Search results for " cognitive"

Maternal homework assistance and children's task-persistent behavior in elementary school

2018

Abstract The present study used a sample of 365 children to investigate the longitudinal associations between maternal homework assistance (i.e., help, monitoring, and autonomy granting) and children's task-persistent behavior in learning situations from grade 2 to grade 4 of elementary school. Also, the extent to which task-persistent behavior plays a role in the links between parental homework assistance and children's academic performance was examined. The results showed that the more autonomy granting mothers reported, the more task-persistent behavior children exhibited; and more task-persistent behavior children exhibited, the more autonomy their mothers granted. In contrast, the more…

Vocational teachers’ pathways in the course of a curriculum reform

2011

Teachers face continuous changes, many of which significantly influence their professional identities and work practices. This study investigates Finnish vocational teachers’ pathways in the course of a curriculum reform. The data were obtained by interviewing 14 vocational teachers twice, i.e. at the initial and later stages of the reform. This study used a narrative approach to analyse the interviews as whole and also to illustrate variations between teachers. The teachers were found to exhibit distinctive pathways through the reform: an empowerment pathway, a critical but adaptive pathway, an open and expectant pathway, a successful transformation pathway, and a struggling pathway. The p…

Fathers’ narratives on support and agency : a case study of fathers in a Finnish child welfare NGO

2017

In Finland, one of the Nordic countries, shared parenting is widely supported through, e.g. family policies and legislation. This is also evident in daily parental practices, as fathers’ share in childcare has increased notably since the late 1980s. Unfortunately, this is not the whole picture of Finnish and Nordic fatherhood: practitioners in child welfare also encounter many fathers with various problems in parenting and life management. In this article, we examine the narratives of fathers who have sought and received support from a Finnish nationwide child welfare NGO. Our research question is: What types of narratives on seeking and receiving support and on their agency do fathers prod…

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)

2017

Beyond the word and image: III. Neurodynamic properties of the semantic network

2019

AbstractUnderstanding the neural process underlying the comprehension of visual images and sentences remains a major open challenge in cognitive neuroscience. We previously demonstrated with fMRI and DTI that comprehension of visual images and sentences describing human activities recruits a common semantic system. The current research tests the hypothesis that this common semantic system will display similar neural dynamics during processing in these two modalities. To investigate these neural dynamics we recorded EEG from naïve subjects as they saw simple narratives made up of a first visual image depicting a human event, followed by a second that was either a sequentially coherent narrat…

Exploring Frequency-dependent Brain Networks from ongoing EEG using Spatial ICA during music listening

2019

AbstractRecently, exploring brain activity based on functional networks during naturalistic stimuli especially music and video represents an attractive challenge because of the low signal-to-noise ratio in collected brain data. Although most efforts focusing on exploring the listening brain have been made through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), sensor-level electro- or magnetoencephalography (EEG/MEG) technique, little is known about how neural rhythms are involved in the brain network activity under naturalistic stimuli. This study exploited cortical oscillations through analysis of ongoing EEG and musical feature during free-listening to music. We used a data-driven method t…

2020

Besides the pure pleasure of watching a dance performance, dance as a whole-body movement is becoming increasingly popular for health-related interventions. However, the science-based evidence for improvements in health or well-being through dance is still ambiguous and little is known about the underlying neurophysiological mechanisms. This may be partly related to the fact that previous studies mostly examined the neurophysiological effects of imagination and observation of dance rather than the physical execution itself. The objective of this pilot study was to investigate acute effects of a physically executed dance with its different components (recalling the choreography and physical …

Neuropsychological profiles of FMR-1 premutation and full-mutation carrier females

1999

Abstract The present French–German investigation of fragile-X syndrome (fra-X) was undertaken to disentangle genetic from environmental effects on cognitive performance as assessed with the following measures: Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised (WAIS-R), Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, Trail-Making Test, Tower of Hanai, Verbal Fluency Test, Stroop Test, short-term and consolidation memory, and the d2 task. Groups with different genotypes ( n =11 mothers with a full mutation in the FMR-1 gene of fra-X children; n =65 mothers with a premutation in the FMR-1 gene of fra-X children; n =18 siblings of these mothers with normal CGG repeats) and with different psychosocial stressors from fra-X…

2020

Abstract Proprioceptive paired-stimulus paradigm was used for 30 children (10–17 years) and 21 adult (25–45 years) volunteers in magnetoencephalography (MEG). Their right index finger was moved twice with 500-ms interval every 4 ± 25 s (repeated 100 times) using a pneumatic-movement actuator. Spatial-independent component analysis (ICA) was applied to identify stimulus-related components from MEG cortical responses. Clustering was used to identify spatiotemporally consistent components across subjects. We found a consistent primary response in the primary somatosensory (SI) cortex with similar gating ratios of 0.72 and 0.69 for the children and adults, respectively. Secondary responses with…

Individual Independent Component Analysis on EEG: Event-Related Responses Vs. Difference Wave of Deviant and Standard Responses

2016

Independent component analysis (ICA) is often used to spatially filter event-related potentials (ERPs). When an oddball paradigm is applied to elicit ERPs, difference wave (DW, responses of deviant stimuli minus those of standard ones) is often used to remove the common responses between the deviant and the standard. Thus, DW can be produced first, and then ICA is used to decompose the DW. Or, ICA is performed on responses of the deviant and standard stimuli separately, and then DW is applied on the filtered responses. In this study, we compared the two approaches to analyzing mismatch negativity (MMN). We found that DW introduced noise in the time and space domains, resulting in more diffi…