Neuropsychology最新文献

Objective: In Huntington's disease (HD), cognitive symptoms, sleep fragmentation, and daily activity pattern alterations can occur up to 15 years before diagnosis in premanifest HD (Pre-HD). Whether sleep and rest-activity patterns relate to cognitive function in Pre-HD, however, remains unclear. We investigated the relationships between rest-activity patterns, sleep, and cognitive function in Pre-HD compared to healthy controls (HCs).

Method: All participants completed 14 days of actigraphy, online questionnaires, and remote cognitive assessments.

Results: The Pre-HD group (n = 36) performed worse on Speeded Tapping than the HC group (n = 42). Pre-HD participants with heightened sleep fragmentation performed more poorly on the Trail Making Test (TMT) and Hopkins Verbal Learning Test-Revised (HVLT-R). In Pre-HD, lower intra-daily variability and higher interdaily stability (more stable, less fragmented rest-activity patterns) were associated with poorer performance on the trail making test Part B, Symbol Digit Modalities Test, Emotion Recognition Task, Rey Complex Figure Test, visual memory task, paced tapping, and HVLT-R total trial. Higher interdaily stability was also linked to poorer HVLT-R performance. Relative amplitude and sleep regularity index were not related to performance. Poorer sleep quality on the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index correlated with worse HVLT-R delayed and paced tapping scores. More severe insomnia (higher Insomnia Severity Index scores) correlated with lower Rey Complex Figure Test copy.

Conclusions: Our findings emphasize the importance of uninterrupted sleep on cognitive function in Pre-HD and reveal targets for interventions aimed at improving cognitive symptoms. Larger cohorts stratified by proximity to diagnosis are critical to improving our understanding of these relationships across the premanifest period. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Objective: Adults with traumatic brain injury (TBI) often show deficits in recognition of facial emotion, but their ability to remember emotions is poorly understood. Furthermore, there are no practicable tasks that measure this ability. This study examined the construct of memory for emotions using a novel Facial Recognition and Memory for Emotion (FRAME) test.

Method: Participants were 53 adults with complicated mild-to-severe TBI and a comparison group of 64 neurologically healthy adults. The FRAME and a neuropsychological battery were administered to participants. Analyses included zero-order and partial correlations, as well as group comparisons. A series of hierarchical logistic regressions evaluated the incremental utility of the FRAME in distinguishing adults with and without TBI.

Results: Adults with TBI performed worse than healthy participants across FRAME indices. Processing speed was the strongest correlate of both emotion recognition and memory for emotion. The FRAME demonstrated a pattern of correlations with cognitive tests supporting convergent and discriminant validity of the concept that memory for emotion is distinct from the simple perception of it. Hierarchical logistic regression models showed that memory for emotion accounted for unique variance in group membership beyond emotion recognition accuracy, memory for nonemotional faces, and verbal delayed recall.

Conclusions: Support was found for the construct validity of a novel performance-based assessment measure of recognition and memory for facial displays of emotion. We conclude that memory for facial emotions represents a unique aspect of social cognition, distinct from accurate recognition of facial emotions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Objective: Unlike adults, children often fail to coordinate their behavior away from unnecessary cognitive demands to conserve effort. The present study investigated whether greater conflict monitoring may contribute to metacognitive monitoring of cognitive demands, which in turn may support greater cognitive demand avoidance with age.

Method: Electroencephalogram data were recorded while 54 adults and fifty-four 5- to 10-year-old children completed a demand selection task, where they chose between versions of a task with either higher or lower demands on cognitive control.

Results: Both adults and children avoided the high-demand task, showing that, in some circumstances, children as young as 5 years can avoid unnecessary cognitive demands. Critically, midfrontal theta power predicted awareness of cognitive demand variations, which in turn predicted demand avoidance. The relationship between midfrontal theta power and demand awareness was negative and did not change between age groups.

Conclusion: Together, these findings suggest that metacognitive monitoring and control are based in part on conflict monitoring in both children and adults. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Objective: The present study intended to improve understanding of cognitive factors contributing to age-related differences in cognitive ability to shift between goal-directed (i.e., purposeful) and habitual (i.e., automatic) behavior.

Method: Fifty participants, divided into two age groups (older: n = 25, M_age = 67.35, 15 female; younger: n = 25, M_age = 20.84, 18 female), were included. They completed behavioral measures of mood and well-being, as well as a cognitive battery of measures related to memory, reaction time, and speed of processing. Goal-directed and habitual responding was measured using the symmetrical outcome-revaluation task. Response window lengths were varied with overall longer response windows for older (800 ms short/1,100 ms long) compared to younger adults (500 ms short/800 ms long). Independent sample t tests, mixed analyses of variance, and analyses of covariance were used to compare age groups on behavioral and cognitive measures and the symmetrical outcome-revaluation task.

Results: When given short response windows, both age groups displayed a reliance on habitual behavior over goal-directed responding. Interestingly, when provided longer response windows, younger adults were able to update responding to exercise goal-directed behavior and significantly improved their task performance compared to older adults who continued to rely on incorrect habitual responses. Working memory did not appear to be a significant driver of performance differences.

Conclusions: These findings provide a better understanding of the balance between goal-directed and habitual behaviors in aging, suggesting that age-related slowing and memory changes do not fully account for older adults' reliance on habitual responding and warrant further research into practical implications of addressing healthy behavioral change in older adults. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Objective: Neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1) is a genetic disorder marked by a range of clinical symptoms, including neurocognitive deficits, particularly in executive functions (EF), which are crucial for adaptive behavior. This study aimed to comprehensively evaluate core EF domains-such as inhibition, working memory, cognitive flexibility, and planning-in children with NF1 using the Child Executive Functions Battery (CEF-B). Additionally, it compared these findings with parent and teacher evaluations from the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function (BRIEF) and examined the role of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Method: Sixty-four children with NF1, aged 7-16 years (M = 10.20, SD = 2.11), were recruited from a university hospital's NF1 referral center between May 2013 and March 2016. The children completed the CEF-B, with results compared to normative data via t tests. Parents and teachers provided BRIEF assessments.

Results: Significant EF deficits were observed across all CEF-B components, and both parents and teachers reported substantial EF difficulties. Cohen's kappa indicated mild to moderate agreement between CEF-B and BRIEF scores (κ = -0.11-0.63). ADHD did not affect CEF-B performance, but children with ADHD were rated as having greater difficulties on the BRIEF than those without ADHD.

Conclusions: NF1 significantly impairs EF across all domains in children, with most showing multiple concurrent EF impairments. These deficits appear to be partially independent of ADHD comorbidity. The CEF-B showed greater sensitivity than questionnaires in detecting EF deficits in NF1, but both performance-based assessments and real-world evaluations are necessary for a comprehensive understanding of these impairments. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Objective: Dyscognition is a frequently overlooked symptom in fibromyalgia (FM) that negatively impacts functioning and contributes to disability. Previous research has substantiated these complaints but lacks a comprehensive assessment battery to establish a neuropsychological profile. Further, the factors contributing to their genesis remain poorly understood. This study aimed to characterize the cognitive profile of FM participants compared to healthy controls using an inclusive battery of neuropsychological measures and to explore the contribution of pain, psychological, and clinical variables in explaining this profile among FM participants.

Method: For this purpose, 33 FM participants and 32 age- and sex-matched healthy controls completed 17 cognitive tests measuring five broad domains. Participants also completed tests measuring pain sensitivity, endogenous pain modulation, and questionnaires on spontaneous pain severity, interference, and psychological and clinical characteristics.

Results: Compared to controls, FM participants reported elevated levels of depression, anxiety, alexithymia, and pain catastrophizing, alongside lower sleep quality and quality of life. They also reported higher spontaneous pain severity and interference, demonstrated heightened sensitivity to evoked pain, and reduced pain modulation. Moreover, our analysis identified a distinct cognitive profile in FM participants, characterized by poorer performance in memory and executive function measures. Elevated spontaneous pain severity and poor sleep quality emerged as key predictors of this cognitive profile.

Conclusions: The present study offers insights into the cognitive profile of FM and substantiates the factors involved in its development. These findings contribute to explaining the high prevalence of dyscognition in FM and suggest multiple treatment targets for addressing these symptoms. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Objective: This study investigates the development of mental rotation skills in male and female youth from a longitudinal study at ages 9/10 (baseline), 11/12 (Year 2), and 13/14 (Year 4) using a relatively novel task, the Little Man Task.

Method: The Little Man Task consists of four humanoid figures holding an object in either hand and rotated on two axes at 0° or 180°. Participants were prompted to indicate which of the figure's hands (left or right) was holding the object. Overall task performance (accuracy and response time on correct trials) and performance for individual orientations were obtained. Youth (n = 4,157) were drawn from the population-based, demographically diverse sample of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study.

Results: Conditional growth models for overall accuracy revealed main effects for age (representing the time variable) and sex. Effect sizes for sex effects were small and interactions between age and sex were not observed. There was a large main effect for orientation accompanied by small effect sizes for the interactions of orientation by age and orientation by sex. Exploratory descriptive data revealed that accuracy on the easiest orientation approximated asymptote at Year 4, whereas performance on the most difficult orientation remained relatively poor.

Conclusions: Results demonstrate that rotational skills emerge early but are incompletely developed at midadolescence. Despite task characteristics optimized to detect sex differences, substantive differences were minimal. Further insight could be gained by incorporating an evaluation of evolving response strategies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Objective: Children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) demonstrate deficits across academic domains including underachievement in math. Proposed models of math skill development suggest that math difficulties may be associated with both neurocognitive (e.g., working memory) and socioemotional factors (e.g., anxiety). Extant literature indicates a 25% co-occurrence rate between ADHD and anxiety, as well as a strong link between neurocognitive deficits in working memory and ADHD symptomology. However, it remains unclear how both trait anxiety and working memory uniquely or jointly relate to underachievement in math in children with ADHD.

Method: The sample comprised 275 clinically evaluated children ages 8-13 (Myears = 10.36, SD = 1.44; 106 girls; 69% White/non-Hispanic) with and without ADHD. Serial conditional effects models were utilized to (a) quantify the magnitude of math underachievement in children with ADHD relative to peers without ADHD and (b) determine the extent to which these impairments are uniquely or jointly related to child self-reported trait anxiety and/or working memory abilities.

Results: The serial path analysis indicated that children with ADHD exhibited large magnitude deficits in math achievement relative to peers without ADHD (d = -0.76; β = -.34, 95% CI excludes 0.0). Furthermore, the ADHD/math achievement relation was uniquely accounted for by its shared association with working memory, whereas self-reported trait anxiety was not a significant predictor of math achievement. Together, ADHD status and working memory accounted for 65% of the variance in math achievement (R2 = .65).

Conclusions: These findings suggest that math difficulties in children with ADHD are largely associated with neurocognitive factors such as working memory and do not appear to be associated with the frequency/severity of trait anxiety symptoms. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Objective: Early-life socioeconomic factors, such as education, closely associated with the opportunity to become multilingual (ML), are important determinants of late-life cognition. To study the cognitive advantage of multilingualism, it is critical to disentangle whether cognitive benefit is driven by multilingualism or education. With rich linguistic diversity across all socioeconomic gradients, India provides an excellent setting to examine the role of multilingualism on cognition among individuals with and without education.

Method: Using data from the Longitudinal Aging Study in India-Diagnostic Assessment of Dementia, we evaluated the association of multilingualism by language similarity (i.e., speaking languages from the same or different language families) and education with cognition. Longitudinal Aging Study in India-Diagnostic Assessment of Dementia is a nationally representative sample of older Indian adults aged 60 and over, speaking 40 different languages and dialects (N = 4,088, 54% without formal schooling). Multilingual participants were categorized whether they spoke ≥2 languages within the same (classified as ML1) or different (classified as ML2) language families. Participants completed a comprehensive cognitive assessment assessing the domains of executive functioning, language, memory, and visuospatial ability.

Results: Education stratified regression models adjusted for relevant covariates in the full sample and in a propensity-score matched sample. Among those with education, multilingualism was associated with better cognitive functioning across all domains regardless of language family (all p's < .05). Among those without education, only ML1 (not ML2) was associated with better executive functioning (B = 0.17 [0.07, 0.27]) compared to monolinguals.

Conclusions: These findings add to the growing literature on cognitive advantage of multilingualism, disentangling them from education and suggesting differential effects by language similarity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Objective: Autobiographical memory has been studied in Alzheimer's disease (AD) by asking for a specified number of memories from a few defined life periods. The present study tests whether a retrograde temporal gradient and a change in the quality of memory specificity is confirmed when using a temporally less restrained access to autobiographical memory. Also, we intended to explore the temporal macrostructure of entire life narratives in AD and to study in more detail the distribution of memories across the past life and the narrativity of memory reports.

Method: Twenty-one elderly adults with mild to moderate AD (Mage = 79.0; M Mini-Mental State Exam = 20.6) were compared with 20 healthy controls (Mage = 76.15, M Mini-Mental State Exam = 29.2). Participants were ethnic Germans from a rural southwestern area of Germany. They provided five most important memories and then told their entire life for up to 15 min. Life narratives were divided into temporal-thematic segments, which were dated and coded for memory specificity as well as for proportion of narrative clauses (narrativity).

Results: Life narratives in AD were shorter and contained proportionally fewer specific memories and fewer narrative clauses. These differences regarded the remembered period from between mid-30s to the recent past, for which also far fewer memories were produced. Life narratives were less chronological.

Conclusions: Maintaining a sense of self-sameness in AD relies less and less on life narratives but more on single-event narratives. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).