Lost in translation: a qualitative study of medical students' experiences of theoretical and practical teaching of empathy.

Background: Empathy has proven to be a fundamental component in the patient-doctor relationship and correlates to several positive outcomes in patient care. Despite this, research suggests that empathy decreases during medical education. To increase the understanding of empathy development during medical education, this study explores medical students' experiences of learning empathy in the transition from theoretical to practical context.

Fluctuations of Attention During Self-paced Naturalistic Goal-Directed Behavior in Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder.

Objective: Temporal fluctuations of attention detected with strictly controlled neuropsychological tests is an important objective behavioral marker for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). This study examined whether intraindividual variability in response latencies is also detectable in more realistic open-ended virtual contexts where the participants can freely interact with the surroundings when performing instructed everyday tasks from memory.

Method: Three ex-Gaussian parameters, μ, σ, and τ, were derived from response latencies in 2 tasks obtained from 2 datasets comprising 9- to 13-year-old children (72 with ADHD and 71 typically developing controls).

Working memory related functional connectivity in adult ADHD and its amenability to training: A randomized controlled trial.

Background: Working memory (WM) deficits are among the most prominent cognitive impairments in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). While functional connectivity is a prevailing approach in brain imaging of ADHD, alterations in WM-related functional brain networks and their malleability by cognitive training are not well known. We examined whole-brain functional connectivity differences between adults with and without ADHD during n-back WM tasks and rest at pretest, as well as the effects of WM training on functional and structural brain connectivity in the ADHD group.

From task-general towards task-specific cognitive operations in a few minutes? Working memory performance as an adaptive process.

Measurement of cognitive functions is typically based on the implicit assumption that the mental architecture underlying cognitive task performance is constant throughout the task. In contrast, skill learning theory implies that cognitively demanding task performance is an adaptive process that progresses from initial heavy engagement of effortful and task-general metacognitive and executive control processes towards more automatic and task-specific performance. However, this hypothesis is rarely applied to the short time spans of traditional cognitive tasks such as working memory (WM) tasks.