Neuropsychological and neurophysiological effects of strengthening exercise for early dementia: A pilot study

ABSTRACT

Research demonstrates a positive effect of aerobic exercise on cognitive functioning in older adults. Unfortunately, aerobic exercise is often contraindicated for older adults due to cardiovascular and functional limitations. Low-intensity strengthening exercise may offer a practical alternative, but the neuropsychological benefits and potential neurophysiological mechanisms are less well understood. The current study evaluated the effects of a 10-week strengthening exercise intervention on cognitive functioning and EEG in a sample of 13 older adults with early dementia, and 9 normative controls. Results revealed beneficial effects of strengthening exercise on verbal memory coupled with frontal beta and delta power asymmetries and N200 amplitude asymmetry. Results point to increased cognitive efficiency following 10 weeks of strengthening exercise. The findings suggest it is feasible to conduct a strengthening intervention with early dementia patients, and to gather neuropsychological and neurophysiological data to evaluate outcomes. Strengthening exercise may serve as a useful alternative to aerobic exercise.     

The contingent negative variation laterality and dynamics in antisaccade task in normal and unmedicated schizophrenic subjects

Contingent negative variation (CNV) topography, hemispheric asymmetry and time-course were investigated in healthy subjects and non-medicated paranoid schizophrenic patients in two antisaccade paradigms with the short (800-1000 ms) and long (1200-1400 ms) durations of the fixation period. EEG and electrooculogram (EOG) were recorded. Saccade characteristics and mean amplitudes of slow cortical potentials time-locked to peripheral target were analyzed in 23 healthy volunteers and 19 schizophrenic patients. Compared to healthy control subjects, schizophrenic patients had significantly slower antisaccades and committed significantly more erroneous saccades in the both antisaccade tasks. The prolongation of the fixation period resulted in noticeable decrease of error percent in patients group. The analysis of CNV time-course has revealed two distinct stages in both groups. The early CNV stage was represented by a negative wave with the maximal amplitude over midline fronto-central area, and the late stage was characterized by increased CNV amplitude at the midline and left parietal electrode sites. In healthy subjects the simultaneous activation of frontal and parietal areas was observed in the paradigm with the shorter fixation interval; the increase of the fixation period produced consecutive activation of these areas. Schizophrenic patients' CNV amplitude was generally smaller than that of healthy subjects. The most pronounced between-group differences of the negative shift amplitude were revealed at frontal electrode sites during the early CNV stage in both modifications of the antisaccade task. The deficit of frontal activation revealed in patients at the early stage of antisaccade preparatory set in both antisaccadic paradigms may be related to pathogenesis of paranoid schizophrenia.     

Outcome Feedback Effects on Under- and Overconfident Judgments (General Knowledge Tasks)

Effects of outcome feedback on overconfident and underconfident judgments were investigated. It was hypothesized that outcome feedback had a twofold effect on confidence judgments, corrective and confidence increasing, the latter effect operating only when the items to be judged are related and/or nonindependent. The proposed hypothesis implies two predictions which were tested in two experiments: (1) If the items are nonindependent and related, outcome feedback will reduce bias and improve calibration of underconfident judgments; by contrast, the feedback will neither reduce bias nor improve calibration in the case of overconfident judgments. (2) If, on the other hand, the items are independent and unrelated, outcome feedback will reduce underconfidence as well as overconfidence bias and improve calibration in both cases. The obtained results provided strong support for the first prediction, while the second prediction was not supported. Although the differences between with- and without-feedback groups on the dependent variables were in the expected direction, they were nonsignificant.     

Bilingualism and brain functional asymmetry

The task of the neural organization of the native language, acquired by a direct method and of another language, studied at school, performed correspondingly by the left and the right hemispheres, was studied in the bilingual patient after unilateral electroconvulsive therapy used in psychiatry. It was established that in such a bilingual type the right hemisphere is concerned with the formation of deep semantic structures of the native language while the left hemisphere is responsible for the formation of second language deep structures and of surface structures of both languages. The effect of language learning method on cerebral organization of bilingualism is postulated.     

Dream content of schizophrenic, nonschizophrenic mentally ill, and community control adolescents

This study compared the manifest dream content of 20 schizophrenic adolescent inpatients whose medications were stable for at least four weeks, 21 adolescent inpatients with other mental disorders (nonschizophrenic group) matched for age and gender, and 31 matched community controls. All participants were administered the standardized Formal Dream Content Rating Scale (FDCRS), which evaluates dream-related anxiety, cognitive disturbance, implausibility, involvement, primitivity, and recall, as well as two additional scales measuring emotional expression and duration of dream report. The Positive and Negative Symptoms Scale (PANSS) was administered to the two inpatient groups. The community controls demonstrated more involvement and emotional expression than the schizophrenic patients; furthermore, they demonstrated more implausibility and had a greater duration of dream report compared with the nonschizophrenic group. In the schizophrenic patients only, elevated scores on the negative subscale of the PANSS were significantly correlated with lower scores on involvement, emotional expression, and dream recall. No relationship was found between the positive subscale of the PANSS and any of the FDCRS subscales. These results suggest that psychopathology per se, rather than the specific psychiatric disturbance, may be associated with impoverishment of dream content, and that negative, rather than positive, schizophrenic symptomatology may be influential in the dream content of schizophrenic youngsters.     

Linking major depression and the neural substrates of associative processing

It has been proposed that mood correlates with the breadth of associative thinking. Here we set this hypothesis to the test in healthy and depressed individuals. Generating contextual associations engages a network of cortical regions including the parahippocampal cortex (PHC), retrosplenial complex, and medial prefrontal cortex. The link between mood, associative processing, and its underlying cortical infrastructure provides a promising avenue for elucidating the mechanisms underlying the cognitive impairments in major depressive disorder (MDD). The participants included 15 nonmedicated individuals with acute major depressive episodes and 15 healthy matched controls. In an fMRI experiment, participants viewed images of objects that were either strongly or weakly associated with a specific context (e.g., a beach chair vs. a water bottle) while rating the commonality of each object. Analyses were performed to examine the brain activation and structural differences between the groups. Consistent with our hypothesis, controls showed greater activation of the contextual associations network than did depressed participants. In addition, PHC structural volume was correlated with ruminative tendencies, and the volumes of the hippocampal subfields were significantly smaller in depressed participants. Surprisingly, depressed participants showed increased activity in the entorhinal cortex (ERC), as compared with controls. We integrated these findings within a mechanistic account linking mood and associative thinking and suggest directions for the future.     

Neuropsychological and neurophysiological effects of strengthening exercise for early dementia: a pilot study

Research demonstrates a positive effect of aerobic exercise on cognitive functioning in older adults. Unfortunately, aerobic exercise is often contraindicated for older adults due to cardiovascular and functional limitations. Low-intensity strengthening exercise may offer a practical alternative, but the neuropsychological benefits and potential neurophysiological mechanisms are less well understood. The current study evaluated the effects of a 10-week strengthening exercise intervention on cognitive functioning and EEG in a sample of 13 older adults with early dementia, and 9 normative controls. Results revealed beneficial effects of strengthening exercise on verbal memory coupled with frontal beta and delta power asymmetries and N200 amplitude asymmetry. Results point to increased cognitive efficiency following 10 weeks of strengthening exercise. The findings suggest it is feasible to conduct a strengthening intervention with early dementia patients, and to gather neuropsychological and neurophysiological data to evaluate outcomes. Strengthening exercise may serve as a useful alternative to aerobic exercise.     

On the Hegelian roots of Lukács’s theory of realism

This article attempts two things. First, it aims to reassess the literary criticism that Georg Lukács produced in the 1930s while he was living in the Soviet Union in light of his earlier, and much-esteemed, The theory of the novel. Second, in order to carry out this reassessment, it examines the place of Hegelian aesthetics in Lukács’s theorization of realism in the 1930s criticism, in relation both to contemporary Soviet writings on the subject and to his own earlier, ostensibly Hegelian work. I argue that, at least in terms of the place of art in the historical dialectic, the later work is more consistent with Hegelian philosophy than The theory of the novel.