Difficult decisions: are intellectually disabled patients given enough information to consent to medical treatment?

Patients with learning disabilities are not always involved in decision-making about their medications. This may mean that some patients are unfairly denied of their autonomy. We carried out an audit of current practice concerning consent to treatment in patients with learning disabilities against best practice guidelines.

Ventromedial prefrontal cortex damage does not impair the development and use of common ground in social interaction: implications for cognitive theory of mind.

During conversation, interactants draw on their shared communicative context and history ("common ground") to help decide what to say next, tailoring utterances based on their knowledge of what the listener knows. The use of common ground draws on an understanding of the thoughts and feelings of others to create and update a model of what is known by the other person, employing cognitive processes such as theory of mind. We tested the hypothesis that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), a neural region involved in processing and interpreting social and emotional information, would be critical for the development and use of common ground.

Distributed impact of cognitive-communication impairment: Disruptions in the use of definite references when speaking to individuals with amnesia.

BACKGROUND: Definite references signal a speaker's belief that a listener can uniquely identify the referent (e.g., the dog, as the only dog among a group of animals).

Teasing apart tangrams: testing hippocampal pattern separation with a collaborative referencing paradigm.

The hippocampus and the medial temporal lobe cortex [medial temporal lobe cortices (MTLC)] both contribute to long-term memory. Although their contributions are thought to be dissociable, the nature of the representations that each region supports remains unclear. The Complementary Learning Systems (CLS) modeling approach suggests that hippocampus represents overlapping information in a sparser and therefore more separated fashion than MTLC.

The use of definite references signals declarative memory: evidence from patients with hippocampal amnesia.

Language function in patients with impaired declarative memory presents a compelling opportunity to investigate the inter-dependence of memory and language in referential communication. We examined amnesic patients' use of definite references during a referential communication task. Discursively, definite references can be used to mark a referent as situationally unique (e.

Bilateral amygdala damage impairs the acquisition and use of common ground in social interaction.

Objective: The development of "common ground," or mutual knowledge of shared information, is believed to require the ability to update a mental representation of another person's thoughts and knowledge based on verbal information and nonverbal social and emotional signals, to facilitate economical communication. As in other forms of everyday social communication, the development of common ground likely requires the orchestration of multiple cognitive processes supported by various neural systems. Here, we investigate the contribution of the amygdala to these processes.

The amygdala and decision-making.

Decision-making is a complex process that requires the orchestration of multiple neural systems. For example, decision-making is believed to involve areas of the brain involved in emotion (e.g.

Declarative memory is critical for sustained advantageous complex decision-making.

Previous studies have reported conflicting evidence concerning the contribution of declarative memory to advantageous decision-making on the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT). One study, in which the measurement of psychophysiology during the task necessitated a 10-s delay between card selections, found that six participants with amnesia due to hippocampal damage failed to develop a preference for advantageous decks over disadvantageous decks [Gutbrod, K., Krouzel, C.