Exercise modulates the interaction between cognition and anxiety in humans

Despite interest in exercise as a treatment for anxiety disorders the mechanism behind the anxiolytic effects of exercise is unclear. Two observations motivate the present work. First, engagement of attention control during increased working memory (WM) load can decrease anxiety. Second, exercise can improve attention control. Therefore, exercise could boost the anxiolytic effects of increased WM load via its strengthening of attention control. Anxiety was induced by threat of shock and was quantified with anxiety-potentiated startle (APS). Thirty-five healthy volunteers (19 male, age M?=?26.11, SD ?=?5.52) participated in two types of activity, exercise (biking at 60–70% of heart rate reserve) and control-activity (biking at 10–20% of heart rate reserve). After each activity, participants completed a WM task (n-back) at low- and high-load during safe and threat. Results were not consistent with the hypothesis: exercise vs. control-activity increased APS in high-load (p?=?.03). However, this increased APS was not accompanied with threat-induced impairment in WM performance (p?=?.37). Facilitation of both task-relevant stimulus processing and task-irrelevant threat processing, concurrent with prevention of threat interference on cognition, suggests that exercise increases cognitive ability. Future studies should explore how exercise affects the interplay of cognition and anxiety in patients with anxiety disorders.     

A new kid on the block: The Memory Validity Profile (MVP) in children with neurological conditions

Determining the validity of obtained data is an inherent part of a neuropsychological assessment. The purpose of this study was investigate the failure rate of the Memory Validity Profile (MVP) in a large clinical sample of children and adolescents with neurological diagnoses. Data were obtained from 261 consecutive patients (mean age = 12.0, SD = 3.9, range = 5–19) who were referred for a neuropsychological assessment in a tertiary care pediatric hospital and were administered the MVP. In this sample, 4.6% of youth failed the MVP. Mean administration time for the MVP was 7.4 min, although time to complete was not associated with failure rates. Failure rates were held relatively consistent at approximately 5% across age ranges, diagnoses, and psychomotor processing speed abilities. Having very low, below normal, or above normal intellectual abilities did not alter failure rate on the MVP. However, those with intellectual disability (i.e., IQ<70) had a higher fail rate at 12% on MVP Total Score, but only 6% on the MVP Visual portion. Failure rates on the MVP were associated with lower scores on memory tests. This study provides support for using the MVP in children as young as 5 years with neurological diagnoses.     

Virtual reality in brain damage rehabilitation: review.

Given the high incidence of brain injury in the population, brain damage rehabilitation is still a relatively undeveloped field. Virtual reality (VR) has the potential to assist current rehabilitation techniques in addressing the impairments, disabilities, and handicaps associated with brain damage. The main focus of much of the exploratory research performed to date has been to investigate the use of VR in the assessment of cognitive abilities, but there is now a trend for more studies to encompass rehabilitation training strategies. This review describes studies that have used VR in the assessment and rehabilitation of specific disabilities resulting from brain injury, including executive dysfunction, memory impairments, spatial ability impairments, attention deficits, and unilateral visual neglect. In addition, it describes studies that have used VR to try to offset some of the handicaps that people experience after brain injury. Finally, a table is included which, although not an exhaustive list of everything that has been published, includes many more studies that are relevant to the use of VR in the assessment and rehabilitation of brain damage. The review concludes that the use of VR in brain damage rehabilitation is expanding dramatically and will become an integral part of cognitive assessment and rehabilitation in the future.     

Memory and learning in children with 22q11.2 deletion syndrome: evidence for ventral and dorsal stream disruption?

This study examined memory functioning in children and adolescents with 22q11.2 Deletion Syndrome (DS; velocardiofacial syndrome). An overall verbal better than nonverbal memory pattern was evident on the Test of Memory and Learning (TOMAL), with children with 22q11.2 DS performing significantly below their siblings and children with low average IQ but similar to children with autism on facial memory. Children with 22q11 DS also performed significantly below their siblings on tests of verbal working memory. Children with autism performed significantly poorer than the siblings of children with 22q11.2 DS only on their recall of stories. Delayed recall was significantly poorer in children with 22q11.2 DS and children with autism, compared to sibling controls. Although there were no significant group differences on tests of multiple trial verbal or visual learning, a relative weakness was noted with multiple trial visual learning in children with 22q11.2 DS and their siblings, suggesting that an alternative or interactive factor other than the deletion may account for the relatively better verbal compared to nonverbal memory abilities. Deficits in facial memory in children with both 22q11.2 DS and autism suggest disruptions in ventral temporal pathways such as between fusiform gyrus and parahippocampal/hippocampal regions whereas deficits in verbal working memory in children with 22q11.2 DS implicates dorsolateral prefrontal regions, both intimating aberrant white matter pathways.     

Contributions of response set and semantic relatedness to cross-modal Stroop-like picture-word interference in children and adults

Resistance to interference from irrelevant auditory stimuli undergoes development throughout childhood. To test whether semantic processes account for age-related changes in a Stroop-like picture-word interference effect, children (3- to 12-year-olds) and adults named pictures while listening to words varying in terms of semantic relatedness to the pictures and response set membership. In Experiments 1 and 2, with animal and clothing pictures, the interference effect observed in children, but not in adults, depended on the distractors' status as members of the response set. In Experiment 3, with unrelated pictures, adults, but not children, showed greater interference for trials with distractors in the response set. These results indicate developmental changes in picture-word interference involving the establishment of a response set in working memory.     

Diminutives in child-directed speech supplement metric with distributional word segmentation cues

In two experiments, we explored whether diminutives (e.g.,birdie, Patty, bootie), which are characteristic of child-directed speech in many languages, aid word segmentation by regularizing stress patterns and word endings. In an implicit learning task, adult native speakers of English were exposed to a continuous stream of synthesized Dutch nonsense input comprising 300 randomized repetitions of six bisyllabic target nonwords. After exposure, the participants were given a forced choice recognition test to judge which strings had been present in the input. Experiment 1 demonstrated that English speakers used trochaic stress to isolate strings, despite being unfamiliar with Dutch phonotactics. Experiment 2 showed benefits from invariance introduced by affricates, which are typically found at onsets of final syllables in Dutch diminutives. Together, the results demonstrate that diminutives contain prosodic and distributional features that are beneficial for word segmentation.     

Stereomotion speed perception is contrast dependent

The effect of contrast on the perception of stimulus speed for stereomotion and monocular lateral motion was investigated for successive matches in random-dot stimuli. The familiar 'Thompson effect'--that a reduction in contrast leads to a reduction in perceived speed--was found in similar proportions for both binocular images moving in depth, and for monocular images translating laterally. This result is consistent with the idea that the monocular motion system has a significant input to the stereomotion system, and dominates the speed percept for approaching motion.     

The role of ON- and OFF-channel processing in the detection of bilateral symmetry

We present evidence that grouping for luminance does not take precedence over the detection of bilaterally symmetrical patterns. Using single-axis and double-axis images, we found that element pairs within which luminance is held constant drive symmetry-detection mechanisms more effectively than pairs within which luminance varies. Moreover, the performance decrement observed for patterns defined by element pairs within which luminance varies is not specific to interchannel variation. Luminance variation within the ON and OFF channels has the same effect as variation between the channels on the performance of axis-orientation identification tasks. It is argued that this constitutes possible evidence for subchannels within the ON and OFF channels. One of the characteristics of the subchannels is that each processes only a limited range of luminance steps. The implications of this type of luminance processing for the detection of symmetry in the visual scene are discussed.     

Familiarity, ambivalence, and firm reputation: is corporate fame a double-edged sword?

This research questioned the proposition that corporate familiarity is positively associated with firm reputation. Student images of familiar and unfamiliar Fortune 500 corporations were examined in 4 experiments. The results suggested that, consistent with behavioral decision theory and attitude theory, highly familiar corporations provide information that is more compatible with the tasks of both admiring and condemning than less familiar corporations. Furthermore, the judgment context may determine whether positive or negative judgments are reported about familiar companies. The notion that people can simultaneously hold contradictory images of well-known firms may help to explain the inconsistent findings on the relation between familiarity and reputation.