Journal of Neuropsychology最新文献

The cortical distribution of the proper name (PN) retrieval network has been widely studied contrary to its connectional anatomy. Here, we report the case of three patients with a low-grade glioma damaging the mid-to-anterior part of the left temporal lobe. A longitudinal behavioural assessment showed that the surgery caused a long-lasting decline in PN retrieval performances in all patients. Furthermore, a detailed analysis of surgery-related structural disconnections revealed that interruption of the inferior longitudinal fasciculus was the unique common denominator.

Affective touch is gentle slow stroking of the skin, which can reduce experimentally induced pain. Our participant, suffering from Parkinson's Disease and chronic pain, received 1 week of non-affective touch and 1 week of affective touch as part of a larger study. Interestingly, after 2 days of receiving affective touch, the participant started to feel less pain. After 7 days, the burning painful sensations fully disappeared. This suggest that affective touch may reduce chronic pain in clinical populations.

The Oxford cognitive screen (OCS) is a stroke-specific cognitive screening assessment. Although the test developers have provided psychometric information for the assessment, the OCS has received minimal external scrutiny, with which to triangulate the underpinning psychometrics. The purpose of this study is to provide a critical review and independent validation of the OCS. This study analysed data from an anonymised clinical database, which consisted of 316 patients who were assessed using the OCS on an Acute Stroke Unit. The rates of impairment on tests of memory and receptive communication were lower than expectation, suggesting that these subtests may be relatively insensitive. Patients with aphasia were more likely to be unable to categorised as impaired on non-language tests, suggesting that they remain sensitive to language processing or non-dominant hand usage. Some of the subtests of the OCS achieve high retest reliability, which makes them good candidates for measuring cognitive change over time. Although the OCS has many advantages, it is also important to adequately consider its limitations, that is insensitivity to memory problems, the potential confounding impact of non-dominant hand usage, and the potential that some tests may sample overall cognitive ability instead of domain-specific functioning.

Individuals affected by psychosis often have deficits in several neurocognitive functions. Prospective memory (PM), the ability to remember to do things, is crucial for activities of daily living, social and occupational functioning, but very few studies have attempted to examine this domain of functioning in people with psychosis, particularly in India. A total of 71 patients with psychosis, (both early and established psychosis), and 140 age, gender and education-matched healthy controls were assessed using the Positive and Negative Symptom Scale, Hospital Anxiety and Depression scale, and Addenbrooke's Cognitive Examination. PM was assessed using the Cambridge Prospective Memory Test and the Prospective and Retrospective Memory Questionnaire (PRMQ). Group differences were evaluated using Mann–Whitney U-tests. Significantly greater cognitive deficits, higher anxiety and depression were evident in the psychosis group compared with controls. The psychosis group performed significantly poorer on both time- and event-based tests in CAMPROMPT than controls. These differences remained when controlling for age, education, general cognitive functioning and mood. The subjective measure of PM (PRMQ) did not differentiate the two groups. The PM performance of early and established psychosis patients was similar. Comparisons with cross-cultural data (PRMQ UK norms and CAMPROMPT and PRMQ Chinese data) revealed important differences in PM performance. Individuals with psychosis have significant deficits in both time- and event-based PM. CAMPROMPT emerged as a more sensitive PM measure compared with PRMQ. Results from cross-cultural comparisons underscore the need for cultural contextualization of assessments.

Patients with left unilateral spatial neglect (USN) typically place the subjective midpoint to the right of the objective centre when bisecting a horizontal line. This pathological phenomenon may be explained as a result of greater dependence on the right endpoint in the external reference frame (Koyama et al., Brain Cogn, 35, 1997, 271; McIntosh et al., Cogn Brain Res, 25, 2005, 833). Ishiai et al. (Brain, 112, 1989, 1485) reported that once patients with USN fixated on a certain point on the right part of the presented line, they persisted with this point and marked the subjective midpoint there without leftward searches. Ishiai et al.'s interpretation was that the patients saw a totalised line representation that extended equidistantly to the right and left sides, based on the information of the attended rightward extent from the subjective midpoint. Accordingly, we used virtual reality goggles (VRG) and devised a mirror-image viewing (MV) condition that showed a full-field view based on the right visual field information to test whether healthy participants would thereby show neglect-like bisection performance. The participants were 30 healthy adults (22–37 years old; 15 women and 15 men). In this condition, 96.7% (29/30) of participants were judged to exhibit USN-like performance of line bisection, indicating the effectiveness of MV condition to simulate USN. The novelty of the present study lies in the use of a task-specific intervention of neglect-like visuospatial processing during line bisection without attempting to modify the direction of spatial attention. This approach may contribute to the understanding of the pathological visuospatial processing of USN.

Here, we examined mechanisms that affect retrograde memory in amnestic mild cognitive impairment (a-MCI) as a function of longitudinal clinical outcome. 8 a-MCI who converted to Alzheimer's dementia (AD) during the subsequent 3-year follow-up (converter a-MCI) and 10 a-MCI who remained clinically stable during the same period (stable a-MCI) were compared at the baseline evaluation (i.e., when they were diagnosed as a-MCI) using a remote memory questionnaire for public events that allows disentangling the differential contribution of storage and retrieval mechanisms to performance accuracy. Results suggest that deficits in remote memory are primarily explained by impaired retrieval abilities in stable a-MCI and by impaired storage in converter-to-AD a-MCI. This distinction between retrograde amnesia due to defective trace utilisation in stable a-MCI and trace storage in converter a-MCI is consistent with the temporal unfolding of declining anterograde memory over the course of disease progression to AD.

There is growing interest in awake craniotomies, but some clinicians are concerned that such procedures are poorly tolerated by patients. Therefore, we conducted a study to assess this phenomenon. In this prospective qualitative study, 68 patients who qualified for awake craniotomy were asked to complete the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS)—two days before the surgery and visual analogue scales (VAS) for pain and stress, two days before the surgery and again about two days after. In addition, after their surgery, they took part in a structured interview about what helped them prepare for and cope with the surgery. Most patients tolerated the awake surgery well, scoring low on stress and pain scales. They reported a lower level of stress during the surgery (when questioned afterwards) than before it. Intensity of stress before the surgery correlated negatively with age, positively with HADS anxiety score and positively with stress subsequently experienced during surgery. The level of stress during surgery was associated with stress experienced before the surgery, pain and HADS anxiety and depression scores. Severity of pain during the surgery was positively correlated with stress during surgery and HADS depression and anxiety scores before the surgery. There was no correlation between stress, pain, anxiety and depression and the location of the lesion. Patients have a high tolerance for awake craniotomy. Various factors have an impact on how well patients cope with the operation. Extensive preoperative preparation should be considered a key part of the procedure.

The hub-and-spoke model of semantic cognition proposes that conceptual representations in a heteromodal ‘hub’ interact with and emerge from modality-specific features or ‘spokes’, including valence (whether a concept is positive or negative), along with visual and auditory features. As a result, valence congruency might facilitate our ability to link words conceptually. Semantic relatedness may similarly affect explicit judgements about valence. Moreover, conflict between meaning and valence may recruit semantic control processes. Here we tested these predictions using two-alternative forced-choice tasks, in which participants matched a probe word to one of two possible target words, based on either global meaning or valence. Experiment 1 examined timed responses in healthy young adults, while Experiment 2 examined decision accuracy in semantic aphasia patients with impaired controlled semantic retrieval following left hemisphere stroke. Across both experiments, semantically related targets facilitated valence matching, while related distractors impaired performance. Valence congruency was also found to facilitate semantic decision-making. People with semantic aphasia showed impaired valence matching and had particular difficulty when semantically related distractors were presented, suggesting that the selective retrieval of valence information relies on semantic control processes. Taken together, the results are consistent with the hypothesis that automatic access to the global meaning of written words affects the processing of valence, and that the valence of words is also retrieved even when this feature is task-irrelevant, affecting the efficiency of global semantic judgements.

The literature on neuropsychological intervention (NI) uses a variety of terms to refer to equivalent constructs, making it difficult to compare intervention programmes and their outcomes. The purpose of this work is to propose a unified terminological framework for describing NI programmes. The terminological framework was developed based on a previous proposal for common terminology by Johnstone and Stonnington (Rehabilitation of neuropsychological disorders: A practical guide for rehabilitation professionals. Psychology Press, 2011) and driven by Cognitive Psychology concepts. The terminological framework was organized into two sections: (a) NI, which includes types of NI, methods and approaches, instructional methods, and strategies; and (b) neurocognitive functions, which include temporal and spatial orientation, sensation, perception, visuo-constructional abilities, attention, memory, language, reasoning of several sorts (e.g., abstract reasoning, and numerical reasoning), and executive functions. Most NI tasks target a main neurocognitive function, but there are underlying neurocognitive functions that may impair performance in the former. Since it is difficult to create a task that is solely focused on one neurocognitive function, the proposed terminology should not be viewed as a taxonomy, but rather as dimensional, with the same task allowing to work different functions, in varying grades. Adopting this terminological framework will allow to define the targeted neurocognitive functions more accurately and simplify the comparison between NI programmes and their outcomes. Future research should focus on describing the main techniques/strategies for each neurocognitive function and non-cognitive interventions.