Overlapping and unique brain responses to cognitive and response inhibition.

Although cognitive inhibition and response inhibition fall under the umbrella term of inhibition, the question remains whether the two aspects of inhibition engage shared or distinct brain regions. The current study is one of the first to examine the neural underpinnings of cognitive inhibition (e.g. the Stroop incongruency effect) and response inhibition (e.g. "no-go" response) within a single task. Adult participants (n = 77) completed an adapted version of the Simon Task in a 3T MRI scanner. The results demonstrated that cognitive and response inhibition recruited a group of overlapping brain regions (inferior frontal cortex, inferior temporal lobe, precentral cortex, parietal cortex). However, a direct comparison of cognitive and response inhibition revealed that the two aspects of inhibition also engaged distinct, task-specific brain regions (voxel-wise FWE corrected p < 0.05). Cognitive inhibition was associated with increases in multiple brain regions within the prefrontal cortex. On the other hand, response inhibition was associated with increases in distinct regions of the prefrontal cortex, right superior parietal cortex, and inferior temporal lobe. Our findings advance the understanding of the brain basis of inhibition by suggesting that cognitive inhibition and response inhibition engage overlapping but distinct brain regions.

Practice makes imperfect: Working memory training can harm recognition memory performance.

There is a great deal of debate concerning the benefits of working memory (WM) training and whether that training can transfer to other tasks. Although a consistent finding is that WM training programs elicit a short-term near-transfer effect (i.e., improvement in WM skills), results are inconsistent when considering persistence of such improvement and far transfer effects. In this study, we compared three groups of participants: a group that received WM training, a group that received training on how to use a mental imagery memory strategy, and a control group that received no training. Although the WM training group improved on the trained task, their posttraining performance on nontrained WM tasks did not differ from that of the other two groups. In addition, although the imagery training group's performance on a recognition memory task increased after training, the WM training group's performance on the task decreased after training. Participants' descriptions of the strategies they used to remember the studied items indicated that WM training may lead people to adopt memory strategies that are less effective for other types of memory tasks. These results indicate that WM training may have unintended consequences for other types of memory performance.

Alternatives to switch-cost scoring in the task-switching paradigm: their reliability and increased validity.

In the task-switching paradigm, the latency switch-cost score-the difference in mean reaction time between switch and nonswitch trials-is the traditional measure of task-switching ability. However, this score does not reflect accuracy, where switch costs may also emerge. In two experiments that varied in response deadlines (unlimited vs. limited time), we evaluated the measurement properties of two traditional switch-cost scoring methods (the latency switch-cost score and the accuracy switch-cost score) and three alternatives (a rate residual score, a bin score, and an inverse efficiency score). Scores from the rate residual, bin score, and inverse efficiency methods had comparable reliability for latency switch-cost scores without response deadlines but were more reliable than latency switch-cost scores when higher error rates were induced with a response deadline. All three alternative scoring methods appropriately accounted for differences in accuracy switch costs when higher error rates were induced, whereas pure latency switch-cost scores did not. Critically, only the rate residual and bin score methods were more valid indicators of task-switching ability; they demonstrated stronger relationships with performance on an independent measure of executive functioning (the antisaccade analogue task), and they allowed the detection of larger effect sizes when examining within-task congruency effects. All of the three alternative scoring methods provide researchers with a better measure of task-switching ability than do traditional scoring methods, because they each simultaneously account for latency and accuracy costs. Overall, the three alternative scoring methods were all superior to the traditional latency switch-cost scoring method, but the strongest methods were the rate residual and bin score methods.

Routine hysterectomy in the surgical management of ovarian cancer: a retrospective case series, physician opinion survey, and review of the literature.

Current international guidelines recommend routine hysterectomy in the initial surgical management of epithelial ovarian cancer. However, there seems to be limited evidence to support these recommendations. We examined the data for a series of women undergoing hysterectomy as part of surgical management of ovarian cancer. Most of the women who underwent hysterectomy had no macroscopic uterine involvement in the ovarian cancer. However, almost half of them had macroscopic residual disease at completion of cytoreductive surgery. The incidence of synchronous primary endometrial cancers was 5%, and preoperative ultrasound had a sensitivity of 82% for predicting endometrial pathology. We also surveyed the members of the Australian Society of Gynaecological Oncologists (ASGO) regarding the role of hysterectomy in the management of ovarian cancer. Most of the respondents indicated that they believe hysterectomy should be routinely performed in the management of ovarian cancer but acknowledge that there is a lack of evidence to support the practice.

An App-Based Workplace Mindfulness Intervention, and Its Effects Over Time.

We investigated the week-to-week effects of a mindfulness intervention on emotional exhaustion, work engagement, and job satisfaction in a field study involving 218 participants who participated and reported their weekly outcomes during the 8-week program. To examine how mindfulness impacted work outcomes, we used intraindividual modeling of the 8-week data. Mindfulness increased over time, and time also had indirect effects on emotional exhaustion, work engagement, and job satisfaction, through mindfulness. Supplementary growth curve analyses on the improvement of mindfulness over time showed a slight decrease in the positive effect of time on mindfulness.

The role of maintenance and disengagement in predicting reading comprehension and vocabulary learning.

This study uses a novel framework based on work by Shipstead, Harrison, and Engle (2016) that includes measures of both working memory capacity and fluid intelligence in an attempt to better understand the processes that influence successful reading comprehension at the latent level. Further, we extend this framework to a second educationally relevant ability: second-language vocabulary learning. A large sample of young adults received a battery of working memory, fluid intelligence, language comprehension, and memory updating tasks. The results indicate that individual differences in reading comprehension and vocabulary learning benefit from the ability to maintain active information, as well as to disengage from no longer relevant information. Subsequently, we provide an interpretation of our results based on the maintenance and disengagement framework proposed by Shipstead et al. (2016). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Intraperitoneal chemotherapy for advanced epithelial ovarian malignancy: lessons learned.

BACKGROUND: The administration of intraperitoneal (IP) chemotherapy as first-line adjuvant treatment for women with optimally debulked advanced ovarian malignancy results in improved median and overall survival when compared with intravenous (IV) chemotherapy. However, the number of adverse events and toxicities are increased in patients treated with IP chemotherapy. In addition, the administration of IP chemotherapy is technically more challenging and the schedule is more demanding in terms of time and resources. AIMS: We report on our initial experience with the administration of IP chemotherapy at two gynaecological oncology units in Australia. METHODS: We collected retrospective data from a series of 23 women undergoing IP chemotherapy as adjuvant treatment for advanced ovarian cancer. In addition to standard (Common Terminology Criteria for Adverse Events v3.0, CTCAE) toxicity data, we collected technical data specific to the administration of IP chemotherapy. RESULTS: The average number of IP chemotherapy cycles received was 4.3. Forty-three per cent of patients received all six planned IP chemotherapy cycles. Thirty-nine per cent of patients discontinued their IP treatment. Of those, 22% were discontinued because of drug-related toxicities and the remaining 17% experienced a port complication or toxicity directly related to the route of administration. CONCLUSIONS: This study demonstrates the feasibility and practicality of and lessons learned from initial experiences with IP chemotherapy for ovarian cancer in Australia.

The cognitive underpinnings of mental model construction in L1 and L2.

This study investigates the ability to create mental models and the role of working memory in mental model ability in the first and second language with English-Spanish bilinguals using L1 and L2 versions of the Spatial Integration Task. Participants showed effects of continuity in accuracy in L1 and L2, but only in L1 did they show effects in the reading times. In L1, working memory capacity predicted identification accuracy for discontinuous descriptions in L1, as well as reading time for the critical discontinuous sentence. In L2, accuracy was predicted by L2 reading ability only and there were no significant predictors of reading times. The findings suggest that the lack of availability of working memory resources in L2 induces participants to rely primarily on verbal abilities to create mental models.

Cancer risk management in Tasmanian women with BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations.

Women carrying germline mutations in BRCA1 or BRCA2 have significantly increased lifetime risks of breast and tubo-ovarian cancer. To manage the breast cancer risk women may elect to have breast screening by MRI/mammogram from age 30, to take risk-reducing medication, or to have a prophylactic bilateral mastectomy. To manage the tubo-ovarian cancer risk, the only effective strategy is to have a bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy, recommended by age 40 (BRCA1) or 'around' age 40 (BRCA2). Early studies suggested that uptake of these cancer risk-reducing strategies was low. More recent studies have revealed higher rates of uptake, however it is unclear whether uptake is genuinely improving or whether the higher uptake rates reflect changes in the populations studied. In this study we surveyed 193 BRCA1/2 mutation carriers in the state of Tasmania to determine the uptake of cancer risk-reducing strategies and what factors might influence women's decisions in relation to both gynaecological and breast surgery. We observed that uptake of risk management strategies varied depending on the strength of the recommendation in the national guidelines. Uptake rates were > 90% for strategies which are strongly recommended, such as breast screening by MRI/mammogram and bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy, and were unaffected by demographic factors such as socio-economic disadvantage and educational achievement. Uptake rates were much lower for strategies which are presented in the guidelines as options for consideration and where patient choice and shared decision making are encouraged, such as prophylactic mastectomy (29%) and chemoprevention (1%) and in the case of prophylactic mastectomy, were influenced by both socio-economic advantage and educational achievement.

Proactive interference and item similarity in working memory.

Proactive interference (PI) may influence the predictive utility of working memory span tasks. Participants in one experiment (N=70) completed Ravens Advanced Progressive Matrices (RAPM) and multiple versions of operation span and probed recall, modified for the type of memoranda (digits or words). Changing memoranda within- or across-trials released PI, but not doing so permitted PI buildup. Scores from PI-build trials, but not PI-release trials, correlated with RAPM and accounted for as much variance in RAPM as unmodified tasks. These results are consistent with controlled attention and inhibition accounts of working memory, and they elucidate a fundamental component of working memory span tasks.

The role of processing difficulty in the predictive utility of working memory span.

Storage-plus-processing working memory span tasks (e.g., operation span [OSPAN]) are strong predictors of higher order cognition, including general fluid intelligence. This is due, in part, to the difficulty of the processing component. When the processing component prevents only articulatory rehearsal, but not executive attentional control, the predictive utility is attenuated. Participants in one experiment (N = 59) completed Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices (RAPM) and multiple versions of OSPAN and probed recall (PR). A distractor task (high or low difficulty) was added to PR, and OSPAN's processing component was manipulated for difficulty. OSPAN and PR correlated with RAPM when the processing component took executive attentional control. These results are suggestive of resource sharing between processing and storage.

Individual differences in susceptibility to false memory in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm.

The authors addressed whether individual differences in the working memory capacity (WMC) of young adults influence susceptibility to false memories for nonpresented critical words in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott associative list paradigm. The results of 2 experiments indicated that individuals with greater WMC recalled fewer critical words than individuals with reduced WMC when participants were forewarned about the tendency of associative lists (e.g., bed, rest, . . .) to elicit illusory memories for critical words (e.g., sleep). In contrast, both high and low WMC participants used repeated study-test trials to reduce recall of critical words. These findings suggest that individual differences in WMC influence cognitive control and the ability to actively maintain task goals in the face of interfering information or habit.

Working memory span tasks: A methodological review and user's guide.

Working memory (WM) span tasks-and in particular, counting span, operation span, and reading span tasks-are widely used measures of WM capacity. Despite their popularity, however, there has never been a comprehensive analysis of the merits of WM span tasks as measurement tools. Here, we review the genesis of these tasks and discuss how and why they came to be so influential. In so doing, we address the reliability and validity of the tasks, and we consider more technical aspects of the tasks, such as optimal administration and scoring procedures. Finally, we discuss statistical and methodological techniques that have commonly been used in conjunction with WM span tasks, such as latent variable analysis and extreme-groups designs.

Working memory and second language comprehension and production: a meta-analysis.

Although working memory (WM) figures centrally in many theories of second language (L2) proficiency development and processing, some have argued that the importance of WM is overstated (e.g., Juffs, Transactions of the Philological Society, 102, 199-225, 2004). Despite many studies over the past two decades, the literature lacks a quantitative synthesis of the extant results. In this article, we report a meta-analysis of data from 79 samples involving 3,707 participants providing 748 effect sizes. The results indicate that WM is positively associated with both L2 processing and proficiency outcomes, with an estimated population effect size (ρ) of .255. In additional analyses, we assessed whether the WM-criterion relationship was modulated by potential covariates identified in the literature search (i.e., participant characteristics, WM measure features, criterion measure factors, and publication status). The results of the covariate analyses indicated larger effect sizes for the executive control (vs. storage) component of WM, and for verbal (vs. nonverbal) measures of WM. Minimal publication bias was detected, suggesting that WM has a robust, positive relationship with L2 outcomes. We discuss the implications of these results for models of WM and theories of L2 processing and L2 proficiency development.

Measuring working memory is all fun and games: a four-dimensional spatial game predicts cognitive task performance.

We developed a novel four-dimensional spatial task called Shapebuilder and used it to predict performance on a wide variety of cognitive tasks. In six experiments, we illustrate that Shapebuilder: (1) Loads on a common factor with complex working memory (WM) span tasks and that it predicts performance on quantitative reasoning tasks and Ravens Progressive Matrices (Experiment 1), (2) Correlates well with traditional complex WM span tasks (Experiment 2), predicts performance on the conditional go/no go task (Experiment 3) and N-back (Experiment 4), and showed weak or nonsignificant correlations with the Attention Networks Task (Experiment 5), and task switching (Experiment 6). Shapebuilder shows that it exhibits minimal skew and kurtosis, and shows good reliability. We argue that Shapebuilder has many advantages over existing measures of WM, including the fact that it is largely language independent, is not prone to ceiling effects, and take less than 6 min to complete on average.

Cotyledonoid dissecting leiomyoma as a possible cause of chronic lower back pain.

Uterine fibroids having the distinct pathological and immunohistochemical features of cotyledonoid dissecting leiomyoma have been reported infrequently. We describe a postmenopausal woman with an incidental finding of an abdominopelvic mass arising from the uterine fundus on routine radiological imaging of the lumbar spine. The imaging was performed for the investigation of chronic radicular lower back pain refractory to usual pain management. However, the woman did not manifest any gynaecological symptoms. Intraoperatively, the pelvic mass appeared malignant and a frozen section suggested uterine sarcoma. As such, the mass was radically resected, resulting in significant resolution of the back pain. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first report of cotyledonoid dissecting leiomyoma presenting solely as chronic lower back pain, and also the first report of this fibroid variant in Australasia. We discuss the diagnostic and operative challenges, emphasising the role of radiological imaging and immunohistopathology in such cases and review current literature.

An oscillatory Hebbian network model of short-term memory.

Recurrent neural architectures having oscillatory dynamics use rhythmic network activity to represent patterns stored in short-term memory. Multiple stored patterns can be retained in memory over the same neural substrate because the network's state persistently switches between them. Here we present a simple oscillatory memory that extends the dynamic threshold approach of Horn and Usher (1991) by including weight decay. The modified model is able to match behavioral data from human subjects performing a running memory span task simply by assuming appropriate weight decay rates. The results suggest that simple oscillatory memories incorporating weight decay capture at least some key properties of human short-term memory. We examine the implications of the results for theories about the relative role of interference and decay in forgetting, and hypothesize that adjustments of activity decay rate may be an important aspect of human attentional mechanisms.

The deployment of attention in short-term memory tasks: trade-offs between immediate and delayed deployment.

Memory at times depends on attention, as when attention is used to encode incoming, serial verbal information. When encoding and rehearsal are difficult or when attention is divided during list presentation, more attention is needed in the time following the presentation and just preceding the response. Across 12 experimental conditions observed in several experiments, we demonstrated this by introducing a nonverbal task with three levels of effort (no task, a natural nonverbal task, or an unnatural version of the task) during a brief retention interval in a short-term digit recall task. Interference from the task during the retention interval was greater when resources were drawn away from the encoding of the stimuli by other factors, including unpredictability of the end point of the list, rapid presentation, and a secondary task during list presentation. When those conditions complicate encoding of the list, we argue, attention is needed after the list so that the contents of passive memory (i.e., postcategorical phonological storage and/or precategorical sensory memory) may be retrieved and become the focus of attention for recall.

How does running memory span work?

In running memory span, a list ends unpredictably, and the last few items are to be recalled. This task is of increasing importance in recent research. We argue that there are two very different strategies for performing running span tasks: a low-effort strategy in which items are passively held until the list ends, when retrieval into a capacity-limited store takes place; and a higher-effort strategy in which working memory is continually updated using rehearsal processes during the list presentation. In two experiments, we examine the roles of these two strategies and the consequences of two types of interference.

Working memory and flexibility in awareness and attention.

We argue that attention and awareness form the basis of one type of working-memory storage. In contrast to models of working memory in which storage and retrieval occur effortlessly, we document that an attention-demanding goal conflict within a retrieval cue impairs recall from working memory. In a conceptual span task, semantic and color-name cues prompted recall of four consecutive words from a twelve-word list. The first-four, middle-four, and final-four words belonged to different semantic categories (e.g., body parts, animals, and tools) and were shown in different colors (e.g., red, blue, and green). In Experiment 1, the color of the cue matched that of cued items 75% of the time, and the rare mismatch impaired recall. In Experiment 2, though, the color of the cue matched that of the cued items only 25% of the time, and the now-more-frequent mismatches no longer mattered. These results are difficult to explain with passive storage alone and indicate that a processing difficulty impedes recall from working memory, presumably by distracting attention away from its storage function.