The bioelectrical activity of cerebellar structures in the freely-moving rat

Electrodes were implanted in the brains of 27 freelymoving rats and the bioelectrical activity of cerebellar cortical structures (lobus simplex, tuber verrais, lobus ansiformis, crus II) and the dentate nucleus was measured simultaneously with the activity of the cerebral cortex and dorsal hippocampus and respiratory rate and motor activity. Different behavioral states were produced by habituation procedures and by elaborating conditional avoidance reflexes to light-flash or click series. In addition, startle reflexes to acoustic stimuli were used to evaluate behavioral state. The following conclusions could be drawn: 1) in the awake rat the various cerebellar structures have clearly distinguishable bioelectrical activity patterns; 2) changes in these patterns depend on the actual behavioral state of the animal; 3) this dependence upon behavior is especially clear in crus II, one of the projection zones of the tactile and proprioceptive afferent nerves in the cerebellar cortex. The changes in the electrocerebellogram of the unrestrained rat may be used as an indicator of the behavioral state of the animal.     

The precuneus and the insula in self-attributional processes

Attributions are constantly assigned in everyday life. A well-known phenomenon is the self-serving bias: that is, people’s tendency to attribute positive events to internal causes (themselves) and negative events to external causes (other persons/circumstances). Here, we investigated the neural correlates of the cognitive processes implicated in self-serving attributions using social situations that differed in their emotional saliences. We administered an attributional bias task during fMRI scanning in a large sample of healthy subjects (n = 71). Eighty sentences describing positive or negative social situations were presented, and subjects decided via buttonpress whether the situation had been caused by themselves or by the other person involved. Comparing positive with negative sentences revealed activations of the bilateral posterior cingulate cortex (PCC). Self-attribution correlated with activation of the posterior portion of the precuneus. However, self-attributed positive versus negative sentences showed activation of the anterior portion of the precuneus, and self-attributed negative versus positive sentences demonstrated activation of the bilateral insular cortex. All significant activations were reported with a statistical threshold of p ≤ .001, uncorrected. In addition, a comparison of our fMRI task with data from the Internal, Personal and Situational Attributions Questionnaire, Revised German Version, demonstrated convergent validity. Our findings suggest that the precuneus and the PCC are involved in the evaluation of social events with particular regional specificities: The PCC is activated during emotional evaluation, the posterior precuneus during attributional evaluation, and the anterior precuneus during self-serving processes. Furthermore, we assume that insula activation is a correlate of awareness of personal agency in negative situations.     

Training and transfer effects of executive functions in preschool children

Executive functions, including working memory and inhibition, are of central importance to much of human behavior. Interventions intended to improve executive functions might therefore serve an important purpose. Previous studies show that working memory can be improved by training, but it is unknown if this also holds for inhibition, and whether it is possible to train executive functions in preschoolers. In the present study, preschool children received computerized training of either visuo‐spatial working memory or inhibition for 5 weeks. An active control group played commercially available computer games, and a passive control group took part in only pre‐ and posttesting. Children trained on working memory improved significantly on trained tasks; they showed training effects on non‐trained tests of spatial and verbal working memory, as well as transfer effects to attention. Children trained on inhibition showed a significant improvement over time on two out of three trained task paradigms, but no significant improvements relative to the control groups on tasks measuring working memory or attention. In neither of the two interventions were there effects on non‐trained inhibitory tasks. The results suggest that working memory training can have significant effects also among preschool children. The finding that inhibition could not be improved by either one of the two training programs might be due to the particular training program used in the present study or possibly indicate that executive functions differ in how easily they can be improved by training, which in turn might relate to differences in their underlying psychological and neural processes.     

Bicycle helmets – A case of risk compensation?

Several studies have shown that bicycle helmets have the potential of reducing injuries from accidents. Yet, no studies have found good evidence of an injury reducing effect in countries that have introduced bicycle helmet legislation. Two of the most promising explanations for why helmet laws do not work as intended are risk compensation and shifts in the cycle population as a response to the law.The present article investigates whether the lack of effect of helmet wearing laws is due to risk compensation mechanisms or population shifts (i.e. discouraging cyclists with the lowest accident risk, and thereby increasing the overall average risk per cyclist). A random sample of 1504 bicycle owners in Norway responded to a questionnaire on among other things helmet use, bicycle equipment use, accident involvement, cycling behaviour and risk perception. Data were analysed by using structural equation model (SEM). The results show that the cyclist population in Norway can be divided into two sub-populations: one speed-happy group that cycle fast and have lots of cycle equipment including helmets, and one traditional kind of cyclist without much equipment, cycling slowly. With all the limitations that have to be placed on a cross sectional study such as this, the results indicate that at least part of the reason why helmet laws do not appear to be beneficial is that they disproportionately discourage the safest cyclists.     

Dopamine, working memory, and training induced plasticity: implications for developmental research

Cognitive deficits and particularly deficits in working memory (WM) capacity are common features in neuropsychiatric disorders. Understanding the underlying mechanisms through which WM capacity can be improved is therefore of great importance. Several lines of research indicate that dopamine plays an important role not only in WM function but also for improving WM capacity. For example, pharmacological interventions acting on the dopaminergic system, such as methylphenidate, improve WM performance. In addition, behavioral interventions for improving WM performance in the form of intensive computerized training have recently been associated with changes in dopamine receptor density. These two different means of improving WM performance--pharmacological and behavioral--are thus associated with similar biological mechanisms in the brain involving dopaminergic systems. This article reviews some of the evidence for the role of dopamine in WM functioning, in particular concerning the link to WM development and cognitive plasticity. Novel data are presented showing that variation in the dopamine transporter gene (DAT1) influences improvements in WM and fluid intelligence in preschool-age children following cognitive training. Our results emphasize the importance of the role of dopamine in determining cognitive plasticity.     

Effect of working memory training on working memory,arithmetic and following instructions

Mathematical ability is dependent on specific mathematical training but also associated with a range of cognitive factors, including working memory (WM) capacity. Previous studies have shown that WM training leads to improvement in non-trained WM tasks, but the results regarding transfer to mathematics are inconclusive. In the present study, 176 children with WM deficits, aged 7–15 years performed 5 weeks of WM training. During the training period, they were assessed five times with a test of complex WM (the Odd One Out), a test of remembering and following instructions and a test of arithmetic. The improvements were compared to the performance of a control group of 304 typically developing children aged 7–15 years who performed the same transfer tasks at the same time intervals, but without training. The training group improved significantly more than the control group on all three transfer tests (all p < 0.0001), after correction for baseline performance, age and sex. The effect size for mathematics was small and the effect sizes for the WM tasks were moderate to large. The transfer increased linearly with the amount of training time and correlated with the amount of improvement on the trained tasks. These results confirm previous findings of training-induced improvements in non-trained WM tasks including the ability to follow instructions, but extend previous findings by showing improvements also for arithmetic. This is encouraging regarding the potential role of cognitive training for education, but it is desirable to find paradigms that would enhance the effect of the training on mathematics. One of the future challenges for studying training effects is combining large sample sizes with high quality and compliance, to detect relevant but smaller effects of cognitive training.     

Visuo-Spatial Working Memory Span: A Sensitive Measure of Cognitive Deficits in Children With ADHD

Working memory (WM) has been hypothesised to be impaired in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). However, there are few studies reported on tests measuring visuo-spatial WM (VSWM) in ADHD. Some of these studies used paradigms including episodic memory, others only used low memory loads. In the present study we used a VSWM test that has not been used previously in ADHD research. The sensitivity of the VSWM test and a choice reaction time (CRT) test was evaluated in a pilot study by comparing them to two commonly used tests in ADHD-research; the Continuous Performance Test (CPT) and a Go/no-go test, in children with and without ADHD. The groups differed significantly in performance on the VSWM test (P<.01) and CRT (P<.05) but not on the CPT (P>.1) or on the Go/no-go test (P>.1). The results from the VSWM and CRT tests were replicated in a larger sample of participants (80 boys; 27 boys with ADHD and 53 controls, mean age 11.4 years). The difference between the groups was significant for both the VSWM test (P<.01) and the CRT test (P<.01). The effect size (ES) of the VSWM test was 1.34. There was a significant age-by-group interaction on the VSWM test, with larger group differences for the older children (P<.01). Our results show that the VSWM test is a sensitive measure of cognitive deficits in ADHD and it supports the hypothesis that deficits in VSWM is a major component of ADHD.     

Studies in measurement of the relations among sovereign states

This article describes the application of three psychometric methods to the problem of measurement of the friendly or hostile relations among states of the world today. To secure judgments, schedules were sent to students of international affairs at several times during the last five years. The method of equal-appearing intervals was used to determine the relative probability of war for 88 pairs of states in January, 1937; the method of triadic combinations to determine relative friendliness among the Great Powers in November, 1938; and the method of multidimensional or group rank order to measure the attitudes of important states toward the Great Powers in March and April, 1939; June, 1940; and June, 1941. A chart of scale values for the pairs of Great Powers shows the changing trends since 1937. The last two methods were used to depict the Great Powers in multidimensional space according to their mutual friendliness, thus permitting the application of a type of factor analysis. The reliability of the methods employed was high, and various types of evidence support the general validity of the results.The writer is indebted to Professors Quincy Wright, and L. L. Thurstone and Dr. M. W. Richardson, for advice at various stages in these studies.