Comparing the Montreal Cognitive Assessment and Rowland Universal Dementia Assessment Scale in a multicultural rehabilitation setting.

In Australia it is recommended that all older people undergoing rehabilitation have a cognitive screen. We performed a longitudinal study comparing the correlation of two cognitive screening tools - the Rowland Universal Dementia Assessment Scale (RUDAS) and Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) with discharge outcomes in a geriatric inpatient setting. The RUDAS cut-off (<23/30) was associated with discharge to a nursing home (sensitivity 52%, specificity 70%).

The influence of emotion on lexical processing: insights from RT distributional analysis.

In two lexical decision experiments, the present study was designed to examine emotional valence effects on visual lexical decision (standard and go/no-go) performance, using traditional analyses of means and distributional analyses of response times. Consistent with an earlier study by Kousta, Vinson, and Vigliocco (Cognition 112:473-481, 2009), we found that emotional words (both negative and positive) were responded to faster than neutral words. Finer-grained distributional analyses further revealed that the facilitation afforded by valence was reflected by a combination of distributional shifting and an increase in the slow tail of the distribution.

Humans process dog and human facial affect in similar ways.

Humans share aspects of their facial affect with other species such as dogs. Here we asked whether untrained human observers with and without dog experience are sensitive to these aspects and recognize dog affect with better-than-chance accuracy. Additionally, we explored similarities in the way observers process dog and human expressions.