Social cogniction and comunication skills in Asperger síndrome Young adults

The aim of this study is to compare patients with Asperger syndrome (AS) and control participants on social cognition tasks and communication skills. Twenty young adults were assessed in three social cognition domains; recognition of basic emotions, recognition of complex emotions and Theory of Mind (ToM). In addition participants completed a self-report questionnaire as a measure of social communication skills. The results indicate that adults with AS perform below neurotypical control participants in emotion processing, ToM and communication skills. There were no significant correlations between the variables of social cognition and communication skills in the group of AS. Taken together,…

Relaciones entre neurocognición, procesamiento emocional y funcionamiento social en la esquizofrenia

Resumen: En la esquizofrenia se presentan una serie de déficits cognitivos que han hecho que la investigación y la práctica profesional actual se centren en el estudio de la neurocognición y la cognición social. Estos déficits tienen importantes implicaciones en el funcionamiento social. El objetivo del presente trabajo es analizar la relaciones entre neurocognición, cognición social, evaluada con tareas de reconocimiento de la emoción, y funcionamiento social. Sesenta personas con diagnóstico de esquizofrenia han formado la muestra y las áreas evaluadas han sido: funcionamiento ejecutivo y flexibilidad cognitiva, atención y vigilancia, memoria, velocidad de procesamiento, identificación y …

Four-subtest short-form of the WAIS-IV for assessment of patients diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Abstract Introduction The present study aimed to obtain a short form of the Spanish version of the WAIS-IV for patients diagnosed with schizophrenia that requires about half an hour to be administered. The reduced test can be very useful in clinical and research settings when an estimation of the intelligence quotient (IQ) is required to decide about intervention programs or to describe the sample. Materials and methods A sample of 143 patients participated in the study, 91 out of them were the test group, and the other 52 were used for a cross-validation analysis. To increase the content validity, the decision was made to create a short form composed of a subtest of each of the four cognit…

Dificultades en la comprensión del habla rápida en oyentes mayores con pérdidas auditivas leves o moderadas

Objetivo En este trabajo se evaluan las dificultades de los adultos mayores, sin y con perdidas auditivas (presbiacusia y perdidas moderadas), en la comprension del habla rapida. El habla rapida es habitual en la comunicacion diaria. Sin embargo, no contamos con suficientes estudios que evaluen este problema en oyentes castellanoparlantes, tal como existen para oyentes angloparlantes. Material y metodo Se comparo el reconocimiento de frases presentadas a 3 tasas de aceleracion: normal, rapida y muy rapida, en los 3 grupos de oyentes. Estas medidas se correlacionaron con medidas audiologicas y con la puntuacion obtenida en un cuestionario de problemas de comunicacion. Resultados La ejecucion…

Forma corta de cuatro subtest de la WAIS-IV para la evaluación de pacientes con diagnóstico de esquizofrenia

Resumen Introduccion El objetivo de este estudio ha sido obtener una forma corta de la version espanola de la WAIS-IV para pacientes con diagnostico de esquizofrenia que necesite entorno a media hora para ser administrada. Una forma abreviada puede ser muy util en contextos clinicos y de investigacion cuando se necesite una estimacion del cociente intelectual de pacientes con diagnostico de esquizofrenia para su adscripcion a programas de intervencion o para la descripcion de la muestra. Materiales y metodos Participo en el estudio una muestra de 143 pacientes. Noventa y uno formaron el grupo de test, y los otros 52 se utilizaron en un analisis de validacion cruzada. Para aumentar la valide…

Perceptual priming in schizophrenia evaluated by word fragment and word stem completion

Implicit memory seems to be preserved in schizophrenia as a whole, but dissociations between conceptual and perceptual tasks and between accuracy and reaction time measures have appeared. The present research has revealed some methodological limitations in many studies to date that are focused on the study of perceptual implicit memory in schizophrenic patients using accuracy measures. The review of these studies revealed that limitations are related to an inadequate definition of performance and priming measures, a lack of control over the characteristics of the stimuli, and the absence of information on the experimental procedures used in data collection. Moreover, the task used in these …

Implicit memory functioning in schizophrenia: Explaining inconsistent findings of word stem completion tasks

The definitive implicit memory profile of schizophrenia is yet to be clarified. Methodological differences between studies could be the reason for the inconsistent findings reported. In this study, we have examined implicit memory functioning using a word stem completion task. In addition, we have addressed methodological issues related with lexical and perceptual stimuli characteristics, and with the strategy used to calculate priming scores. Our data show similar performance values in schizophrenic patients and healthy controls. Furthermore, we have not detected significant differences in priming between the two groups, even when this parameter was calculated using three different procedu…

Fragment Difficulty in Priming on Word-Completion Tests

Word-fragment completion is a frequently used test in implicit memory research. In this test priming is the relevant variable. Priming is obtained by subtracting the proportion of nonstudied word fragments correctly completed (called “completion difficulty baseline”) from the studied word fragments correctly completed. Since completion difficulty can spuriously vary greatly between experimental conditions, its effect on magnitude of priming is studied. Normative frequency of occurrence of target words was considered because their influence over performance is known. In an experiment using a word-fragment completion test, participants' completion of fragments at three levels of completion d…

Effect of Prime Type on Lexical Decision Time

The present investigation concerns the issues of the control condition and type of related prime-target relationship operationalization in the lexical-decision paradigm. It is shown that the use of a row of asterisks produces strong inhibitory effects on reaction time to the target relative to a control condition formed with the word “neutro” (“neutral”). The operationalization of prime-target relatedness by means of association of category norms seems equally adequate, although category exemplars do not prime category exemplar targets. Both sets of data are discussed in relation to current research trends using lexical-decision time.

Priming index of the Spanish word fragments from the Dasí, Soler, and Ruiz (2004) database

Word-fragment completion is a frequently used test in implicit memory research. A database of 196 Spanish fragments was recently published (Dasi, Soler, & Ruiz, 2004) in which the fragments were described for indices, such as difficulty, familiarity, frequency, number of meanings, and so on (www.psychonomic.org/archive). In this work, a new index, thepriming index, is described for the same 196 fragments. This index is calculated for each fragment by subtracting the difficulty index (the proportion of correct completion when the fragment is not studied) from the proportion of correct completion when the fragment is studied, and it means the capacity of an item to be primed. In order to dete…

Study time effects in recognition memory.

We empirically tested the assumption that study time increases recognition accuracy because the storage of information is better when study time is longer as Shiffrin and colleagues have reported, an assumption common to parallel models of recognition. In the present study with 123 subjects, we examined the effect of item strength on four measures: hit rate, false alarm rate, d′, and β, for a single-word recognition task with longer study times than those usually used in the literature. Analysis indicated significant increase for hit rate and d′ and a decrease in false alarm rate, as one goes from weak to stronger study conditions, and a change in ln(β) when study time is greater than 1 se…

The University of Valencia’s computerized word pool

This paper presents the University of Valencia’s computerized word pool. This is a database that includes 16,109 Spanish words, together with 11 psychological variables for limited groups of items. The purpose behind the creation of this database was to have available a large quantity of verbal stimuli in a well-controlled system, ready for automatic selection. The description includes a summary of statistics on each of the 11 psychological variables, together with a correlational and factor analysis of them. This statistical analysis produces results close to those obtained for equivalent English material.

The effect of associative strength on semantic priming in schizophrenia

The present research was designed to investigate the pattern of semantic priming in schizophrenia as a function of strength of association (or semantic distance between concepts in the semantic network). Thirty schizophrenia patients, without formal thought disorder, and twenty-nine healthy controls participated in a lexical decision task in which prime-target associative strength (strong, weak and not related) and stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA: 250 ms and 750 ms) were manipulated. Patients and controls showed the same associative strength effect on RTs. In the short SOA condition priming effects were obtained for both strong and weak prime-target associative conditions. However in the lon…

Reproducibility of the World Health Organization 2008 criteria for myelodysplastic syndromes

The reproducibility of the World Health Organization 2008 classification for myelodysplastic syndromes is uncertain and its assessment was the major aim of this study. The different peripheral blood and bone marrow variables required for an adequate morphological classification were blindly evaluated by four cytomorphologists in samples from 50 patients with myelodysplastic syndromes. The degree of agreement among observers was calculated using intraclass correlation coefficient and the generalized kappa statistic for multiple raters. The degree of agreement for the percentages of blasts in bone marrow and peripheral blood, ring sideroblasts in bone marrow, and erythroid, granulocytic and m…

Social cognition scale (SCS): A newly developed assessment instrument

Gender differences on the WAIS-IV in patients with schizophrenia

Introduccion Los resultados de los estudios que han investigado diferencias de genero en funcionamiento neuropsicologico en la esquizofrenia han sido inconsistentes. Diferencias en la fase de la enfermedad, en las caracteristicas demograficas y clinicas de las muestras y en los instrumentos utilizados podrian explicar esa heterogeneidad. Objetivo Investigar la heterogeneidad en los resultados comparando el funcionamiento cognitivo de pacientes con diagnostico de esquizofrenia. Metodo Veinticinco mujeres y veinticinco hombres pacientes con diagnostico de esquizofrenia equiparados en edad, edad al inicio de la enfermedad y nivel educativo se evaluaron en funcionamiento cognitivo utilizando la…

[Difficulties understanding compressed speech in elderly listeners with mild-to-moderate hearing loss].

Objective In this work we evaluated the difficulties in understanding rapid speech (normal, fast and very fast rates) in elderly listeners with and without hearing loss (presbycusis and moderate hearing loss). Rapid speech is common in daily communication, yet few studies have been conducted to assess this problem in Spanish-speaking listeners, as has been done for English speakers. Material and method We compared the recognition of sentences presented at normal, fast, and very fast speech rates in 3 groups of listeners. Recognition scores were correlated to their audiological measures and the score obtained on a Communication Difficulties Questionnaire. Results Compressed sentences were mo…

A Comparison of implicit memory tests in schizophrenic patients and normal controls

The objective of the current study was to compare the performance of schizophrenic patients and normal controls on implicit memory tests. Two neuropsychological tasks were administered to 29 patients and normal participant samples. The implicit tests were: Word fragment completion and Word production from semantic categories. The priming score was the variable of interest. Priming effects are obtained in normal subjects and schizophrenia patients, regardless of the implicit test used. However, a dissociation in priming between normal and patient groups was observed, depending on the test used. For word fragment test, priming was identical between... (Ver más) the two groups. However, for wo…

Intellectual functioning and memory deficits in schizophrenia

Background: There is converging evidence about the existence of different subgroups of patients with schizophrenia in relation to intellectual ability (intelligence quotient [IQ]). Studying cognitive deficits in such patients in relation to IQ, and more specifically to memory, could help determine the patterns of preserved and impaired functioning in cognitive abilities in association with patterns of preserved and compromised intellect. This information could serve to delimit the possibilities of treatment and rehabilitation in those patients. Methods: A total of 44 patients with schizophrenia completed a cognitive battery that included executive functioning, attention, speed of informatio…

Supporting parenting of infants: evaluating outcomes for parents and children in a community-based program.

This research presents an evaluation of the intervention dose-effect of the Parent-Child Psychological Support Program (PCPS). The PCPS is a universal community-based program to support parenting, during the first 18 months, and to promote protective adaptive systems in children through a schedule of quarterly office-based appointments, starting at 3 months of age. Generally children attend for six visits. When the Program opens in a particular area, parents of all children under 18 months are invited. The different ages of the children who are joining present a unique opportunity to obtain groups to evaluate the program dose-effect using a cohort-sequential design. This dose-effect on pare…

Null Effect of Set Size in Lexical Decision

The effect of set size indicates that recall of a word is greater when its cue is associated with fewer words. This study was designed to replicate this result with lexical decisions of 18 students. In spite of obtaining the set-size effect with cue recall, it was not observed with lexical decision.

Fault Emulation for Dependability Evaluation of VLSI Systems

Advances in semiconductor technologies are greatly increasing the likelihood of fault occurrence in deep-submicrometer manufactured VLSI systems. The dependability assessment of VLSI critical systems is a hot topic that requires further research. Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have been recently pro posed as a means for speeding-up the fault injection process in VLSI systems models (fault emulation) and for reducing the cost of fixing any error due to their applicability in the first steps of the development cycle. However, only a reduced set of fault models, mainly stuck-at and bit-flip, have been considered in fault emulation approaches. This paper describes the procedures to inje…

Short Form of Spanish Version of the WISC–IV for Intelligence Assessment in Elementary School Children

In educational settings, quick assessments of intelligence are often required to screen children with potential special needs. The WISC–IV is administered individually and takes between one and two hours to complete. Given its widespread use in Spain, a short-form of the Spanish version is likely to be of use to professionals. The goal of this research was to develop a short form of the WISC–IV that can be performed in approximately half an hour. Data obtained in 100 elementary school children were analyzed following the criteria of Resnick and Entin (1971). The results showed that the most accurate estimation of intelligence was achieved with a combination of the Vocabulary, Block Design,…

Priming in word stem completion tasks: comparison with previous results in word fragment completion tasks

This study investigates priming in an implicit Word Stem Completion (WSC) task. A total of 305 participants performed a WSC task in two phases (study and test). The test phase included 63 unique-solution stems and 63 multiple-solution stems. After confirming the presence of priming (mean = 0.22), analysis revealed that it was stronger in the case of multiple-solution stems, indicating that the stems were not a homogeneous group of stimuli. Thus, further analyses were performed only for the data of the unique-solution stems. The correlations between priming and a set of conceptual (familiarity, frequency of use, number of meanings) and non-conceptual (letters/blanks ratio and difficulty of c…

Effectiveness of the Cognitive Differentiation Program of the Integrated Psychological Therapy

The aim of the current pilot study was to compare two strategies in the application of the cognitive differentiation program of Integrated Psychological Therapy for people with schizophrenia. Twenty-six outpatients were randomly assigned to the application of the program in group sessions (CDg), or to its application in individualized sessions (CDi). The program provides cognitive exercises to promote better performance in cognition, and both groups of participants completed the same number of exercises following the same number of sessions per week. Outcomes were assessed on neuropsychological measures of attention, executive functioning and everyday memory, and everyday functioning. Effec…

Lost in the Social World: How Social Cognitive Deficits Affect Social Functioning of People with Asperger Syndrome

Were we to visualise autism spectrum disorders as a continuum, Asperger syndrome (AS) would be situated at one of its extremes. What appears to determine each individual’s position in this continuum is his or her symptomatology. In the case of AS symptomatology presents itself more discretely. According to Barthelemy (2000), the abovementioned symptomatology can be grouped in three major areas: a) difficulties in development of social interaction; b) difficulties in verbal and nonverbal communication; and c) presence of fixated interests, routines or rituals and repetitive behaviours. Being a developmental disorder, symptoms vary according to age. While some features tend to disappear with …

Run-Time Reconfiguration for Emulating Transient Faults in VLSI Systems

Advances in circuitry integration increase the probability of occurrence of transient faults in VLSI systems. A confident use of these systems requires the study of their behaviour in the presence of such faults. This study can be conducted using model-based fault injection techniques. In that context, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) offer a great promise by enabling those techniques to execute models faster. This paper focuses on how run-time reconfiguration techniques can be used for emulating the occurrence of transient faults in VLSI models. Although the use of FPGAs for that purpose has been restricted so far to the well-known bit-flip fault model, recent studies in fault repres…

The spontaneous use of memory aids at different educational levels

Three groups of students in different educational levels: 8th–9th grade students (average age 15); 10th–11th grade students (average age 16); and college students (average age 21), completed a metamemory questionnaire on the use of external, general, and formal memory aids in everyday life and study situations. Short-term repetition, mental rehearsing, and summary elaboration were the most frequent aids. The least frequently used were those that require a special training to be used effectively (e.g. Digit-letters and method of loci). There were differences in the use of general memory aids due to education level, but not in the case of external and formal memory aids. Results showed also t…

Normative data on the familiarity and difficulty of 196 Spanish word fragments

In this article, normative data on the familiarity and difficulty of 196 single-solution Spanish word fragments are presented. The database includes the following indices: difficulty, familiarity, frequency, number of meanings, number of letters given in the fragment, first and/or last letters given, and ratio of letters to blanks. A factor analysis was performed on difficulty, and two factors were obtained. Frequency, familiarity, and number of meanings loaded highly on the first factor, which we consider to measure lexical processes, whereas number of letters in the fragment, first and/or last letters given, and ratio of letters to blanks loaded highly on the second factor, which we judge…

WAIS-IV Performance in Patients With Schizophrenia.

Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) is one of the most widely used instruments to measure cognitive functioning. The aims of this study were 1) to obtain the cognitive profile of Spanish patients with schizophrenia on the WAIS-IV; 2) to compare their profile to the profile of a healthy control group; and 3) to compare the cognitive profile of patients with schizophrenia to the performance observed in two separate previous studies in Canada and China. A sample of 99 outpatients and 99 healthy control participants, matched on age, sex, and educational level, were measured using the WAIS-IV, including 10 core subtests, 4 indices, and 2 general intelligence scores, to obtain their cognitiv…

On benchmarking the dependability of automotive engine control applications

The pervasive use of ECUs (electronic control units) in automotive systems motivates the interest of the community in methodologies for quantifying their dependability in a reproducible and cost-effective way. Although the core of modern vehicle engines is managed by the control software embedded in engine ECUs, no practical approach has been proposed so far to characterise the impact of faults on the behaviour of this software. This paper proposes a dependability benchmark for engine control applications. The essential features of such type of applications are first captured in a general model, which is then exploited in order to specify a standard procedure to assess dependability measure…

Recomendaciones en el manejo de la pandemia por coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) en pacientes con trasplante renal

The SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) coronavirus pandemic is evolving very quickly and means a special risk for both immunosuppressed and comorbid patients. Knowledge about this growing infection is also increasing although many uncertainties remain, especially in the kidney transplant population. This manuscript presents a proposal for action with general and specific recommendations to protect and prevent infection in this vulnerable population such as kidney transplant recipients. Resumen: La pandemia por coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) está evolucionando de manera muy rápida y representa un riesgo especial en pacientes inmunodeprimidos y con comorbilidades añadidas. El conocimiento sobre esta in…

More on magnitude of priming in implicit memory tasks.

The effects of word frequency, length of the word, and type of word Fragment in a fragment-completion test were investigated with 57 undergraduate students, 19–22 years. Priming with better performance on studied than on nonstudied words in this task was greater for low frequency words than for high frequency words and greater for fragments without the first letter than for fragments with the first letter. It was inferred that characteristics of fragments should be considered in any implicit memory task when the magnitude of priming is of interest. In general, word fragment-completion processes appear to be based on sources of information available in visual identification tasks.

Olvido dirigido de falsas memorias: ¿Podemos olvidar intencionalmente una falsa memoria?

Directed forgetting of false memories: Can we forget a false memory? In two directed forgetting experiments subjects were required to forget some false memories. In experiment 1 the 13 words from list 1 were related to a non presented critical word whereas the 13 words from list 2 were unrelated. In experiment 2 both list 1 and 2 had 18 words: 6 words related to a first critical word, 6 related to a second critical word, and the last 6 words to a third critical word. None of both experiments found inhibition of such false memories suggesting that is not possible to forget a false memory. Even in experiment 2 there was a trend to the appearance of a postsuppression rebound that would indicat…

Brain activity changes with emotional words in different stages of psychosis.

Abstract Background To date, a large number of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have been conducted on psychosis. However, little is known about changes in brain functioning in psychotic patients using an emotional auditory paradigm at different stages of the disease. Such knowledge is important for advancing our understanding of the disorder and thus creating more targeted interventions. This study aimed to investigate whether individuals with first-episode psychosis (FEP) and chronic schizophrenia show abnormal brain responses to emotional auditory processing and to compare the responses between FEP and chronic schizophrenia. Methods Patients with FEP (n = 31) or chron…

Influence of articulation rate on two memory tasks in young and older adults.

This study investigated the relation between phonological loop functioning and age. Phonological loop is a time-based subsystem of the Working Memory Model of Baddeley and Wilson, which uses rehearsal of information as an active process to avoid phonological decay. Performance differences were examined between young and older adults in two speech-based memory tasks, such as the immediate serial recall of words and the Digit Ordering Task. Analysis showed that performance on both tasks was lower for the older group. Articulation rate was also measured to test the hypothesis that the impairment of some cognitive functions in adults can be associated to their slowness or the greater time need…

Perceptual Priming and Reading Speed among Fourth Grade Children

AbstractThis study evaluated the perceptual priming in fourth grade primary school children using a word-fragment completion task. The children were classified into two categories according to their reading speed: high and low. Using several sub-scales of the WISC-IV, their working memory was measured, and their total IQ was estimated, in order to control for their effects on priming. The statistical analyses showed that children with high reading speed were significantly better at word-fragment completion and showed greater priming (p < .01); in other words, the prior processing of the words from which the fragments came produced a greater benefit in the performance of the word-fragment…