 70) of a non-fear-related contextual extinction task particularly suited for investigation of renewal. Participants without renewal exhibited significantly higher functional connectivity between prefrontal regions and bilateral intraparietal sulcus of the dorsal attention network. Functional connectivity between these regions correlated negatively with renewal level. Only in participants with renewal, the renewal level correlated positively with connectivity between left frontal eye field and several prefrontal regions. In contrast, functional connectivity of prefrontal regions with the salience network did not differ between groups. The results deliver first-time evidence for differences in resting-state functional connectivity between participants with and without renewal in non-fear-related extinction. Intraparietal-sulcus-guided top-down attentional control appears more strongly related to prefrontal activity in participants without renewal, and thus may have a role in their default processing mode of focusing on the stimulus and disregarding the context.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1093/arclin/acab043

Archives of clinical neuropsychology : the official journal of the National Academy of Neuropsychologists

Arch Clin Neuropsychol

A New Test of Irony and Indirect Requests Comprehension-The IRRI Test: Validation and Normative Data in French-Speaking Adults.

Nonliteral language comprehension disorders in individuals with acquired brain injuries (ABI) are frequently reported in the literature but rarely assessed in clinical settings. A major reason is the lack of tools available to clinicians. Therefore, the present study aimed to further promote the pragmatic assessment routine by creating a new nonliteral language comprehension tool for ABI individuals: the IRRI test. This tool is intended to be standardized and capable of directing clinicians to cognitive deficits underlying a poor understanding of nonliteral language-context processing, executive functions, and theory of mind. Three studies were conducted. The first study aimed at constructing the two IRRI test tasks: the irony and indirect requests comprehension tasks. These tasks integrate the cognitive processes within them. The second study aimed at analyzing the tasks' psychometric qualities in a sample of 33 ABI participants and 33 healthy participants (HC). Preliminary normative data obtained from 102 healthy French-speaking subjects were collected in the third study. Significant differences in the IRRI test's performances were observed between the ABI and HC individuals. The indirect requests task demonstrated robust convergent validity and good sensibility to discriminate altered participants among ABI participants. Both IRRI test's tasks also showed excellent test-retest and inter-rater reliability. The preliminary norms were stratified according to the conditions of interest in relation to the cognitive mechanisms underlying the understanding of nonliteral language. The IRRI test is a promising new standardized test of nonliteral language comprehension, which contributes to identifying cognitive-pragmatic profiles to guide therapy.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1016/j.nlm.2021.107465

Neurobiology of learning and memory

Neurobiol Learn Mem

The DA-antagonist Tiapride affects context-related extinction learning in a predictive learning task, but not initial forming of associations, or renewal.

Renewal describes the recovery of an extinguished response if the contexts of extinction and recall differ, highlighting the context dependency of extinction. Studies demonstrated dopaminergic (DA) signalling to be important for context-related extinction learning with and without a fear component. In a previous study in humans, administration of the dopamine D2/D3 antagonist tiapride prior to extinction impaired extinction learning in a novel, but not a familiar context, without affecting renewal. In a further study, context processing during initial acquisition of associations was shown to be related to renewal. In this human fMRI study we investigated the potential role of DA signalling during this initial conditioning for the learning process and for renewal. While tiapride, administered prior to the start of learning, did not affect initial acquisition and renewal, extinction learning in a novel context was impaired, associated with reduced BOLD activation in vmPFC, left iFG and ACC - regions mediating response inhibition and selection from competing options using contextual information. Thus, different timepoints of administration of tiapride (before initial conditioning or extinction) had largely similar effects upon extinction and renewal. In addition, retrieval of previously acquired associations was impaired, pointing towards weaker association forming during acquisition. Conceivably, effects of the DA blockade are associated with the challenge present in the respective task rather than the administration timepoint: the cognitive flexibility required for forming a new inhibitory association that includes a novel element clearly requires DA processing, while initial forming of associations, or of inhibitory associations without a new element, apparently rely less on the proper function of the DA system.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1177/00048674211010327

The Australian and New Zealand journal of psychiatry

Aust N Z J Psychiatry

Neural, behavioural and real-life correlates of social context sensitivity and social reward learning during interpersonal interactions in the schizophrenia spectrum.

Recent findings suggest that diminished processing of positive contextual information about others during interactions may contribute to social impairment in the schizophrenia spectrum. This could be due to general social context processing deficits or specific biases against positive information. We studied the impact of positive and negative social contextual information during social interactions using functional neuroimaging and probed whether these neural mechanisms were associated with real-life social functioning in schizophrenia spectrum disorders. Patients with a schizophrenia spectrum disorder ( = 23) and controls disorder ( = 25) played three multi-round trust games during functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning, with no, positive and negative information about the counterpart's trustworthiness, while all counterparts were programmed to behave trustworthy. The main outcome variable was the height of the shared amount in the trust game, i.e. investment, representing an indication of trust. The first investment in the game was considered to be basic trust, since no behavioural feedback was given yet. We performed region-of-interest analyses and examined the association with real-life social functioning using the experience sampling method. Social contextual information had no effect on patients' first investments, whereas controls made the lowest investment after negative and the highest investments after positive contextual information was provided. Over trials, patients decreased investments, suggesting reduced social reward learning, whereas controls increased investments in response to behavioural feedback in the negative context. Patients engaged the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex less than controls during context presentation and showed reduced activity within the caudate during repayments. In patients, lower investments were associated with more time spent alone and social exclusion and lower caudate activation was marginally significantly associated with higher perceived social exclusion. The failure to adapt trust to positive and negative social contexts suggests that patients have a general insensitivity to prior social information, indicating top-down processing impairments. In addition, patients show reduced sensitivity to social reward, i.e. bottom-up processing deficits. Moreover, lower trust and lower neural activation were related to lower real-life social functioning. Together, these findings indicate that improving trust and social interactions in schizophrenia spectrum needs a multi-faceted approach that targets both mechanisms.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1016/j.bbr.2021.113282

Behavioural brain research

Behav Brain Res

Hippocampal activation during contextual fear inhibition related to resilience in the early aftermath of trauma.

Impaired contextual fear inhibition is often associated with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Our previous work has demonstrated that more hippocampal activation during a response inhibition task after trauma exposure was related to greater resilience and fewer future PTSD symptoms. In the current study, we sought to extend our previous findings by employing a contextual fear conditioning and extinction paradigm to further determine the role of the hippocampus in resilience and PTSD in the early aftermath of trauma. Participants (N = 28) were recruited in the Emergency Department shortly after experiencing a traumatic event. A contextual fear inhibition task was conducted in a 3 T MRI scanner approximately two months post-trauma. Measures of resilience (CD-RISC) at time of scan and PTSD symptoms three months post-trauma were collected. The associations between hippocampal activation during fear conditioning and during the effect of context during extinction, and post-trauma resilience and PTSD symptoms at three-months were assessed. During fear conditioning, activation of the bilateral hippocampal region of interest (ROI) correlated positively with resilience (r = 0.48, p = 0.01). During the effect of context during extinction, greater bilateral hippocampal activation correlated with lower PTSD symptoms three months post-trauma after controlling for baseline PTSD symptoms, age and gender (r=-0.59, p=0.009). Greater hippocampal activation was related to post-trauma resilience and lower PTSD symptoms three months post-trauma. The current study supports and strengthens prior findings suggesting the importance of hippocampus-dependent context processing as a mechanism for resilience versus PTSD risk, which could be a potential mechanistic target for novel early interventions.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1016/j.neuroimage.2021.117983

NeuroImage

Neuroimage

Separation of item and context in item-method directed forgetting.

Contextual information plays a critical role in directed forgetting (DF) of lists of items, whereas DF of individual items has been primarily associated with item-level processing. This study was designed to investigate whether context processing also contributes to the forgetting of individual items. Participants first viewed a series of words, with task-irrelevant scene images (used as "context tags") interspersed between them. Later, these words reappeared without the scenes and were followed by an instruction to remember or forget that word. Multivariate pattern analyses of fMRI data revealed that the reactivation of context information associated with the studied words (i.e., scene-related activity) was greater whereas the item-related information diminished after a forget instruction compared to a remember instruction. Critically, we found the magnitude of the separation between item information and context information predicted successful forgetting. These results suggest that the unbinding of an item from its context may support the intention to forget, and more generally they establish that contextual processing indeed contributes to item-method DF.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.2147/CIA.S287619

Clinical interventions in aging

Clin Interv Aging

Contextual Processing and the Impacts of Aging and Neurodegeneration: A Scoping Review.

Contextual processing (or context processing; CP) is an integral component of cognition. CP allows people to manage their thoughts and actions by adjusting to surroundings. CP involves the formation of an internal representation of context in relation to the environment, maintenance of this information over a period of time, and the updating of mental representations to reflect changes in the environment. Each of these functions can be affected by aging and associated conditions. Here, we introduced contextual processing research and summarized the literature studying the impact of normal aging and neurodegeneration-related cognitive decline on CP. Through searching the PubMed, PsycINFO, and Google Scholar databases, 23 studies were retrieved that focused on the impact of aging, mild cogniitve impairment (MCI), Alzheimer's disease (AD), and Parkinson's disease (PD) on CP. Results indicated that CP is particularly vulnerable to aging and neurodegeneration. Older adults had a delayed onset and reduced amplitude of electrophysiological response to information detection, comparison, and execution. MCI patients demonstrated clear signs of impaired CP compared to normal aging. The only study on AD suggested a decreased proactive control in AD participants in maintaining contextual information, but seemingly intact reactive control. Studies on PD restricted to non-demented older participants, who showed limited ability to use contextual information in cognitive and motor processes, exhibiting impaired reactive control but more or less intact proactive control. These data suggest that the decline in CP with age is further impacted by accelerated aging and neurodegeneration, providing insights for improving intervention strategies. This review highlights the need for increased attention to research this important but understudied field.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1044/2020_JSLHR-20-00142

Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR

J Speech Lang Hear Res

Age-Related Differences in the Online Processing of Spoken Semantic Context and the Effect of Semantic Competition: Evidence From Eye Gaze.

Purpose The study examined age-related differences in the use of semantic context and in the effect of semantic competition in spoken sentence processing. We used offline (response latency) and online (eye gaze) measures, using the "visual world" eye-tracking paradigm. Method Thirty younger and 30 older adults heard sentences related to one of four images presented on a computer monitor. They were asked to touch the image corresponding to the final word of the sentence (target word). Three conditions were used: a nonpredictive sentence, a predictive sentence suggesting one of the four images on the screen (semantic context), and a predictive sentence suggesting two possible images (semantic competition). Results Online eye gaze data showed no age-related differences with nonpredictive sentences, but revealed slowed processing for older adults when context was presented. With the addition of semantic competition to context, older adults were slower to look at the target word after it had been heard. In contrast, offline latency analysis did not show age-related differences in the effects of context and competition. As expected, older adults were generally slower to touch the image than younger adults. Conclusions Traditional offline measures were not able to reveal the complex effect of aging on spoken semantic context processing. Online eye gaze measures suggest that older adults were slower than younger adults to predict an indicated object based on semantic context. Semantic competition affected online processing for older adults more than for younger adults, with no accompanying age-related differences in latency. This supports an early age-related inhibition deficit, interfering with processing, and not necessarily with response execution.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.3389/fnhum.2020.610548

Frontiers in human neuroscience

Front Hum Neurosci

The Effect of Bilingualism on Cue-Based vs. Memory-Based Task Switching in Older Adults.

Findings suggest a positive impact of bilingualism on cognition, including the later onset of dementia. However, it is not clear to what extent these effects are influenced by variations in attentional control demands in response to specific task requirements. In this study, 20 bilingual and 20 monolingual older adults performed a task-switching task under explicit task-cuing vs. memory-based switching conditions. In the cued condition, task switches occurred in random order and a visual cue signaled the next task to be performed. In the memory-based condition, the task alternated after every second trial in a predictable sequence without presenting a cue. The performance of bilinguals did not vary across experimental conditions, whereas monolinguals experienced a pronounced increase in response latencies and error rates in the cued condition. Both groups produced similar switch costs (difference in performance on switch trials as opposed to repeating trials within the mixed-task block) and mixing costs (difference in performance on repeat trials of a mixed-task block as opposed to trials of a single-task block), but bilinguals produced them with lower response latencies. The cognitive benefits of bilingualism seem not to apply to executive functions but to affect specific cognitive processes that involve task-relevant context processing. The present results suggest that lifelong bilingualism could promote in older adults a flexible adjustment to environmental cues, but only with increased task demands. However, due to the small sample size, the results should be interpreted with caution.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1037/neu0000682

Neuropsychology

Neuropsychology

Differential impairments in irony comprehension in brain-damaged individuals: Insight from contextual processing, theory of mind, and executive functions.

The comprehension of irony can be affected after brain injuries. The cognitive mechanisms accounting for such disorders remain yet unclear. The heterogeneity of cognitive profiles of brain-damaged individuals and the use of independent tests to measure the links between these mechanisms and the comprehension of irony might contribute to this lack of clarity. The present study aimed to further explore the underlying mechanisms of irony-understanding disorders (i.e., context processing, executive functions [EF], and theory of mind [ToM]) in patients with brain lesions. We used a paradigm manipulating these mechanisms within an irony task to identify different patterns of pragmatic performance associated with cognitive profiles. We administered this task and standard neuropsychological tests assessing EF and ToM to 30 participants with acquired brain injury (ABI) and 30 healthy control (HC) participants. A cluster analysis revealed that two thirds of the participants with ABI (3 subgroups out of 4) presented atypical pragmatic and neuropsychological patterns. The most severe disturbances in understanding irony, characterized by insensitivity to the context, were associated with a joint impairment of ToM and EF in 1 subgroup. In the 2 other context-sensitive subgroups, an isolated deficit in EF co-occurred with difficulties dealing with literal or ironic statements when the EF demand of the irony task was increased. However, the effect of this EF demand could be negated by the presence of markers helping the comprehension of irony. These results have important clinical implications for the evaluation and therapy of pragmatic disorders in individuals with ABI. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2019.107264

Neuropsychologia

Neuropsychologia

Age effects on the neural processing of object-context associations in briefly flashed natural scenes.

In daily life, fast visual recognition of surrounding objects is facilitated through context-based expectations. However the ability to rapidly and accurately recognize unexpected stimuli in a given environment is also crucial and this ability is impaired with age. The present fMRI study aimed at comparing in young and older adults the neural correlates of fast object processing. Patterns of cerebral activity were investigated in response to briefly-presented (100 ms) congruent and incongruent natural scenes. Participants were slower and less accurate when categorizing objects in incongruent relative to congruent contexts. This behavioral cost was notably more pronounced in the older group. Height and multivariate patterns of fMRI activity in context-selective regions were equivalent in both age groups, suggesting preserved processing of coarse scene features in older participants. Incongruent scenes elicited additional activity in the parahippocampal gyrus that possibly reflected simultaneous activation of rarely co-occurring neural representations. Contextual effects were observed in object-selective cortex for the young group only, and may be driven by detection of mismatch between actually perceived and previously-experienced associations. In the older group exclusively, increased bilateral prefrontal and left fusiform activity in response to incongruent scenes was observed. However this supplemental activity was not found to efficiently contribute to improve task performance in difficult visual conditions. Altogether these results suggest age-related changes in the interaction between object- and context-processing pathways, that may subserve impairment in fast identification of unexpected objects in natural scenes.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1177/0269881119878178

Journal of psychopharmacology (Oxford, England)

J Psychopharmacol

Caffeine improves text reading and global perception.

Reading is a unique human skill. Several brain networks involved in this complex skill mainly involve the left hemisphere language areas. Nevertheless, nonlinguistic networks found in the right hemisphere also seem to be involved in sentence and text reading. These areas do not deal with phonological information, but are involved in verbal and nonverbal pattern information processing. The right hemisphere is responsible for global processing of a scene, which is needed for developing reading skills. Caffeine seems to affect global pattern processing specifically. Consequently, our aim was to discover if it could enhance text reading skill. In two mechanistic studies (=24 and =53), we tested several reading skills, global and local perception, alerting, spatial attention and executive functions, as well as rapid automatised naming and phonological memory, using a double-blind, within-subjects, repeated-measures design in typical young adult readers. A single dose of 200 mg caffeine improved global processing, without any effect on local information processing, alerting, spatial attention and executive or phonological functions. This improvement in global processing was accompanied by faster text reading speed of meaningful sentences, whereas single word/pseudoword or pseudoword text reading abilities were not affected. These effects of caffeine on reading ability were enhanced by mild sleep deprivation. These findings show that a small quantity of caffeine could improve global processing and text reading skills in adults.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1016/j.neuroimage.2019.116012

NeuroImage

Neuroimage

Default-mode network activation underlies accurate contextual processing of exclusive disjunctions in older but not younger adults.

Young adults proactively engage frontoparietal processing of contextual cues to preempt subsequent events. Rather than being preemptive, older adults engage these brain areas reactively upon event occurrences. Reactive frontoparietal processes in older adults, however, might be insufficient for complex contextual neural computations where utilities of contexts are not straightforward but dependent on a set of stimulus-response rules. Applying non-linear logic (XOR) rules in an fMRI experiment, we found higher default-mode network (DMN) activity critical for correctly responding to such contingency in older but not younger adults. Moreover, older individuals with higher proactive cue processing showed better performances with less DMN activity. Thus, DMN processing provides critical support when older adults are faced with complex contextual contingencies. These findings suggest an age-related change in the neurocomputational role of introspective processes in decision-making from young to older adulthood.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1371/journal.pone.0219397

PloS one

PLoS One

Stability and flexibility in cognitive control: Interindividual dynamics and task context processing.

Adaptive behaviour requires cognitive control for shielding current goals from distractors (stability) but at the same time for switching between alternative goals (flexibility). In this behavioural study, we examine the stability-flexibility balance in left- and right-handers during two types of decision-making, instructed (sensory cued) and voluntary (own choice), by means of distractor inhibition and hand/task switching. The data revealed that both groups showed opposite tendencies for instructed decision-making. Moreover, right-handers resisted distracting information more efficiently whereas left-handers showed superior switching abilities. When participants were involved in voluntary decision-making, no effects of handedness were noted, which suggests that free-choice processing alters the balance between stability and flexibility. These data illustrate that handedness is an index of individual variation during instructed decision-making, biasing the proficiency of cognitive control towards stability and flexibility of information processing. These biases can however be overruled by top-down strategies that dominate during voluntary decision-making. Overall, the research underlines the antagonistic functions of stability and flexibility in decision-making, and offers an approach for examining cognitive control and the role of internal and external factors in balancing the stability-flexibility trade-off.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1037/xge0000645

Journal of experimental psychology. General

J Exp Psychol Gen

Differential impairment of positive and negative schizotypy in list-method and item-method directed forgetting.

Schizophrenia is characterized by cognitive impairment and this impairment is expected to occur, albeit to a lesser degree, in people putatively at risk for schizophrenia. Two experiments assessed the relationship between directed forgetting (DF) and schizotypy, which is a multidimensional construct that reflects the expression of the underlying vulnerability for schizophrenia. Experiment 1 involved item-method DF and Experiment 2 involves list-method DF study. The schizotypy dimensions exhibited differential patterns of impairment across the 2 methods that suggest different underlying processes. Positive schizotypy showed impairment in item-method DF that was driven by reduced ability to forget forget-cued items, whereas performance on remember-cued items was unaffected in positive schizotypy. Despite the deficit in item-method DF, positive schizotypy participants showed preserved performance in list-method DF. The opposite pattern was found in negative schizotypy participants, who showed impairment in list-method DF, despite preserved performance in item-method DF. Negative schizotypy was previously associated with deficits in context processing and, consistent with context-change account of list-method DF, showed deficits in list-method DF task. Positive schizotypy is characterized by deficits in inhibitory control and, consistent with inhibitory account of item-method DF, showed deficits in item-method DF task. Collectively, these results (a) suggest that different DF methods involve different underlying mechanisms, (b) support the context-account of list-method DF and an inhibitory account of item-method DF, and (c) support the multidimensional model of schizotypy by showing differential impairment in positive and negative schizotypy across the 2 DF tasks. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1016/j.bpsc.2019.03.012

Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging

Biol Psychiatry Cogn Neurosci Neuroimaging

Dysfunctional Neural Processes Underlying Context Processing Deficits in Schizophrenia.

People with schizophrenia (PSZ) have profound deficits in context processing, an executive process that guides adaptive behaviors according to goals and stored contextual information. Although various neural processes are involved in context processing and are affected in PSZ, the core underlying neural dysfunction is unclear. To determine the relative importance of neural dysfunctions within prefrontal cognitive control, sensory activity, and motor activity to context processing deficits in PSZ, we examined event-related potentials (ERPs) in 60 PSZ and 51 healthy control subjects during an optimal context processing task. We also analyzed the Ex-Gaussian reaction time distribution to examine abnormalities in motor control variability in PSZ. Compared with healthy control subjects, PSZ had lower response accuracy and greater variability in their normal reaction times during high context processing demands. Latencies of normal and slow responses were generally increased in PSZ. High context processing-related reductions in frontal ERPs were indicative of specific deficits in proactive and reactive cognitive controls in PSZ, while ERPs associated with visual and motor processes were reduced regardless of context processing demands, indicating generalized visuomotor deficits. In contrast to previous studies, we found that diminished frontal responses reflective of proactive control of the contextual cue, rather than visual responses of cue encoding, predicted response accuracy deficits in PSZ. In addition, probe-related ERP components of motor preparation, prefrontal reactive control, and frontomotor interaction predicted Ex-Gaussian indices of reaction time instability in PSZ. Prefrontal proactive and reactive control deficits associated with failures in using mental representation likely underlie context processing deficits in PSZ.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1037/xan0000214

Journal of experimental psychology. Animal learning and cognition

J Exp Psychol Anim Learn Cogn

Attentional instructions modulate differential context-switch effects after short and long training in human predictive learning.

Three experiments in human predictive learning assessed the modulating role of instructions on context-switch effects on performance after different levels of training. Cue X (a food name) was paired with an outcome (gastric malaise) in Context A (a specific restaurant), whereas another cue, Y, was presented in the absence of outcome in Context B. The series manipulated the testing context (same or different from the acquisition context), the length of training (short vs. long), and the instructions participants received before testing (attentional or neutral). Attentional instructions intended to either focusing participants' attention on the context (Experiments 1 and 2) or to take attention away from the context (Experiment 3). In agreement with the predictions of the attentional theory of context processing, instructions that focused participants' attention on the context made retrieval of information after long training context specific, something that did not occur in the absence of attentional instructions. Conversely, instructions that took participants' attention away from the context (by focusing their attention on the cue) attenuated context-switch effects that otherwise appear after short training. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.3389/fnbeh.2019.00024

Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience

Front Behav Neurosci

Cognitive Flexibility Training Improves Extinction Retention Memory and Enhances Cortical Dopamine With and Without Traumatic Stress Exposure.

Stress exposure can cause lasting changes in cognition, but certain individual traits, such as cognitive flexibility, have been shown to reduce the degree, duration, or severity of cognitive changes following stress. Both stress and cognitive flexibility training affect decision making by modulating monoamine signaling. Here, we test the role cognitive flexibility training, and high vs. low cognitive flexibility at the individual level, in attenuating stress-induced changes in memory and monoamine levels using the single prolonged stress (SPS) rodent model of traumatic stress in male Sprague-Dawley rats. Exposure to SPS can heighten fear responses to conditioned cues (i.e., freezing) after a fear association has been extinguished, referred to as a deficit in extinction retention. This deficit is thought to reflect an impairment in context processing that is characteristic of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). During a cognitive flexibility training we assessed individual variability in cognitive skills and conditioned rats to discriminately use cues in their environment. We found that cognitive flexibility training, alone or followed by SPS exposure, accelerated extinction learning and decreased fear responses over time during extinction retention testing, compared with rats not given cognitive flexibility training. These findings suggest that cognitive flexibility training may improve context processing in individuals with and without traumatic stress exposure. Individual performance during the reversal phase of the cognitive flexibility training predicted subsequent context processing; individuals with high reversal performance exhibited a faster decrease in freezing responses during extinction retention testing. Thus, high reversal performance predicted enhanced retention of extinction learning over time and suggests that cognitive flexibility training may be a strategy to promote context processing. In a brain region vital for maintaining cognitive flexibility and fear suppression, the prelimbic cortex (PLC), cognitive flexibility training also lastingly enhanced dopamine (DA) and norepinephrine (NE) levels, in animals with and without traumatic stress exposure. In contrast, cognitive flexibility training prior to traumatic stress exposure decreased levels of DA and its metabolites in the striatum, a region mediating reflexive decision making. Overall, our results suggest that cognitive flexibility training can provide lasting benefits by enhancing extinction retention, a hallmark cognitive effect of trauma, and prelimbic DA, which can maintain flexibility across changing contexts.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1371/journal.pone.0212592

PloS one

PLoS One

Telling a good story: The effects of memory retrieval and context processing on eyewitness suggestibility.

Witnesses are likely to describe a crime many times before testifying or encountering misinformation about that crime. Research examining the effect of retrieval on later suggestibility has yielded mixed results. LaPaglia and Chan manipulated whether misinformation was presented in a narrative or misleading questions, and they found that retrieval increased suggestibility when misinformation was presented in a narrative, but reduced suggestibility when the same misinformation was presented in questions. In the current study, we aimed to address why these differences occurred. Specifically, we examined whether contextual detail and narrative coherence during misinformation exposure influenced the relation between retrieval and suggestibility. Participants watched a robbery video and some were questioned about the event afterwards. They were then exposed to misinformation presented in a narrative (Experiment 1) or questions (Experiment 2) before taking a final memory test. Testing enhanced suggestibility when the misinformation phase reinstated contextual information of the event, but not when the misinformation phase included few contextual details-regardless of whether the misinformation was in a narrative or questions. In Experiment 3, disrupting narrative coherence by randomizing the order of contextual information eliminated retrieval-enhanced suggestibility. Therefore, context processing during the post-event information phase influences whether retrieval enhances or reduces eyewitness suggestibility.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1037/abn0000383

Journal of abnormal psychology

J Abnorm Psychol

A meta-analysis of context integration deficits across the schizotypy spectrum using AX-CPT and DPX tasks.

Schizotypy and schizophrenia involve disrupted context integration (CI), the ability to assimilate internal and external information into coherent mental representations. Research has primarily examined patients with schizophrenia, with fewer studies assessing CI in schizotypy-spectrum groups. The literature shows overall CI deficits, but mixed results for specific performance patterns and associations with clinical symptoms. Furthermore, conclusions are limited by small samples and heterogeneity across studies. To examine CI deficits across the schizotypy spectrum using AX-Continuous Performance Task (CPT) and Dot Pattern Expectancy task (DPX) performance. Systematic review involved searching 4 databases and 12 journals, examining key references, and contacting 227 researchers for published and unpublished data. Search terms included AX-CPT/DPX/dot pattern expectancy task/CNTRACs/context* integration/context* processing and schizo*/prodromal/high risk/psychosis; context* and ultra high risk. Independent data from studies with diagnostically or psychometrically assessed schizotypy-spectrum groups and AX-CPT/DPX tasks with 10+ trials and 60+% AX trials were included. Articles were independently coded by two authors using predefined coding schemes with good agreement. Meta-analyses pooled outcomes using random-effects models. Forty-one studies met inclusion criteria. CI impairment was present across the schizotypy spectrum. CI deficits in schizophrenia were substantial and associated with disorganized and negative symptoms. Outcomes were comparable between patients with chronic and first-episode schizophrenia. At-risk groups demonstrated moderate CI impairment. Results were robust across task parameters and there was no evidence that reporting biases grossly impacted outcomes. Findings lend support to theories suggesting that CI is a stable vulnerability factor for schizophrenia. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1002/hbm.24443

Human brain mapping

Hum Brain Mapp

Hippocampal subfields alterations in adolescents with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Reexperiencing symptoms in adolescent Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) are characterized by the apparition of vivid intrusive images of the traumatic event. The emergence of these intrusions is thought to be related to a deficiency in context processing and could then be related to hippocampal alterations. The hippocampus is a complex structure which can be divided into several subfields, namely, the Cornu Ammonis (CA1, CA2, and CA3), the subiculum, and the dentate gyrus (DG). As each subfield presents different histological characteristics and functions, it appears more relevant to consider hippocampal subfields, instead of only assessing the whole hippocampus, to understand the neurobiology of PTSD. Hence, this study presents the first investigation of structural alterations within hippocampal subfields and their links to reexperiencing symptoms in adolescent PTSD. Hippocampal subfields were manually delineated on high-resolution MRI images in 15 adolescents (13-18 years old) with PTSD and 24 age-matched healthy controls. The volume of the region CA2-3/DG region was significantly smaller in the PTSD group compared to controls in both hemispheres. No other significant difference was found for other subfields. Moreover, the volume of the left CA2-3/DG was negatively correlated with the intrusion score (as measured by the Impact of Events Scale-Revised) in the PTSD group. To conclude, an alteration in the hippocampal subregion CA2-3/DG, known to resolve interferences between new and similar stored memories, could participate in the apparition of intrusive trauma memories in adolescents with PTSD.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1037/bne0000277

Behavioral neuroscience

Behav Neurosci

Neonatal hippocampal lesions facilitate biconditional contextual discrimination learning in monkeys.

This study examined whether selective neonatal hippocampal lesions in monkeys (), which left the surrounding cortical areas (parahippocampal cortex) intact, affect contextual learning and memory compared with controls. Monkeys were tested with an automated touch-screen apparatus so that stimuli and contextual cues could be manipulated independently of one another. The data suggest that animals with neonatal hippocampal lesions have sparing of function with regard to contextual learning and memory when (a) contextual information is irrelevant or (b) relevant for good discrimination performance, and (c) when transferring a contextual rule to new discriminations. These findings are at odds with studies examining contextual learning and memory in monkeys with selective adult-onset hippocampal lesions, and those with nonselective neonatal hippocampal lesions, which have demonstrated impairment in contextual learning and memory. Therefore, the sparing of function seen in this study may be attributable to the early nature of the damage and the plastic nature of the infant brain, as well as the intact medial temporal lobe cortical areas as a result of the lesion methodology. Specifically, by removing the hippocampus early in life, before it has begun to function, the parahippocampal (TH/TF) and perirhinal cortices and its interactions with the lateral prefrontal cortex may be able to support context processing throughout life. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1080/13546805.2018.1528972

Cognitive neuropsychiatry

Cogn Neuropsychiatry

Attribution of intentions and context processing in psychometric schizotypy.

Impairment in Theory of mind (TOM) has frequently been associated with schizophrenia and with schizotypy. Studies have found that a tendency to over-attribute intentions and special meaning to events and to people is related to positive psychotic symptoms. Further, it has been suggested that this intentionality bias may be due to a broader deficit in context processing (CP). The aim of the present study was thus to investigate the relationship between positive schizotypy and both over-attribution of intentions and contextual processing. One-hundred and nineteen healthy individuals completed the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire and were assessed with tasks measuring contextual treatment and ToM. Results revealed that positive schizotypy was significantly related to an over-attribution of intentions on the ToM task and with a faster processing of implicit context. Partial correlational analyses indicated that the association between the attribution of intentions and positive schizotypy was not explained by a deficit of CP. In contrast, stepwise multiple regression analyses showed that both an over-attribution of intentions and a faster processing of implicit context significantly predicted positive schizotypy. These results show that an over-attribution of intention is independent from a broader deficit in context information processing and that they both possibly contribute to the development and maintenance of positive psychotic symptoms.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1017/S0033291718002477

Psychological medicine

Psychol Med

Integrated assessment of visual perception abnormalities in psychotic disorders and relationship with clinical characteristics.

The visual system is recognized as an important site of pathology and dysfunction in schizophrenia. In this study, we evaluated different visual perceptual functions in patients with psychotic disorders using a potentially clinically applicable task battery and assessed their relationship with symptom severity in patients, and with schizotypal features in healthy participants. Five different areas of visual functioning were evaluated in patients with schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder (n = 28) and healthy control subjects (n = 31) using a battery that included visuospatial working memory (VSWM), velocity discrimination (VD), contour integration, visual context processing, and backward masking tasks. The patient group demonstrated significantly lower performance in VD, contour integration, and VSWM tasks. Performance did not differ between the two groups on the visual context processing task and did not differ across levels of interstimulus intervals in the backward masking task. Performances on VSWM, VD, and contour integration tasks were correlated with negative symptom severity but not with other symptom dimensions in the patient group. VSWM and VD performances were also correlated with negative sychizotypal features in healthy controls. Taken together, these results demonstrate significant abnormalities in multiple visual processing tasks in patients with psychotic disorders, adding to the literature implicating visual abnormalities in these conditions. Furthermore, our results show that visual processing impairments are associated with the negative symptom dimension in patients as well as healthy individuals.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1016/j.schres.2018.05.039

Schizophrenia research

Schizophr Res

Episodic memory retrieval is impaired in negative schizotypy under fast response deadline.

Schizotypy offers a useful, multidimensional framework for understanding the development and expression of schizophrenia-spectrum psychopathology. Nonclinically ascertained young adults who endorse positive and negative schizotypy traits exhibit similar, albeit milder, versions of the symptoms and impairment seen in schizophrenia-spectrum disorders. Previous studies have demonstrated that negative, but not positive, schizotypy is associated with impairment in free-recall, recognition, and source memory. Furthermore, these deficits appear to result from context processing deficits in negative schizotypy. However, neither positive nor negative schizotypy were associated with variation in the set size effect. The present study further examined the association with set-size effect under fast and slow response deadlines across the schizotypy continuum. We replicated the finding that the set size effect was invariant across both positive and negative schizotypy dimensions. However, negative schizotypy was associated with poorer overall recall, and the negative schizotypy by response deadline interaction revealed that negative schizotypy was differentially impaired by the speeded responding in overall memory. Despite instructions to guess on the cued-recall task, negative schizotypy was associated with increased likelihood of omission errors (failing to produce a response), whereas positive schizotypy was associated with decreased omission errors. The findings provide further support for the multidimensional model of schizotypy and previous findings that negative schizotypy is associated with impaired retrieval, especially under fast response deadlines.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1371/journal.pone.0197812

PloS one

PLoS One

Normal development of context processing using the AXCPT paradigm.

Context processing involves a flexible and continually updated representation of task relevant information and is a core aspect of cognitive control. The expectancy AX Continuous Performance Test (AXCPT) was designed to specifically measure context processing and has been widely applied to elucidate mechanisms of cognitive control and their impairments in conditions such as aging and schizophrenia. Here we present a large-sample, cross-sectional study of context processing aimed at characterizing its normal development from childhood to early adulthood (8 to 22 years old). We track the age-related changes in the standard AXCPT performance measures and also investigate their validity using detailed data-driven method. We show how critical maturational changes in context processing can be validly tracked from mid-adolescence onward with increasing reliance on preparatory, proactive strategies well into early adulthood. However, the early maturation from childhood into adolescence showed a sharp, two-fold discontinuity: while standard measures provide partially conflicting results suggesting an early worsening of proactive strategies, further analyses do not support their validity during this period. Our findings advocate the existence of multiple preparatory strategies that cannot be captured by indices that assume a simple dichotomy of proactive vs. reactive strategies. When evaluating context processing differences over development or in clinical populations, we advocate the explicit testing of the assumptions underlying standard AXCPT indices through complementary data-driven methods.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1007/s10597-018-0278-0

Community mental health journal

Community Ment Health J

Paranoia Symptoms Moderate the Impact of Emotional Context Processing on Community Functioning of Individuals with Schizophrenia.

This study examined whether better emotional context processing is associated with better community functioning among persons with schizophrenia, and whether the relationship between the two variables is moderated by level of paranoid symptoms. The Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale-Expanded Version, Emotional Context Processing Scale, and Multnomah Community Ability Scale were administered to 39 community-dwelling participants with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder. Emotional context processing had a small-to-moderate association with community functioning. However, the association between emotional context processing and community functioning was moderated by level of paranoid symptoms. Emotional context processing in participants with mild paranoid symptoms was strongly associated with better community functioning, whereas emotional context processing in those with severe paranoid symptoms was not. Emotional context processing and the degree of paranoia should be considered in treatment plans designed to enhance the community functioning of individuals with schizophrenia to help them improve their understanding of social situations.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1162/CPSY_a_00004

Computational psychiatry (Cambridge, Mass.)

Comput Psychiatr

Implications of Information Theory for Computational Modeling of Schizophrenia.

Information theory provides a formal framework within which information processing and its disorders can be described. However, information theory has rarely been applied to modeling aspects of the cognitive neuroscience of schizophrenia. The goal of this article is to highlight the benefits of an approach based on information theory, including its recent extensions, for understanding several disrupted neural goal functions as well as related cognitive and symptomatic phenomena in schizophrenia. We begin by demonstrating that foundational concepts from information theory-such as Shannon information, entropy, data compression, block coding, and strategies to increase the signal-to-noise ratio-can be used to provide novel understandings of cognitive impairments in schizophrenia and metrics to evaluate their integrity. We then describe more recent developments in information theory, including the concepts of infomax, coherent infomax, and coding with synergy, to demonstrate how these can be used to develop computational models of schizophrenia-related failures in the tuning of sensory neurons, gain control, perceptual organization, thought organization, selective attention, context processing, predictive coding, and cognitive control. Throughout, we demonstrate how disordered mechanisms may explain both perceptual/cognitive changes and symptom emergence in schizophrenia. Finally, we demonstrate that there is consistency between some information-theoretic concepts and recent discoveries in neurobiology, especially involving the existence of distinct sites for the accumulation of driving input and contextual information prior to their interaction. This convergence can be used to guide future theory, experiment, and treatment development.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1080/02699206.2018.1430851

Clinical linguistics & phonetics

Clin Linguist Phon

Context processing during irony comprehension in right-frontal brain-damaged individuals.

The aim of the present study was to investigate whether the degree of incongruity between contextual information and a target sentence influences the extent to which irony is understood in individuals with right-frontal-hemisphere damage (RHD). A psycholinguistic paradigm was used, allowing us to assess whether impairment in irony understanding is likely to be due to insensitivity (i.e. difficulty in capturing or detecting relevant contextual information) to relevant contextual information or to difficulties in integrating contextual information. Twenty individuals with RHD and 20 healthy control (HC) participants were tested on their understanding of a speaker's ironic intent and their executive functions. The main results revealed that individuals with RHD exhibit different patterns of performance, some of them being able to understand irony while in others this ability was impaired. The present study gives support to the hypothesis that difficulties in adequately using contextual information may account for pragmatic impairment of individuals with RHD. More importantly, the results suggested that these difficulties are related to a lack of sensitivity to contextual information instead of difficulty integrating it along with the ironic utterance. A subgroup of individuals with RHD processed the speaker's utterance without any reference to contextual information, which led them to a literal interpretation of the utterance.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02309

Frontiers in psychology

Front Psychol

Altered Neural Activity during Irony Comprehension in Unaffected First-Degree Relatives of Schizophrenia Patients-An fMRI Study.

Irony is a type of figurative language in which the literal meaning of the expression is the opposite of what the speaker intends to communicate. Even though schizophrenic patients are known as typically impaired in irony comprehension and in the underlying neural functions, to date no one has explored the neural correlates of figurative language comprehension in first-degree relatives of schizophrenic patients. In the present study, we examined the neural correlates of irony understanding in schizophrenic patients and in unaffected first-degree relatives of patients compared to healthy adults with functional MRI. Our aim was to investigate if possible alterations of the neural circuits supporting irony comprehension in first-degree relatives of patients with schizophrenia would fulfill the familiality criterion of an endophenotype. We examined 12 schizophrenic patients, 12 first-degree relatives of schizophrenia patients and 12 healthy controls with functional MRI while they were performing irony and control tasks. Different phases of irony processing were examined, such as context processing and ironic statement comprehension. Patients had significantly more difficulty understanding irony than controls or relatives. Patients also showed markedly different neural activation pattern compared to controls in both stages of irony processing. Although no significant differences were found in the performance of the irony tasks between the control group and the relative group, during the fMRI analysis, the relatives showed stronger brain activity in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex during the context processing phase of irony tasks than the control group. However, the controls demonstrated higher activations in the left dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and in the right inferior frontal gyrus during the ironic statement phase of the irony tasks than the relative group. Our results show that despite good task performance, first-degree relatives of schizophrenia patients had alterations in the neural circuits during irony processing. Thus, we suggest that neural alteration of irony comprehension could be a potential endophenotypic marker of schizophrenia.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1037/xge0000401

Journal of experimental psychology. General

J Exp Psychol Gen

Moving beyond summary scores: Decomposing free recall performance to understand episodic memory deficits in schizotypy.

Negative symptom schizophrenia and negative schizotypy are associated with deficits in episodic memory, which may reflect deficits in context processing. However, studies that rely on summary performance measures such as mean accuracy or latency are limited in the extent that they can examine processes underlying memory impairment. The present study decomposed free recall performance by examining serial position functions, first response probability, temporal contiguity effect, cumulative recall functions, and interresponse times in high-positive schizotypy, high-negative schizotypy, and control groups. The negative schizotypy group exhibited not only impaired overall free recall performance but also a pattern of deficits consistent with impaired context processing on the underlying measures. Specifically, the negative schizotypy group was less likely than the other groups to initiate recall with the first item in the list, suggesting impaired encoding or reinstatement of context, and also showed reduced temporal contiguity compared with the other groups, suggesting diminished temporal organization. The cumulative recall function indicated that the negative schizotypy group experienced disruptions in both the sampling and recovery stages of retrieval. Finally, the negative schizotypy group experienced greater slowing between the responses during retrieval, consistent with the finding of reduced temporal contiguity and indicating that it likely terminated memory search before the remaining groups. The positive schizotypy and control groups did not differ on any of the measures. The finding that context-processing deficits occur in both subclinical negative schizotypy and negative symptom schizophrenia suggests that they may represent core areas of impairment in the schizophrenia spectrum. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1016/j.neuroimage.2017.12.022

NeuroImage

Neuroimage

The effects of dopaminergic D2-like receptor stimulation upon behavioral and neural correlates of renewal depend on individual context processing propensities.

Renewal is defined as the recovery of an extinguished response when the contexts of extinction and recall differ. Prominent hippocampal activity during context-related extinction can predict renewal. Dopaminergic antagonism during extinction learning impaired extinction and reduced hippocampal activation, without affecting renewal. However, to what extent dopaminergic stimulation during extinction influences hippocampal processing and renewal is as yet unknown. In this fMRI study, we investigated the effects of the dopamine D2-like agonist bromocriptine upon renewal in an associative learning task, in hippocampus and ventromedial PFC. We observed significant differences between bromocriptine (BROMO) and placebo (PLAC) treatments in the subgroups showing (REN) and lacking (NoREN) renewal: the renewal level of BROMO REN was significantly higher, and associated with more prominent hippocampal activation during extinction and recall, compared to PLAC REN and BROMO NoREN. Results suggest that an interaction between D2like-agonist-induced enhancement of hippocampal activity and a pre-existing tendency favoring context processing contributed to the higher renewal levels. In contrast, ventromedial prefrontal activation was unchanged, indicating that increased hippocampal context processing and not prefrontal response selection constituted the central driving force behind the high renewal levels. The findings demonstrate that hippocampal dopamine is important for encoding and providing of context information, and thus crucially involved in the renewal effect.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01969

Frontiers in psychology

Front Psychol

Does the Effort of Processing Potential Incentives Influence the Adaption of Context Updating in Older Adults?

A number of aging studies suggest that older adults process positive and negative information differently. For instance, the socioemotional selectivity theory postulates that older adults preferably process positive information in service of emotional well-being (Reed and Carstensen, 2012). Moreover, recent research has started to investigate whether incentives like gains or losses can influence cognitive control in an ongoing task. In an earlier study (Schmitt et al., 2015), we examined whether incentive cues, indicating potential monetary gains, losses, or neutral outcomes for good performance in the following trial, would influence older adults' ability to exert cognitive control. Cognitive control was measured in an AX-Continuous-Performance-Task (AX-CPT) in which participants had to select their responses to probe stimuli depending on a preceding context cue. In this study, we did not find support for a positivity effect in older adults, but both gains and losses led to enhanced context processing. As the trial-wise presentation mode may be too demanding on cognitive resources for such a bias to occur, the main goal of the present study was to examine whether motivational mindsets, induced by block-wise presentation of incentives, would result in a positivity effect. For this reason, we examined 17 older participants (65-76 years) in the AX-CPT using a block-wise presentation of incentive cues and compared them to 18 older adults (69-78 years) with the trial-wise presentation mode from our earlier study (Schmitt et al., 2015). Event-related potentials were recorded to the onset of the motivational cue and during the AX-CPT. Our results show that (a) older adults initially process cues signaling potential losses more strongly, but later during the AX-CPT invest more cognitive resources in preparatory processes like context updating in conditions with potential gains, and (b) block-wise and trial-wise presentation of incentive cues differentially influenced cognitive control. When incentives were presented block-wise, the above described valence effects were consistently found. In contrast, when incentives were presented trial-wise, the effects were mixed and salience as well as valence effects can be obtained. Hence, how positive and negative incentive cues influence cognitive control in older adults is dependent on demands of cue processing.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.3389/fnbeh.2017.00206

Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience

Front Behav Neurosci

Lost in Time and Space: States of High Arousal Disrupt Implicit Acquisition of Spatial and Sequential Context Information.

Biased cognition during high arousal states is a relevant phenomenon in a variety of topics: from the development of post-traumatic stress disorders or stress-triggered addictive behaviors to forensic considerations regarding crimes of passion. Recent evidence indicates that arousal modulates the engagement of a hippocampus-based "cognitive" system in favor of a striatum-based "habit" system in learning and memory, promoting a switch from flexible, contextualized to more rigid, reflexive responses. Existing findings appear inconsistent, therefore it is unclear whether and which type of context processing is disrupted by enhanced arousal. In this behavioral study, we investigated such arousal-triggered cognitive-state shifts in human subjects. We validated an arousal induction procedure (three experimental conditions: violent scene, erotic scene, neutral control scene) using pupillometry (Preliminary Experiment, = 13) and randomly administered this method to healthy young adults to examine whether high arousal states affect performance in two core domains of contextual processing, the acquisition of spatial (spatial discrimination paradigm; Experiment 1, = 66) and sequence information (learned irrelevance paradigm; Experiment 2, = 84). In both paradigms, spatial location and sequences were encoded incidentally and both displacements when retrieving spatial position as well as the predictability of the target by a cue in sequence learning changed stepwise. Results showed that both implicit spatial and sequence learning were disrupted during high arousal states, regardless of valence. Compared to the control group, participants in the arousal conditions showed impaired discrimination of spatial positions and abolished learning of associative sequences. Furthermore, Bayesian analyses revealed evidence against the null models. In line with recent models of stress effects on cognition, both experiments provide evidence for decreased engagement of flexible, cognitive systems supporting encoding of context information in active cognition during acute arousal, promoting reduced sensitivity for contextual details. We argue that arousal fosters cognitive adaptation towards less demanding, more present-oriented information processing, which prioritizes a current behavioral response set at the cost of contextual cues. This transient state of behavioral perseverance might reduce reliance on context information in unpredictable environments and thus represent an adaptive response in certain situations.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1007/s10548-017-0607-6

Brain topography

Brain Topogr

Fast Neural Dynamics of Proactive Cognitive Control in a Task-Switching Analogue of the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test.

One common assumption has been that prefrontal executive control is mostly required for target detection (Posner and Petersen in Ann Rev Neurosci 13:25-42, 1990). Alternatively, cognitive control has also been related to anticipatory updating of task-set (contextual) information, a view that highlights proactive control processes. Frontoparietal cortical networks contribute to both proactive control and reactive target detection, although their fast dynamics are still largely unexplored. To examine this, we analyzed rapid magnetoencephalographic (MEG) source activations elicited by task cues and target cards in a task-cueing analogue of the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test. A single-task (color sorting) condition with equivalent perceptual and motor demands was used as a control. Our results revealed fast, transient and largely switch-specific MEG activations across frontoparietal and cingulo-opercular regions in anticipation of target cards, including (1) early (100-200 ms) cue-locked MEG signals at visual, temporo-parietal and prefrontal cortices of the right hemisphere (i.e., calcarine sulcus, precuneus, inferior frontal gyrus, anterior insula and supramarginal gyrus); and (2) later cue-locked MEG signals at the right anterior and posterior insula (200-300 ms) and the left temporo-parietal junction (300-500 ms). In all cases larger MEG signal intensity was observed in switch relative to repeat cueing conditions. Finally, behavioral restart costs and test scores of working memory capacity (forward digit span) correlated with cue-locked MEG activations at key nodes of the frontoparietal network. Together, our findings suggest that proactive cognitive control of task rule updating can be fast and transiently implemented within less than a second and in anticipation of target detection.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing