The role of cognitive factors in the pathogenesis of obsessive-compulsive symptoms: a prospective study

Cognitive models of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) posit that specific kinds of dysfunctional beliefs (e.g., pertaining to responsibility and the significance of intrusive thoughts) underlie the development of this disorder. The present study was designed to prospectively evaluate whether dysfunctional beliefs thought to underlie OCD act as a specific vulnerability factor in the pathogenesis of obsessive-compulsive symptomatology. Eighty-five individuals were prospectively followed over a period of time thought to be associated with an increased onset of OCD symptoms -- childbirth and the postpartum. The majority of these new mothers and fathers experienced intrusive infant-related thoughts and performed neutralizing behaviors similar to, but less severe than, those observed in OCD. Scores on a measure of dysfunctional beliefs thought to underlie OCD predicted the development of obsessive-compulsive symptoms after controlling for pre-existing OCD symptoms, anxiety, and depression. Dysfunctional beliefs also predicted the severity of checking, washing, and obsessional OCD symptom dimensions, but not neutralizing, ordering, or hoarding symptom dimensions. These data provide evidence for specific dysfunctional beliefs as risk factors in the development of some types of OCD symptoms.     

Orthogonality is not a panacea: backpropagation and "catastrophic interference"

Connectionist models with the backpropagation learning rule are said to exhibit catastrophic interference (or forgetting) with sequential training. Subsequent works showed that interference can be reduced by using orthogonal inputs. This study investigated, with a more rigorous assessment method, whether all orthogonal inputs lead to comparable extent of interference using three coding schemes. The results revealed large differences between the coding schemes. With larger networks, dense inputs led to severer interference compared with sparse inputs. With smaller networks, all the three schemes led to comparable extent of interference. Therefore, this study proved that not all the orthogonal inputs cause the same extent of interference, and that severity of interference depends on the interaction of the input coding scheme and the network size.     

Therapeutic response to Cognitive Processing Therapy in White and Black female veterans with military sexual trauma-related PTSD

Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) is an evidence-based treatment (EBT) for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) which has been validated for female veterans with military-related PTSD. Existing trials have enrolled predominantly White veterans with some studies documenting higher rates of early termination from EBTs among Black females when compared to White females. Data from a previously published randomized clinical trial were used to evaluate the effectiveness of CPT for Black female veterans with military sexual trauma (MST)-related PTSD. Reductions in PTSD symptom severity, number of sessions attended, and early termination rates were compared between Black (n = 20) and White (n = 16) female veterans. A hierarchical linear modeling approach was used, with PTSD symptom severity over the course of treatment and follow-up entered as a level-1 variable and race (Black or White) entered as a level-2 predictor. Piecewise growth curves analyses revealed that both Black and White female veterans experienced significant reductions in PTSD symptom severity over the course of treatment and gains were maintained up to 6 months post-treatment. Race was not found to be a significant predictor of change in the slope of PTSD symptom severity over the course of CPT treatment. Additionally, number of sessions attended and rates of early termination did not significantly differ based on race. Results suggest that CPT was a well-tolerated and effective psychotherapeutic treatment for this sample regardless of racial self-identification.     

Different mechanisms for role relations versus verb–action congruence effects: Evidence from ERPs in picture–sentence verification

Extant accounts of visually situated language processing do make general predictions about visual context effects on incremental sentence comprehension; these, however, are not sufficiently detailed to accommodate potentially different visual context effects (such as a scene–sentence mismatch based on actions versus thematic role relations, e.g., (Altmann & Kamide, 2007; Knoeferle & Crocker, 2007; Taylor & Zwaan, 2008; Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998)). To provide additional data for theory testing and development, we collected event-related brain potentials (ERPs) as participants read a subject–verb–object sentence (500 ms SOA in Experiment 1 and 300 ms SOA in Experiment 2), and post-sentence verification times indicating whether or not the verb and/or the thematic role relations matched a preceding picture (depicting two participants engaged in an action). Though incrementally processed, these two types of mismatch yielded different ERP effects. Role–relation mismatch effects emerged at the subject noun as anterior negativities to the mismatching noun, preceding action mismatch effects manifest as centro-parietal N400s greater to the mismatching verb, regardless of SOAs. These two types of mismatch manipulations also yielded different effects post-verbally, correlated differently with a participant's mean accuracy, verbal working memory and visual-spatial scores, and differed in their interactions with SOA. Taken together these results clearly implicate more than a single mismatch mechanism for extant accounts of picture–sentence processing to accommodate.     

Infants’ ability to associate motion paths with object kinds

The goal of the present research was to examine whether infants associate different paths of motion with animate beings and inanimate objects. An infant-controlled habituation procedure was used to examine 10–20-month-old infants’ ability to associate a non-linear motion path (jumping) with animals and a linear (rebounding) motion path with vehicles (Experiment 1) and furniture (Experiment 2). During the habituation phase, infants saw a dog jumping over a barrier and either a vehicle or a piece of furniture rebounding off the barrier. In the test phase, infants looked longer when another inanimate object jumped rather than rebounded, but showed no such differential looking in the case of another animate object. The ability to restrict the animate motion path of jumping to animate beings was present by 10 months of age. The present findings support the hypothesis that motion path is associated with the animate–inanimate distinction early in infancy.     

Cognitive behavior therapy in treatment-naive children and adolescents with obsessive-compulsive disorder: an open trial

This work aims is to evaluate the therapeutic efficacy of cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) in pediatric patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) who had not previously been treated with either pharmacotherapy or psychotherapy and who remained medication-free during CBT. Sixteen OCD outpatients, 8-17 years of age, were treated in a 12-week open trial with manualized CBT. Target symptoms were rated at two-week intervals with the Children's Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale (CY-BOCS), the National Institute of Mental Health Global Obsessive-Compulsive Scale (NIMH Global), the Clinical Global Impression Scale (CGI), and the Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale (Ham-A). Statistical analyses showed a significant benefit for treatment. Ten patients experienced at least a 50% reduction in symptoms on the CY-BOCS; seven were asymptomatic on the NIMH Global. These results build on previous reports that CBT may be effective in the acute treatment of pediatric OCD. Further, the results of this study suggest that CBT can be efficacious in alleviating OCD symptoms in the absence of pharmacotherapy. These results must be considered preliminary, given the small sample size and open administration of treatment.     

Parts and wholes in person recognition: developmental trends

This study's aim is the investigation of short-term visual person recognition in 8- and 10-year-olds and adults, within the part-whole paradigm introduced by. Natural unfamiliar whole persons were contrasted with natural unfamiliar faces to test for differences between person processing and face processing. Two experiments showed advantages of whole face recognition over isolated face feature recognition. Also, these was a complete over part probe advantage (CPA, ) for person recognition in all age groups. Thus, recognition became more accurate between 8 years and adulthood, but no developmental shift in visual information processing was observable with face and whole person recognition. I conclude that person recognition does not rely on processes completely different from those of face recognition and that this holds for 8- and 10-year-olds as well as for adults.     

Activation of semantic information at the sublexical level during handwriting production: Evidence from inhibition effects of Chinese semantic radicals in the picture‐word interference paradigm

Using a non‐alphabetic language (e.g., Chinese), the present study tested a novel view that semantic information at the sublexical level should be activated during handwriting production. Over 80% of Chinese characters are phonograms, in which semantic radicals represent category information (e.g., 椅 ‘chair,’ 桃 ‘peach,’ 橙 ‘orange’ are related to plants) while phonetic radicals represent phonetic information (e.g., 狼 ‘wolf,’ 朗 ‘brightness,’ 郎 ‘male,’ are all pronounced /lang/). Under different semantic category conditions at the lexical level (semantically related in Experiment 1; semantically unrelated in Experiment 2), the orthographic relatedness and semantic relatedness of semantic radicals in the picture name and its distractor were manipulated under different SOAs (i.e., stimulus onset asynchrony, the interval between the onset of the picture and the onset of the interference word). Two questions were addressed: (1) Is it possible that semantic information could be activated in the sublexical level conditions? (2) How are semantic and orthographic information dynamically accessed in word production? Results showed that both orthographic and semantic information were activated under the present picture‐word interference paradigm, dynamically under different SOAs, which supported our view that discussions on semantic processes in the writing modality should be extended to the sublexical level. The current findings provide possibility for building new orthography‐phonology‐semantics models in writing.     

相互作用的认知子系统理论述评

该介绍和分析了“相互作用的认知子系统”理论的基本观点,即信息的意义分为具体的、低层次的意义和一般的、高层次的意义;编码形式的转换遵循着特定的规则;不同信息的存储具有各自独立的记忆存储系统：高层次的意义对情绪产生具有直接作用。同时阐述了该理论对抑郁性情绪障碍的研究,并指出了该研究对治疗情绪障碍的意义及存在的问题。     

A multi-modal approach to cognitive training and assistance in minimally invasive surgery

Minimally-invasive surgery (MIS) offers many benefits to patients, but is considerably more difficult to learn and perform than is open surgery. One main reason for the observed difficulty is attributable to the visuo-spatial challenges that arise in MIS, taxing the surgeons’ cognitive skills. In this contribution, we present a new approach that combines training and assistance as well as the visual and the auditory modality to help surgeons to overcome these challenges. To achieve this, our approach assumes two main components: An adaptive, individualized training component as well as a component that conveys spatial information through sound. The training component (a) specifically targets the visuo-spatial processes crucial for successful MIS performance and (b) trains surgeons in the use of the sound component. The second component is an auditory display based on a psychoacoustic sonification, which reduces and avoids some of the commonly experienced MIS challenges. Implementations of both components are described and their integration is discussed. Our approach and both of its components go beyond the current state of the art in important ways. The training component has been explicitly designed to target MIS-specific visuo-spatial skills and to allow for adaptive testing, promoting individualized learning. The auditory display is conveying spatial information in 3-D space. Our approach is the first that encompasses both training for improved mastery and reduction of cognitive challenges in MIS. This promises better tailoring of surgical skills and assistance to the needs and the capabilities of the surgeons and, thus, ultimately, increased patient safety and health.