Neuropsychologia
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Adults with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) have been found to have accelerated long-term forgetting, but this phenomenon has not yet been investigated in children. Although deficits in recall of materials after short (20- to 30-minute) delays have been shown to slowly emerge from childhood to adolescence in patients with TLE, it is unknown whether such a trend will also be found in recall of materials after long delays. This study examined the presence of accelerated long-term forgetting in children with TLE and how it relates to chronological age. ⋯ This association was not present in the control group. To our knowledge, this is the first study to show evidence of accelerated long-term forgetting in children with TLE, which could not be explained by poor performance on standardised memory tests. Additionally, these results suggest that the developmental trajectory of long-term memory in children with TLE is similar to that of short-term memory: deficits emerge gradually, therefore older children are more likely to present with long-term memory deficits.
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Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) is a debilitating neurodegenerative disorder characterized by severely impaired social and emotional behaviour, including emotion recognition deficits. Though fear recognition impairments seen in particular neurological and developmental disorders can be ameliorated by reallocating attention to critical facial features, the possibility that similar benefits can be conferred to patients with FTD has yet to be explored. In the current study, we examined the impact of presenting distinct regions of the face (whole face, eyes-only, and eyes-removed) on the ability to recognize expressions of anger, fear, disgust, and happiness in 24 patients with FTD and 24 healthy controls. ⋯ Thus, unlike some neurological and developmental disorders featuring amygdala dysfunction, the emotion recognition deficit observed in FTD is not likely driven by selective inattention to critical facial features. Patients with FTD also mislabelled negative facial expressions as happy more often than controls, providing further evidence for abnormalities in the representation of positive affect in FTD. This work suggests that the emotional expression recognition deficit associated with FTD is unlikely to be rectified by adjusting selective attention to diagnostic features, as has proven useful in other select disorders.
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For infants it is crucial to differentiate conspecifics from other animates in order to profoundly learn about the world, the self, and other people. The current study investigates brain correlates of a categorical human-animal distinction in infants of different age groups as well as in adults. Using the categorical oddball task (Pauen, Wahl, & Hoehl, 2011), we compared event-related potentials of 4- and 7-month-old infants with those of adults. ⋯ In adults, we found an increased N1 amplitude for oddballs as compared to standards. Thus, adults' sensitivity to the relative frequencies of the contrasted categories at the level of the N1 was comparable to infants' Nc response at 7 months. Furthermore, in adults we found the N2 amplitude to reflect category-specific processing, with a consistently increased amplitude in reaction to animals.
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While affordances have been intensively studied, the mechanisms according to how their activation is modulated by context are poorly understood. We investigated how the Agent׳s reach-to-grasp movement towards a target-object (e.g. a can) is influenced by the other׳s interaction with a second object (manipulative/functional) and by his/her eye-gaze communication. To manipulate physical context we showed participants two objects that could be linked by a spatial relation (e.g. can-knife, typically found in the same context), or by different functional relations. ⋯ Consistently participants reached faster the MFA when the objects were related by a functional-individual than a functional-cooperative relation. The Agent׳s getting response strongly affected the grasping component of the movement: in case of eye-gaze sharing, MFA was greater when the other previously performed a manipulative than a functional grip. Results reveal that humans have developed a sophisticated capability in detecting information from hand posture and eye-gaze, which are informative as to the Agent׳s intention.
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How to reduce pain is a fundamental clinical and experimental question. Acute pain is a complex experience which seems to emerge from the co-activation of two main processes, namely the nociceptive/discriminative analysis and the affective/cognitive evaluation of the painful stimulus. Recently it has been found that pain threshold increases following the visual magnification of the body part targeted by the painful stimulation. ⋯ Moreover a reduction of subjective pain experience was found specifically for the magnified hand in explicit pain ratings. These findings suggest that the visual increase of body size enhances the cognitive, anticipatory component of pain processing; such an anticipatory reaction reduces the response to the following contact with the noxious stimulus. The present results support the idea that cognitive aspects of pain experience relay on the multisensory representation of the body, and that could be usefully exploited for inducing a significant reduction of subjective pain experience.