Is the Cogmed program effective for youths with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder under pharmacological treatment?

The primary objective of this study was to examine the effects of the Cogmed training program on working memory among youths 7 to 13 years old, with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) type and comorbidity controlled for. A secondary objective was to examine the generalization of effects to ADHD symptoms, nonverbal reasoning, attentional and executive functions, inhibition, reading comprehension, and mathematical reasoning. Participants were under pharmacological treatment for ADHD combined type and a comorbidity. They were randomized into an experimental group that received the Cogmed program and an active control group that received a low-intensity comparison version of the training. They were evaluated at three time points: 6 weeks prior to intervention onset (T1), immediately prior to onset (T2), and 1 week following intervention completion (T3). Results indicate no significant effect attributable to the Cogmed program. The fact that participants were on medication at the time of training and evaluation normalized their performances and limited the detection of effects. Moreover, cognitive training did not lead to a reduction in ADHD symptoms or to an improvement in the other cognitive functions measured or in academic performance. The results of this study do not demonstrate the effectiveness of the Cogmed program for youths with ADHD combined type and a comorbidity when they receive the training while under pharmacological treatment.     

Knowledge, Attitudes, and Beliefs of Arab-American Women Regarding Inherited Cancer Risk

The increasing incidence of breast cancer in the Arab world, coupled with a relatively early age of onset, raises concern for the presence of hereditary risk factors in this population. However, due to potential structural and cultural barriers, Arab Americans make up the smallest percentage of individuals tested for Hereditary Breast and Ovarian Cancer Syndrome in the United States. The objectives of this qualitative pilot focus group of 13 Arab-American women were to explore attitudes, knowledge and beliefs regarding hereditary breast cancer in the Arab-American community in metropolitan Detroit, identify barriers that would prevent women from seeking hereditary cancer screening/testing and determine who women would talk to about inherited cancer. Results indicated that cultural beliefs and personal experiences with cancer influenced the women’s perspectives on hereditary cancer risk. A high level of secrecy about cancer within Arab-American families was present, which may prevent accurate risk assessment and referral for genetic services. Other identified barriers that may influence hereditary risk assessment included stigma, fears and misconceptions of cancer. While these barriers were present, participants also expressed a strong need for education and tailored cancer risk information for their community.     

professional lapses: occupational deviance and neutralization techniques in veterinary medical practice

This study explores the techniques veterinarians use to neutralize ethically legally problematic lapses in the performance of their professional duties. Data were collected during a five-year period via ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews with veterinarians in a Southern state. Though the veterinarians in this study do not question the validity of the rules in the dominant normative system, they do question the applicability of those rules to their roles in certain circumstances. Through the use of various neutralization techniques, these veterinarians make possible behaviors that outsiders to their circumstances might question on legal or ethical grounds.     

Recollection and Familiarity in Aging Individuals with Mild Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimer’s Disease: A Literature Review

Memory impairment is a central cognitive symptom in mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer Disease (AD). Recognition tasks are often used to characterize and define the nature of memory deficits. Dual-process theories posit that familiarity and recollection are independently involved in the recognition of previously encountered material and both contribute to successful recognition. Recent evidence indicates that there is a double dissociation in the neuronal substrates of those two processes. More precisely, it has been suggested that perirhinal and entorhinal areas are selectively involved in familiarity-based recognition, while the hippocampus is associated with recollection. Interestingly, these regions are among the first to be targeted by neurofibrillary tangles, one of AD’s neuropathological hallmarks. Impairment in recognition performance can occur in the very early stages of AD, such as MCI. To define the nature of recognition impairment in these clinical populations, we reviewed the current literature on familiarity and recollection performance in individuals with MCI and AD. Together with clinical features, methodological factors are taken into consideration in the interpretation of findings.     

Whose Rights Count? Negotiating Practice,Policy, and Legal Dilemmas Regarding Infant–Parent Contact When Infants are in Out‐of‐Home Care

This article takes a human rights perspective with a view to articulating the infant's perspective when the infant has been subjected to abuse, neglect, or both and is reliant on the state to ensure his or her health and well‐being. When a young child is removed from parental care, important and often difficult decisions have to be made about subsequent contact between child and parent. We consider a number of dilemmas which may arise for practitioners when they are assisting child welfare decision makers in relation to contact, and acknowledge the limited empirical follow‐up studies of the impact of child welfare practice and legal decisions on infant outcomes. We draw on the significant and substantive evidence base about infant emotional and cognitive development and infant–parent attachment relationships as well as infant mental health to illuminate the infant's subjective experience in these practice dilemmas. We describe innovations in practice from various countries, which seek to shed light on the challenges often associated with contact.     

Perceptual Expertise as a Shift from Strategic Interference to Automatic Holistic Processing

Holistic processing was initially characterized a unique hallmark of face perception (e.g., Young et al., 1987) and later argued a domain-general marker of perceptual expertise (e.g., Gauthier et al., 1998). More recently, evidence for holistic processing - measured by interference from task-irrelevant parts - was obtained in novices, raising questions for its usefulness as a test of expertise. Indeed, recent studies use the same task to make opposite claims: Hsiao & Cottrell (2009) found more interference in novices than experts for Chinese characters, while Wong, Palmeri & Gauthier (2009) found more interference in experts than novices with objects. Offering a resolution to this paradox, our work on the perception of musical notation (Wong & Gauthier, in press) suggests that expert and novice interference effects represent two ends of a continuum: interference is initially strategic and contextual, but becomes more automatic as holistic processing develops with the acquisition of perceptual expertise.     

Holistic processing of musical notation: Dissociating failures of selective attention in experts and novices

Holistic processing (i.e., the tendency to process objects as wholes) is associated with face perception and also with expertise individuating novel objects. Surprisingly, recent work also reveals holistic effects in novice observers. It is unclear whether the same mechanisms support holistic effects in experts and in novices. In the present study, we measured holistic processing of music sequences using a selective attention task in participants who vary in music-reading expertise. We found that holistic effects were strategic in novices but were relatively automatic in experts. Correlational analyses revealed that individual holistic effects were predicted by both individual music-reading ability and neural responses for musical notation in the right fusiform face area (rFFA), but in opposite directions for experts and novices, suggesting that holistic effects in the two groups may be of different natures. To characterize expert perception, it is important not only to measure the tendency to process objects as wholes, but also to test whether this effect is dependent on task constraints.