Neuropsychological correlates of auditory perceptual inference: A mismatch negativity (MMN) study

The mismatch negativity (MMN) component of the auditory event-related potential can be used to study automatic perceptual inference. This study was designed to explore “Conditional Inference” in the MMN system – the capacity of the auditory system to use current input to switch between inference models in memory. We presented a “Random” sequence comprising a standard repeating sound occasionally interrupted by a change in frequency, duration or intensity (louder or softer). We also presented the same sequence with a conditional linkage between deviants – that is, frequency and duration deviants always followed an intensity change. We explored whether the auditory system could use intensity deviance to change the inference from “expect the standard to repeat” to “expect a frequency or duration violation” and quantified this as the proportion decline in the MMN elicited to duration and frequency deviant sounds in the linked versus random sequence. We report three main outcomes on a sample of 25 healthy young adults: (1) there was a significant conditional inference effect (a reduction in MMN amplitude in linked versus random sequences) to duration but not frequency deviants; (2) larger simple MMN and larger conditional inference effect on duration MMN were correlated with higher Digit Span; and (3) the conditional inference effect but not simple MMN to duration deviants, was strongly correlated with working memory ability (rs=.78, p<.001). The results are discussed with respect to the differential cognitive demands of simple MMN and conditional inference, and the possible involvement of prefrontal cortex in implementing conditional inference in the MMN system.

from Brain Research

Neurocognitive functions in euthymic bipolar patients

Objective: Meta-analytic findings support the hypothesis of specific neurocognitive deficits for bipolar patients in the domains of attention, processing speed, memory and executive functions. This study aims to show neurocognitive impairment in euthymic patients with bipolar I disorder compared with healthy controls while detailing the impact of medication side-effects or illness characteristics on neuropsychological test performance.

Method: Forty euthymic patients with bipolar I disorder were compared with 40 healthy controls in a cross-sectional design. Clinical features and neuropsychological measures of IQ, psychomotor speed, verbal fluency, learning and memory, executive functions and attention were assessed.

Results: Patients without antipsychotic drug use did not differ significantly from healthy controls in any neuropsychological measure. Yet patients treated with antipsychotics showed significant underperformance in the domains of semantic fluency, verbal learning and recognition memory as well as executive functions related to planning abilities, even when clinical features were controlled for.

Conclusion: The impact of antipsychotic medication needs to be further clarified for euthymic bipolar patients and should be considered when neuropsychological test performance is interpreted.

from Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica

Cognitive performance in community-dwelling English- and Spanish-speaking seniors

Objectives: to examine the association of language (English vs Spanish), and commonly used measures of memory and word fluency among older adults.

Design: cross-sectional.

Setting: community-based settings in New York City, including senior centres and residential complexes.

Subjects: four hundred and twenty independently living adults aged 60 or older (mean 73.8 years).

Methods: participants completed the Mini-Mental State Exam (MMSE), animal naming test (ANT) and Wechsler Memory Scale III (WMS) Story A immediate and delayed subtests. Scores were examined by strata of language, age or education and for different thresholds of the MMSE. We tested the association of language and cognitive test performance using multivariable linear regression.

Results: twenty-one per cent of subjects were interviewed in Spanish and 16.2% reported poor-fair English proficiency. The mean WMS scores were not statistically different between English and Spanish groups (immediate recall, 9.9 vs 9.5, P = 0.44; delayed recall, 8.0 vs 7.6, P = 0.36, respectively), whereas ANT scores did differ (16.6 vs 14.3, P < 0.0001). These associations were consistent across MMSE thresholds. The association of language and ANT score was not significant after accounting for education.

Conclusions: we found little difference in performance on the Story A subtests from the WMS suggesting that this test may be used for both English- and Spanish-speaking populations. Results suggest that variations in ANT performance may be accounted for by adjusting for the level of education. These results have important implications for the generalisability of test scores among diverse older populations.

from Age and Ageing

Procedural and declarative memory in children with and without specific language impairment

Conclusions & Implications: The results were interpreted to suggest an uneven profile of memory functioning in specific language impairment. On measures of declarative memory, specific language impairment appears to be associated with difficulties learning verbal information. At the same time, procedural memory is also appears to be impaired. Collectively, this study indicates multiple memory impairments in specific language impairment.

from the International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders

Perception of the acoustic environment and neuroimaging findings: a report of six cases with a history of closed head injury

Conclusion: The main finding was the relation between difficulty in determining the direction of movement of a sound source and frontal lesions and poor working memory. Poor correspondence in some cases between functional findings and imaging findings can be due to the possibility of axonal degeneration as well as plastic reorganization. Objective: The purpose of the present investigation of six cases was to identify auditory, cognitive and neuroimaging long-term sequelae of closed head injury (CHI) with particular focus on environmental sound recognition and moving sound sources. Subjects and methods: Six subjects who had experienced CHI were investigated with auditory tests. Four subjects also completed cognitive testing. CT and MRI were performed. Results: There was a large individual variability of the test results with respect to morphological findings. In five cases with central auditory processing disorders morphological brain damage was demonstrated. Two cases with shortcomings on cognitive testing and with frontal brain lesions demonstrated problems in determining the direction of movement of a sound source. The results may indicate that basal frontal lobe structures play a role in following and determining the direction of movement of a sound source. Two cases had problems with environmental sound recognition; in one left temporal brain lesions were demonstrated.

from Acta Oto-Laryngologica

Perception of the acoustic environment and neuroimaging findings: a report of six cases with a history of closed head injury

Conclusion: The main finding was the relation between difficulty in determining the direction of movement of a sound source and frontal lesions and poor working memory. Poor correspondence in some cases between functional findings and imaging findings can be due to the possibility of axonal degeneration as well as plastic reorganization. Objective: The purpose of the present investigation of six cases was to identify auditory, cognitive and neuroimaging long-term sequelae of closed head injury (CHI) with particular focus on environmental sound recognition and moving sound sources. Subjects and methods: Six subjects who had experienced CHI were investigated with auditory tests. Four subjects also completed cognitive testing. CT and MRI were performed. Results: There was a large individual variability of the test results with respect to morphological findings. In five cases with central auditory processing disorders morphological brain damage was demonstrated. Two cases with shortcomings on cognitive testing and with frontal brain lesions demonstrated problems in determining the direction of movement of a sound source. The results may indicate that basal frontal lobe structures play a role in following and determining the direction of movement of a sound source. Two cases had problems with environmental sound recognition; in one left temporal brain lesions were demonstrated.

from Acta Oto-Laryngologica

Perception of the acoustic environment and neuroimaging findings: a report of six cases with a history of closed head injury

Conclusion: The main finding was the relation between difficulty in determining the direction of movement of a sound source and frontal lesions and poor working memory. Poor correspondence in some cases between functional findings and imaging findings can be due to the possibility of axonal degeneration as well as plastic reorganization. Objective: The purpose of the present investigation of six cases was to identify auditory, cognitive and neuroimaging long-term sequelae of closed head injury (CHI) with particular focus on environmental sound recognition and moving sound sources. Subjects and methods: Six subjects who had experienced CHI were investigated with auditory tests. Four subjects also completed cognitive testing. CT and MRI were performed. Results: There was a large individual variability of the test results with respect to morphological findings. In five cases with central auditory processing disorders morphological brain damage was demonstrated. Two cases with shortcomings on cognitive testing and with frontal brain lesions demonstrated problems in determining the direction of movement of a sound source. The results may indicate that basal frontal lobe structures play a role in following and determining the direction of movement of a sound source. Two cases had problems with environmental sound recognition; in one left temporal brain lesions were demonstrated.

from Acta Oto-Laryngologica

Procedural and declarative memory in children with and without specific language impairment

Outcomes & Results: The results from the SRT Task showed the children with specific language impairment did not learn the sequence at levels comparable with the non-impaired children. On the measures of declarative memory, differences between the groups were observed on the verbal but not the visual task. The differences on the verbal declarative memory task were found after statistically controlling for differences in vocabulary and phonological short-term memory.

Conclusions & Implications: The results were interpreted to suggest an uneven profile of memory functioning in specific language impairment. On measures of declarative memory, specific language impairment appears to be associated with difficulties learning verbal information. At the same time, procedural memory is also appears to be impaired. Collectively, this study indicates multiple memory impairments in specific language impairment.

from the International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders

Sentence planning following traumatic brain injury

Conclusions: These findings of this pilot project suggest that the deficits in language production following TBI may include specific impairments to sentence planning. This evidence suggests that the language profile of TBI may be one of both microlinguistic and macrolinguistic impairments.

from Neurorehabilitation

Brain atrophy associated with baseline and longitudinal measures of cognition

The overall goal was to identify patterns of brain atrophy associated with cognitive impairment and future cognitive decline in non-demented elders. Seventy-one participants were studied with structural MRI and neuropsychological testing at baseline and 1-year follow-up. Deformation-based morphometry was used to examine the relationship between regional baseline brain tissue volume with baseline and longitudinal measures of delayed verbal memory, semantic memory, and executive function. Smaller right hippocampal and entorhinal cortex (ERC) volumes at baseline were associated with worse delayed verbal memory performance at baseline while smaller left ERC volume was associated with greater longitudinal decline. Smaller left superior temporal cortex at baseline was associated with worse semantic memory at baseline, while smaller left temporal white and gray matter volumes were associated with greater semantic memory decline. Increased CSF and smaller frontal lobe volumes were associated with impaired executive function at baseline and greater longitudinal executive decline. These findings suggest that baseline volumes of prefrontal and temporal regions may underlie continuing cognitive decline due to aging, pathology, or both in non-demented elderly individuals.

from Neurobiology of Aging

Genetic variance in processing speed drives variation in aging of spatial and memory abilities.

Previous analyses have identified a genetic contribution to the correlation between declines with age in processing speed and higher cognitive abilities. The goal of the current analysis was to apply the biometric dual change score model to consider the possibility of temporal dynamics underlying the genetic covariance between aging trajectories for processing speed and cognitive abilities. Longitudinal twin data from the Swedish Adoption/Twin Study of Aging, including up to 5 measurement occasions covering a 16-year period, were available from 806 participants ranging in age from 50 to 88 years at the 1st measurement wave. Factors were generated to tap 4 cognitive domains: verbal ability, spatial ability, memory, and processing speed. Model-fitting indicated that genetic variance for processing speed was a leading indicator of variation in age changes for spatial and memory ability, providing additional support for processing speed theories of cognitive aging. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved)

from Developmental Psychology

The cognitive and linguistic foundations of early reading development: A Norwegian latent variable longitudinal study.

The authors present the results of a 2-year longitudinal study of 228 Norwegian children beginning some 12 months before formal reading instruction began. The relationships between a range of cognitive and linguistic skills (letter knowledge, phoneme manipulation, visual–verbal paired-associate learning, rapid automatized naming (RAN), short-term memory, and verbal and nonverbal ability) were investigated and related to later measures of word recognition in reading. Letter knowledge, phoneme manipulation, and RAN were independent longitudinal predictors of early reading (word recognition) skills in the regular Norwegian orthography. Early reading skills initially appeared well described as a unitary construct that then showed rapid differentiation into correlated subskills (word decoding, orthographic choice, text reading, and nonword reading) that showed very high levels of longitudinal stability. The results are related to current ideas about the cognitive foundations of early reading skills. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved)

from Developmental Psychology

The cognitive and linguistic foundations of early reading development: A Norwegian latent variable longitudinal study.

The authors present the results of a 2-year longitudinal study of 228 Norwegian children beginning some 12 months before formal reading instruction began. The relationships between a range of cognitive and linguistic skills (letter knowledge, phoneme manipulation, visual–verbal paired-associate learning, rapid automatized naming (RAN), short-term memory, and verbal and nonverbal ability) were investigated and related to later measures of word recognition in reading. Letter knowledge, phoneme manipulation, and RAN were independent longitudinal predictors of early reading (word recognition) skills in the regular Norwegian orthography. Early reading skills initially appeared well described as a unitary construct that then showed rapid differentiation into correlated subskills (word decoding, orthographic choice, text reading, and nonword reading) that showed very high levels of longitudinal stability. The results are related to current ideas about the cognitive foundations of early reading skills. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved)

from Developmental Psychology

Foreign accent syndrome as a developmental motor speech disorder

This paper for the first time documents two patients who presented with FAS on a developmental basis. The finding that FAS does not only occur in the context of acquired brain damage or psychogenic illness but also exists as developmental motor speech impairment requires a re-definition of FAS as a clinical syndrome.

from Cortex

Outcomes of Child Sleep Problems Over the School-Transition Period: Australian Population Longitudinal Study

CONCLUSIONS. Sleep problems during school transition are common and associated with poorer child outcomes. Randomized, controlled trials could determine if population-based sleep interventions can reduce the prevalence and impact of sleep problems.

from Pediatrics