The Impact of COVID-19 Lockdown Measures and COVID-19 Infection on Cognitive Functions: A Review in Healthy and Neurological Populations.

The COVID-19 pandemic severely affected people's mental health all over the world. This review aims to present a comprehensive overview of the literature related to the effects of COVID-19 lockdown measures and COVID-19 infection on cognitive functioning in both healthy people and people with neurological conditions by considering only standardized tests. We performed a narrative review of the literature via two databases, PUBMED and SCOPUS, from December 2019 to December 2022.

How Has COVID-19 Impacted Our Language Use?

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to severe consequences for people's mental health. The pandemic has also influenced our language use, shaping our word formation habits. The overuse of new metaphorical meanings has received particular attention from the media.

A Standardized Prospective Memory Evaluation of the Effects of COVID-19 Confinement on Young Students.

The restriction imposed worldwide for limiting the spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) globally impacted our lives, decreasing people's wellbeing, causing increased anxiety, depression, and stress and affecting cognitive functions, such as memory. Recent studies reported decreased working memory (WM) and prospective memory (PM), which are pivotal for the ability to plan and perform future activities. Although the number of studies documenting the COVID-19 effects has recently blossomed, most of them employed self-reported questionnaires as the assessment method.

DUAL-tDCS Treatment over the Temporo-Parietal Cortex Enhances Writing Skills: First Evidence from Chronic Post-Stroke Aphasia.

The learning of writing skills involves the re-engagement of previously established independent procedures. Indeed, the writing deficit an adult may acquire after left hemispheric brain injury is caused by either an impairment to the lexical route, which processes words as a whole, to the sublexical procedure based on phoneme-to-grapheme conversion rules, or to both procedures. To date, several approaches have been proposed for writing disorders, among which, interventions aimed at restoring the sub-lexical procedure were successful in cases of severe agraphia.

Spinal or cortical direct current stimulation: Which is the best? Evidence from apraxia of speech in post-stroke aphasia.

To date, new advances in technology have already shown the effectiveness of non-invasive brain stimulation and, in particular, of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), in enhancing language recovery in post-stroke aphasia. More recently, it has been suggested that the stimulation over the spinal cord improves the production of words associated to sensorimotor schemata, such as action verbs. Here, for the first time, we present evidence that transpinal direct current stimulation (tsDCS) combined with a language training is efficacious for the recovery from speech apraxia, a motor speech disorder which might co-occur with aphasia.