Assessment of cognitive symptoms in prodromal and early Huntington disease

The Functional Rating Scale Taskforce for pre-Huntington Disease (FuRST-pHD) is a multinational, multidisciplinary initiative with the goal of developing a data-driven, comprehensive, psychometrically sound, rating scale for assessing symptoms and functional ability in prodromal and early Huntington disease (HD) gene expansion carriers. The process involves input from numerous sources to identify relevant symptom domains, including HD individuals, caregivers, and experts from a variety of fields, as well as knowledge gained from the analysis of data from ongoing large-scale studies in HD using existing clinical scales. This is an iterative process in which an ongoing series of field tests in prodromal (prHD) and early HD individuals provides the team with data on which to make decisions regarding which questions should undergo further development or testing and which should be excluded. We report here the development and assessment of the first iteration of interview questions aimed to assess cognitive symptoms in prHD and early HD individuals.

Mouse movements of motion-impaired users: a submovement analysis

Understanding human movement is key to improving input devices and interaction techniques. This paper presents a study of mouse movements of motion-impaired users, with an aim to gaining a better understanding of impaired movement. The cursor trajectories of six motion-impaired users and three able-bodied users are studied according to their submovement structure. Several aspects of the movement are studied, including the frequency and duration of pauses between submovements, verification times, the number of submovements, the peak speed of submovements and the accuracy of submovements in two-dimensions. Results include findings that some motion-impaired users pause more often and for longer than able-bodied users, require up to five times more submovements to complete the same task, and exhibit a correlation between error and peak submovement speed that does not exist for able-bodied users.

Cognitive process modelling of controllers in en route air traffic control

In recent years, various efforts have been made in air traffic control (ATC) to maintain traffic safety and efficiency in the face of increasing air traffic demands. ATC is a complex process that depends to a large degree on human capabilities, and so understanding how controllers carry out their tasks is an important issue in the design and development of ATC systems. In particular, the human factor is considered to be a serious problem in ATC safety and has been identified as a causal factor in both major and minor incidents. There is, therefore, a need to analyse the mechanisms by which errors occur due to complex factors and to develop systems that can deal with these errors. From the cognitive process perspective, it is essential that system developers have an understanding of the more complex working processes that involve the cooperative work of multiple controllers. Distributed cognition is a methodological framework for analysing cognitive processes that span multiple actors mediated by technology. In this research, we attempt to analyse and model interactions that take place in en route ATC systems based on distributed cognition. We examine the functional problems in an ATC system from a human factors perspective, and conclude by identifying certain measures by which to address these problems. This research focuses on the analysis of air traffic controllers' tasks for en route ATC and modelling controllers' cognitive processes.

Blueberry supplementation induces spatial memory improvements and region-specific regulation of hippocampal BDNF mRNA expression in young rats

Rationale: Flavonoid-rich foods have been shown to be able to reverse age-related cognitive deficits in memory and learning in both animals and humans. However, to date, there have been only a limited number of studies investigating the effects of flavonoid-rich foods on cognition in young/healthy animals. Objectives: The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of a blueberry-rich diet in young animals using a spatial working memory paradigm, the delayed non-match task, using an eight-arm radial maze. Furthermore, the mechanisms underlying such behavioural effects were investigated. Results: We show that a 7-week supplementation with a blueberry diet (2 % w/w) improves the spatial memory performance of young rats (2 months old). Blueberry-fed animals also exhibited a faster rate of learning compared to those on the control diet. These behavioural outputs were accompanied by the activation of extracellular signal-related kinase (ERK1/2), increases in total cAMP-response element binding protein (CREB) and elevated levels of pro- and mature brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) in the hippocampus. Changes in hippocampal CREB correlated well with memory performance. Further regional analysis of BDNF gene expression in the hippocampus revealed a specific increase in BDNF mRNA in the dentate gyrus and CA1 areas of hippocampi of blueberry-fed animals. Conclusions: The present study suggests that consumption of flavonoid-rich blueberries has a positive impact on spatial learning performance in young healthy animals, and these improvements are linked to the activation of ERK–CREB– BDNF pathway in the hippocampus.

Cognitive, affective and behavioural characteristics of mothers with anxiety disorders in the context of child anxiety disorder

Parental emotional distress, particularly high maternal anxiety, is one of the most consistent predictors of child anxiety treatment outcome. In order to identify the cognitive, affective and behavioural parenting characteristics of mothers of children with anxiety disorders who themselves have an anxiety disorder, we assessed the expectations and appraisals of 88 mothers of anxious children (44 not anxious (NONANX) and 44 with a current anxiety disorder (ANX)) before and after interacting with their 7-12 year old children. There were no observed differences in anxiety and avoidance among children of ANX and NONANX mothers, but, compared to NONANX mothers, ANX mothers held more negative expectations and differed on observations of intrusiveness, expressed anxiety, warmth and the quality of the relationship. Associations were moderated by the degree to which children expressed anxiety during the tasks. Maternal reported negative emotions during the task significantly mediated the association between maternal anxiety status and the observed quality of the relationship. These findings suggest that maternal anxiety disorder is associated with reduced tolerance of children’s negative emotions. This may interfere with the maintenance of a positive, supportive mother-child interaction under conditions of stress, and as such impede optimum treatment outcomes. The findings identify potential cognitive, affective and behavioural targets to improve treatment outcomes for children with anxiety disorders in the context of a current maternal anxiety disorder.

Revealing and quantifying the impaired phonological analysis underpinning impaired comprehension in Wernicke’s aphasia

Wernicke’s aphasia is a condition which results in severely disrupted language comprehension following a lesion to the left temporo-parietal region. A phonological analysis deficit has traditionally been held to be at the root of the comprehension impairment in WA, a view consistent with current functional neuroimaging which finds areas in the superior temporal cortex responsive to phonological stimuli. However behavioural evidence to support the link between a phonological analysis deficit and auditory comprehension has not been yet shown. This study extends seminal work by Blumstein et al. (1977) to investigate the relationship between acoustic-phonological perception, measured through phonological discrimination, and auditory comprehension in a case series of Wernicke’s aphasia participants. A novel adaptive phonological discrimination task was used to obtain reliable thresholds of the phonological perceptual distance required between nonwords before they could be discriminated. Wernicke’s aphasia participants showed significantly elevated thresholds compared to age and hearing matched control participants. Acoustic-phonological thresholds correlated strongly with auditory comprehension abilities in Wernicke’s aphasia. In contrast, nonverbal semantic skills showed no relationship with auditory comprehension. The results are evaluated in the context of recent neurobiological models of language and suggest that impaired acoustic-phonological perception underlies the comprehension impairment in Wernicke’s aphasia and favour models of language which propose a leftward asymmetry in phonological analysis.

Assessing L2 task performance: understanding effects of task design

The overarching aim of the research reported here was to investigate the effects of task structure and storyline complexity of oral narrative tasks on second language task performance. Participants were 60 Iranian language learners of English who performed six narrative tasks of varying degree of structure and storyline complexity in an assessment setting. A number of analytic detailed measures were employed to examine whether there were any differences in the participants’ performances elicited by the different tasks in terms of their accuracy, fluency, syntactic complexity and lexical diversity. Results of the data analysis showed that performance in the more structured tasks was more accurate and to a great extent more fluent than that in the less structured tasks. The results further revealed that syntactic complexity of L2 performance was related to the storyline complexity, i.e. more syntactic complexity was associated with narratives that had both foreground and background storylines. These findings strongly suggest that there is some unsystematic variance in the participants’ performance triggered by the different aspects of task design.

Researching task difficulty: towards understanding L2 proficiency

The prime purpose of this article is to put teachers’, learners’ and research perspectives of task difficulty (TD) together and to investigate whether teachers’ and learners’ perceptions of and criteria for TD are in line with the available research on TD. A summary of three interrelated empirical studies on learner and teacher perceptions of TD is presented before the findings are discussed in light of the current models of TD. The chapter concludes by arguing that cognitive demands of a task are a signifcant factor that contributes to TD and should be considered more critically by L2 educators and SLA researchers.

Use of nutritional complete supplements in older adults with dementia: systematic review and meta-analysis of clinical outcomes

Background & Aims: Malnutrition is prevalent in people diagnosed with dementia however ensuring adequate oral intake within this group is often problematic. It is important to determine whether providing nutritionally complete oral nutritional supplements (ONS) drinks is an effective way of improving clinical outcomes for older people with dementia. This paper systematically reviewed clinical, wellbeing and nutritional outcomes in people with long-term cognitive impairment. Methods: The CINAHL, Medline and EMBASE databases were searched from their inception until January 2012. Reference lists of the included papers, foreign language papers and review articles obtained were manually searched. Results: Twelve articles were included in the review containing 1076 people in the supplement groups (intervention) and 748 people in the control groups. Meta-analysis shows there was a significant improvement in weight (p=<0.0001), Body Mass Index (BMI) (p=<0.0001) and cognition at 6.5+/-3.9 month follow up (p=0.002) when supplements were given compared to the control group. Conclusions: Providing ONS drinks has a positive effect on weight gain and cognition at follow up in older people with dementia. Additional research is required in both comparing nutritional supplements to vitamin/mineral tablets and high protein/calorie shots and clinical outcomes relevant to hospitalised people with dementia.

The neural bases of the short-term storage of verbal information are anatomically variable across individuals

What are the precise brain regions supporting the short-term retention of verbal information? A previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study suggested that they may be topographically variable across individuals, occurring, in most, in regions posterior to prefrontal cortex (PFC), and that detection of these regions may be best suited to a single-subject (SS) approach to fMRI analysis (Feredoes and Postle, 2007). In contrast, other studies using spatially normalized group-averaged (SNGA) analyses have localized storage-related activity to PFC. To evaluate the necessity of the regions identified by these two methods, we applied repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to SS- and SNGA-identified regions throughout the retention period of a delayed letter-recognition task. Results indicated that rTMS targeting SS analysis-identified regions of left perisylvian and sensorimotor cortex impaired performance, whereas rTMS targeting the SNGA-identified region of left caudal PFC had no effect on performance. Our results support the view that the short-term retention of verbal information can be supported by regions associated with acoustic, lexical, phonological, and speech-based representation of information. They also suggest that the brain bases of some cognitive functions may be better detected by SS than by SNGA approaches to fMRI data analysis.

Magnetic resonance imaging of a randomized controlled trial investigating predictors of recovery following psychological treatment in adolescents with moderate to severe unipolar depression: study protocol for Magnetic Resonance - Improving Mood with Psychoanalytic and Cognitive Therapies (MR-IMPACT)

Background Major depressive disorders (MDD) are a debilitating and pervasive group of mental illnesses afflicting many millions of people resulting in the loss of 110 million working days and more than 2,500 suicides per annum. Adolescent MDD patients attending NHS clinics show high rates of recurrence into adult life. A meta-analysis of recent research shows that psychological treatments are not as efficacious as previously thought. Modest treatment outcomes of approximately 65% of cases responding suggest that aetiological and clinical heterogeneity may hamper the better use of existing therapies and discovery of more effective treatments. Information with respect to optimal treatment choice for individuals is lacking, with no validated biomarkers to aid therapeutic decision-making. Methods/Design Magnetic resonance-Improving Mood with Psychoanalytic and Cognitive Therapies, the MR-IMPACT study, plans to identify brain regions implicated in the pathophysiology of depressions and examine whether there are specific behavioural or neural markers predicting remission and/or subsequent relapse in a subsample of depressed adolescents recruited to the IMPACT randomised controlled trial (Registration # ISRCTN83033550). Discussion MR-IMPACT is an investigative biomarker component of the IMPACT pragmatic effectiveness trial. The aim of this investigation is to identify neural markers and regional indicators of the pathophysiology of and treatment response for MDD in adolescents. We anticipate that these data may enable more targeted treatment delivery by identifying those patients who may be optimal candidates for therapeutic response.

The lottery-panel task for bi-dimensional parameter-free elicitation of risk attitudes

We propose first, a simple task for the eliciting attitudes toward risky choice, the SGG lottery-panel task, which consists in a series of lotteries constructed to compensate riskier options with higher risk-return trade-offs. Using Principal Component Analysis technique, we show that the SGG lottery-panel task is capable of capturing two dimensions of individual risky decision making i.e. subjects’ average risk taking and their sensitivity towards variations in risk-return. From the results of a large experimental dataset, we confirm that the task systematically captures a number of regularities such as: A tendency to risk averse behavior (only around 10% of choices are compatible with risk neutrality); An attraction to certain payoffs compared to low risk lotteries, compatible with over-(under-) weighting of small (large) probabilities predicted in PT and; Gender differences, i.e. males being consistently less risk averse than females but both genders being similarly responsive to the increases in risk-premium. Another interesting result is that in hypothetical choices most individuals increase their risk taking responding to the increase in return to risk, as predicted by PT, while across panels with real rewards we see even more changes, but opposite to the expected pattern of riskier choices for higher risk-returns. Therefore, we conclude from our data that an “economic anomaly” emerges in the real reward choices opposite to the hypothetical choices. These findings are in line with Camerer's (1995) view that although in many domains, paid subjects probably do exert extra mental effort which improves their performance, choice over money gambles is not likely to be a domain in which effort will improve adherence to rational axioms (p. 635). Finally, we demonstrate that both dimensions of risk attitudes, average risk taking and sensitivity towards variations in the return to risk, are desirable not only to describe behavior under risk but also to explain behavior in other contexts, as illustrated by an example. In the second study, we propose three additional treatments intended to elicit risk attitudes under high stakes and mixed outcome (gains and losses) lotteries. Using a dataset obtained from a hypothetical implementation of the tasks we show that the new treatments are able to capture both dimensions of risk attitudes. This new dataset allows us to describe several regularities, both at the aggregate and within-subjects level. We find that in every treatment over 70% of choices show some degree of risk aversion and only between 0.6% and 15.3% of individuals are consistently risk neutral within the same treatment. We also confirm the existence of gender differences in the degree of risk taking, that is, in all treatments females prefer safer lotteries compared to males. Regarding our second dimension of risk attitudes we observe, in all treatments, an increase in risk taking in response to risk premium increases. Treatment comparisons reveal other regularities, such as a lower degree of risk taking in large stake treatments compared to low stake treatments and a lower degree of risk taking when losses are incorporated into the large stake lotteries. Results that are compatible with previous findings in the literature, for stake size effects (e.g., Binswanger, 1980; Antoni Bosch-Domènech & Silvestre, 1999; Hogarth & Einhorn, 1990; Holt & Laury, 2002; Kachelmeier & Shehata, 1992; Kühberger et al., 1999; B. J. Weber & Chapman, 2005; Wik et al., 2007) and domain effect (e.g., Brooks and Zank, 2005, Schoemaker, 1990, Wik et al., 2007). Whereas for small stake treatments, we find that the effect of incorporating losses into the outcomes is not so clear. At the aggregate level an increase in risk taking is observed, but also more dispersion in the choices, whilst at the within-subjects level the effect weakens. Finally, regarding responses to risk premium, we find that compared to only gains treatments sensitivity is lower in the mixed lotteries treatments (SL and LL). In general sensitivity to risk-return is more affected by the domain than the stake size. After having described the properties of risk attitudes as captured by the SGG risk elicitation task and its three new versions, it is important to recall that the danger of using unidimensional descriptions of risk attitudes goes beyond the incompatibility with modern economic theories like PT, CPT etc., all of which call for tests with multiple degrees of freedom. Being faithful to this recommendation, the contribution of this essay is an empirically and endogenously determined bi-dimensional specification of risk attitudes, useful to describe behavior under uncertainty and to explain behavior in other contexts. Hopefully, this will contribute to create large datasets containing a multidimensional description of individual risk attitudes, while at the same time allowing for a robust context, compatible with present and even future more complex descriptions of human attitudes towards risk.

Televised Whorf: cognitive restructuring in advanced foreign language learners as a function of audio-visual media exposure

The encoding of goal-oriented motion events varies across different languages. Speakers of languages without grammatical aspect (e.g., Swedish) tend to mention motion endpoints when describing events, e.g., “two nuns walk to a house,”, and attach importance to event endpoints when matching scenes from memory. Speakers of aspect languages (e.g., English), on the other hand, are more prone to direct attention to the ongoingness of motion events, which is reflected both in their event descriptions, e.g., “two nuns are walking.”, and in their non-verbal similarity judgements. This study examines to what extent native speakers of Swedish (n = 82) with English as a foreign language (FL) restructure their categorisation of goal-oriented motion as a function of their English proficiency and experience with the English language (e.g., exposure, learning). Seventeen monolingual native English speakers from the United Kingdom (UK) were engaged for comparison purposes. Data on motion event cognition were collected through a memory-based triads matching task, in which a target scene with an intermediate degree of endpoint orientation was matched with two alternative scenes with low and high degrees of endpoint orientation, respectively. Results showed that the preference among the Swedish speakers of L2 English to base their similarity judgements on ongoingness rather than event endpoints was correlated with their use of English in their everyday lives, such that those who often watched television in English approximated the ongoingness preference of the English native speakers. These findings suggest that event cognition patterns may be restructured through the exposure to FL audio-visual media. The results thus add to the emerging picture that learning a new language entails learning new ways of observing and reasoning about reality.

Increased resting state functional connectivity in the default mode network in recovered anorexia nervosa.

Functional brain imaging studies have shown abnormal neural activity in individuals recovered from anorexia nervosa (AN) during both cognitive and emotional task paradigms. It has been suggested that this abnormal activity which persists into recovery might underpin the neurobiology of the disorder and constitute a neural biomarker for AN. However, no study to date has assessed functional changes in neural networks in the absence of task-induced activity in those recovered from AN. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate whole brain resting state functional connectivity in nonmedicated women recovered from anorexia nervosa. Functional magnetic resonance imaging scans were obtained from 16 nonmedicated participants recovered from anorexia nervosa and 15 healthy control participants. Independent component analysis revealed functionally relevant resting state networks. Dual regression analysis revealed increased temporal correlation (coherence) in the default mode network (DMN) which is thought to be involved in self-referential processing. Specifically, compared to healthy control participants the recovered anorexia nervosa participants showed increased temporal coherence between the DMN and the precuneus and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex/inferior frontal gyrus. The findings support the view that dysfunction in resting state functional connectivity in regions involved in self-referential processing and cognitive control might be a vulnerability marker for the development of anorexia nervosa.

Expected value, reward outcome, and temporal difference error representations in a probabilistic decision task

In probabilistic decision tasks, an expected value (EV) of a choice is calculated, and after the choice has been made, this can be updated based on a temporal difference (TD) prediction error between the EV and the reward magnitude (RM) obtained. The EV is measured as the probability of obtaining a reward x RM. To understand the contribution of different brain areas to these decision-making processes, functional magnetic resonance imaging activations related to EV versus RM (or outcome) were measured in a probabilistic decision task. Activations in the medial orbitofrontal cortex were correlated with both RM and with EV and confirmed in a conjunction analysis to extend toward the pregenual cingulate cortex. From these representations, TD reward prediction errors could be produced. Activations in areas that receive from the orbitofrontal cortex including the ventral striatum, midbrain, and inferior frontal gyrus were correlated with the TD error. Activations in the anterior insula were correlated negatively with EV, occurring when low reward outcomes were expected, and also with the uncertainty of the reward, implicating this region in basic and crucial decision-making parameters, low expected outcomes, and uncertainty.