Characterization of Cochlear Implant Artifact and Removal Based on Multi-Channel Wiener Filter in Unilateral Child Patients.

Cochlear implants (CI) allow deaf patients to improve language perception and improving their emotional valence assessment. Electroencephalographic (EEG) measures were employed so far to improve CI programming reliability and to evaluate listening effort in auditory tasks, which are particularly useful in conditions when subjective evaluations are scarcely appliable or reliable. Unfortunately, the presence of CI on the scalp introduces an electrical artifact coupled to EEG signals that masks physiological features recorded by electrodes close to the site of implant.

Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Listening Effort in Young Children with Cochlear Implants.

Very early bilateral implantation is thought to significantly reduce the attentional effort required to acquire spoken language, and consequently offer a profound improvement in quality of life. Despite the early intervention, however, auditory and communicative outcomes in children with cochlear implants remain poorer than in hearing children. The distorted auditory input via the cochlear implants requires more auditory attention resulting in increased listening effort and fatigue.

Case of COVID-19-induced vestibular neuritis in a child.

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a growing need to fully understand all the possible clinical features of the epidemic, which often presents with unusual manifestations, especially in children. In this report, we describe the case of a child with a COVID-19 infection and suffering exclusively from vertigo and fever. Altogether, considering the clinical manifestation, laboratory tests and imaging, given the patient's positivity to SARS-CoV-2 infection and its neurotropic potential, we assumed that the child had COVID-19-induced vestibular neuritis, which, in consideration of the spontaneous improvement of symptoms, did not require any therapeutic adjustments, apart from the natural compensation of the central nervous system.

Higher Right Hemisphere Gamma Band Lateralization and Suggestion of a Sensitive Period for Vocal Auditory Emotional Stimuli Recognition in Unilateral Cochlear Implant Children: An EEG Study.

In deaf children, huge emphasis was given to language; however, emotional cues decoding and production appear of pivotal importance for communication capabilities. Concerning neurophysiological correlates of emotional processing, the gamma band activity appears a useful tool adopted for emotion classification and related to the conscious elaboration of emotions. Starting from these considerations, the following items have been investigated: (i) whether emotional auditory stimuli processing differs between normal-hearing (NH) children and children using a cochlear implant (CI), given the non-physiological development of the auditory system in the latter group; (ii) whether the age at CI surgery influences emotion recognition capabilities; and (iii) in light of the right hemisphere hypothesis for emotional processing, whether the CI side influences the processing of emotional cues in unilateral CI (UCI) children.

Exploring mobility in Italian Neolithic and Copper Age communities.

As a means for investigating human mobility during late the Neolithic to the Copper Age in central and southern Italy, this study presents a novel dataset of enamel oxygen and carbon isotope values (δOca and δCca) from the carbonate fraction of biogenic apatite for one hundred and twenty-six individual teeth coming from two Neolithic and eight Copper Age communities. The measured δOca values suggest a significant role of local sources in the water inputs to the body water, whereas δCca values indicate food resources, principally based on C plants. Both δCca and δOca ranges vary substantially when samples are broken down into local populations.