Search results for "cognitive performance"

The Influence of Sports on Cognitive Task Performance – A Critical Overview

2013

The potential effect of different methods on cognitive performance is of great interest to scientific researchers. In addition to drugs, nutrition and sleeping behavior, extensive research has focused on different kinds of sports and exercise and their potential to enhance cognitive task performance. In this chapter, I will give the reader an overview of studies dealing with athletic activities of healthy people and their effects on cognitive task performance. Furthermore, I present and discuss limitations and problems found in these studies. One problem that I point out that makes the comparison of the study results difficult is the heterogeneous study design regarding mode, duration and i…

Psychomotor slowness is associated with self-reported sleep duration among the general population

2010

Short and long self‐reported sleep durations have been found to be associated with several seemingly disparate health risks and impaired functional abilities, including cognitive functioning. The role of long sleep is especially poorly understood in this context. Psychomotor slowness, shown to have analogous associations with cognitive performance and health risks as self‐reported long sleep duration, has not been studied together with sleep duration in epidemiological settings. We hypothesized that self‐reported habitual sleep duration, especially long sleep, is associated with slow psychomotor reaction time, and that this association is independent of vigilance‐related factors. The hypoth…

Occupational cognitive complexity and episodic memory in old age

2021

The aim of this study was to investigate occupational cognitive complexity of main lifetime occupation in relation to level and 15-year change in episodic memory recall in a sample of older adults (≥ 65 years, n = 780). We used latent growth curve modelling with occupational cognitive complexity (O*NET indicators) as independent variable. Subgroup analyses in a sample of middle-aged (mean: 49.9 years) men (n = 260) were additionally performed to investigate if a general cognitive ability (g) factor at age 18 was predictive of future occupational cognitive complexity and cognitive performance in midlife. For the older sample, a higher level of occupational cognitive complexity was related to…

A population-based survey on cognitive performance in Sicily. Cognitive impairment is modified by fertile life characteristics.

2009

A Door-to-Door population based survey on cognitive performance In Bagheria, Sicily.

2008

Cognitive Deficits in Chronic Stroke Patients: Neuropsychological Assessment, Depression, and Self-Reports

2017

<b><i>Background:</i></b> Following stroke, clinicians are challenged to detect and untangle symptoms of cognitive dysfunction and mood disorders. Additionally, they need to evaluate the informative value of self-reports to identify patients in need of further attendance. <b><i>Aims:</i></b> To examine the association between neuropsychological measures, symptoms of depression, and self-reported cognitive function. <b><i>Methods:</i></b> One-hundred and five chronic stroke patients underwent assessment covering 6 cognitive domains and answered the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale and the Memory and Thinking Scale f…

Boosting working memory with accelerated clocks

2021

Our perception of time varies with the degree of cognitive engagement in tasks. The perceived passage of time accelerates while working on demanding tasks, whereas time appears to drag during boring situations. Our experiment aimed at investigating whether this relationship is mutual: Can manipulated announcements of elapsed time systematically affect the attentional resources applied to a cognitive task? We measured behavioral performance and the EEG in a whole report working memory paradigm with six items of different colors that each had to be reported after a short delay period. The 32 participants were informed about the current time after each 20 trials, while the clock was running at…

2017

Moving and acting underwater within recreational or occupational activities requires intact executive functions, since they subserve higher cognitive functions such as successful self-regulation, coping with novel situations, and decision making; all of which could be influenced by nitrogen narcosis due to elevated partial pressure under water. However, specific executive functions that could provide a differentiated view on humans’ cognitive performance ability have not yet been systematically analyzed in full-water immersion, which is a research gap addressed within this approach to contribute to a better understanding of nitrogen narcosis. In this study, 20 young, healthy, and certified …

Association of basal forebrain volumes and cognition in normal aging.

2013

The basal forebrain cholinergic system (BFCS) is known to undergo moderate neurodegenerative alterations during normal aging and severe atrophy in Alzheimer's disease (AD). It has been suggested that functional and structural alterations of the BFCS mediate cognitive performance in normal aging and AD. But, it is still unclear to what extend age-associated cognitive decline can be related to BFCS in normal aging. We analyzed the relationship between BFCS volume and cognition using MRI and a comprehensive neuropsychological test battery in a cohort of 43 healthy elderly subjects spanning the age range from 60 to 85 years. Most notably, we found significant associations between general intell…

Early life stress programming of NG2+ glia transcriptome alters functional properties of voltage gated sodium (Nav) channels and cognitive performance

2020

AbstractThe precise mechanisms underlying the detrimental effects of early life stress (ELS) on adult mental health remain still elusive. To date, most studies have exclusively targeted neuronal populations and not considered neuron-glia crosstalk as a crucially important element for the integrity of stress-related brain function. Here, we have investigated the impact of ELS on a glial subpopulation with unique properties in brain homeostasis, the NG2+ cells. ELS shifted the NG2+ transcriptome towards more mature stages, and these transcriptional effects were dependent on stress-induced glucocorticoids. The functional relevance of one candidate gene, Scn7a, could be confirmed by an increase…