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PubMedDate not supplied

Cognitive profiles of boys with the fragile X syndrome.

Testing 20 boys with the fragile X (or Martin-Bell) syndrome with the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children (K-ABC) showed a consistent pattern of strengths and weaknesses that may be useful in predicting a fragile X positive result from cytogenetic testing. This K-ABC pattern included 1) Sequential Scale score less than the Simultaneous Scale score; 2) Mental Processing Composite less than the Achievement Scale score; 3) Spatial Memory subtest score less than the Matrix Analogies subtest score; and 4) Arithmetic subtest score less than the mean of the Achievement subtest scores. A comparison group of 20 boys did not demonstrate such a pattern. Testing with the K-ABC should be considered for boys who present as learning disabled, hyperactive with attentional problems, or mildly retarded. Boys with three or four of the four features of the K-ABC fragile X pattern should be considered for medical evaluation and cytogenetic testing.

Child↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Cognitive dysfunction associates with white matter hyperintensities and subcortical atrophy on magnetic resonance imaging of the elderly diabetes mellitus Japanese elderly diabetes intervention trial (J-EDIT).

BACKGROUND: Type 2 diabetes is associated with cognitive dysfunction and increases the risk of dementia in the elderly. The aim of this study was to explore, by means of magnetic resonance (MR) imaging, possible relationships among clinical profiles of diabetes, cognitive function, white matter hyperintensities (WMHs) and subcortical brain atrophy. METHODS: Data were obtained from 95 nondemented type 2 diabetic participants aged 65 years or over, enrolled in an intervention trial for Japanese elderly diabetic patients. Cognitive function was measured with neuropsychiatric tests, including mini-mental state examination (MMSE), verbal memory, digit symbol substitution and Stroop tests. Hyperintensity was classified into periventricular, deep white matter, thalamic and basal ganglia. Four ventricle-to-brain ratios were used to measure subcortical atrophy. To identify clinical features of diabetes, indices of glycemic control, lipid metabolism, blood pressure and complications were examined. Canonical correlation analysis and regression analysis were used to assess correlation. RESULTS: Scores for digit symbol substitution and MMSE negatively correlated with WMHs in the parietal lobe and hyperintensities in the thalamus, respectively. Lower scores for memory and digit symbol substitution showed positive association with enlarged subcortical atrophy adjacent to lateral ventricles. There was no association between clinical pictures of diabetic patients with cognitive dysfunction and of those with morphological changes in the brain. CONCLUSIONS: Impaired cognitive domains of the speed of mental processes and memory were associated with WMHs and subcortical atrophy. Degenerative changes in the cerebral small vessels may constitute predictive factors for the rate of cognitive dysfunction in elderly diabetic patients.

Aged↗
PubMed2005

'Irrational' stated preferences: a quantitative and qualitative investigation.

Individuals' rationality has been a key issue long debated in Economics. While normative theories establish the way 'rational' consumers should behave, many empirical studies have documented numerous systematic violations of normative principles. This has led some to question the validity of classic economic models as an adequate approximation of individuals' real decision-making. This paper aims to shed more light on this debate. A stated preference choice experiment was set up to test rational choice properties. Attention was given to the extent to which satisfaction of such tests is related to both the complexity of the design, and subject characteristics. Quantitative and qualitative methods are applied. The majority of respondents passed the rationality tests. Satisfaction of the tests was sensitive to normatively irrelevant factors such as the complexity of the task and demographic characteristics. A significant proportion of those individuals who 'failed' seem to have reformulated the experiment in some way in their mental process. Implications for the design and analyses of future DCEs are discussed.

Adult↗
PubMed1985

Mental status and functional health 4 days following relocation to a nursing home.

Nurses frequently note changes in the health status of the aged following admission to a nursing home. The purpose of this study was to determine the stability of mental status and functional health over a 4-day period immediately following relocation from hospital to nursing home. Participants (N = 55) over the age of 60 were chosen sequentially as admitted to a 120-bed, long-term care facility for rehabilitation or convalescence, and interviewed on Day 1 and Day 4 following admission. Level of consciousness, attention/concentration, orientation, memory, and higher cognitive function were evaluated by the Mental Status Examination, and six activities of daily living were evaluated by the Scaled Outcome Criteria. A matched pairs t-test (p less than .05) demonstrated no significant differences in mean scores between Day 1 and Day 4. Results indicated that these short-term residents were stable in their mental status and functional health during the immediate period following relocation. Additional study is needed, with evaluation of the environment and its effect on participants' and expectation for length of stay.

Activities of Daily Living↗
PubMed1999

Communicative competence and the architecture of the mind/brain.

Cognitive pragmatics is concerned with the mental processes involved in intentional communication. I discuss a few issues that may help clarify the relationship between this area and the broader cognitive science and the contribution that they give, or might give, to each other. Rather than dwelling on the many technicalities of the various theories of communication that have been advanced, I focus on the different conceptions of the nature and the architecture of the mind/brain that underlie them. My aims are, first, to introduce and defend mentalist views of communication in general; second, to defend one such view, namely that communication is a cognitive competence, that is, a faculty, and the underlying idea that the architecture of the mind/brain is domain-specific; and, third, to review the (scarce) neuropsychological evidence that bears on these issues.

Brain↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Continuing influences of to-be-forgotten information.

In the present paper, we first argue that it is critical for humans to forget; that is, to have some means of preventing out-of-date information from interfering with the recall of current information. We then argue that the primary means of accomplishing such adaptive updating of human memory is retrieval inhibition: Information that is rendered out of date by new learning becomes less retrievable, but remains at essentially full strength in memory as indexed by other measures, such as recognition and word-fragment completion. We conclude with a speculation that certain unconscious influences of prior events may, in fact, be stronger if those events were to be forgotten rather than to be remembered.

Adult↗
PubMed2000

Consciousness, content, and metacognitive judgments.

Because metacognition consists in our having mental access to our cognitive states and mental states are conscious only when we are conscious of them in some suitable way, metacognition and consciousness shed important theoretical light on one another. Thus, our having metacognitive access to information carried by states that are not conscious helps confirm the hypothesis that a mental state's being conscious consists in having a noninferential higher-order thought about that state. This higher-order-thought hypothesis readily explains the appearance to consciousness of confabulatory mental states-states that do not actually occur. This fits well with, and helps refine, the "No-Magic Hypothesis" advanced by Nelson and Narens (1990).

Cognition↗
PubMed2000

Feelings and judgments of knowing: is there a special noetic state?

A. Koriat distinguishes between feeling-based and inferentially based feeling-of-knowing judgments. The former are attributable to partial information that is activated in implicit memory but not fully articulated. They are not, however, attributable to direct access to the target-an hypothesis that Koriat specifically repudiates. While there is considerable merit in the distinction that Koriat draws, and his emphasis on the possibility that people base at least some of their metacognitive judgments on implicit information seems well founded, it is argued that his rejection of the direct access view is premature. There may be a state-a true noetic state-in which people actually know the answer before they are able to express it. A case is made for further consideration of the scientific merits of the direct-access view of the noetic feelings people experience in imminent tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) states.

Cognition↗
PubMed2000

External and Internal Instantiation of Abstract Information Facilitates Transfer in Insight Problem Solving.

Four studies were conducted to examine how instantiation of abstract statements facilitates solutions to insight problems. The first two experiments explored the effects of external instantiation (adding a concrete example to the abstract source information) on transfer. Providing an example along with the abstract source statement fostered transfer of analogous solutions. Moreover, adding a complete concrete instantiation to an abstract statement produced greater transfer than adding only specific items to illustrate the abstract terms. The second two experiments examined the effects of internal instantiation (encouraging learners to generate their own concrete examples of the abstract information) on transfer. This factor, too, facilitated problem solving. Generating examples to instantiate the abstract statement yielded even better transfer than simply informing participants of the relationship between the abstract statements and the target problems. These findings suggest that both external and internal instantiation facilitate transfer by promoting mental processes associated with implementing the source analogs. Copyright 2000 Academic Press.

Journal Article↗
PubMed2000

Selective Influence and Response Time Cumulative Distribution Functions in Serial-Parallel Task Networks.

We analyze sets of mental processes, some of which are concurrent and some of which are sequential, under the assumption that the processes are partially ordered, that is, arranged in a directed acyclic network. Information about the process arrangement can be discovered by examining the effects on response time of selectively influencing process durations. Previous work has mainly focused on analyses of mean response times. Here we consider analyses based on cumulative distribution functions, for one of the major classes of directed acyclic networks, serial-parallel networks. When two processes are selectively influenced, patterns in the cumulative distribution functions can be used to test whether the processes are sequential or concurrent and whether the task network has AND gates or OR gates. Cumulative distribution functions are potentially more informative than means, and some previous results for means are shown to follow from our results for cumulative distribution functions. Copyright 2000 Academic Press.

Journal Article↗
PubMed2000

The Importance of Complexity in Model Selection.

Model selection should be based not solely on goodness-of-fit, but must also consider model complexity. While the goal of mathematical modeling in cognitive psychology is to select one model from a set of competing models that best captures the underlying mental process, choosing the model that best fits a particular set of data will not achieve this goal. This is because a highly complex model can provide a good fit without necessarily bearing any interpretable relationship with the underlying process. It is shown that model selection based solely on the fit to observed data will result in the choice of an unnecessarily complex model that overfits the data, and thus generalizes poorly. The effect of over-fitting must be properly offset by model selection methods. An application example of selection methods using artificial data is also presented. Copyright 2000 Academic Press.

Journal Article↗
PubMed2001

Attention versus intention in the primate premotor cortex.

One challenging issue in cognitive neuroscience has been to dissociate a variety of mental processes from one another in order to elucidate brain functions. Attention, in particular, has been a recurrent issue because of its strong links with perceptual, cognitive, and motor performances. This paper reviews data from neurophysiological experiments designed to dissociate neuronal activity related to visuo-spatial attention from preparatory activity in the monkey brain. Cell activity was recorded from the dorsal premotor area (PMd) and compared to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPf), from which it receives inputs. PMd has been implicated in the planing and execution of voluntary movements (PMd), and the majority of its cells are active during tasks with instructed delay time. However, the activity of many PMd cells is not specifically correlated with movement preparation, as is observed when the animal is attending to a visual stimulus, although the proportion of attention-related cells is much lower than in the DLPf. The distribution of attention-related and intention-related neurons within PMd tends to vary along the rostrocaudal axis, with the former more frequent rostrally (PMdr) and the latter more predominant caudally (PMdc). In a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study in humans, we compared the premotor activation in two tasks: a spatial attention/memory task and a motor preparation task. The results suggest a rostrocaudal specialization within PMd of the human brain, with attention-related activation rostrally and medially and intention-related activation caudally. These studies indicate strong similarities in the functional organization of dorsal premotor cortex of human and monkey.

Animals↗
PubMed2002

A comparison of neural circuits underlying auditory and visual object categorization.

Knowledge about environmental objects derives from representations of multiple object features both within and across sensory modalities. While our understanding of the neural basis for visual object representation in the human and nonhuman primate brain is well advanced, a similar understanding of auditory objects is in its infancy. We used a name verification task and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to characterize the neural circuits that are activated as human subjects match visually presented words with either simultaneously presented pictures or environmental sounds. The difficulty of the matching judgment was manipulated by varying the level of semantic detail at which the words and objects were compared. We found that blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signal was modulated in ventral and dorsal regions of the inferior frontal gyrus of both hemispheres during auditory and visual object categorization, potentially implicating these areas as sites for integrating polymodal object representations with concepts in semantic memory. As expected, BOLD signal increases in the fusiform gyrus varied with the semantic level of object categorization, though this effect was weak and restricted to the left hemisphere in the case of auditory objects.

Adult↗
PubMed2003

Awake craniotomy in glioma surgery.

Awake craniotomy is the cheapest and most reliable method to ensure neurological integrity in cerebral gliomas that infiltrate or come close to the eloquent areas of the brain, allowing (a) the localization of eloquent cortical areas by electrical stimulation and epileptic foci by cortical recording, and (b) the monitoring of the functional integrity of awake patients while aiming at subtotal removal of the gliomatous tissue. In addition, awake craniotomy opens a brief but unique window to the living brain for (a) basic neuroscience, including verification of preoperative functional imaging data and recording of electrophysiological correlates of mental processes, and for (b) applied research, including development of innovative instrumentation for brain recording and monitoring as well as screening for potential areas to be modulated in movement disorders and chronic pain.

Brain Neoplasms↗
PubMed1996

A possible contribution of phenomenology to ethology: application to a behaviour pattern in the mouse.

Classical ethology encourages a causal approach to animal behaviour, using Tinbergen's four questions concerning evolution, function, mechanism and development of behaviour. It sets aside the study of mental processes, which could otherwise help to unify our picture of the relationships between animal and environment. Here the steps in research focused on the psychological meaning of a peculiar behaviour in the mouse--carrying its tail--and what this implies regarding the mouse's cognitive world are given. Initial empirical observations suggested epistemic choices concerning space and object notions in the mouse; this led us to go beyond the first stage in exploring the significance of this behaviour. Later experiments showed the limitations of an explanation based on a cause-effect relationship. An interpretative model integrating a phenomenological conceptual framework is proposed.

Animals↗
PubMed1987

Relationships between catecholamine or 3-methoxy 4-hydroxy phenylglycol changes and the mental performance under submaximal exercise in man.

Eleven young students were tested to determine the relationship between the improvement of mental performances observed under prolonged submaximal work and central or peripheral catecholamine changes. The subjects pedaled a bicycle ergometer for 1 h at a work load individually calculated to approximate 75% of maximal oxygen uptake. The mental test, consisting of 1-h sessions of time-limited word tests and arithmetical calculations, required a high degree of concentration (vigilance and short-term memory). Catecholamines [epinephrine (E), norepinephrine (NE), dopamine (DA)], metanephrine (MN), normetanephrine (NMN) and the glucuronide conjugate of 3-methoxy 4-hydroxyphenylglycol (MHPG) were assayed in urine to assess peripheral activity: E and MN as indexes of adrenomedullary secretion, NE, NMN and MHPG glucuronide as markers of NE metabolism in sympathetic nerves. Urinary MHPG sulfate was determined as a possible marker of central noradrenergic metabolism. When compared to the effect of single tests, the combination of prolonged submaximal work and mental task induced significant increases in MHPG sulfate and E + MN excretions. Both these increases were correlated each to one another and also correlated to the number of discriminated words. Altogether, the present data show that prolonged submaximal work under mental load activates catecholamine systems and suggest that a relationship exists between adrenomedullary activation and the improvement of mental performance. Based on literature data, the possible modulatory role of peripheral E on mental processes and central noradrenergic activity is discussed.

Adult↗
PubMed1988

[Change and controversy of paradigms in the neurophysiology of motor control].

A review is given of the theoretical trends in modern neurophysiology of motor control. Three periods are distinguished to which paradigmatic basic concepts, in the sense of Th. Kuhn, can be assigned. The main exponents of these concepts, their ideological background and their critics are briefly presented. Detailed consideration is given to the present controversial discussions on the basic understanding of the psycho-mental processes in the brain. Here, the old struggle between dualists and monists has awakened to new life. Recently, science itself has discovered fundamental limitations to the epistemological capacities of the human mind, which indicate a "metatheoretical ambiguity" of natural occurrences. This allows for several different (but provisional) interpretations even of human thought and action, which, however, remain ultimately unresolved.

Animals↗