Using explainable artificial intelligence to identify linguistic biomarkers of amyloid pathology in primary progressive aphasia.

Introduction: Recent success has been achieved in Alzheimer's disease (AD) clinical trials targeting amyloid beta (β), demonstrating a reduction in the rate of cognitive decline. However, testing methods for amyloid-β positivity are currently costly or invasive, motivating the development of accessible screening approaches to steer patients toward appropriate diagnostic tests. Here, we employ a pre-trained language model (Distil-RoBERTa) to identify amyloid-β positivity from a short, connected speech sample.

Language about the future on social media as a novel marker of anxiety and depression: A big-data and experimental analysis.

Anxiety and depression negatively impact many. Studies suggest depression is associated with future time horizons, or how "far" into the future people tend to think, and anxiety is associated with temporal discounting, or how much people devalue future rewards. Separate studies from linguistics and economics have shown that how people refer to future time predicts temporal discounting.

Not When But Whether: Modality and Future Time Reference in English and Dutch.

Previous research on linguistic relativity and economic decisions hypothesized that speakers of languages with obligatory tense marking of future time reference (FTR) should value future rewards less than speakers of languages which permit present tense FTR. This was hypothesized on the basis of obligatory linguistic marking (e.g.

Five studies evaluating the impact on mental health and mood of recalling, reading, and discussing fiction.

Does reading fiction improve mental health and well-being? We present the results of five studies that evaluated the impact of five forms of exposure to fiction. These included the effects of recalling reading fiction, of being prescribed fiction, of discussing fiction relative to non-fiction, and of discussing literary fiction relative to best-seller fiction. The first three studies directly recruited participants; the final two relied on scraped social media data from Reddit and Twitter.

Fictional narrative as a variational Bayesian method for estimating social dispositions in large groups.

Modelling intentions in large groups is cognitively costly. Not alone must first order beliefs be tracked ('what does A think about X?'), but also beliefs about beliefs ('what does A think about B's belief concerning X?'). Thus linear increases in group size impose non-linear increases in cognitive processing resources.

Trade-off between fertility and predation risk drives a geometric sequence in the pattern of group sizes in baboons.

Group-living offers both benefits (protection against predators, access to resources) and costs (increased ecological competition, the impact of group size on fertility). Here, we use cluster analysis to detect natural patternings in a comprehensive sample of baboon groups, and identify a geometric sequence with peaks at approximately 20, 40, 80 and 160. We suggest (i) that these form a set of demographic oscillators that set habitat-specific limits to group size and (ii) that the oscillator arises from a trade-off between female fertility and predation risk.

Functional Benefits of (Modest) Alcohol Consumption.

Alcohol use has a long and ubiquitous history. Despite considerable research on the misuse of alcohol, no one has ever asked why it might have become universally adopted, although the conventional view assumes that its only benefit is hedonic. In contrast, we suggest that alcohol consumption was adopted because it has social benefits that relate both to health and social bonding.