Transcoding number words to typed multi-digit numerals: revisiting the strange case in Arabic bilinguals.

Language-specific effects are observed in the performance of numerical tasks. We evaluated the effect of the number word system (non-inverted; decade-unit format HDU vs inverted; unit-decade format HUD) in multi-digit numbers on transcoding performance among Arabic-Hebrew bilingual university students. Both languages are written right-to-left, but only in Arabic the sequence of number words is inverted, with units stipulated before decades (e.

The effect of inverting decades and units on the retention of two-digit numbers in working memory: a matter of the output mode.

Number-word structure affects transcoding and relates to working memory capacity (WMc). We tested the relationship between the structure of number-words (inverted "Units-Decades (UD) format" or not "Decades-Units (DU) format") and performance on the digit span task for recalling two-digit number-words presented verbally, using two modes of output. University students, native speakers of Arabic, who were also highly proficient in Hebrew, and native speakers of Hebrew, were asked to response by typing Arabic digits or recalling numbers verbally.

[DISSOCIATION BETWEEN DECLERATIVE AND PROCEDURAL MEMORY IN PATIENTS WITH TRAUMATIC BRAIN INJURY].

Introduction: Converging evidence from studies of patients suffering focal brain lesions and results from animal models led to the notion of two functionally and structurally distinct memory systems, declarative-explicit-episodic and procedural-implicit-skill.

Aims: Assessment of skill acquisition and procedural memory in patients after blunt traumatic brain injury (TBI) who suffer from deficit of explicit (episodic) memory in comparison to patients without such a deficit.

Methods: Comparison of skill acquisition in the Finger Opposition Sequence task in two patients after TBI presenting with episodic-explicit memory deficit to eight patients without such a deficit.

Different delayed consequences of attaining a plateau phase in practicing a simple (finger-tapping sequence learning) and a complex (Tower of Hanoi puzzle) task.

In practicing a new task, the initial performance gains, across consecutive trials, decrease; in the following phase, performance tends to plateau. However, after a long delay additional performance improvements may emerge (delayed/ "offline" gains). It has been suggested that the attainment of the plateau phase is a necessary condition for the triggering of skill consolidation processes that lead to the expression of delayed gains.

Paradoxical Long-term Memory Augmentation following Temporal Pairing between "Limited" and "Extensive" Motor Sequence Training Experiences.

Consecutive training on two movement sequences often leads to retroactive interference-obstructing memory for the initially trained sequence but not for the second. However, in the context of hippocampal-system dependent memories, a poor learning experience, memory for which would soon decay, can be enhanced if temporally paired with a "strong" memory triggering experience. The synaptic tagging and capture hypothesis explains this paradoxical enhancement by suggesting that only strong experiences generate cellular resources necessary for synaptic remodeling.

Sequence-specific delayed gains in motor fluency evolve after movement observation training in the absence of early sleep.

Following physical practice, delayed, consolidation-phase, gains in the performance of the trained finger-to-thumb opposition sequence (FOS) can be expressed, in young adults, only after a sleep interval is afforded. These delayed gains are order-of-movements specific. However, in several perceptual learning tasks, time post-learning, rather than an interval of sleep, may suffice for the expression of delayed performance gains.

Improving old tricks as new: Young adults learn from repeating everyday activities.

The notion that young healthy adults can substantially improve in activities that are part of their daily routine is often overlooked because it is assumed that such activities have come to be fully mastered. We followed, in young healthy adults, the effects of repeated executions of the Timed-Up-and-Go (TUG) task, a clinical test that assesses the ability to execute motor activities relevant to daily function-rising from a seated position, walking, turning and returning to a seated position. The participants (N = 15) performed 18 consecutive trials of the TUG in one session, and were retested on the following day and a week later.

Memory for incidentally learned categories evolves in the post-learning interval.

Humans generate categories from complex regularities evolving across even imperfect sensory input. Here, we examined the possibility that incidental experiences can generate lasting category knowledge. Adults practiced a simple visuomotor task not dependent on acoustic input.

Skill-learning by observation-training with patients after traumatic brain injury.

Unlabelled: Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a major cause of death and disability in Western society, and often results in functional and neuropsychological abnormalities. Memory impairment is one of the most significant cognitive implications after TBI. In the current study we investigated procedural memory acquisition by observational training in TBI patients.

Long-term benefits after a rhyme-repetition based intervention program for kindergarteners: Better reading and spelling in the first grade.

Oral language proficiency in kindergarten can facilitate the acquisition of reading and writing. However, in diglossic languages, like Arabic, the large gap between the spoken and the formal, modern standard (MSA) varieties of the language may restrict the benefits of oral language proficiency to subsequent literacy skills. Here, we tested, in a randomized controlled study, whether an intervention program, implemented in kindergarten, that familiarized the children with rhymes presented in MSA through recitation, facilitated reading and spelling in first grade.

Practice schedule and testing per se affect children's transfer abilities in a grapho-motor task.

Children's ability to transfer the gains of a motor experience, such as learning to write a letter, to novel conditions, such as cursive writing of the same letter, are affected by the way in which the learning experience is parsed. Parsing may have limitations because a short session may hamper the engagement of procedural memory consolidation processes. Here, we compared the effects of two practice schedules with the total amount of practice identical training provided in a single-session practice versus multi-session practice, wherein each session on its own was insufficient for generating long-term gains.

Motor sequence learning in patients with ideomotor apraxia: Effects of long-term training.

Recent studies show that limb apraxia is a quite frequent, yet often underdiagnosed, higher motor impairment following stroke. Because it adversely affects every-day life and personal independence, successful rehabilitation of apraxia is essential for personal well-being. Nevertheless, evidence of long-term efficacy of training schemes and generalization to untrained actions is still scarce.

Better later: evening practice is advantageous for motor skill consolidation in the elderly.

How does the time of day of a practice session affect learning of a new motor sequence in the elderly? Participants practiced a given finger tapping sequence either during morning or evening hours. All participants robustly improved performance speed within the session concurrent with a reorganization of the tapping pattern of the sequence. However, evening-trained participants showed additional gains overnight and at 1 wk posttraining; moreover, evening training led to a further reorganization of the tapping pattern offline.

Recitation as a structured intervention to enhance the long-term verbatim retention and gist recall of complex texts in kindergarteners.

Recitation is an effective way for children to become familiar with basic blocks of knowledge. It is not clear, however, whether repeated structured exposure to complex texts via listening or active reciting benefits the ability of kindergarteners to retain verbal material in long-term memory verbatim and as content. Here, we tested the effectiveness of teaching longer texts to kindergarteners by repeated exposure in terms of long-term retention (6 months).

Practice Makes Transfer Imperfect: Evidence From Auditory Learning.

Background: Evidence from motor and visual studies suggests that the ability to generalize learning gains to untrained conditions decreases as the training progresses. This decrease in generalization was suggested to reflect a shift from higher to lower levels of neuronal representations of the task following prolonged training. In the auditory modality, however, the few studies that tested the influence of prolonging training on generalization ability showed no decrease and sometimes even an increase in generalization.

Recitation and listening to nursery rhymes in the familiarization with a literacy language in kindergarteners: Not kids' stuff.

A large linguistic distance exists between spoken Arabic and the Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) the literary language (a diglosia). Novice readers, therefore, struggle with the complex orthography of Arabic as well as the mastering of MSA. Here, we tested whether structured activities in MSA would advance kindergarteners' MSA aptitude by the end of the school year.

A Delayed Advantage: Multi-Session Training at Evening Hours Leads to Better Long-Term Retention of Motor Skill in the Elderly.

The acquisition and retention of motor skills is necessary for everyday functioning in the elderly and may be critical in the context of motor rehabilitation. Recent studies indicate that motor training closely followed by sleep may result in better engagement of procedural ("how to") memory consolidation processes in the elderly. Nevertheless, elderly individuals are mostly morning oriented and a common practice is to time rehabilitation programs to morning hours.

Deficits in Explicit Language Problem Solving Rather Than in Implicit Learning in Specific Language Impairment: Evidence From Learning an Artificial Morphological Rule.

Purpose The purpose of this study was to delineate differences between children with specific language impairment (SLI), typical age-matched (TAM) children, and typical younger (TY) children in learning and mastering an undisclosed artificial morphological rule (AMR) through exposure and usage. Method Twenty-six participants (eight 10-year-old children with SLI, 8 TAM children, and ten 8-year-old TY children) were trained to master an AMR across multiple training sessions. The AMR required a phonological transformation of verbs depending on a semantic distinction: whether the preceding noun was animate or inanimate.

Subclinical Scores in Self-Report Based Screening Tools for Attention Deficits Correlate With Cognitive Traits in Typical Evening-Type Adults Tested in the Morning.

Previous studies suggest that in adolescents and young adults, evening chronotype is a subclinical factor in physical, cognitive, and psychiatric fitness; poor sleep habits and larger misalignment with the social schedule constraints may exacerbate symptoms of inattention, impulsivity and the risks for detrimental behaviors. The influence of chronotype on neurocognitive performance during morning hours and scores in self-reports about attention deficit symptoms (ADS) and executive functioning, was explored in 42 healthy young university students (29 women), divided to evening type (ET) and combined morning/intermediate type (MT/IT) groups. Evening chronotypes scored significantly higher in the questionnaires of inattention Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale (ASRS-6) (MT/IT: 1.

Susceptibility of consolidated procedural memory to interference is independent of its active task-based retrieval.

Reconsolidation theory posits that upon retrieval, consolidated memories are destabilized and need to be restabilized in order to persist. It has been suggested that experience with a competitive task immediately after memory retrieval may interrupt these restabilization processes leading to memory loss. Indeed, using a motor sequence learning paradigm, we have recently shown that, in humans, interference training immediately after active task-based retrieval of the consolidated motor sequence knowledge may negatively affect its performance levels.

Learning to decipher time-compressed speech: Robust acquisition with a slight difficulty in generalization among young adults with developmental dyslexia.

Learning to decipher acoustically distorted speech serves as a test case for the study of language-related skill acquisition in persons with developmental dyslexia (DD). Deciphering this type of input is rarely learned explicitly and does not yield conscious insights. Problems in implicit and procedural skill learning have been proposed as possible causes of DD.

Atypical Within-Session Motor Procedural Learning after Traumatic Brain Injury but Well-Preserved Between-Session Procedural Memory Consolidation.

Using the finger-to-thumb opposition sequence (FOS) learning task, we characterized motor skill learning in sub-acute patients hospitalized for rehabilitation following traumatic brain injury (TBI). Ten patients (Trained TBI) and 11 healthy participants (Trained Healthy) were trained using a multi-session protocol: a single session was afforded in the first week of the study, and four daily sessions were afforded during the second week. Intensity of practice was adapted to patients.

Innateness of magnitude perception? Skill can be acquired and mastered at all ages.

We agree with Leibovich et al.'s argument that the number sense theory should be re-evaluated. However, we argue that highly efficient skills (i.

Re-stepping into the same river: competition problem rather than a reconsolidation failure in an established motor skill.

Animal models suggest that consolidated memories return to their labile state when reactivated and need to be restabilized through reconsolidation processes to persist. Consistent with this notion, post-reactivation pharmacological protein synthesis blockage results in mnemonic failure in hippocampus-dependent memories. It has been proposed that, in humans, post-reactivation experience with a competitive task can also interfere with memory restabilization.