Predicting the severity of mood and neuropsychiatric symptoms from digital biomarkers using wearable physiological data and deep learning.

Neuropsychiatric symptoms (NPS) and mood disorders are common in individuals with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and increase the risk of progression to dementia. Wearable devices collecting physiological and behavioral data can help in remote, passive, and continuous monitoring of moods and NPS, overcoming limitations and inconveniences of current assessment methods. In this longitudinal study, we examined the predictive ability of digital biomarkers based on sensor data from a wrist-worn wearable to determine the severity of NPS and mood disorders on a daily basis in older adults with predominant MCI.

Predicting cognitive scores from wearable-based digital physiological features using machine learning: data from a clinical trial in mild cognitive impairment.

Background: Continuous assessment and remote monitoring of cognitive function in individuals with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) enables tracking therapeutic effects and modifying treatment to achieve better clinical outcomes. While standardized neuropsychological tests are inconvenient for this purpose, wearable sensor technology collecting physiological and behavioral data looks promising to provide proxy measures of cognitive function. The objective of this study was to evaluate the predictive ability of digital physiological features, based on sensor data from wrist-worn wearables, in determining neuropsychological test scores in individuals with MCI.

Enhancing perceptual and attentional skills requires common demands between the action video games and transfer tasks.

Despite increasing evidence that shows action video game play improves perceptual and cognitive skills, the mechanisms of transfer are not well-understood. In line with previous work, we suggest that transfer is dependent upon common demands between the game and transfer task. In the current study, participants played one of four action games with varying speed, visual, and attentional demands for 20 h.

Are videogame training gains specific or general?

Many recent studies using healthy adults document enhancements in perception and cognition from playing commercial action videogames (AVGs). Playing action games (e.g.

Enhancing cognition with video games: a multiple game training study.

Background: Previous evidence points to a causal link between playing action video games and enhanced cognition and perception. However, benefits of playing other video games are under-investigated. We examined whether playing non-action games also improves cognition.

The effects of acute stress on human prefrontal working memory systems.

We examined the relationship between acute stress and prefrontal-cortex (PFC) based working memory (WM) systems using behavioral (Experiment 1) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI; Experiment 2) paradigms. Subjects performed a delayed-response item-recognition task, with alternating blocks of high and low WM demand trials. During scanning, participants performed this task under three stress conditions: cold stress (induced by cold-water hand-immersion), a room temperature water control (induced by tepid-water hand-immersion), and no-water control (no hand-immersion).

Visual working memory for global, object, and part-based information.

We investigated visual working memory for novel objects and parts of novel objects. After a delay period, participants showed strikingly more accurate performance recognizing a single whole object than the parts of that object. This bias to remember whole objects, rather than parts, persisted even when the division between parts was clearly defined and the parts were disconnected from each other so that, in order to remember the single whole object, the participants needed to mentally combine the parts.

Evidence for multiple manipulation processes in prefrontal cortex.

The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is known to subserve working memory (WM) processes. Brain imaging studies of WM using delayed response tasks (DRTs) have shown memory-load-dependent activation increases in dorsal prefrontal cortex (PFC) regions. These activation increases are believed to reflect manipulation of to-be-remembered information in the service of memory-consolidation.