Apraxia and Alzheimer’s Disease: Review and Perspectives

Apraxia is one of the cognitive deficits that characterizes Alzheimer’s disease. Despite its prevalence and relevance to diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease, this topic has received little attention and is without comprehensive review. The review herein is aimed to fill this gap by first presenting an overview of the impairment caused in different clinical situations: pantomime of tool use, single tool use, real tool use, mechanical problem solving, function and manipulation knowledge tasks, and symbolic/meaningless gestures. On the basis of these results, we then propose alternative interpretations regarding the nature of the underlying mechanisms impaired by the disease. Also presented are principal methodological issues precluding firm conclusions from being drawn.     

Relative category-specific preservation in semantic dementia? Evidence from 35 cases

Category-specific deficits have rarely been reported in semantic dementia (SD). To our knowledge, only four previous studies have documented category-specific deficits, and these have focused on the living versus non-living things contrast rather than on more fine-grained semantic categories. This study aimed to determine whether a category-specific effect could be highlighted by a semantic sorting task administered to 35 SD patients once at baseline and again after 2 years and to 10 Alzheimer’s disease patients (AD). We found a relative preservation of fruit and vegetables only in SD.This relative preservation of fruit and vegetables could be considered with regard to the importance of color knowledge in their discrimination. Indeed, color knowledge retrieval is known to depend on the left posterior fusiform gyrus which is relatively spared in SD. Finally, according to predictions of semantic memory models, our findings best fitted the Devlin and Gonnerman’s computational account.     

From stimulus-driven to appraisal-driven attention: Towards differential effects of goal relevance and goal relatedness on attention?

The Component Process Model posits that attention is appraisal-driven rather than stimulus-driven and that the appraisal of relevance is of critical importance in such a mechanism. This means that any stimulus can attract attention or not depending on how relevant it is appraised. This hypothesis was tested in an implicit border similarity judgement task, in which thirsty participants were presented with bottles and vases that were respectively very relevant and weakly relevant to their goal to quench their thirst. These stimuli were also presented to quenched participants for whom none of the stimuli was relevant. The findings support the idea that our attention is more likely to be appraisal-driven than stimulus-driven, since bottles produced an attentional interference in thirsty participants only. It was also observed that, even if vases were judged weakly relevant by thirsty participants, they produced an attentional interference compared to empty stimuli, which was not the case in the quenched participants group. The concept of goal relatedness was proposed as an explanation for this result, and methodological implications were also discussed.     

A cognitive-based model of tool use in normal aging

While several cognitive domains have been widely investigated in the field of aging, the age-related effects on tool use are still an open issue and hardly any studies on tool use and aging is available. A significant body of literature has indicated that tool use skills might be supported by at least two different types of knowledge, namely, mechanical knowledge and semantic knowledge. However, neither the contribution of these kinds of knowledge to familiar tool use, nor the effects of aging on mechanical and semantic knowledge have been explored in normal aging. The aim of the present study was to fill this gap. To do so, 98 healthy elderly adults were presented with three tasks: a classical, familiar tool use task, a novel tool use task assessing mechanical knowledge, and a picture matching task assessing semantic knowledge. The results showed that aging has a negative impact on tool use tasks and on knowledge supporting tool use skills. We also found that aging did not impact mechanical and semantic knowledge in the same way, confirming the distinct nature of those forms of knowledge. Finally, our results stressed that mechanical and semantic knowledge are both involved in the ability to use familiar tools.     

Merah and Breivik: A Reflection of the European Identity Crisis

While the cases of Anders Behring Breivik and Mohamed Merah clearly demonstrate the impact of social networks and the role of the Internet and prison on the radicalization process, the killings in Norway and France in fact expose larger issues that exist within contemporary Europe, including profound identity crises manifesting as Islamist extremism in some quarters and far-right extremism in others. This article discusses the individual pathways towards extremism of Merah and Breivik, the interconnectivity of two extremisms and how these can be understood as mirrored manifestations of an identity crisis in Europe.¹1. A shorter version of this article was presented at the international conference on “Europe and Islam in the 21st Century,” organized by the Monash European and EU Centre, Monash University, Prato, Italy, June 20–21, 2013. I would also like to thank Associate Professor Pete Lentini, and Dr Natalie Doyle for having inspired me to continue this research that is close to my heart.     

A novel,short and easy-to-perform method to evaluate newborns’ social olfactory preferences

Animal Cognition - Humans’ early olfactory perception has been studied mainly within the framework of mother–offspring interactions and only a few studies have focused on...     

Culture of honour theory and social anxiety: Cross-regional and sex differences in relationships among honour-concerns,social anxiety and reactive aggression

According to the Appraisal-Tendency Framework (Han, Lerner, & Keltner, 2007), certainty-associated emotions increase risk taking compared with uncertainty-associated emotions. To date, this general effect has only been shown in static judgement and decision-making paradigms; therefore, the present study tested the effect of certainty on risk taking in a sequential decision-making task. We hypothesised that the effect would be reversed due to the kind of processing involved, as certainty is considered to encourage heuristic processing that takes into account the emotional cues arising from previous decisions, whereas uncertainty leads to more systematic processing. One hundred and one female participants were induced to feel one of three emotions (film clips) before performing a decision-making task involving risk (Game of Dice Task; Brand et al., 2005). As expected, the angry and happy participants (certainty-associated emotions) were more likely than the fearful participants (uncertainty-associated emotion) to make safe decisions (vs. risky decisions).     

Psychological Predictors of Career Planning among Active Elite Athletes: An Application of the Social Cognitive Career Theory

The present study examines mechanisms underlying career planning among athletes in the context of sport career termination. The contribution of conscientiousness to athletes' career planning was investigated among 180 active athletes (88 females, 92 males; M_age = 20.36) by applying the social cognitive career theory (SCCT). Bootstrap analyses, performed at both broad and facet-level, revealed that conscientious individuals are more likely to plan for their future career because they set higher goals and are more confident in their capacity to plan their future career. Implications for practice are discussed in relation to intervention that could induce career planning among athletes.     

Pleasant emotional induction broadens the visual world of young children

These experiments aimed at studying the influence of emotional context on global/local visual processing in children. Children 5 years old, known to present an immature global visual bias, and 8 years old, known to pay attention predominantly to global information, were placed in either a neutral or pleasant emotional context and subsequently presented with a global/local visual judgement task. As with previous findings for adults, both age groups presented a pronounced perceptual bias toward global information following exposure to emotionally pleasant pictures. Interestingly, younger children, who do not present a global bias during the neutral exposure, presented the same preference for global information as older children when exposed to the pleasant context. These findings indicate that emotion may strongly affect visual perception in children, with important implications for educational practice and models of cognition.