The Value of a Virtual Assistant to Improve Engagement in Computerized Cognitive Training at Home: Exploratory Study.

Background: Impaired cognitive function is observed in many pathologies, including neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer disease. At present, the pharmaceutical treatments available to counter cognitive decline have only modest effects, with significant side effects. A nonpharmacological treatment that has received considerable attention is computerized cognitive training (CCT), which aims to maintain or improve cognitive functioning through repeated practice in standardized exercises.

Emotional attention: Time course and effects of agonistic and antagonistic overlay of intrinsic and goal relevances.

Emotional attention can be explained within a goal-directed theory framework according to which attention is captured by the goal relevance of stimuli, that is, their conduciveness nature to a momentarily important goal. However, such an explanation does not consider the attentional impact of intrinsic relevance of stimuli, that is, their general pleasantness. This problem could be resolved by appraisal theories, suggesting that attention is captured by intrinsic relevance and goal relevance of stimuli, whether the relevance overlay is agonistic (e.

A Single Session of Bifrontal tDCS Can Improve Facial Emotion Recognition in Major Depressive Disorder: An Exploratory Pilot Study.

Emotional processing deficits are key features in major depressive disorder (MDD). Neuroimaging studies indicate that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) plays a pivotal role in both depressive symptoms and emotional processing. Recently, transcranial Direct Current Stimulations (tDCS) applied over the DLPFCs have held the promise to alleviate the symptoms in patients with MDD, but the effect on emotional processing in the patients is unclear.

Combined effects of intrinsic and goal relevances on attention and action tendency during the emotional episode.

Recent work on emotional attention suggests that attention is prioritized toward stimuli that are intrinsically relevant and toward events that are conducive to momentaneous important goals. The appraisal of intrinsic relevance and goal relevance is aimed to alert individuals to the presence of events that may require action that could affect their well-being and is part of the process that leads to an emotional episode. However, to our knowledge, no empirical data has yet highlighted how precisely intrinsic and goal relevances combine with each other to trigger attentional biases.

Relearn Faster and Retain Longer.

Both repeated practice and sleep improve long-term retention of information. The assumed common mechanism underlying these effects is memory reactivation, either on-line and effortful or off-line and effortless. In the study reported here, we investigated whether sleep-dependent memory consolidation could help to save practice time during relearning.

Ugly aesthetic perception associated with emotional changes in experience of art by behavioural variant of frontotemporal dementia patients.

The aesthetic experience through art is a window into the study of emotions. Patients with behavioural variant of frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) have early alteration of emotional processing. A new appreciation of art has been reported in some of these patients.

Optimising retention through multiple study opportunities over days: The benefit of an expanding schedule of repetitions.

Few studies have investigated how scheduling repeated studies of the same material over several days influences its subsequent retention. The study-phase retrieval hypothesis predicts that, under these circumstances, expanding intervals between repetitions will promote the greatest likelihood that the participant will be reminded of previous occurrences of the item, thus leading to a benefit for subsequent recall. In the present article, participants studied vocabulary pairs that were repeated according to one of three schedules.

From stimulus-driven to appraisal-driven attention: towards differential effects of goal relevance and goal relatedness on attention?

The Component Process Model posits that attention is appraisal-driven rather than stimulus-driven and that the appraisal of relevance is of critical importance in such a mechanism. This means that any stimulus can attract attention or not depending on how relevant it is appraised. This hypothesis was tested in an implicit border similarity judgement task, in which thirsty participants were presented with bottles and vases that were respectively very relevant and weakly relevant to their goal to quench their thirst.

Emergence of hyper empathy after right amygdalohippocampectomy.

We report a fascinating case of a patient with a hyper empathy that appeared after resective epilepsy surgery. This behavioral modification has remained unchanged since the surgery took place 13 years ago. Recent neuropsychological objective assessments confirmed hyper empathy in a self-report questionnaire, and revealed higher affective theory of mind than controls in a "Reading the Mind in the Eyes Task.

The relevance bias: valence-specific, relevance-modulated performance in a two-choice detection task.

The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that relevance modulates subsequent non-emotional behaviour, using a personalised mental-imagery-cued relevance manipulation paradigm. Participants had to build positive, negative and neutral mental images based on personalised scenarios that had been selected during an earlier picture-cued imagery phase. Participants imagined situations that were highly relevant for them and situations that were moderately relevant for them, depending on the effects the situations could exert on them.

Influence of multiple-day temporal distribution of repetitions on memory: a comparison of uniform, expanding, and contracting schedules.

Very few studies have examined the influence of schedules of repetitions across multiple days (e.g., Tsai, 1927 ).

Mental rotation in schizophrenia.

Motor imagery provides a direct insight into action representations. The aim of the present study was to investigate the level of impairment of action monitoring in schizophrenia by evaluating the performance of schizophrenic patients on mental rotation tasks. We raised the following questions: (1) Are schizophrenic patients impaired in motor imagery both at the explicit and at the implicit level? (2) Are body parts more difficult for them to mentally rotate than objects? (3) Is there any link between the performance and the hallucinating symptom profile? The schizophrenic patients (n = 13) displayed the same pattern of performance as the control subjects (n = 13).

Investigation of functional hemispheric asymmetry of language in tinnitus sufferers.

The authors tested functional hemispheric asymmetry through word dichotic listening and lateralized lexical decision tasks in tinnitus patients and controls stimulated by a continuous tinnitus-like noise to test the influence of a tinnitus-like external stimulation. A classic right-ear advantage was shown in the auditory task for all but right-ear tinnitus patients, who performed as equally badly when the stimuli were presented to the right and left ears. Concerning the visual task, all participants demonstrated the expected right visual field advantage for word stimuli.

Levels-of-processing effects on a task of olfactory naming.

The effects of odor processing were investigated at various analytical levels, from simple sensory analysis to deep or semantic analysis, on a subsequent task of odor naming. Students (106 women, 23.6 +/- 5.