A study of language functioning in Alzheimer patients

Language functioning in Alzheimer's disease is reviewed and the performance of 25 Alzheimer patients on a standard battery is reported. All these hospitalized patients were aphasic to some degree. As a group, they differed from normals on all language variables, and from stroke patients in terms of higher fluency and lower comprehension. Spontaneous speech showed high incidence of circumlocutions and semantic jargon, but no phonemic paraphasias or target approximations. Syllabic perseverations, shouting, inappropriate laughter, and mutism were late-appearing features. Transcortical Sensory, and Wernicke's aphasias were frequent, but Broca's and Transcortical Motor aphasias notably absent. Extent of language impairment correlated with current length of hospitalization but not age. Reading, writing, and performance scores except praxis, were lower than oral language scores. Findings were discussed in relation to previous results, methodology, and language organization in the brain.     

Deep agraphia

A case of agraphia is documented which resembles in every respect the pattern of results obtained in deep dyslexia. Pronounceable pseudowords could not be written to dictation while concrete nouns were more accurately transcribed than abstract nouns. Verbs and functions words were written very poorly and oral spelling was impaired. In addition, semantic paragraphias were present. In contrast to the deficit observed in writing, no such impairment was found for reading. It is concluded that writing can occur without phoneme-grapheme conversion and that codes generated for reading are functionally distinct from codes generated for writing.     

Risking Everything in Obsessive–Compulsive Disorder: An Analogue Decision-Making Study

An experiment examined decision-making processes among nonclinical participants with low or high levels of OCD symptomatology (N?=?303). To better simulate the decision environments that are most likely to be problematic for clients with OCD, we employed decision tasks that incorporated “black swan” options that have a very low probability but involve substantial loss. When faced with a choice between a safer option that involved no risk of loss or a riskier alternative with a very low probability of substantial loss, most participants chose the safer option regardless of OCD symptom level. However, when faced with choices between options that had similar expected values to the previous choices, but where each option had some low risk of a substantial loss, there was a significant shift towards riskier decisions. These effects were stronger when the task involved a contamination based, health-relevant decision task as compared to one with financial outcomes. The results suggest that both low and high symptom OC participants approach decisions involving risk-free options and decisions involving risky alternatives in qualitatively different ways. There was some evidence that measures of impulsivity were better predictors of the shift to risky decision making than OCD symptomatology.

     

Mind-Wandering and Childhood ADHD: Experimental Manipulations across Laboratory and Naturalistic Settings

Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology - The conceptual overlap between mind-wandering and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)-related impairments is considerable, yet little...     

Constraint-evading surrogacy: the missing piece in Radical Embodied Cognition’s non-representationalist account of intentionality?

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences - Radical Embodied Cognition (REC) is an anti-representationalist approach to the nature of basic cognition proposed by Daniel Hutto and Erik Myin. While...