Subjective organization in the episodic memory of individuals with Parkinson’s disease associated with mild cognitive impairment

Word clustering (i.e., the ability to reproduce the same word pairs in consecutive recall trials of an unrelated word list) has been extensively investigated as a proxy of subjective organization (SO) of memorandum. In healthy subjects and in groups of brain-damaged patients, the rate of SO generally predicts accuracy of word list recall. This study aimed at evaluating SO in the performance of patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) on a word list recall task in order to investigate the basic mechanisms of episodic memory impairment that are frequently observed in these patients. For this purpose, 56 PD patients, who were stratified according to the presence and quality of mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and a group of healthy controls (HCs) were administered a word list task and an extensive battery of neuropsychological tests. Results showed that recall accuracy on the word list task progressively decreased passing from HC to PD patients without cognitive impairment, to patients with single-domain dysexecutive MCI and to patients with multiple-domain dysexecutive and amnesic MCI. Conversely, only the latter PD group showed a lower SO score than that achieved by the other groups. In the overall PD group, correlational and regression analyses demonstrated that SO scores and a composite score of executive functions were not reciprocally related, but both provided an independent and significant contribution to the prediction of word list recall accuracy. These data are discussed in terms of the contribution of executive functions and hippocampal storage processes to the onset of memory impairment in PD.     

Monitoring for Health in the Work Environment: Beyond Pathology and Occupational Diseases

In ne fait aucun doute que la promotion de la santé dans le monde du travail nécessite une approche nouvelle. Cette affirmation repose sur le fait que les actions en faveur de la santé qui appliquent les notions traditionnelles de la médicine du travail ne sont plus, de nos jours, appropriées. Cette nouvelle approche devrait insister davantage sur l'élimination des effets nocifs de l'exposition à des conditions de travail défavorables et moins sur la prévention de pathologies et de maladies professionelles reconnues. Cet article tente de défendre les idées axées sur la mise en oeuvre d'une autre politique de promotion de la santé basée sur le choix et l'évaluation d'indices précoces comportementaux et psychophysiologiques des risques virtuels de l'environnement de travail.
There is no doubt that the promotion of health in the working world needs a new approach. This statement rests on the fact that the health-related activities based on the traditional concepts of occupational medicine, nowadays, are not adequate. This new approach should focus more on the elimination of the adverse effects of exposure to unfavourable working conditions and less on the prevention of recognised occupational diseases and pathology. This paper is an attempt to contribute with ideas aimed at the development and establishment of an alternative policy of health promotion based on the assessment and evaluation of the behavioural and psychological early indices of potential hazards in the work environment.     

The handedness of imagined bodies in action and the role of perspective taking

Past research at the nexus of motor control and perception investigated the role of perspective taking in many behavioral and neuroimaging studies. Some investigators addressed the issue of one's own vs. others' action imagination, but the possible effects of a front or a back view in imagining others' actions have so far been neglected. We report two 'single trial' experiments in which a total of 640 participants were asked to imagine a person performing a manual action - either in a front or in a back view - and then to indicate the hand used by the imagined person during movement execution. In such a task, we assume the existence of two distinct biases: a perceptual-mnemonic bias due to subjects' visual experience of others' actions, encouraging them to imagine right-handed movements, and a motor bias due to subjects' experience of self-made actions, encouraging them to imagine movements performed with the same hand as their dominant hand. We hypothesized that a greater involvement of motor representations in the back view compared to the front view could result in an increased correspondence between one's own manual preference and the hand used by the imagined agent in the former condition. The results of both experiments were consistent with this hypothesis, suggesting that while imagining others' actions we employ motor simulations in different degrees according to the perspective adopted.     

Improved mental representation of space in beginner orienteers

The purpose of the present study was to monitor any improvement in orienteering skills attributable to acquiring a better mental representation of space. Two groups were examined: the experimental group, who attended 6 mo. of orienteering lessons, versus the control group, who did jogging training instead. Each group, consisting of 20 children, was tested on the Corsi Block-tapping Test, run Forward and Backward, and the Star-Butterfly Test. Pre- and post-tests were administered. In the experimental group, scores increased in mean complexity from pre- to post-test on the Forward and the Backward Corsi tests, while on the Star-Butterfly Test both time and mistakes had decreased after the training. In the control group, mean complexity and Star-Butterfly Test scores were unchanged from pre- to post-test. These results showed that after continual training in orienteering techniques, the orienteering group was able to remember and repeat sequences of events with greater precision than before the training, while these skills were unchanged in the control group after training in jogging.     

Not by thoughts alone: how language supersizes the cognitive toolkit

We propose that Vaesen's target article (a) underestimates the role of language in humans' cognitive toolkit and thereby (b) overestimates the proposed cognitive discontinuity between chimps and humans. We provide examples of labeling, numerical computation, executive control, and the relation between language and body, concluding that language plays a crucial role in "supersizing humans' cognitive toolkit."     

Multisensory Assessment of Acoustic Comfort Aboard Metros: a Virtual Reality Study

In this study, a multisensory methodology is used to assess acoustic comfort aboard different real‐world metros by means of subjective annoyance and cognitive performance measures. Two experimental conditions were compared: unimodal versus bimodal. Immersive virtual reality was used to simulate journeys aboard metro coaches. Participants performed four tasks (Rey Test, Verbal Fluency, Backward Counting and Auditory Words Discrimination) while listening to metro sounds (unimodal condition) or while listening to metro sounds within a virtual metro coach (bimodal condition). At the end of each journey, participants reported their degree of noise annoyance. The results showed that cognitive performances were worse in the bimodal than in the unimodal condition. Moreover, the bimodal condition affected negatively the capacity to discriminate words and to count backward. However, reported noise annoyance was higher in the unimodal than bimodal condition. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Quality of life of patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis

The aim of this study is to evaluate the correlation between different measures of quality of life (QoL), functional status and mood status in patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). A sample of 40 patients with ALS was recruited and scales for the evaluation of health-related QoL (SF36), patient-centered QoL (SEIQoL), functional status (ALSFRS) and depression (ZDS) have been administered to them. All the correlations (Pearson's r) between the scores have been considered and the t-test was performed in order to compare male with female patients. No correlation emerged between the different measures of QoL and functional status, apart from the scores of the Physical Functioning subscale of the SF36 which resulted positively correlated (p?相似文献   

Changing auditory time with prismatic goggles

The aim of the present study was to explore the spatial organization of auditory time and the effects of the manipulation of spatial attention on such a representation. In two experiments, we asked 28 adults to classify the duration of auditory stimuli as "short" or "long". Stimuli were tones of high or low pitch, delivered left or right of the participant. The time bisection task was performed either on right or left stimuli regardless of their pitch (Spatial experiment), or on high or low tones regardless of their location (Tonal experiment). Duration of left stimuli was underestimated relative to that of right stimuli, in the Spatial but not in the Tonal experiment, suggesting that a spatial representation of auditory time emerges selectively when spatial-encoding is enforced. Further, when we introduced spatial-attention shifts using the prismatic adaptation procedure, we found modulations of auditory time processing as a function of prismatic deviation, which correlated with the interparticipant adaptation effect. These novel findings reveal a spatial representation of auditory time, modulated by spatial attention.