Word or pseudoword? The lexicality effect in naming and lexical decision tasks during advanced aging.

Although there is evidence that recognizing pseudowords is more difficult than recognizing words during childhood, adulthood, and early old age (60-75 years), it is not yet clear what happens during advanced aging or the fourth age, a stage when the decline of fluid intelligence strongly affects processing speed, but a good performance of crystallized intelligence is described through an increase in vocabulary and knowledge. The objective of this study was to determine the lexicality effect in advanced aging, specifically exploring how the ability to recognize words and pseudowords (ortho-phonologically plausible for Spanish) is affected during the third and fourth-ages. The lexicality effect was measured using naming and lexical decision tasks.

Executive Functions and Theory of Mind in Teachers and Non-Teachers.

Human teaching is a key behavior for the socialization of cultural knowledge. Previous studies suggest that human teaching behavior would support the development of executive and ToM skills, which in turn would refine the teaching behavior. Given this connection, it raises the question of whether subjects with professional training in teaching also have more efficient executive and ToM systems.

Students' negative emotions and their rational and irrational behaviors during COVID-19 outbreak.

The pandemic has posed an intense threat to the mental health of younger adults. Despite significant efforts in studying various aspects of COVID-19, there is a dearth of evidence on how negative emotions are associated with behaviors. A comparison across associated factors to different negative emotions by means of a unified model is especially missing from the literature.

Children's and adults' eye movements and the extraction of number information from ambiguous and unambiguous markings.

Children learn to extract number information from utterances using a variety of language-specific cues, but in some languages this information is encoded in features that display high variability in their realization. How does this affect their acquisition process? In this paper, we present an eye tracking study comparing 3.5- to 7.

Real-time comprehension of Spanish prepositions and prepositional locutions in bilingual children with developmental language disorder: A study based on eye-movement evidence.

Background: Function words, and more specifically prepositions and prepositional locutions, are considered to be one of the most important difficulties for children with DLD.

Aims: To examine the capacity of bilingual children with developmental language disorder (DLD) to comprehend different Spanish prepositions and prepositional locutions in a simple sentence structure, for example, El gato está sobre la mesa/El gato está bajo la mesa (The cat is on the table/The cat is under the table).

Methods & Procedures: We used simple sentence structures to reduce lexical difficulties in order to focus our evaluation strictly on the grammatical morphemes under study.

Inside minds, beneath diseases: social cognition in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis-frontotemporal spectrum disorder.

Objective: To compare social cognition performance between patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and those patients with behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD).

Methods: We included 21 participants with ALS, 20 with bvFTD and 21 healthy controls who underwent a comprehensive cognitive battery, including the short version of the Social Cognition and Emotional Assessment (Mini-SEA), which comprises the test and Facial Emotion Recognition Test (FERT); Mini-Mental State Examination; Frontal Assessment Battery; lexical fluency (F-A-S), category fluency (animals/minute), digit span (direct and backwards) tests and the Hayling test. A post hoc analysis was conducted with the patients with ALS divided into two subgroups: patients without cognitive impairment (ALScn; n=13) and patients with cognitive impairment (ALSci; n=8).

A Study on Congruency Effects and Numerical Distance in Fraction Comparison by Expert Undergraduate Students.

School mathematics comprises a diversity of concepts whose cognitive complexity is still poorly understood, a chief example being fractions. These are typically taught in middle school, but many students fail to master them, and misconceptions frequently persist into adulthood. In this study, we investigate fraction comparison, a task that taps into both conceptual and procedural knowledge of fractions, by looking at performance of highly mathematically skilled young adults.

Mapping the neuroanatomy of functional decline in Alzheimer's disease from basic to advanced activities of daily living.

Background: Impairments in activities of daily living (ADL) are a criterion for Alzheimer's disease (AD) dementia. However, ADL gradually decline in AD, impacting on advanced (a-ADL, complex interpersonal or social functioning), instrumental (IADL, maintaining life in community), and finally basic functions (BADL, activities related to physiological and self-maintenance needs). Information and communication technologies (ICT) have become an increasingly important aspect of daily functioning.

Eye Tracking During Visually Situated Language Comprehension: Flexibility and Limitations in Uncovering Visual Context Effects.

The present work is a description and an assessment of a methodology designed to quantify different aspects of the interaction between language processing and the perception of the visual world. The recording of eye-gaze patterns has provided good evidence for the contribution of both the visual context and linguistic/world knowledge to language comprehension. Initial research assessed object-context effects to test theories of modularity in language processing.

Effects of speech rate, preview time of visual context, and participant instructions reveal strong limits on prediction in language processing.

There is a consensus among language researchers that people can predict upcoming language. But do people always predict when comprehending language? Notions that "brains … are essentially prediction machines" certainly suggest so. In three eye-tracking experiments we tested this view.

Undesirable Difficulty Effects in the Learning of High-Element Interactivity Materials.

According to the concept of desirable difficulties, introducing difficulties in learning may sacrifice short-term performance in order to benefit long-term retention of learning. We describe three types of desirable difficulty effects: testing, generation, and varied conditions of practice. The empirical literature indicates that desirable difficulty effects are not always obtained and we suggest that cognitive load theory may be used to explain many of these contradictory results.

Corrigendum: Semantic Interference and Facilitation: Understanding the Integration of Spatial Distance and Conceptual Similarity During Sentence Reading.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.

Semantic Interference and Facilitation: Understanding the Integration of Spatial Distance and Conceptual Similarity During Sentence Reading.

Existing evidence has shown a processing advantage (or facilitation) when representations derived from a non-linguistic context (spatial proximity depicted by gambling cards moving together) match the semantic content of an ensuing sentence. A match, inspired by conceptual metaphors such as 'similarity is closeness' would, for instance, involve cards moving closer together and the sentence relates similarity between abstract concepts such as war and battle. However, other studies have reported a disadvantage (or interference) for congruence between the semantic content of a sentence and representations of spatial distance derived from this sort of non-linguistic context.

Dementia in Latin America: Assessing the present and envisioning the future.

The demographic structure of Latin American countries (LAC) is fast approaching that of developing countries, and the predicted prevalence of dementia in the former already exceeds the latter. Dementia has been declared a global challenge, yet regions around the world show differences in both the nature and magnitude of such a challenge. This article provides evidence and insights on barriers which, if overcome, would enable the harmonization of strategies to tackle the dementia challenge in LAC.

Neuroanatomical Comparison of the "Word" and "Picture" Versions of the Free and Cued Selective Reminding Test in Alzheimer's Disease.

Episodic memory tests with cued recall, such as the Free and Cued Selective Reminding Test (FCSRT), allow for the delineation of hippocampal and prefrontal atrophy contributions to memory performance in Alzheimer's disease (AD). Both Word and Picture versions of the test exist but show different profiles, with the Picture version usually scoring higher across different cohorts. One possible explanation for this divergent performance between the different modality versions of the test might be that they rely on different sets of neural correlates.

Using game authoring platforms to develop screen-based simulated functional assessments in persons with executive dysfunction following traumatic brain injury.

The assessment of functional status is a critical component of clinical neuropsychological evaluations used for both diagnostic and therapeutic purposes in patients with cognitive brain disorders. There are, however, no widely adopted neuropsychological tests that are both ecologically valid and easily administered in daily clinical practice. This discrepancy is a roadblock to the widespread adoption of functional assessments.

Dementia in Latin America: Epidemiological Evidence and Implications for Public Policy.

Population aging is among the most important global transformations. Today, 12% of the world population is of age 60 and over and by the middle of this century this segment will represent 21.5%.

Statistical Speech Segmentation in Tone Languages: The Role of Lexical Tones.

Research has demonstrated distinct roles for consonants and vowels in speech processing. For example, consonants have been shown to support lexical processes, such as the segmentation of speech based on transitional probabilities (TPs), more effectively than vowels. Theory and data so far, however, have considered only non-tone languages, that is to say, languages that lack contrastive lexical tones.