Cognitive and motor deficits in older adults with HIV infection: Comparison with normal ageing and Parkinson’s disease

Despite the life-extending success of antiretroviral pharmacotherapy in HIV infection (HIV), the prevalence of mild cognitive impairment in HIV remains high. Near-normal life expectancy invokes an emerging role for age–infection interaction and a potential synergy between immunosenescence and HIV-related health factors, increasing risk of cognitive and motor impairment associated with degradation in corticostriatal circuits. These neural systems are also compromised in Parkinson’s disease (PD), which could help model the cognitive deficit pattern in HIV. This cross-sectional study examined three groups, age 45–79 years: 42 HIV, 41 PD, and 37 control (CTRL) participants, tested at Stanford University Medical School and SRI International. Neuropsychological tests assessed executive function (EF), information processing speed (IPS), episodic memory (MEM), visuospatial processing (VSP), and upper motor (MOT) speed and dexterity. The HIV and PD deficit profiles were similar for EF, MEM, and VSP. Although only the PD group was impaired on MOT compared with CTRL, MOT scores were related to cognitive scores in HIV but not PD. Performance was not related to depressive symptoms, socioeconomic status, or CD4⁺ T-cell counts. The overlap of HIV-PD cognitive deficits implicates frontostriatal disruption in both conditions. The motor-cognitive score relation in HIV provides further support for the hypothesis that these processes share similar underlying mechanisms in HIV infection possibly expressed with or exacerbated by ageing.     

The Essence of Cinema?

Philosophical Studies -     

Children’s prior experiences of their successes and failures modulate belief alignment

ABSTRACT

An ability to flexibly learn from others while at other times relying upon one’s own judgements is an important adaptive human capacity. The present research investigated how others’ epistemic states and prior experience of their own independent ability in a given task modulate young children’s selective learning. In particular, we asked whether 4-year-old children’s judgement concerning the location of a hidden object is modulated both by an informant’s knowledge states and by the absence/presence of a prior experience with a particular task. We found that the children were more likely to align their judgement according to the informant’s verbal report when the informant was knowledgeable than when she was ignorant – but only when they had explicitly experienced their own incapability to accurately guess an object’s location. The findings suggest that 4-year-old children are able to combine their own experience with others’ input to make their judgement.     

从古代小说看道教世俗化过程中神仙形象的演变

神仙形象源自于早期神话和信仰中的"神"的形象.因此,早期的道教神仙被描绘为生活在远方异域,与凡人完全不同的特殊群体.随着道教神仙观念的发展,道教的神仙形象也在逐渐"人性化":神仙逐渐摆脱了过去的神秘色彩和"非人"特征,较多地吸收了"人"的形象特征.宋元以后,这一趋势变得更为显著.神仙形象中"神"的特征进一步减弱,而"人"的因素、特别是普通人的特征日益明显.我们通过对不同时期中国古代小说中神仙形象的比较,可以清晰地发现这一变化.在这篇论文中,我们也试图探讨道教的世俗化趋势对神仙形象的影响以及不同的神仙观念在中国古代小说的神仙形象中留下的痕迹.     

Don’t know,don’t care?

Philosophical Studies - My thesis is that moral ignorance does not imply a failure to care adequately about what is in fact morally significant. I offer three cases: one in which someone is...     

Perceptual fluency effects in judgments of creativity and beauty: creative objects are perceived fluently yet they are visually complex

ABSTRACT

Perceptual fluency typically has a positive influence on aesthetic evaluations of beauty, but few studies have examined its influence on creativity evaluations. Creativity has two facets, originality and quality. If creativity judgments involve estimating product originality, such judgments may be associated with perceptual disfluency, while product quality may be associated with perceptual fluency. We examined the relationship between perceptual fluency and judgments of creativity and beauty across seven experiments. Creativity judgments were affected by most perceptual fluencysources. We observed a highly-fluent-is-beautiful-and-creative relation when testing repeated exposure and figure-ground contrast. Prototypicality displayed a high-fluency–is-beautiful relation, with creativity judgments unaffected. Visual complexity displayed a consistent disfluent-is-creative effect, with mixed results for beauty. For creativity (but not beauty) evaluations, increased saliency of visual complexity led to discounting fluent-is-creative effects, supporting the hypothesis that there are at least two fluency pathways to creativity judgments that take both originality and quality into account.