USING STIMULUS EQUIVALENCE PROCEDURES TO TEACH NAME-FACE MATCHING TO ADULTS WITH BRAIN INJURIES

On pretests, 3 men with brain injuries matched dictated names of three therapists to written names, but did not match dictated or written names to photos, produce correct names in response to photos, locate offices given written names, or name therapists on sight. Match-to-sample training established conditional relations between dictated names and photos. Posttests showed the emergence of untrained conditional relations involving photos and written names, indicating development of three classes of equivalent stimuli (each containing a dictated name, photo, and written name). For 1 participant, conditional relations involving photos of office nameplates were also examined, but did not emerge pre- or posttraining. Two participants produced names orally when given photos and sorted written names and faces together after training; the 3rd participant was unavailable for these posttests. After training, 1 participant located and named all three therapists in their offices.     

PROBLEM SOLVING TO PREVENT WORK INJURIES IN SUPPORTED EMPLOYMENT

A problem-solving strategy was used to teach three groups of 3 individuals in supported employment how to prevent work-related injuries. The problem-solving strategy was taught in two training phases. The first training phase involved the use of cue cards, and the second involved the withdrawal of the cue cards. Interviews and staged generalization assessments in the participants' natural work environments were conducted before, during, and up to 12 weeks after training. In these assessments, situations were presented that were either similar or dissimilar to situations presented in training. Results of both the interviews and staged assessments indicated that the participants' newly acquired problem-solving skills generalized to similar and dissimilar situations.     

成人脑涨落图年龄变化特点的研究

该工作研究了１２０名２０－７９岁正常成人脑涨落图的年龄变化特点。结果表明：（１）从２０岁到５０岁,Ｓ系谱线活动向低频方向集中,６０岁后谱线又向高频方向有所移动;（２）部分谐振系的随龄变化表现明显,其中以Ｓ１７系变化最为敏感;（３）脑区间相干活动和各脑区的连频活动随年龄增强,脑能量分布的有序性逐渐破坏;（４）增龄性变化主要反映在优势脑区（左前脑）和优势脑轴（左前／右后脑）上,与脑高级机能活动密切相关的左前脑的退行性变化最为明显。上述结果反映了脑功能的减退是一个非线性的多层次的复杂过程。     

Decision-making bioinspired model for target definition and “satisfactor” selection for physiological needs

Every person, from an early age, has to make decisions to resolve situations that arise in life. In general, different people make different decisions in the same situation, since decision-making takes into account different factors such as age, emotional state, experience, among others. We can make decisions about situations that we classify as: more important than others, routine, unexpected, or trivial. However, making the correct decision(s) in a timely manner for these situations is one of the most complex and delicate challenges that human beings face. This is due to the arduous mental process required to be carried out. Providing such behavior to a virtual entity is possible through the use of Cognitive Architectures (CAs). CAs are an approach for modeling human intelligence and behavior. This paper presents an functional bioinspired computational decision-making model to satisfy the physiological needs of hunger and thirst. Our proposal considers as black boxes other cognitive functions that are part of a general CA (named Cuäyöllötl or brain in Nahuatl). In the proposed case study, it is proved that the decision-making process plays an essential role in determining the objective and selecting the object that satisfies the established need.     

Declarative working memory: A bio-inspired cognitive architecture proposal

Memory is considered one of the most important functions since it allows us to code, store and retrieve knowledge. These qualities make it an indispensable function for a virtual creature. In general, memory can be classified based on the durability of the stored data in working memory and long-term memory. Working memory refers to the capacity to maintain temporarily a limited amount of information in mind, which can then be used to support various abilities, including learning, reasoning, planning and decision-making. Unlike short-term memory, working memory is not only a storage site, but it is also a framework of interacting processes that involve the temporary storage and manipulation of information in the service of performing complex cognitive activities. Declarative memory is a type of long-term memory related with the storage of facts and events. This research focuses on the development of a cognitive architecture for the type of working memory that maintains and manipulates declarative information. The construction of the model was grounded in theoretical evidence taken from cognitive sciences such as neuroscience and psychology, which gave us the components and their processes. The model was evaluated through a case study that covers the encoding, storing, and retrieval stages. Our hypothesis is that a virtual creature endowed with our working memory model will provide faster access to the information needed for the ongoing task. Therefore, it improves the planning and decision-making processes.     

Processing homonymy and polysemy: effects of sentential context and time-course following unilateral brain damage

The present study investigated the abilities of left-hemisphere-damaged (LHD) non-fluent aphasic, right-hemisphere-damaged (RHD), and normal control individuals to access, in sentential biasing contexts, the multiple meanings of three types of ambiguous words, namely homonyms (e.g., "punch"), metonymies (e.g., "rabbit"), and metaphors (e.g., "star"). Furthermore, the predictions of the "suppression deficit" and "coarse semantic coding" hypotheses, which have been proposed to account for RH language function/dysfunction, were tested. Using an auditory semantic priming paradigm, ambiguous words were incorporated in dominant- or subordinate-biasing sentence-primes followed after a short (100 ms) or long (1,000 ms) interstimulus interval (ISI) by dominant-meaning-related, subordinate-meaning-related or unrelated target words. For all three types of ambiguous words, both the effects of context and ISI were obvious in the performance of normal control subjects, who showed multiple meaning activation at the short ISI, but eventually, at the long ISI, contextually appropriate meaning selection. Largely similar performance was exhibited by the LHD non-fluent aphasic patients as well. In contrast, RHD patients showed limited effects of context, and no effects of the time-course of processing. In addition, although homonymous and metonymous words showed similar patterns of activation (i.e., both meanings were activated at both ISIs), RHD patients had difficulties activating the subordinate meanings of metaphors, suggesting a selective problem with figurative meanings. Although the present findings do not provide strong support for either the "coarse semantic coding" or the "suppression deficit" hypotheses, they are viewed as being more consistent with the latter, according to which RH damage leads to deficits suppressing alternative meanings of ambiguous words that become incompatible with the context.     

The "Perceptual Wedge Hypothesis" as the basis for bilingual babies' phonetic processing advantage: new insights from fNIRS brain imaging

In a neuroimaging study focusing on young bilinguals, we explored the brains of bilingual and monolingual babies across two age groups (younger 4-6 months, older 10-12 months), using fNIRS in a new event-related design, as babies processed linguistic phonetic (Native English, Non-Native Hindi) and nonlinguistic Tone stimuli. We found that phonetic processing in bilingual and monolingual babies is accomplished with the same language-specific brain areas classically observed in adults, including the left superior temporal gyrus (associated with phonetic processing) and the left inferior frontal cortex (associated with the search and retrieval of information about meanings, and syntactic and phonological patterning), with intriguing developmental timing differences: left superior temporal gyrus activation was observed early and remained stably active over time, while left inferior frontal cortex showed greater increase in neural activation in older babies notably at the precise age when babies’ enter the universal first-word milestone, thus revealing a first-time focalbrain correlate that may mediate a universal behavioral milestone in early human language acquisition. A difference was observed in the older bilingual babies’ resilient neural and behavioral sensitivity to Non-Native phonetic contrasts at a time when monolingual babies can no longer make such discriminations. We advance the “Perceptual Wedge Hypothesis” as one possible explanation for how exposure to greater than one language may alter neural and language processing in ways that we suggest are advantageous to language users. The brains of bilinguals and multilinguals may provide the most powerful window into the full neural “extent and variability” that our human species’ language processing brain areas could potentially achieve.     

Brain activity in adults who stutter: similarities across speaking tasks and correlations with stuttering frequency and speaking rate

Many differences in brain activity have been reported between persons who stutter (PWS) and typically fluent controls during oral reading tasks. An earlier meta-analysis of imaging studies identified stutter-related regions, but recent studies report less agreement with those regions. A PET study on adult dextral PWS (n = 18) and matched fluent controls (CONT, n = 12) is reported that used both oral reading and monologue tasks. After correcting for speech rate differences between the groups the task-activation differences were surprisingly small. For both analyses only some regions previously considered stutter-related were more activated in the PWS group than in the CONT group, and these were also activated during eyes-closed rest (ECR). In the PWS group, stuttering frequency was correlated with cortico-striatal-thalamic circuit activity in both speaking tasks. The neuroimaging findings for the PWS group, relative to the CONT group, appear consistent with neuroanatomic abnormalities being increasingly reported among PWS.     

Exposure to severe urban air pollution influences cognitive outcomes, brain volume and systemic inflammation in clinically healthy children

Exposure to severe air pollution produces neuroinflammation and structural brain alterations in children. We tested whether patterns of brain growth, cognitive deficits and white matter hyperintensities (WMH) are associated with exposures to severe air pollution. Baseline and 1 year follow-up measurements of global and regional brain MRI volumes, cognitive abilities (Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised, WISC-R), and serum inflammatory mediators were collected in 20 Mexico City (MC) children (10 with white matter hyperintensities, WMH⁺, and 10 without, WMH⁻) and 10 matched controls (CTL) from a low polluted city. There were significant differences in white matter volumes between CTL and MC children - both WMH⁺ and WMH⁻ - in right parietal and bilateral temporal areas. Both WMH⁻ and WMH⁺ MC children showed progressive deficits, compared to CTL children, on the WISC-R Vocabulary and Digit Span subtests. The cognitive deficits in highly exposed children match the localization of the volumetric differences detected over the 1 year follow-up, since the deficits observed are consistent with impairment of parietal and temporal lobe functions. Regardless of the presence of prefrontal WMH, Mexico City children performed more poorly across a variety of cognitive tests, compared to CTL children, thus WMH⁺ is likely only partially identifying underlying white matter pathology. Together these findings reveal that exposure to air pollution may perturb the trajectory of cerebral development and result in cognitive deficits during childhood.     

The covariation of independent and dependant variables in neurofeedback: A proposal framework to identify cognitive processes and brain activity variables

This methodological article proposes a framework for analysing the relationship between cognitive processes and brain activity using variables measured by neurofeedback (NF) carried out by functional Magnetic Resonance Imagery (fMRI NF). Cognitive processes and brain activity variables can be analysed as either the dependant variable or the independent variable. Firstly, we propose two traditional approaches, defined in the article as the “neuropsychological” approach (NP) and the “psychophysiology” approach (PP), to extract dependent and independent variables in NF protocols. Secondly, we suggest that NF can be inspired by the style of inquiry used in neurophenomenology. fMRI NF allows participants to experiment with his or her own cognitive processes and their effects on brain region of interest (ROI) activations simultaneously. Thus, we suggest that fMRI NF could be improved by implementing “the elicitation interview method”, which allows the investigator to gather relevant verbatim from participants’ introspection on subjective experiences.