Search results for "Executive Function"
showing 10 items of 295 documents
“My Mind Is Doing It All”
2015
Objective: To study whether pressure of speech in jargon aphasia arises out of disturbances to core language or executive processes, or at the intersection of conceptual preparation. Background: Conceptual preparation mechanisms for speech have not been well studied. Several mechanisms have been proposed for jargon aphasia, a fluent, well-articulated, logorrheic propositional speech that is almost incomprehensible. Methods: We studied the vast quantity of jargon speech produced by patient J.A., who had suffered an infarct after the clipping of a middle cerebral artery aneurysm. We gave J.A. baseline cognitive tests and experimental word-and sentencegeneration tasks that we had designed for …
The temporal association between executive function and life-space mobility in old age
2018
Background Life-space mobility, an indicator of community mobility, describes person’s movements in terms of the distance from home, the frequency of movement, and the need of assistance for movement. Executive function (EF) is a higher-order cognitive function that supervises motor control and plays a key role in a person’s ability to function independently. Cognitive impairment often co-occurs with restricted life-space mobility; however, the direction of the longitudinal associations between EF and life-space mobility is unclear. The aim of this study was to investigate the temporal associations between EF and life-space mobility among community-dwelling older people. Methods One hundred…
Early improvement of executive test performance during antidepressant treatment predicts treatment outcome in patients with Major Depressive Disorder
2017
Executive dysfunctions frequently occur in patients with Major Depressive Disorder and have been shown to improve during effective antidepressant treatment. However, the time course of improvement and its relationship to treatment outcome is unknown. The aim of the study was to assess the test performance and clinical outcome by repetitive assessments of executive test procedures during antidepressant treatment. Executive test performance was assessed in 209 –patients with Major Depressive Disorder (mean age 39.3 ± 11.4 years) and 84 healthy controls five times in biweekly intervals from baseline to week 8. Patients were treated by a defined treatment algorithm within the early medication c…
Trail Making Test in assessing children with reading disabilities: a test of executive functions or content information.
1997
The speed of performance on Part A, Part B, and on an experimental version containing alphabetical series (Part A Alphabetic) of the Trail Making Test was studied with 19 children with reading disabilities and 34 controls from Grades 4 to 6. When the test was used in discriminant profile fashion, children with reading disabilities showed a deficit compared with control children on Part B relative to Part A but did not relative to the new Part A Alphabetic. The results indicate that the performance of the children with reading disabilities on Part B is likely to be affected by their slowness on the alphabetical series. Based on these results we recommend that the speed of following the alph…
Effects of dual task difficulty in motor and cognitive performance: Differences between adults and adolescents
2017
In the present study our aim was to compare dual-task performance in thirteen adolescents and fifteen young adults while concurrently performing a cognitive and a motor task. The postural control variables were obtained under three different conditions: i) bipedal stance, ii) tandem stance and iii) unipedal stance. The cognitive task consisted of a backward digit span test in which the participants were asked to memorize a sequence of numbers and then repeat the number in reverse order at three different difficulty levels (i.e. with 3, 4 and 5 digits). The difficulty of the cognitive task was seen to have different effects on adolescents and young adults. Adolescents seem to prioritize post…
Stimulus Evaluation, Event Preparation, and Motor Action Planning in Young Patients With Mild Spastic Cerebral Palsy: An Event-Related Brain Potentia…
2012
The study investigated stimulus evaluation time, event preparation, and motor action planning of patients with mild spastic cerebral palsy and a peer control group in the age range of 9 to 18 years. To this end, participants were carrying out a stimulus recognition task. Findings indicated an overall slowness and inaccurate reaction time performance of the patient group. An event-related potential analysis revealed that the stimulus evaluation processing, indexed by the parietal P300, was intact in the group of patients. Also event preparation and action planning, indexed by respectively the frontal late contingent negative variation and the frontal P2, were intact in the group of patients…
Functioning of the Attentional Networks at Rest vs. During Acute Bouts of Aerobic Exercise
2011
The present study explored the effects of three different activity conditions on three attentional functions: alerting, orienting, and executive control. A group of highly experienced cyclists performed the Attention Network Test–Interactions (Callejas, Lupiáñez, & Tudela, 2004) at rest, during moderate aerobic exercise, and during intense aerobic exercise. Results indicated that aerobic exercise accelerated reaction time and reduced the alerting effect compared with the rest condition. However, aerobic exercise did not modulate the functioning of either the orienting or the executive control attentional networks. No differences in reaction time or attentional functioning were observed …
Cognitive flexibility modulates maturation and music-training-related changes in neural sound discrimination
2015
Previous research has demonstrated that musicians show superior neural sound discrimination when compared to non-musicians, and that these changes emerge with accumulation of training. Our aim was to investigate whether individual differences in executive functions predict training-related changes in neural sound discrimination. We measured event-related potentials induced by sound changes coupled with tests for executive functions in musically trained and non-trained children aged 9-11 years and 13-15 years. High performance in a set-shifting task, indexing cognitive flexibility, was linked to enhanced maturation of neural sound discrimination in both musically trained and non-trained chil…
Improving spatial functioning in children with cerebral palsy using computerized and traditional game tasks.
2003
To examine the effectiveness of combining virtual environment (VE) instruction with additional desk-top tasks, based on the Luria-Vygotsky methodology, for spatial remediation in children having complex motor disabilities restricting movement.In Experiment 1, from among children attending for residential rehabilitation, an experimental subgroup had additional spatial training using a VE and corresponding desk-top models. All children were tested at the start and end of training, using four spatial tests. In Experiment 2, larger groups of children (pair-matched for initial performance) were given the same training as in Experiment 1, but experimentals received both VE-based training and supp…
Repeated assessment of the Tower of Hanoi test: reliability and age effects.
2000
The purpose of this research was to analyze the effects of repeating an executive function test. Three versions of the Tower of Hanoi (TOH) test were repeated three times each, with test-retest intervals of 2 months. Two groups of children participated in the research (7.7 and 11.6 years, n = 22 and n = 28). Repeating the assessment improved the performance and decreased the total performance time in both of the groups. The older participants improved their performance faster than the younger ones. The reliability of all the scores, besides the error scores, seemed to be satisfactory after the first few assessments. The stability of the scores was maintained through all the assessments. Th…