Neural predictive mechanisms and their role in cognitive incrementalism

Many neuroscientists view prediction as one of the core brain functions, especially on account of its support of fast movements in complex environments. This leads to the natural question whether predictive knowledge forms the cornerstone of our common-sense understanding of the world. However, there is little consensus as to the exact nature of predictive information and processes, or of the neural mechanisms that realize them. This paper compares procedural versus declarative notions of prediction, examines how the brain appears to carry out predictive functions, and discusses to what degree, and at what level, these neural mechanisms support cognitive incrementalism: the notion that high-level cognition stems from sensorimotor behavior.     

BIS, BAS, and bias: The role of personality and cognitive bias in social anxiety

The goal of the present research was to test the hypothesis that cognitive biases for negative and threatening social information mediate the effects of behavioral inhibition system (BIS) and behavioral approach system (BAS) sensitivity on social anxiety. Participants completed self-report measures of BIS and BAS and then underwent a social-threat induction procedure in which they were told they would have to perform a speech. A battery of cognitive bias measures was then administered, followed by a battery of state anxiety measures. Audience members also rated participants’ anxiety during the speech. Structural equation modeling was used to test the hypothesized model. As predicted, the fully-mediated model showed the best fit to the data, and higher BIS and lower BAS were found to have significant indirect effects on social anxiety via cognitive bias.     

The role of attachment and cognitive inhibition in children's memory and suggestibility for a stressful event

There has been increasing interest in children's abilities to report memories of and resist misleading suggestions about distressing events. Individual differences among children and their parents may provide important insight into principles that govern children's eyewitness memory and suggestibility for such experiences. In the present study, 51 children between the ages of 3 and 7 years were interviewed about an inoculation after a delay of approximately 2 weeks. Results indicated that parents' attachment Avoidance was associated with children's distress during the inoculation. Parental attachment Anxiety and the interaction between parental Avoidance and children's stress predicted children's memory for the inoculation. Cognitive inhibition was also a significant predictor of children's memory errors and suggestibility. Theoretical implications concerning effects of stress and individual differences on children's eyewitness memory and suggestibility are discussed.     

The role of personality and learning experiences in social cognitive career theory

We sought to extend the empirical literature on Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT) by testing (a) the posited indirect effect of personality on interests through learning experiences and sociocognitive mechanisms, and (b) hypotheses that self-efficacy percepts and outcome expectations derive from corresponding career-relevant learning experiences. Participants (327 college students) completed a measure of the Big Five personality factors and measures of learning experiences, self-efficacy, outcome expectations, and interests corresponding to each of Holland’s (1997) six RIASEC themes. Results of path analyses indicated that personality’s relation to interests was mediated via learning experiences and sociocognitive mechanisms; however, the extent of that mediation varied considerably across the different personality-interest relations. Findings also indicated strong support, across Holland themes, for SCCT’s hypothesized relations of learning experiences to self-efficacy and outcome expectations; however, for five of the six Holland themes, the relation between learning experiences and outcome expectations was at least partially mediated through self-efficacy.     

Valence of autobiographical memories: The role of mood, cognitive reappraisal, and suppression

The selective recall of positive memories is thought to be an effective mood repair technique, but little research has examined individual differences in the motivation or ability to implement this strategy. This study examined factors considered likely to impact valenced memory recall: dysphoria and emotion regulation strategies (i.e., cognitive reappraisal and suppression). Dysphoria was related to memory negativity but not positivity, whereas cognitive reappraisal was associated with positivity but not negativity. Suppression was not reliably related to the valence of self-reported memories, but was associated with increased accessibility of negative memories, as indicated by a response time measure. Our results indicate a relationship between cognitive reappraisal and more positive memory and suggest that the experience of dysphoria is more strongly related to negativity than positivity of memory. Our findings highlight the utility of examining emotion regulatory variables, in addition to mood, in the study of valenced memory recall, and underscore the importance of including both behavioral and self-report memory measures.     

When autobiographical memory begins

The authors review competing theories concerning the emergence and early development of autobiographical memory. It is argued that the differences between these accounts, although important, may be more apparent than real. The crux of these disagreements lies not in what processes are important, but rather, the role these different processes play in the emergence of autobiographical memory and the temporal primacy of these controlling variables. These differences are explored theoretically and then extant as well as new data are brought to bear on these issues. What emerges is a new, more inclusive, multifactorial framework that integrates the controlling variables from diverse perspectives providing a more complete account of the beginnings of autobiographical memory.     

Differential Memory Test Sensitivity for Diagnosing Amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment and Predicting Conversion to Alzheimer's Disease

ABSTRACT

Episodic memory is the first and most severely affected cognitive domain in Alzheimer's disease (AD), and it is also the key early marker in prodromal stages including amnestic mild cognitive impairment (MCI). The relative ability of memory tests to discriminate between MCI and normal aging has not been well characterized. We compared the classification value of widely used verbal memory tests in distinguishing healthy older adults (n = 51) from those with MCI (n = 38). Univariate logistic regression indicated that the total learning score from the California Verbal Learning Test-II (CVLT-II) ranked highest in terms of distinguishing MCI from normal aging (sensitivity = 90.2; specificity = 84.2). Inclusion of the delayed recall condition of a story memory task (i.e., WMS-III Logical Memory, Story A) enhanced the overall accuracy of classification (sensitivity = 92.2; specificity = 94.7). Combining Logical Memory recognition and CVLT-II long delay best predicted progression from MCI to AD over a 4-year period (accurate classification = 87.5%). Learning across multiple trials may provide the most sensitive index for initial diagnosis of MCI, but inclusion of additional variables may enhance overall accuracy and may represent the optimal strategy for identifying individuals most likely to progress to dementia.     

Neuropsychological differentiation of progressive aphasic disorders

The differentiation of subtypes of primary progressive aphasia (PPA) remains challenging. We aimed to identify optimum neuropsychological measures for characterizing PPA, to examine the relationship between behavioural change and subtypes of PPA and to determine whether characteristic profiles of language, working memory, and behavioural changes occur in PPA. Forty-seven patients with PPA and multi-domain Alzheimer's disease (AD) together with 19 age-matched controls underwent a large battery of working memory and language tests. We found that simple tasks of sentence ordering, narrative production, and buccofacial praxis were particularly useful in differentiating non-fluent/agrammatic variant PPA (nfvPPA) from other PPA subtypes, whereas a test of single word comprehension was useful in detecting semantic dementia (SD). No individual tests were discriminating for logopenic variant PPA (lvPPA) relative to nfvPPA. LvPPA and multidomain AD exhibited similar language profiles. A principal components analysis revealed that characteristic PPA profiles extended beyond the realms of language, in particular, the presence of apraxia in nfvPPA, behavioural changes in SD, and working memory deficits in lvPPA. These findings suggest that not all tests are equally discriminatory for PPA and highlight the importance of a test profile in differentiating PPA. These results also support the view that lvPPA is a focal form of AD and emphasize the difficulties classifying lvPPA.     

Job search and social cognitive theory: The role of career-relevant activities

Social cognitive theory was used to explain the relationships between career-relevant activities (environmental and self career exploration, career resources, and training), self-regulatory variables (job search self-efficacy and job search clarity), variables from the Theory of Planned Behavior (job search attitude, subjective norm, job search intention), and job search intensity. Based on a sample of employed and unemployed job seekers, we found that job seekers who spent more time in career exploration, attended more training programs, and used more career resources reported higher job search clarity and job search self-efficacy. Job search self-efficacy, job search attitude, and subjective norm predicted job search intention, and job search clarity and job search intention predicted job search intensity eight months later. The results of this study provide practical information on what job seekers can do to improve their job search clarity and job search self-efficacy and demonstrate the application of social cognitive theory for understanding and predicting job search behavior.     

Autopoietic theory,enactivism, and their incommensurable marks of the cognitive

This paper examines a fundamental philosophical difference between two radical postcognitivist theories that are usually assumed to offer (more or less) the same view of cognition; namely the autopoietic theory (AT) and the enactive approach. The ways these two theories understand cognition, it is argued, are not compatible nor incompatible but rather incommensurable. The reason, so it is argued, is that while enactivism, following the traditional stance held by most of the cognitive theories, understands cognitive systems as constituting a (sort of) natural kind, the autopoietic theory understands them as constituting only a conventional kind. Additionally, the paper shows that AT’s conventionalist stance about cognition, far from being an undesirable or useless position, offers some methodological virtues that might be timely and welcome in the agitated and revolutionary climate of current cognitive science.

     

Recent Innovative Studies of Memory in Temporal Lobe Epilepsy

Investigations of patients with temporal lobe epilepsy continue to result in significant advancements in the neuroscience of human memory, as they have for over 50 years. Recent reviews describing the state of the art in the clinical neuropsychology of TLE generally have emphasized (1) lateralization of cognitive deficits and the material-specific model of memory and/or (2) the relationships among pre- and post-surgery performance on standardized measures of anterograde memory, demographic and epilepsy variables and neuroimaging, neuropathology, and neurosurgery data. As information continues to accumulate about the pattern of performance on standard laboratory memory tests and the implications of these data before and after anterior temporal lobectomy for the treatment of TLE, innovative assessment techniques also are increasingly being applied. This review focuses on English language publications that addressed selected novel topics in adult TLE memory research. These topics are: (1) remote memory; (2) accelerated forgetting or long term amnesia; and (3) lateral versus mesial temporal lobe contributions to memory.     

Recognition memory: a review of the critical findings and an integrated theory for relating them

The development of formal models has aided theoretical progress in recognition memory research. Here, I review the findings that are critical for testing them, including behavioral and brain imaging results of single-item recognition, plurality discrimination, and associative recognition experiments under a variety of testing conditions. I also review the major approaches to measurement and process modeling of recognition. The review indicates that several extant dual-process measures of recollection are unreliable, and thus they are unsuitable as a basis for forming strong conclusions. At the process level, however, the retrieval dynamics of recognition memory and the effect of strengthening operations suggest that a recall-to-reject process plays an important role in plurality discrimination and associative recognition, but not necessarily in single-item recognition. A new theoretical framework proposes that the contribution of recollection to recognition depends on whether the retrieval of episodic details improves accuracy, and it organizes the models around the construct of efficiency. Accordingly, subjects adopt strategies that they believe will produce a desired level of accuracy in the shortest amount of time. Several models derived from this framework are shown to account the accuracy, latency, and confidence with which the various recognition tasks are performed.     

Memory systems within a cognitive architecture

This article addresses the division of memory systems in relation to an overall cognitive architecture. As understanding the architecture is essential to understanding the mind, developing computational cognitive architectures is an important enterprise in computational psychology (computational cognitive modeling). The article proposes a set of hypotheses concerning memory systems from the standpoint of a cognitive architecture, in particular, the four-way division of memory (including explicit and implicit procedural memory and explicit and implicit declarative memory). It then discusses in detail how these hypotheses may be validated through examining qualitatively the literature on memory. A quick review follows of computational simulations of a variety of quantitative data (which are not limited to narrowly conceived “memory tasks”). Results of accounting for both qualitative and quantitative data point to the promise of this approach.     

Language and cognition-Kurt Goldstein's theory of semantics

Kurt Goldstein is regarded as one of the major proponents of the holistic movement at the beginning of the 20th century. He rejected the strong localization hypothesis in the field of aphasiology and attempted to link language disturbances to an underlying general intellectual impairment. Goldstein's criticism was based on his subtle symptomatology, his organismic biology, and his philosophical reflections. In his concept of abstract attitude Goldstein searched for a general psychological function that might explain a variety of aphasic symptoms. Abstract attitude bridges the gap between cognitive and linguistic structures. According to Goldstein, it is the basis for words to have a meaning, to be employed in a categorical sense. Since amnesic aphasics are confined to a concrete attitude, their words have lost their representational function. Although Goldstein's concept of abstract attitude is no longer used in scientific discourse, it is analyzed for its heuristic value. It led Goldstein to questions about the relation between cognition and language and to fragments of a semantic theory.     

Social cognitive theory of posttraumatic recovery: the role of perceived self-efficacy

The present article integrates findings from diverse studies on the generalized role of perceived coping self-efficacy in recovery from different types of traumatic experiences. They include natural disasters, technological catastrophes, terrorist attacks, military combat, and sexual and criminal assaults. The various studies apply multiple controls for diverse sets of potential contributors to posttraumatic recovery. In these different multivariate analyses, perceived coping self-efficacy emerges as a focal mediator of posttraumatic recovery. Verification of its independent contribution to posttraumatic recovery across a wide range of traumas lends support to the centrality of the enabling and protective function of belief in one's capability to exercise some measure of control over traumatic adversity.