Functional Correlates of Midline Brain Volume Loss in Chronic Traumatic Brain Injury.

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is associated with long-term changes in daily life functioning, yet the neuroanatomical correlates of these changes are poorly understood. This study related outcome assessed across several domains to brain structure derived from quantitative magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Sixty individuals spanning a wide range of TBI severity participated 1-year post-injury as part of the Toronto TBI study.

Dynamic working memory performance in individuals with single-domain amnestic mild cognitive impairment.

Previous studies have observed poorer working memory performance in individuals with amnestic mild cognitive impairment than in healthy older adults. It is unclear, however, whether these difficulties are true only of the multiple-domain clinical subtype in whom poorer executive functioning is common. The current study examined working memory, as measured by the self-ordered pointing task (SOPT) and an n-back task, in healthy older adults and adults with single-domain amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI).

Recollection can support hybrid visual memory search.

On a daily basis, we accomplish the task of searching our visual environment for one of a number of possible objects, like searching for any one of our friends in a crowd, and we do this with ease. Understanding how attention, perception, and long-term memory interact to accomplish this process remains an important question. Recent research (Wolfe in Psychological Science 23:698-703, 2012) has shown that increasing the number of possible targets one is searching for adds little cost to the efficiency of visual search-specifically, that response times increase logarithmically with memory set size.

Contributions of frontal and medial temporal lobe functioning to the errorless learning advantage.

Among individuals with episodic memory impairments, trial-and-error learning is less successful than when errors are avoided. This "errorless learning advantage" has been replicated numerous times, but its neurocognitive mechanism is uncertain, with existing evidence pointing to both medial temporal lobe (MTL) and frontal lobe (FL) involvement. To test the relative contribution of MTL and FL functioning to the errorless learning advantage, 51 healthy older adults were pre-experimentally assigned to one of four groups based on their neuropsychological test performance: Low MTL-Low FL, Low MTL-High FL, High MTL-Low FL, High MTL-High FL.

Self-generation amplifies the errorless learning effect in healthy older adults when transfer appropriate processing conditions are met.

Errorless learning improves memory for older adults by providing individuals with correct information from the onset, thereby minimizing the misleading influence of errors. Our previous research demonstrated that self-generation enhanced the errorless learning effect among older adults in cued recall when encoding encouraged processing of cue-target relationships, suggesting that transfer appropriate processing is necessary for this interactive effect ( Lubinsky, Rich, & Anderson, 2009 , Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 15, 704). The current study further tests this notion by investigating whether the interaction of errorless learning and self-generated learning is observed in free recall when study conditions foster encoding of inter-item associations.