Social information processing skills link executive functions to aggression in adolescents with mild to borderline intellectual disability

Executive Functions (EFs) have been associated with aggression in children and adolescents. EFs as higher-order cognitive abilities are assumed to affect cognitive functions such as Social Information Processing (SIP). We explored SIP skills as a mediating mechanism linking EFs to aggression in adolescents with mild to borderline intellectual disability (MBID with IQ from 50–84), a high risk group for aggressive behaviors and EF impairments. A total of 153 adolescents (M_age = 15.24, SD = 1.35; 54% male) with MBID participated. Focused attention, behavioral inhibition, and working memory were tested with multiple neurocognitive tasks to define latent EF constructs. Participants responded to a video-based SIP task. A latent construct for aggression was defined by caretaker, teacher, and adolescent self-reports of aggression (Child Behavior Check List, Teacher Report Form, and Youth Self Report). Structural equation modeling was performed to test mediation. Results were consistent with mediation of the relation between focused attention and aggression by SIP, namely via hostile interpretations and self-efficacy for aggression. Behavioral inhibition was linked to aggression, but this relation was not mediated by SIP. The relation between working memory and aggression was mediated by SIP, namely via hostile interpretations, aggressive response generation and via self-efficacy for aggressive responses. Bearing the cross-sectional design in mind, support was found for SIP skills as a mechanism linking EFs, in particular focused attention and working memory, to aggression, providing a viable explanation for the high vulnerability of adolescents with MBID for aggression.     

2~5年级小学生汉字识别中预视效应的发展研究

在阅读时,读者可以获取副中央凹处的词汇信息,副中央凹加工是构成流畅阅读的重要因素。本研究从儿童语言发展的角度,通过3个实验（共534名被试）,考察了汉语视觉字词加工中2~5年级学生的字形、语音、语义预视效应。结果发现：（1）2~5年级小学生均有字形预视效应;（2）2、3年级学生没有语音预视效应,4、5年级学生有此效应;（3）2年级学生没有语义预视效应,3、4、5年级学生有此效应。这表明,低水平的视觉信息—字形信息在儿童副中央凹加工中一直稳定地发挥作用;高水平的语言信息—语音和语义信息,随着儿童年级的升高和阅读技能的提升,逐渐地在儿童的副中央凹加工中发挥作用。儿童对汉字各类型信息的获取与使用的发展模式不同于拼音文字阅读发展理论的预测。     

Unconscious arithmetic: Assessing the robustness of the results reported by Karpinski,Briggs, and Yale (2018)

In 2012, a study by Sklar et al. reported that participants could solve invisible subtractions. This notion of unconscious arithmetic has been influential because it challenges current theories of consciousness. In 2016, Karpinski et al. published a direct replication reporting evidence for unconscious addition rather than subtraction. About a year later, the study was retracted due to a computation error in the analysis pipeline. After this error was corrected, no evidence for unconscious addition nor subtraction was obtained. Recently, Karpinski et al. republished the study by applying the exclusion criteria used in Sklar et al. The reanalysis found weak evidence for unconscious subtraction. To assess the robustness of these results, we examine how sensitive the results are to data analytic decisions. We outline a set of 250 analyses that we consider justified to perform. We show that none of the analyses indicates evidence for unconscious subtraction.     

Sensitivity to amplitude envelope rise time in infancy and vocabulary development at 3 years: A significant relationship

Here we report, for the first time, a relationship between sensitivity to amplitude envelope rise time in infants and their later vocabulary development. Recent research in auditory neuroscience has revealed that amplitude envelope rise time plays a mechanistic role in speech encoding. Accordingly, individual differences in infant discrimination of amplitude envelope rise times could be expected to relate to individual differences in language acquisition. A group of 50 infants taking part in a longitudinal study contributed rise time discrimination thresholds when aged 7 and 10 months, and their vocabulary development was measured at 3 years. Experimental measures of phonological sensitivity were also administered at 3 years. Linear mixed effect models taking rise time sensitivity as the dependent variable, and controlling for non‐verbal IQ, showed significant predictive effects for vocabulary at 3 years, but not for the phonological sensitivity measures. The significant longitudinal relationship between amplitude envelope rise time discrimination and vocabulary development suggests that early rise time discrimination abilities have an impact on speech processing by infants.     

It's not all in the face: reduced face visibility does not modulate social segmentation

Humans rely on social information to parse environmental content into social and nonsocial events. Here, we assessed if information conveyed by faces was necessary for this process. We asked participants to view a video clip depicting a social interaction and mark social and nonsocial events while actors’ faces were either visible or blurred. Keypress and eye-movement data were collected. Participants consistently identified social and nonsocial event boundaries independently of face availability, with greater agreement and less variability in keypresses for social relative to nonsocial events. Eye-tracking revealed that participants attended more to actors’ faces when they were visible and more to bodies when faces were blurred. Thus, face information is not necessary for social segmentation, which appears to be a flexible process that depends on a range of information conveyed by both faces and bodies.     

Parental coping socialization is associated with healthy and anxious early‐adolescents’ neural and real‐world response to threat

The ways parents socialize their adolescents to cope with anxiety (i.e., coping socialization) may be instrumental in the development of threat processing and coping responses. Coping socialization may be important for anxious adolescents, as they show altered neural threat processing and over reliance on disengaged coping (e.g., avoidance and distraction), which can maintain anxiety. We investigated whether coping socialization was associated with anxious and healthy adolescents’ neural response to threat, and whether neural activation was associated with disengaged coping. Healthy and clinically anxious early adolescents (N = 120; M = 11.46 years; 71 girls) and a parent engaged in interactions designed to elicit adolescents’ anxiety and parents’ response to adolescents’ anxiety. Parents’ use of reframing and problem solving statements was coded to measure coping socialization. In a subsequent visit, we assessed adolescents’ neural response to threat words during a neuroimaging task. Adolescents’ disengaged coping was measured using ecological momentary assessment. Greater coping socialization was associated with lower anterior insula and perigenual cingulate activation in healthy adolescents and higher activation in anxious adolescents. Coping socialization was indirectly associated with less disengaged coping for anxious adolescents through neural activation. Findings suggest that associations between coping socialization and early adolescents’ neural response to threat differ depending on clinical status and have implications for anxious adolescents’ coping.     

Do attentional capacities and processing speed mediate the effect of age on executive functioning?

The executive processes are well known to decline with age, and similar data also exists for attentional capacities and processing speed. Therefore, we investigated whether these two last nonexecutive variables would mediate the effect of age on executive functions (inhibition, shifting, updating, and dual-task coordination). We administered a large battery of executive, attentional and processing speed tasks to 104 young and 71 older people, and we performed mediation analyses with variables showing a significant age effect. All executive and processing speed measures showed age-related effects while only the visual scanning task performance (selective attention) was explained by age when controlled for gender and educational level. Regarding mediation analyses, visual scanning partially mediated the age effect on updating while processing speed partially mediated the age effect on shifting, updating and dual-task coordination. In a more exploratory way, inhibition was also found to partially mediate the effect of age on the three other executive functions. Attention did not greatly influence executive functioning in aging while, in agreement with the literature, processing speed seems to be a major mediator of the age effect on these processes. Interestingly, the global pattern of results seems also to indicate an influence of inhibition but further studies are needed to confirm the role of that variable as a mediator and its relative importance by comparison with processing speed.     

Examining HPA-axis functioning as a mediator of the relationship between depression and cognition across the adult lifespan

Altered HPA-axis functioning is a hypothesized mechanism for worsened cognition in depression. The current study examines the indirect effects of depression on processing speed, executive functioning, and memory as a function of the HPA-axis. 38 individuals with a depression diagnosis and 50 healthy controls (HCs) aged 18–86 underwent neuropsychological testing and at-home diurnal salivary cortisol collection. Depression was assessed via structured clinical interviews and rating scales. Cognitive composite scores were derived from factor analysis. Daytime cortisol exposure was estimated using area under the curve (AUC). Depression was associated with higher cortisol levels and slower processing speed . A significant suppression effect of AUC was present on the relationship between depression and processing speed. Limitations include the cross-sectional design and limited sample heterogeneity. Though poorly modulated HPA-axis is one proposed mechanism of cognitive alterations in depression, our results did not support this conclusion for processing speed. Alternative mechanisms should be considered to inform interventions to target cognitive alterations in depression.     

A performance comparison between shallow and deeper neural networks supervised classification of tomosynthesis breast lesions images

Computer Aided Decision (CAD) systems, based on 3D tomosynthesis imaging, could support radiologists in classifying different kinds of breast lesions and then improve the diagnosis of breast cancer (BC) with a lower X-ray dose than in Computer Tomography (CT) systems.In previous work, several Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures were evaluated to discriminate four different classes of lesions considering high-resolution images automatically segmented: (a) irregular opacity lesions, (b) regular opacity lesions, (c) stellar opacity lesions and (d) no-lesions. In this paper, instead, we use the same previously extracted relevant Regions of Interest (ROIs) containing the lesions, but we propose and evaluate two different approaches to better discriminate among the four classes.In this work, we evaluate and compare the performance of two different frameworks both considering supervised classifiers topologies. The first framework is feature-based, and consider morphological and textural hand-crafted features, extracted from each ROI, as input to optimised Artificial Neural Network (ANN) classifiers. The second framework, instead, considers non-neural classifiers based on automatically computed features evaluating the classification performance extracting several sets of features using different Convolutional Neural Network models.Final results show that the second framework, based on features computed automatically by CNN architectures performs better than the first approach, in terms of accuracy, specificity, and sensitivity.