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Scientific Reports May 2024Numerous efforts have been made to test the OPTIMAL theory of motor learning in healthy children and adult populations. However, only a small number of studies have... (Randomized Controlled Trial)
Randomized Controlled Trial
Numerous efforts have been made to test the OPTIMAL theory of motor learning in healthy children and adult populations. However, only a small number of studies have tested this theory in children with cognitive-motor disorders, such as developmental coordination disorder (DCD). The present study aims to examine the individual and additive effects of a visual illusion and self-controlled practice on a golf putting task in children at risk for DCD based on the OPTIMAL theory. Forty children at risk for DCD (mean age = 8.57 ± 1.05 years) were randomly assigned to four experimental groups (1-small visual illusion + self-controlled practice; 2-big visual illusion + self-controlled practice; 3-small visual illusion + yoked; 4-big visual illusion + yoked). Following 12 pretest trials of a golf putting task, the participants completed 5 blocks of 12 trials of practice on the first day. A retention test (12 trials) and a transfer dual-task test (12 trials) were conducted on the second day. The results indicated that in retention test the big visual illusion + self-controlled practice group was significantly better than the small visual illusion + yoked group (p = 0.01), while there was not any other significant difference between groups at retention test as well as between all groups at practice phase and transfer test (p > 0.05 for all comparisons). In other words, an additive effect has been observed just in the retention test but not the practice phase as well as transfer test. In general, the results of this study support the OPTIMAL theory of motor learning in children at risk for DCD and suggests to all educators who work with these children to use the combination of the visual illusion with self-controlled practice to improve the motor learning of children at risk for DCD.
Topics: Humans; Motor Skills Disorders; Child; Male; Female; Illusions; Learning; Motor Skills; Psychomotor Performance
PubMed: 38816488
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-63387-z -
Biological Psychology Jul 2024The perception of biological motion is an important social cognitive ability. Models of biological motion perception recognize two processes that contribute to the...
The perception of biological motion is an important social cognitive ability. Models of biological motion perception recognize two processes that contribute to the perception of biological motion: a bottom-up process that binds optic-flow patterns into a coherent percept of biological motion and a top-down process that binds sequences of body-posture 'snapshots' over time into a fluent percept of biological motion. The vast majority of studies on autism and biological motion perception have used point-light figure stimuli, which elicit biological motion perception predominantly via bottom-up processes. Here, we investigated whether autism is associated with deviances in the top-down processing of biological motion. For this, we tested a sample of adults scoring low vs high on autism traits on a recently validated EEG paradigm in which apparent biological motion is combined with frequency tagging (Cracco et al., 2022) to dissociate between two percepts: 1) the representation of individual body postures, and 2) their temporal integration into movements. In contrast to our hypothesis, we found no evidence for a diminished temporal body posture integration in the high-scoring group. We did, however, find a group difference that suggests that adults scoring high on autism traits have a visual processing style that focuses more on a single percept (i.e. either body postures or movements, contingent on saliency) compared to adults scoring low on autism traits who instead seemed to represent the two percepts included in the paradigm in a more balanced manner. Although unexpected, this finding aligns well with the autism literature on perceptual stability.
Topics: Humans; Motion Perception; Male; Female; Adult; Autistic Disorder; Young Adult; Electroencephalography; Photic Stimulation; Posture
PubMed: 38815896
DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsycho.2024.108820 -
ELife May 2024In the 'double-drift' illusion, local motion within a window moving in the periphery of the visual field alters the window's perceived path. The illusion is strong even...
In the 'double-drift' illusion, local motion within a window moving in the periphery of the visual field alters the window's perceived path. The illusion is strong even when the eyes track a target whose motion matches the window so that the stimulus remains stable on the retina. This implies that the illusion involves the integration of retinal signals with non-retinal eye-movement signals. To identify where in the brain this integration occurs, we measured BOLD fMRI responses in visual cortex while subjects experienced the double-drift illusion. We then used a combination of univariate and multivariate decoding analyses to identify (1) which brain areas were sensitive to the illusion and (2) whether these brain areas contained information about the illusory stimulus trajectory. We identified a number of cortical areas that responded more strongly during the illusion than a control condition that was matched for low-level stimulus properties. Only in area hMT+ was it possible to decode the illusory trajectory. We additionally performed a number of important controls that rule out possible low-level confounds. Concurrent eye tracking confirmed that subjects accurately tracked the moving target; we were unable to decode the illusion trajectory using eye position measurements recorded during fMRI scanning, ruling out explanations based on differences in oculomotor behavior. Our results provide evidence for a perceptual representation in human visual cortex that incorporates extraretinal information.
Topics: Humans; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Motion Perception; Female; Male; Visual Cortex; Adult; Illusions; Eye Movements; Young Adult; Photic Stimulation; Brain Mapping; Brain
PubMed: 38809774
DOI: 10.7554/eLife.76803 -
CoDAS 2024To compare the acoustic measurements of Cepstral Peak Prominence Smoothed (CPPS) and Acoustic Voice Quality Index (AVQI) of children with normal and altered voices, to... (Comparative Study)
Comparative Study
Cepstral Peak Prominence Smoothed - CPPS and Acoustic Voice Quality Index - AVQI in healthy and altered children's voices: comparation, relationship with auditory-perceptual judgment and cut-off points.
PURPOSE
To compare the acoustic measurements of Cepstral Peak Prominence Smoothed (CPPS) and Acoustic Voice Quality Index (AVQI) of children with normal and altered voices, to relationship with auditory-perceptual judgment (APJ) and to establish cut-off points.
METHODS
Vocal recordings of the sustained vowel and number counting tasks of 185 children were selected from a database and submitted to acoustic analysis with extraction of CPPS and AVQI measurements, and to APJ. The APJ was performed individually for each task, classified as normal or altered, and for the tasks together defining whether the child would pass or fail in a situation of vocal screening.
RESULTS
Children with altered APJ and who failed the screening had lower CPPS values and higher AVQI values, than those with normal APJ and who passed the screening. The APJ of the sustained vowel task was related to CPPS and AVQI, and APJ of the number counting task was related only to AVQI and CPPS numbers. The cut-off points that differentiate children with and without vocal deviation are 14.07 for the vowel CPPS, 7.62 for the CPPS numbers and 2.01 for the AVQI.
CONCLUSION
Children with altered voices, have higher AVQI values and lower CPPS values, when detected in children with voices within the normal range. The acoustic measurements were related to the auditory perceptual judgment of vocal quality in the sustained vowel task, however, the number counting task was related only to the AVQI and CPPS. The cut-off points that differentiate children with and without vocal deviation are 14.07 for the CPPS vowel, 7.62 for the CPPS numbers and 2.01 for the AVQI. The three measures were similar in identifying voices without deviation and dysphonic voices.
Topics: Humans; Voice Quality; Child; Speech Acoustics; Female; Male; Auditory Perception; Voice Disorders; Adolescent; Case-Control Studies; Speech Production Measurement; Judgment
PubMed: 38808777
DOI: 10.1590/2317-1782/20242023047pt -
Psychiatria Polska Apr 2024"Schizotypy" is a term describing personality traits reflected in emotional, perceptual and cognitive styles. Affective temperaments are trait-like features which were...
OBJECTIVES
"Schizotypy" is a term describing personality traits reflected in emotional, perceptual and cognitive styles. Affective temperaments are trait-like features which were observed to be stable in time and predispose to mood disorders. The purpose of this study was to examine relationship between schizotypal features, affective temperaments and anhedonia in patients with bipolar depression.
METHODS
54 patients with bipolar depression were included in the study. Participant were administered the following psychometric tools: Dimensional Anhedonia Rating Scale (DARS), Snaith-Hamilton Pleasure Scale (SHAPS), Oxford-Liverpool Inventory of Feelings and Experiences (O-LIFE), Temperament Evaluation of Memphis, Pisa, Paris, and San Diego Autoquestionnaire (TEMPS-A), and Quick Inventory of Depressive Symptomatology - Self-Report (QIDS-SR). Correlations between the variables were calculated and linear regression models were built.
RESULTS
Only hyperthymia (affective temperament) and introvertive anhedonia (schizotypal domain) were statistically significantly correlated with anhedonia. In regression models, introvertive anhedonia predicted higher whereas hyperthymic features lower severity of anhedonia (measured by the SHAPS scale).
CONCLUSIONS
Hyperthymic features are protective and introvertive anhedonia is a risk factor for consummatory anhedonia.
PubMed: 38805600
DOI: 10.12740/PP/OnlineFirst/178345 -
Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence 2024Perceptual measures, such as intelligibility and speech disorder severity, are widely used in the clinical assessment of speech disorders in patients treated for oral or...
Perceptual measures, such as intelligibility and speech disorder severity, are widely used in the clinical assessment of speech disorders in patients treated for oral or oropharyngeal cancer. Despite their widespread usage, these measures are known to be subjective and hard to reproduce. Therefore, an M-Health assessment based on an automatic prediction has been seen as a more robust and reliable alternative. Despite recent progress, these automatic approaches still remain somewhat theoretical, and a need to implement them in real clinical practice rises. Hence, in the present work we introduce SAMI, a clinical mobile application used to predict speech intelligibility and disorder severity as well as to monitor patient progress on these measures over time. The first part of this work illustrates the design and development of the systems supported by SAMI. Here, we show how deep neural speaker embeddings are used to automatically regress speech disorder measurements (intelligibility and severity), as well as the training and validation of the system on a French corpus of head and neck cancer. Furthermore, we also test our model on a secondary corpus recorded in real clinical conditions. The second part details the results obtained from the deployment of our system in a real clinical environment, over the course of several weeks. In this section, the results obtained with SAMI are compared to an perceptual evaluation, conducted by a set of experts on the new recorded data. The comparison suggests a high correlation and a low error between the perceptual and automatic evaluations, validating the clinical usage of the proposed application.
PubMed: 38800762
DOI: 10.3389/frai.2024.1359094 -
Cortex; a Journal Devoted To the Study... Jul 2024The goal of this preregistered scoping review is to create an overview of the research on developmental prosopagnosia (DP). Through analysis of all empirical studies of... (Review)
Review
The goal of this preregistered scoping review is to create an overview of the research on developmental prosopagnosia (DP). Through analysis of all empirical studies of DP in adults, we investigate 1) how DP is conceptualized and defined, 2) how individuals are classified with DP and 3) which aspects of DP are investigated in the literature. We reviewed 224 peer-reviewed studies of DP. Our analysis of the literature reveals that while DP is predominantly defined as a lifelong face recognition impairment in the absence of acquired brain injury and intellectual/cognitive problems, there is far from consensus on the specifics of the definition with some studies emphasizing e.g., deficits in face perception, discrimination and/or matching as core characteristics of DP. These differences in DP definitions is further reflected in the vast heterogeneity in classification procedures. Only about half of the included studies explicitly state how they classify individuals with DP, and these studies adopt 40 different assessment tools. The two most frequently studied aspects of DP are the role of holistic processing and the specificity of face processing, and alongside a substantial body of neuroimaging studies of DP, this paints a picture of a research field whose scientific interests and aims are rooted in cognitive neuropsychology and neuroscience. We argue that these roots - alongside the heterogeneity in DP definition and classification - may have limited the scope and interest of DP research unnecessarily, and we point to new avenues of research for the field.
Topics: Prosopagnosia; Humans; Facial Recognition; Recognition, Psychology
PubMed: 38795651
DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2024.04.011 -
Cerebral Cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) May 2024We report an investigation of the neural processes involved in the processing of faces and objects of brain-lesioned patient PS, a well-documented case of pure acquired...
We report an investigation of the neural processes involved in the processing of faces and objects of brain-lesioned patient PS, a well-documented case of pure acquired prosopagnosia. We gathered a substantial dataset of high-density electrophysiological recordings from both PS and neurotypicals. Using representational similarity analysis, we produced time-resolved brain representations in a format that facilitates direct comparisons across time points, different individuals, and computational models. To understand how the lesions in PS's ventral stream affect the temporal evolution of her brain representations, we computed the temporal generalization of her brain representations. We uncovered that PS's early brain representations exhibit an unusual similarity to later representations, implying an excessive generalization of early visual patterns. To reveal the underlying computational deficits, we correlated PS' brain representations with those of deep neural networks (DNN). We found that the computations underlying PS' brain activity bore a closer resemblance to early layers of a visual DNN than those of controls. However, the brain representations in neurotypicals became more akin to those of the later layers of the model compared to PS. We confirmed PS's deficits in high-level brain representations by demonstrating that her brain representations exhibited less similarity with those of a DNN of semantics.
Topics: Humans; Prosopagnosia; Female; Adult; Brain; Neural Networks, Computer; Middle Aged; Pattern Recognition, Visual; Male; Models, Neurological
PubMed: 38795358
DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhae211 -
Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual... May 2024Visual snow is the hallmark of the neurological condition visual snow syndrome (VSS) but the characteristics of the visual snow percept remain poorly defined. This study...
PURPOSE
Visual snow is the hallmark of the neurological condition visual snow syndrome (VSS) but the characteristics of the visual snow percept remain poorly defined. This study aimed to quantify its appearance, interobserver variability, and effect on measured visual performance and self-reported visual quality.
METHODS
Twenty-three participants with VSS estimated their visual snow dot size, separation, luminance, and flicker rate by matching to a simulation. To assess whether visual snow masks vision, we compared pattern discrimination thresholds for textures that were similar in spatial scale to visual snow as well as more coarse than visual snow, in participants with VSS, and with and without external noise simulating visual snow in 23 controls.
RESULTS
Mean and 95% confidence intervals for visual snow appearance were: size (6.0, 5.8-6.3 arcseconds), separation (2.0, 1.7-2.3 arcmin), luminance (72.4, 58.1-86.8 cd/m2), and flicker rate (25.8, 18.9-32.8 frames per image at 120 hertz [Hz]). Participants with finer dot spacing estimates also reported greater visibility of their visual snow (τb = -0.41, 95% confidence interval [CI] = -0.62 to -0.13, P = 0.01). In controls, adding simulated fine-scale visual snow to textures increased thresholds for fine but not coarse textures (F(1, 22) = 4.98, P = 0.036, ηp2 = 0.19). In VSS, thresholds for fine and coarse textures were similar (t(22) = 0.54, P = 0.60), suggesting that inherent visual snow does not act like external noise in controls.
CONCLUSIONS
Our quantitative estimates of visual snow constrain its likely neural origins, may aid differential diagnosis, and inform future investigations of how it affects vision. Methods to quantify visual snow are needed for evaluation of potential treatments.
Topics: Humans; Male; Female; Adult; Middle Aged; Visual Acuity; Young Adult; Sensory Thresholds; Vision Disorders; Aged; Visual Perception; Observer Variation; Pattern Recognition, Visual; Perceptual Disorders
PubMed: 38787547
DOI: 10.1167/iovs.65.5.38 -
Frontiers in Psychology 2024
PubMed: 38784607
DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1411947