Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation versus Conventional Treatment: Neurodevelopmental and Social Outcomes at 24 Months

The purpose of this prospective, controlled study was to compare neurodevelopmental and social outcomes at 2 years of age for children treated with extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO; n = 25) to those of children with severe respiratory illness treated with conventional methods (CT; n = 16) and to matched, healthy full-term (FT; n = 29) children. Mothers' parenting attitudes and children's mental, motor, language, exploratory play, and social competence skills were assessed. A retrospective chart review was also undertaken to further describe the groups with respect to the results of neuroimaging, audiologic, and neuromotor examinations. The FT group had significantly higher mental, motor, and language scores as compared to the ECMO and CT groups. Groups did not differ on measures of behavior, social competence, exploratory play skills, or parental attitudes. Specifically for the ECMO group, there was a trend toward language being more problematic than other areas of development. In general, the data demonstrate that severe respiratory complications, regardless of type of treatment, place children at increased risk for neurodevelopmental difficulties.     

Individual Differences in the Encoding Processes of Egocentric and Allocentric Survey Knowledge

This study examined how different components of working memory are involved in the acquisition of egocentric and allocentric survey knowledge by people with a good and poor sense of direction (SOD). We employed a dual‐task method and asked participants to learn routes from videos with verbal, visual, and spatial interference tasks and without any interference. Results showed that people with a good SOD encoded and integrated knowledge about landmarks and routes into egocentric survey knowledge in verbal and spatial working memory, which is then transformed into allocentric survey knowledge with the support of all three components, distances being processed in verbal and spatial working memory and directions in visual and spatial working memory. In contrast, people with a poor SOD relied on verbal working memory and lacked spatial processing, thus failing to acquire accurate survey knowledge. Based on the results, a possible model for explaining individual differences in spatial knowledge acquisition is proposed.     

Visual image retention does not contribute to modulation of event-related potentials by mental rotation

Rotation of a visual image in mind is associated with a slow posterior negative deflection of the event-related potential (ERP), termed rotation-related negativity (RRN). Retention of a visual image in short-term memory is also associated with a slow posterior negative ERP, termed negative slow wave (NSW). We tested whether short-term memory retention, indexed by the NSW, contributes to the RRN. ERPs were recorded in the same subjects in two tasks, a mental rotation task, eliciting the RRN, and a visual short-term memory task, eliciting the NSW. Over both right and left parietal scalp, no association was found between the NSW and the RRN amplitudes. Furthermore, adjusting for the effect of the NSW had no influence on a significant association between the RRN amplitude and response time, an index of mental rotation performance. Our data indicate that the RRN reflects manipulation of a visual image but not its retention in short-term memory.     

Behavioral assessment of emotional and motivational appraisal during visual processing of emotional scenes depending on spatial frequencies

Previous studies performed on visual processing of emotional stimuli have revealed preference for a specific type of visual spatial frequencies (high spatial frequency, HSF; low spatial frequency, LSF) according to task demands. The majority of studies used a face and focused on the appraisal of the emotional state of others. The present behavioral study investigates the relative role of spatial frequencies on processing emotional natural scenes during two explicit cognitive appraisal tasks, one emotional, based on the self-emotional experience and one motivational, based on the tendency to action. Our results suggest that HSF information was the most relevant to rapidly identify the self-emotional experience (unpleasant, pleasant, and neutral) while LSF was required to rapidly identify the tendency to action (avoidance, approach, and no action). The tendency to action based on LSF analysis showed a priority for unpleasant stimuli whereas the identification of emotional experience based on HSF analysis showed a priority for pleasant stimuli. The present study confirms the interest of considering both emotional and motivational characteristics of visual stimuli.     

Deeper attentional masking by lateral objects in children with autism

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is often associated with a detail-oriented perception and overselective attention in visual tasks, such as visual search and crowding. These results were obtained manipulating exclusively the spatial properties of the stimuli: few is known about the spatio-temporal dynamics of visual processing in ASD. In this study we employed an attentional masking (AM) paradigm comparing children with ASD and IQ-matched typically developing (TD) controls. The AM effect refers to an impaired identification of a target followed by a competitive masking object at different proximities in space and time. We found that ASD and TD groups did not differ in the AM effect provoked by the competitive object displayed in the same position of the target. In contrast, children with ASD showed a deeper and prolonged interference than the TD group when the masking object was displayed in the lateral position. These psychophysical results suggest that the inefficient attentional selection in ASD depends on the spatio-temporal interaction between competitive visual objects. These evidence are discussed in the light of the ASD altered neural connectivity hypothesis and the reentrant theory of perception.     

Short-Term Memory and Working Memory in Children with Blindness: Support for a Domain General or Domain Specific System?

The study explored the contribution of two component processes (phonological and executive) to blind children's memory performance. Children with blindness and sight were matched on gender, chronological age, and verbal intelligence and compared on measures of short-term memory (STM) and working memory (WM). Although the measures were highly correlated, the results from two experiments indicated that the blind children were superior to sighted children on measures of STM, but not on measures of WM. The results supported the notion that children with blindness have advantages on memory tasks that draw upon resources from the phonological loop. However, comparable performance between the ability groups on WM measures suggests there are domain specific aspects in the executive system.     

Visual Perception and Memory Impairments in Children at Risk of Nonverbal Learning Disabilities

Visuospatial working memory (VSWM) and visual perception were examined in two groups aged 11–13, one with children displaying symptoms of nonverbal learning disability (NLD) (n = 18) and the other a control group without learning disabilities (n = 18). The two groups were matched for general verbal abilities, age, gender, and socioeconomic level. The children were presented with VSWM tests involving visual and spatial-simultaneous processes, and also with a classical visual illusion, a classical ambiguous figure, as well as visual perception tests specifically devised for the present study. Results revealed that performance of children at risk of NLD was worse than controls in some VSWM and in visual perception tests without memory involvement; these latter required comparisons of visual stimuli and locations in space with distractors. Moreover, the two groups differed in perceiving the classical ambiguous figure. Findings are discussed in the light of both theoretical and clinical implications.     

How semantic category modulates preschool children’s visual memory

The dynamic interplay between perception and memory has been explored in preschool children by presenting filtered stimuli regarding animals and artifacts. The identification of filtered images was markedly influenced by both prior exposure and the semantic nature of the stimuli. The identification of animals required less physical information than artifacts did. Our results corroborate the notion that the human attention system evolves to reliably develop definite category-specific selection criteria by which living entities are monitored in different ways.     

Charting the Developmental Trajectories of Attention and Executive Function in Chinese School-Aged Children

Attention is a complex domain that has reawakened research interest in recent years. There are relatively few studies that have examined age-related changes across different attention subcomponents, such as selection, maintenance, and control, using large samples covering a wide age range. The present study assessed performance in 466 participants in order to identify the ages at which mature performance was reached across differing attention subcomponents. Furthermore, we investigated whether the nature of the attentional demands or task difficulty predicted the age at which stable levels of performance were reached. The results supported the former rather than the latter alternative.     

An anxiety-induced bias in the perception of a bistable point-light walker

Human sensitivity for social cues is exquisite, as illustrated by the ease with which simplified point-light movements invoke social and emotional responses. Compared to faces, these biological motion stimuli only recently started to be used to explore questions regarding social cognition and anxiety. We presented human point-light walkers that could be perceived as facing towards or facing away from the observer, and tested whether participants with high social anxiety would perceive these bistable stimuli differently, because this type of stimuli has particular relevance for them. The results showed that observers with high social anxiety tended to see walkers as facing away more frequently than those with low social anxiety. This may mean that high socially anxious observers are biased towards the more positive perceptual alternative because they are motivated to protect themselves against threatening social experiences, but we also explore alternative explanations. The findings are in line with the evidence for a positivity bias in perception, also called wishful seeing, but in contrast with the attentional negativity bias often found in social anxiety. We discuss reasons for this divergence and possible limitations of the current study.