Search results for " function"

Gross motor proficiency and intellectual functioning

2018

This cross-sectional study examines differences in gross motor proficiency as a function of different intellectual functioning profiles. Two motor areas have been investigated as being equally essential to gross motor functions in every-day life: locomotion and object control. It aims to compare gross motor skills endorsed by children with Down syndrome (DS), children with borderline intellectual functioning (BIF), and typically developing children (TDC). Group 1 was composed of 18 children with DS (chronological age=8.22), group 2 was composed of 18 children with BIF (chronological age=9.32), and group 3 was composed of 18 children with typical development (TD) (chronological age=9.28). Gr…

Did you hear? Auditory prospective memory cues are more beneficial for autistic than for non-autistic children and adolescents

2021

Item does not contain fulltext Background: The transition from primary to secondary school is particularly difficult for autistic children, a transition underpinned by an increase in prospective memory (PM) demands. Aims: To better understand PM in autistic children of the relevant age range and its underlying processes, the current study investigated the impact of cue salience (distinctiveness) on PM in autistic and non-autistic children and adolescents. The study was unique in manipulating the visual and auditory salience of PM cues. Salient cues are assumed to put lower demands on executive control resources as compared to cues that blend in with the ongoing activity. Methods and procedu…

Robotic Rehabilitation and Multimodal Instrumented Assessment of Post-stroke Elbow Motor Functions-A Randomized Controlled Trial Protocol.

2020

Background: The reliable assessment, attribution, and alleviation of upper-limb joint stiffness are essential clinical objectives in the early rehabilitation from stroke and other neurological disorders, to prevent the progression of neuromuscular pathology and enable proactive physiotherapy toward functional recovery. However, the current clinical evaluation and treatment of this stiffness (and underlying muscle spasticity) are severely limited by their dependence on subjective evaluation and manual limb mobilization, thus rendering the evaluation imprecise and the treatment insufficiently tailored to the specific pathologies and residual capabilities of individual patients. Methods: To ad…

Assessment of Functional Activities in Individuals with Parkinson’s Disease Using a Simple and Reliable Smartphone-Based Procedure

2020

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Corticospinal Tract Integrity and Long-Term Hand Function Prognosis in Patients With Stroke

2019

Background: The restoration of hand function is an important goal for patients with stroke. This study investigated the relationship between corticospinal tract (CST) integrity and the functional status of the hand in patients with stroke 6 months after onset and evaluated which of the following values would be useful for predicting hand function: fiber number (FN), fractional anisotropy (FA) at the mid-pons, and FA at the pontomedullary junction. Methods: The present retrospective cross-sectional observational study assessed 44 patients with stroke who were able to walk without using a walking aid or orthosis. The final hand function results were classified into three groups: no recovery (…

Sexual narcissism and its association with sexual and well-being outcomes

2020

Abstract Theories on narcissism are traditionally closely related to sexuality. Most research on the association between narcissism and sexual behavior, however, has focused on harmful/maladaptive outcomes. The aim of the present two studies was to examine the possible health-promoting influence of both global and sexual narcissism on sexual function and genital self-image. In Study 1, sexual narcissism was positively associated with sexual functioning in both women and men (N = 505, online-recruited German participants). In the women's sample, sexual narcissism was related to a positive genital self-image. The facet sexual skill was identified as the most important predictor for sexual fun…

2017

Children’s improved performance with age in analogy tasks has been explained by an increase in semantic knowledge of the items and the relations between them or by the development of an increased ability to inhibit irrelevant information. We tested the so-called "unbalanced attentional focus hypothesis" that claims that a failure to choose the "analogical" match can be the result of a difficulty to focus on all the relevant information available. Previous eye-tracking research has suggested, in analogies of the A:B::C:D format, that 5-6 year-olds organize their search around the C item. They focused significantly less than adults on the A:B pair, thereby hindering their discovering the rela…

Employers’ attitudes towards labour inclusion of persons with borderline intellectual functioning (BIF): An empirical evidence

2020

In the vocational rehabilitation of persons with disabilities (BIF), the need to consider the variables related to employer demand is increasingly becoming an important research topic. This empirical research explores the perceptions and attitudes of employers in hiring and retaining people with borderline intellectual functioning (BIF). For this purpose, the Metaplan procedure was used and a focus group was conducted in small and medium enterprises (SMEs) of the Spanish Vinalopó Footwear Cluster. Results showed a significant lack of knowledge and visibility of people with BIF. Lack of financial support to encourage hiring was pointed out by participants in the group as the most relevant ba…

Dynamic Functional Connectivity Captures Individuals’ Unique Brain Signatures

2020

Recent neuroimaging evidence suggest that there exists a unique individual-specific functional connectivity (FC) pattern consistent across tasks. The objective of our study is to utilize FC patterns to identify an individual using a supervised machine learning approach. To this end, we use two previously published data sets that comprises resting-state and task-based fMRI responses. We use static FC measures as input to a linear classifier to evaluate its performance. We additionally extend this analysis to capture dynamic FC using two approaches: the common sliding window approach and the more recent phase synchrony-based measure. We found that the classification models using dynamic FC pa…

A New Paradigm in Interactive Evolutionary Multiobjective Optimization

2020

Over the years, scalarization functions have been used to solve multiobjective optimization problems by converting them to one or more single objective optimization problem(s). This study proposes a novel idea of solving multiobjective optimization problems in an interactive manner by using multiple scalarization functions to map vectors in the objective space to a new, so-called preference incorporated space (PIS). In this way, the original problem is converted into a new multiobjective optimization problem with typically fewer objectives in the PIS. This mapping enables a modular incorporation of decision maker’s preferences to convert any evolutionary algorithm to an interactive one, whe…