Cognitive Neuropsychology最新文献

Visual imagery has a close overlapping relationship with visual perception. Posterior cortical atrophy (PCA) is a neurodegenerative syndrome marked by early impairments in visuospatial processing and visual object recognition. We asked whether PCA would therefore also be marked by deficits in visual imagery, tested using objective forced-choice questionnaires, and whether imagery deficits would be selective for certain properties. We recruited four patients with PCA and a patient with integrative visual agnosia due to bilateral occipitotemporal strokes for comparison. We administered a test battery probing imagery for object shape, size, colour lightness, hue, upper-case letters, lower-case letters, word shape, letter construction, and faces. All subjects showed significant impairments in visual imagery, with imagery for lower-case letters most likely to be spared. We conclude that PCA subjects can show severe deficits in visual imagery. Further work is needed to establish how frequently this occurs and how early it can be found.

Reading is a complex process involving multiple stages. An impairment in any of these stages may cause distinct types of reading deficits- distinct types of dyslexia. We describe the Malabi, a screener to identify deficits in various orthographic, lexical, and sublexical components of the reading process in French. The Malabi utilizes stimuli that are sensitive to different forms of dyslexia, including "attentional dyslexia", as it is traditionally refered to, characterized by letter-to-word binding impairments leading to letter migrations between words (e.g., "bar cat" misread as "bat car"), and "letter-position dyslexia", resulting in letter transpositions within words (e.g., "destiny" misread as "density"). After collecting reading error norms from 138 French middle-school students, we analyzed error types of 16 students with developmental dyslexia. We identified three selective cases of attentional dyslexia and one case of letter-position dyslexia. Further tests confirmed our diagnosis and demonstrate, for the first time, how these dyslexias are manifested in French. These results underscore the significance of recognizing and discussing the existence of multiple dyslexias, both in research contexts when selecting participants for dyslexia studies, and in practical settings where educators and practitioners work with students to develop personalized support. The test and supporting materials are available on Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/3pgzb/).

Previous studies have emphasized the critical role of the prefrontal cortex in cognitive estimation and theory of mind, however, none of them has questioned the possible role of cognitive estimation processes in understanding the mental states of others. In this study, we compared 30 patients with focal prefrontal cortex damage and 30 control subjects matched by gender, age, and education level on their performances on a cognitive estimation task and two tasks assessing theory of mind: the "Faux-Pas" task and the Reading the Mind in the Eyes task. The results showed that patients were significantly impaired compared with control subjects on both abilities of cognitive estimation and theory of mind. Moreover, regression analyses showed that performance on theory of mind was predicted by the scores on cognitive estimation. Finally, using voxel-based lesion analysis, we identified a partially common bilaterally distributed prefrontal network involved in both these domains centred within the ventral and dorsomedial areas with extension to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

Being able to empathise with others is a crucial ability in everyday life. However, this does not usually entail feeling the pain of others in our own bodies. For individuals with mirror-sensory synaesthesia (MSS), however, this form of empathic embodiment is a common feature. Our study investigates the empathic ability of adults who experience MSS using a video-based empathy task. We found that MSS participants did not differ from controls on emotion identification and affective empathy; however, they showed higher affect sharing (degree to which their affect matches what they attribute to others) than controls. This finding indicates difficulties with self-other distinction, which our data shows results in fewer signs of prosocial behaviour. Our findings are in line with the self-other control theory of MSS and highlight how the use of appropriate empathy measures can contribute to our understanding of this important socio-affective ability, both in typical and atypical populations.

Speaking involves the preparation of the linguistic content of an utterance and of the motor programs leading to articulation. The temporal dynamics of linguistic versus motor-speech (phonetic) encoding is highly debated: phonetic encoding has been associated either to the last quarter of an utterance preparation time (∼150ms before articulation), or to virtually the entire planning time, simultaneously with linguistic encoding. We (i) review the evidence on the time-course of motor-speech encoding based on EEG/MEG event-related (ERP) studies and (ii) strive to replicate the early effects of phonological-phonetic factors in referential word production by reanalysing a large EEG/ERP dataset. The review indicates that motor-speech encoding is engaged during at least the last 300ms preceding articulation (about half of a word planning lag). By contrast, the very early involvement of phonological-phonetic factors could be replicated only partially and is not as robust as in the second half of the utterance planning time-window.