Search results for "cognitive task"
showing 10 items of 52 documents
High cognitive reserve in bipolar disorders as a moderator of neurocognitive impairment
2017
BackgroundCognitive reserve (CR) reflects the capacity of the brain to endure neuropathology, minimize clinical manifestations and successfully complete cognitive tasks. The present study aims to determine whether high CR may constitute a moderator of cognitive functioning in bipolar disorder (BD).MethodsOne hundred and two patients with BD and 32 healthy controls were enrolled. All patients met DSM-IV criteria for I or II BD and were euthymic (YMRS ≤ 6 and HDRS ≤ 8) during a 6-month period. All participants were tested with a comprehensive neuropsychological battery, and a Cerebral Reserve Score (CRS) was estimated. Subjects with a CRS below the group median were classified as having low C…
Prism adaptation and neck muscle vibration in healthy individuals: Are two methods better than one?
2013
Studies involving therapeutic combinations reveal an important benefit in the rehabilitation of neglect patients when compared to single therapies. In light of these observations our present work examines, in healthy individuals, sensorimotor and cognitive after-effects of prism adaptation and neck muscle vibration applied individually or simultaneously. We explored sensorimotor after-effects on visuo-manual open-loop pointing, visual and proprioceptive straight-ahead estimations. We assessed cognitive after-effects on the line bisection task. Fifty-four healthy participants were divided into six groups designated according to the exposure procedure used with each: 'Prism' (P) group; 'Vibra…
The gait is less stable in children with cerebral palsy in normal and dual-task gait compared to typically developed peers
2021
There is limited evidence about gait stability and its alteration by concurrent motor and cognitive tasks in children with cerebral palsy (CP). We examined gait stability and how it is altered by constrained cognitive or motor task in CP and their typically developed (TD) controls. Gait kinematics were recorded using inertial-measurement units (IMU) from 18 patients with hemiplegia (13.5 +/- 2.4 years), 12 with diplegia (13.0 +/- 2.1 years), and 31 TD controls (13.5 +/- 2.2 years) during unconstrained gait, and motor (carrying a tray) and cognitive (word naming) task constrained gait at preferred speed (similar to 400 steps/task). Step duration, its standard deviation and refined-compound-m…
The role of transcranial magnetic stimulation in the study of cerebellar cognitive function.
2007
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) allows non-invasive stimulation of brain structures. This technique can be used either for stimulating the motor cortex, recording motor evoked potentials from peripheral muscles, or for modulating the excitability of other non-motor areas in order to establish their necessity for a given task. TMS of the cerebellum can give interesting insights on the cerebellar functions. Paired-TMS techniques, delivering stimuli over the cerebellum followed at various interstimulus intervals by stimuli over the motor cortex, allow studying the pattern of connectivity between the cerebellum and the contralateral motor cortex in physiological as well as in pathologic…
Swarming Models for Facilitating Collaborative Decisions
2010
The paper highlights the computational power of swarming models (i.e., stigmergic mechanisms) to build collaborative support systems for complex cognitive tasks such as facilitation of group decision processes (GDP) in e-meetings. Unlike traditional approaches that minimize the cognitive complexity by incorporating the facilitation knowledge into the system, stigmergic coordination mechanisms minimize the complexity by providing the system with emergent functionalities that are shaped by the environment itself through the possibility to structure it in terms of high-level cognitive artefacts. This is illustrated by conducting a socio-simulation experiment for an envisioned collaborative sof…
Do Individual Effects Reflect Quantitative or Qualitative Differences in Cognition?
2021
Rouder and Haaf (2020) posed the important question if there are some individuals whose behavior is not in accordance with well-established experimental effects and whether these individual differences are quantitative or qualitative in nature. In our commentary, we discuss the distinction between quantitative and qualitative individual differences and between individual and average causal effects and come to the conclusion that this is not a new question, but in fact one that has already been discussed by Gordon W. Allport (1937) and Donald B. Rubin (1974, 1978). Moreover, we critically examine their proposed rule of thumb to collect about 100 trials per experimental condition to reliably …
Cognitive performance and emotion are indifferent to ambient color
2017
Folklore has it that ambient color has the power to relax or arouse the observer and enhance performance when executing cognitive tasks. We picked a number of commercially available colors that allegedly have the power to alter cognitive performance and the emotional state, and exposed subjects to them while solving a battery of cognitive tasks. The colors were “Cool Down Pink”, which is said to produce relaxing effects and reduce effort, “Energy Red”, allegedly enhancing performance via increased arousal, “Relaxing Blue”, which is said to enhance attention and concentration, as well as white as a control. In a between-subjects design, a total of 170 high school students carried out five ta…
Disentangling the effects of optimism and attributions on feelings of success
2014
Two experiments examined the effects of dispositional optimism and attributions on feelings of success in a performance setting. In Experiment 1, participants successfully solved three cognitive tasks and attributed the success either internally (i.e., to themselves) or externally (i.e., to a teammate). We found no effect of optimism, but a significant effect of the attribution: Internal attribution predicted an increase in feelings of success. In Experiment 2, we replicated the design and adopted an extreme groups approach in order to include the extremes of the optimism dimension. Only optimism affected feelings of success in this sample: Pessimistic participants showed higher increases i…
The Effect of Corrective Feedback on Performance in Basic Cognitive Tasks: An Analysis of RT Components
2016
[EN] The current work examines the effect of trial-by-trial feedback about correct and error responding on performance in two basic cognitive tasks: a classic Stroop task (n = 40) and a color-word matching task (n = 30). Standard measures of both RT and accuracy were examined in addition to measures obtained from fitting the ex-Gaussian distributional model to the correct RTs. For both tasks, RTs were faster in blocks of trials with feedback than in blocks without feedback, but this difference was not significant. On the other hand, with respect to the distributional analyses, providing feedback served to significantly reduce the size of the tails of the RT distributions. Such results sugge…
Attention and Planning in Older Adults
1997
In a study with 48 adults between 65 and 97 years of age, we examined the influence of working memory, inhibitory efficiency, and attentional flexibility on the ability to solve efficiently a complex planning task: 26 of the subjects were living independently in their own home, and 22 subjects were recruited from nursing homes. Subjects first participated in a number of cognitive ability tests. They then had to plan a trip for a group of 20 people. The results indicate that inhibitory efficiency combined with the flexible use of attentional resources can account for substantial amounts of variance in the planning task. The results support the view that chronological age does not necessaril…