Memory factors in Rey AVLT: Implications for early staging of cognitive decline

Supraspan verbal list learning is widely used to assess dementia and related cognitive disorders where declarative memory deficits are a major clinical sign. While the overall learning rate is important for diagnosis, serial position patterns may give insight into more specific memory processes in patients with cognitive impairment. This study explored these patterns in a memory clinic clientele. One hundred eighty three participants took the Rey Auditory‐Verbal Learning Test (RAVLT). The major groups were patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD), Vascular Dementia (VD), Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), and Subjective Cognitive Impairment (SCI) as well as healthy controls (HC). Raw scores for the five trials and five serial partitions were factor analysed. Three memory factors were found and interpreted as Primacy, Recency, and Resistance to Interference. AD and MCI patients had impaired scores in all factors. SCI patients were significantly impaired in the Resistance to Interference factor, and in the Recency factor at the first trial. The main conclusion is that serial position data from word list testing reflect specific memory capacities which vary with levels of cognitive impairment.     

Adorno and Schelling: How to ‘Turn Philosophical Thought Towards the Non-Identical’

This paper explores the relationship between Adorno and Schelling. It argues that Adorno resorted to Schellingian motifs (whether he acknowledged them or not, or acknowledged them only partially) to counteract the influence of Hegelian thought. In defending this thesis, I examine the various stages in the development of Adorno’s thought, beginning with two texts from the 1930s and concluding with Negative Dialectics and ‘Skoteinos’. This allows us to see that Adorno’s concern to discover a way of thinking that is capable of doing justice to the ‘non-identical’ was present throughout his philosophical career.     

Alexithymia and Affect Intensity of Fine Artists

Research on creative artists has examined mainly their personality traits or cognitive abilities. However, it seems important to explore also their emotional traits to complete the profile. This study examines two emotional characteristics: alexithymia and affect intensity. Even if most research suggests that artists are less alexithymic and experience more intensively their emotions, Botella, M., Zenasni, F., and Lubart, T. (Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 5 , 251, 2011) observed that art students were as alexithymic as psychology students and more alexithymic than a normative population. The aim of this study was to examine these issues with artists and non‐artists and to compare artists to art students. Results indicate that artists are less alexithymic and present higher affect intensity than non‐artists. Moreover, results show that art students present more difficulties processing their emotions than artists.     

Possible competences to be aimed at in ethics education – Ethical competences highlighted in educational research journals

Abstract

The aim of this article is to present varieties of ethical competence that are highlighted in ethics and moral education research articles, and to discuss them in the light of competences stressed in the Swedish curriculum, understood as an example of ethics education in compulsory school. The material consists of 1,940 educational research articles published between 2000 and 2015, and the method of analysis is inductive, focusing on ethical competence. One finding is the similarity between the study’s tentative formulation of identified ethical competences in four categories, and Rest’s understanding of acting morally, captured in the four components: sensitivity, judgement, motivation and implementation. Based on the analysis of the articles, broader understandings of these focuses are developed, and later discussed in relation to Swedish ethics education, characterised as both a conservative and liberal values education. The analyses and comparison show the importance of the components of moral sensitivity and moral implementation and their relative absence in the Swedish curriculum, but also how moral judgement must include a competence to evaluate moral motivations, where empirically testable reasons are also central. Moreover, the risk of neglecting contextual, situational and knowledge-related aspects of ethical competence is highlighted.     

A specific role for efferent information in self-recognition

We investigated the specific contribution of efferent information in a self-recognition task. Subjects experienced a passive extension of the right index finger, either as an effect of moving their left hand via a lever ('self-generated action'), or imposed externally by the experimenter ('externally-generated action'). The visual feedback was manipulated so that subjects saw either their own right hand ('view own hand' condition) or someone else's right hand ('view other's hand' condition) during the passive extension of the index finger. Both hands were covered with identical gloves, so that discrimination on the basis of morphological differences was not possible. Participants judged whether the right hand they saw was theirs or not. Self-recognition was significantly more accurate when subjects were themselves the authors of the action, even though visual and proprioceptive information always specified the same posture, and despite the fact that subjects judged the effect and not the action per se. When the passive displacement of the participants right index finger was externally generated, and only afferent information was available, self-recognition performance dropped to near-chance levels. Differences in performance across conditions reflect the distinctive contribution of efferent information to self-recognition, and argue against a dominant role of proprioception in self-recognition.     

Mental rotation in schizophrenia

Motor imagery provides a direct insight into action representations. The aim of the present study was to investigate the level of impairment of action monitoring in schizophrenia by evaluating the performance of schizophrenic patients on mental rotation tasks. We raised the following questions: (1) Are schizophrenic patients impaired in motor imagery both at the explicit and at the implicit level? (2) Are body parts more difficult for them to mentally rotate than objects? (3) Is there any link between the performance and the hallucinating symptom profile? The schizophrenic patients (n = 13) displayed the same pattern of performance as the control subjects (n = 13). More particularly, schizophrenic patients’ reaction time varied as a function of the angular disparity of the stimuli. On the other hand, they were significantly slower and less accurate. Interestingly, patients suffering from hallucinations made significantly more errors than non-hallucinatory patients. We discussed these latter results in terms of deficit of the forward model. We emphasized the necessity to distinguish different levels of action, more or less impaired in schizophrenia.     

Self-esteem and depression revisited: implicit positive self-esteem in depressed patients?

The cognitive behavioural model of depression holds that negative cognitions related to the self have etiological importance for the maintenance and relapse of depression. This has been confirmed by research using questionnaires. Recent research using the Implicit Association Test, however, showed positive implicit self-esteem in formerly depressed participants, even after negative mood induction [Gemar, Segal, Sagrati, & Kennedy (2001). Mood-induced changes on the implicit association test in recovered depressed patients. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 110, 282-289]. These results are not in line with cognitive theory of depression. Since this could be an artifact of the specific procedure that was used, we investigated implicit self-esteem of currently depressed participants and healthy controls using three different paradigms: The Implicit Association Test, the Name Letter Preference Task, and the Extrinsic Affective Simon Task. The results of the three experiments are unequivocally indicative of positive implicit self-esteem in currently depressed patients. However, it remains an intriguing question what exactly these indirect measures assess.     

Executive control in the Simon effect: an electromyographic and distributional analysis

Manual responses to lateralized stimuli are faster for spatially congruent stimulus-response associations than for incongruent associations, even if the stimulus location is irrelevant. This effect, however, decreases as reaction time increases. Recent data suggest that such a decrease reflects online, within-trial executive control. The present study was aimed at testing this hypothesis by analyzing the electromyographic activity of muscles involved in response execution. We focused on the particular trials in which an activation of the muscle involved to the incorrect response preceded the execution of the correct response. A sequential effect analysis, along with an analysis of the reaction time distributions, revealed that after such dual-activation trials, executive control was reinforced. In addition, a distribution analysis of the reaction times associated with such trials compared to the trials without incorrect activation, revealed online, within-trial changes in executive control. Arguments against a late motor locus of the effect of the irrelevant stimulus location are also provided. These results are discussed in terms of current models of cognitive control.     

The neural correlates of updating information in verbal working memory

The aim of the present study was to re-examine cerebral areas subserving the updating function of the central executive with a running span task requiring subjects to watch strings of consonants of unknown length and then to recall serially a specific number of recent items. In order to dissociate more precisely the updating process from the storage function, a four-item instead of a six-item memory load was used, contrary to our previous study (Salmon et al., 1996). In addition, a serial recall procedure was preferred to a recognition procedure in order to suppress the use of visuospatial strategies. The most significant increase of rCBF occurred in the left frontopolar cortex (Brodmann's area 10), spreading to the left middle frontal (Brodmann's area 46). Results suggest that frontopolar activation underlies an updating process in working memory.