Luria's fist-edge-palm test: A small change makes a big difference.

Slight modifications in the instructions or administration of neuropsychological tests could result in noticeable differences in performance. A good example is offered by a test devised by Luria to assess executive functioning in motor planning, the three-step fist-edge-palm (FEP) test, which is still frequently employed in clinical settings and features in several neuropsychological test batteries such as the Frontal Assessment Battery (FAB). While Luria described the orientation of the fist as horizontal to the testing desk (hFEP), recent versions of the task indicate the fist should be vertical to the testing desk (vFEP). The current study examined whether administering the hFEP or the vFEP tests results in different performance in healthy people, and whether one version is better than the other at detecting impairments in a patient population. The hFEP proved more challenging for healthy adults than the vFEP, and people with brain damage committed more errors on the hFEP than the vFEP. Both versions correlated with executive measures but also with several other cognitive variables, indicating that the test is not a specific marker of executive functions. Although performance on the FEP is sensitive to articulatory suppression, faster pace, and the number of sequences performed, none of these conditions fully account for the differences between the hFEP and vFEP. The additional demand of the hFEP appears to be due to the less natural (i.e., automatic) orientation of the horizontal fist. In conclusion, a small change in the administration of the test, eluding Luria's instructions, grossly modified its sensitivity. Clinicians and researchers should be wary of modifying instructions or testing procedures without considering the possible consequences of such modifications.

The time course of planar and non-planar rotations in a letter rotation task.

Mental rotation (MR) of character letters requires participants to mentally rotate the letter in their minds' eyes through a process akin to the physical rotation of the stimulus. It has been suggested that different cognitive processes are engaged during such MR of both canonical and mirror-reversed letters. In addition to the planar rotation of the canonical letters, an additional "flip-over" process (non-planar rotation) has been assumed during the MR of mirror-reversed letters. However, the temporal relationship between planar and non-planar rotation has not been systematically investigated. In this study, the occurrence of both planar and non-planar rotations were examined through the analysis of the event-related brain potentials (ERPs) elicited by canonical or mirror-reversed letters presented at different rotation angles between 300 and 1000 ms post-stimulus onset over consecutive 50ms time-windows. For smaller rotation angles (30° and 60°), non-planar rotation preceded planar rotation. For letters rotated by 90°, planar and non-planar rotation occurred at the same time. For larger angles (120° and 150°), the letter was first rotated within the plane (planar rotation) and afterwards it was also rotated out-of-the-plane (non-planar rotation) until it was fully canonicalized. Thus, the temporal relationship between planar and non-planar rotation differed for each rotation angle, with the non-planar rotation occurring at increasingly later intervals for different points in time for progressively larger rotation angles. These findings have relevant methodological implications for studies investigating the psychophysiological correlates of the mental rotation of mirror letters.

Forgetting Rates of Prose Memory in Mild Cognitive Impairment.

BACKGROUND: Some authors report steeper slopes of forgetting in early Alzheimer's disease (AD), while others do not. Contrasting findings are thought to be due to methodological inconsistencies or variety of testing methods, yet they also emerge when people are assessed on the same testing procedure. OBJECTIVE: We aimed to assess if forgetting slopes of people with mild cognitive impairment due to AD (MCI-AD) are different from age-matched healthy controls (HC) by using a prose paradigm. METHODS: Twenty-nine people with MCI-AD and twenty-six HC listened to a short prose passage and were asked to freely recall it after delays of 1 h and 24 h. RESULTS: Generalized linear mixed modelling revealed that, compared to HC, people with MCI-AD showed poorer encoding at immediate recall and steeper forgetting up to 1 h in prose memory as assessed by free recall and with repeated testing of the same material. Forgetting rates between groups did not differ from 1 h to 24 h. CONCLUSION: The differences observed in MCI-AD could be due to a post-encoding deficit. These findings could be accounted either by a differential benefit from retrieval practice, whereby people with MCI-AD benefit less than HC, or by a working memory deficit in people with MCI-AD, which fails to support their memory performance from immediate recall to 1 h.

Locations of objects are better remembered than their identities in naturalistic scenes: An eye-tracking experiment in mild cognitive impairment.

OBJECTIVE: Retaining the identity or location of decontextualized objects in visual short-term working memory (VWM) is impaired by healthy and pathological ageing, but research remains inconclusive on whether these two features are equally impacted by it. Moreover, it is unclear whether similar impairments would manifest in naturalistic visual contexts. METHOD: 30 people with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and 32 age-matched control participants (CPs) were eye-tracked within a change detection paradigm. They viewed 120 naturalistic scenes, and after a retention interval (1 s) asked whether a critical object in the scene had (or not) changed on either: identity (became a different object), location (same object but changed location), or both (changed in location and identity). RESULTS: MCIs performed worse than CP but there was no interaction with the type of change. Changes in both were easiest while changes in identity alone were hardest. The latency to first fixation and first-pass duration to the critical object during successful recognition was not different between MCIs and CPs. Objects that changed in both features took longer to be fixated for the first time but required a shorter first pass compared to changes in identity alone which displayed the opposite pattern. CONCLUSIONS: Locations of objects are better remembered than their identities; memory for changes is best when involving both features. These mechanisms are spared by pathological ageing as indicated by the similarity between groups besides trivial differences in overall performance. These findings demonstrate that VWM mechanisms in the context of naturalistic scene information are preserved in people with MCI. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Long-term memory for spatial frequency: a non-replication.

Reports on stability of spatial frequency in short-term memory span have confirmed low-level perceptual memory mechanism in early visual processing. However, some studies have also claimed evidence for high-fidelity perceptual long-term storage of spatial frequency. We report an attempted replication of Magnussen et al. (Psychol Sci 14:74-76, 2003) where participants were asked to discriminate the spatial frequency of a reference grating from a test stimulus after intervals of 5 s or 24 h. Group thresholds after 24 h were significantly higher than after 5 s, therefore failing to support long-term storage of spatial frequency.

Long-term learning and forgetting of feature binding in verbal free recall.

Temporary feature bindings can be learned under specific experimental conditions. However, how this learning occurs and how it is forgotten over long intervals is unclear. We addressed this question with repeated presentation of an array of coloured shapes followed by verbal free recall after delays of 1 day, 1 week, and 1 month. A total of 120 participants viewed 24 repetitions of the same study array of six objects each with two features (shape and colour). After 24 trials, 61 participants reported becoming aware of the repetition while 59 reported being unaware. Memory performance improved across trials, with aware participants showing faster learning than unaware participants whose performance appeared to reflect the capacity of short-term visual memory across all repetitions. Both aware and unaware participants recalled some of the array after their allocated delay, showing that learning had occurred during repetition trials, even for unaware participants who showed little or no improvement across 24 repetition trials. Memory for binding showed no change after 1 day compared with performance on the 24th repetition trial, was significantly lower for participants tested after 1 week, and was lower still for those tested after 1 month. Findings are interpreted as consistent with both a short-term, limited capacity visual cache that supports performance during early repetition trials, before learning can have occurred, and gradual strengthening across trials of an episodic long-term memory trace that supports learning. If the episodic trace exceeds the threshold of awareness, this accelerates learning.

Short-term memory conjunctive binding in Alzheimer's disease: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

OBJECTIVE: Short-term memory (STM) binding tests assess the ability to temporarily hold conjunctions between surface features, such as objects and their colors (i.e., feature binding condition), relative to the ability to hold the individual features (i.e., single feature condition). Impairments in performance of these tests have been considered cognitive markers of Alzheimer's disease (AD). The objective of the present study was to conduct a meta-analysis of results from STM binding tests used in the assessment of samples mapped along the AD clinical continuum. METHOD: We searched PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science for articles that assessed patients with AD (from preclinical to dementia) using the STM binding tests and compared their results with those of controls. From each relevant article, we extracted the number of participants, the mean and standard deviations from single feature and of feature binding conditions. Results across studies were combined using standardized mean differences (effect sizes) to produce overall estimates of effect. RESULTS: The feature binding condition of the STM binding showed large effects in all stages of AD. However, small sample sizes across studies, the presence of moderate to high heterogeneity and cross-sectional, case-controls designs decreased our confidence in the current evidence. CONCLUSIONS: To be considered as a cognitive marker for AD, properly powered longitudinal designs and studies that clearly relate conjunctive memory tests with biomarkers (amyloid and tau) are still needed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Forgetting rates of gist and peripheral episodic details in prose recall.

In a seminal study, Slamecka and McElree showed that the degree of initial learning of verbal material affected the intercepts but not the slopes of forgetting curves. However, more recent work has reported that memories for central events (gist) and memory for secondary details (peripheral) were forgotten at different rates over periods of days, with gist memory retained more consistently over time than details. The present experiments aimed to investigate whether qualitatively different types of memory scoring (gist vs. peripheral) are forgotten at different rates in prose recall. In three experiments, 232 participants listened to two prose narratives and were subsequently asked to freely recall the stories. In the first two experiments participants were tested repeatedly after days and a month, while in the third experiment they were tested only after a month to control for repeated retrieval. Memory for gist was higher than for peripheral details, which were forgotten at a faster rate over a month, with or without the presence of intermediate recall. Moreover, repeated retrieval had a significant benefit on both memory for gist and peripheral details. We conclude that the different nature of gist and peripheral details leads to a differential forgetting in prose free recall, while repeated retrieval does not have a differential effect on the retention of these different episodic details.

Skill and self-knowledge: empirical refutation of the dual-burden account of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

For many intellectual tasks, the people with the least skill overestimate themselves the most, a pattern popularly known as the Dunning-Kruger effect (DKE). The dominant account of this effect depends on the idea that assessing the quality of one's performance (metacognition) requires the same mental resources as task performance itself (cognition). Unskilled people are said to suffer a dual burden: they lack the cognitive resources to perform well, and this deprives them of metacognitive insight into their failings. In this Registered Report, we applied recently developed methods for the measurement of metacognition to a matrix reasoning task, to test the dual-burden account. Metacognitive sensitivity (information exploited by metacognition) tracked performance closely, so less information was exploited by the metacognitive judgements of poor performers; but metacognitive efficiency (quality of metacognitive processing itself) was unrelated to performance. Metacognitive bias (overall tendency towards high or low confidence) was positively associated with performance, so poor performers were appropriately less confident-not more confident-than good performers. Crucially, these metacognitive factors did not cause the DKE pattern, which was driven overwhelmingly by performance scores. These results refute the dual-burden account and suggest that the classic DKE is a statistical regression artefact that tells us nothing much about metacognition.

Righteous Adam, Sinister Eve.

The symbolism of laterality in images implies that the virtuous figure is represented on the right of the scene whereas the sinful character is depicted on the left. In portraits of male and female characters this has reflected and reinforced stereotypes and inequalities down the ages. Given these premises, we hypothesized that the prototypical representations of Adam and Eve, as a man and a woman conflated with notions of virtue and vice, would show a non-random arrangement. We tested this hypothesis, sampling artistic depictions of the Garden of Eden, from the twelth century to the present day in three separately-collected series of 100, 99, and 142 images respectively. Eve is depicted to Adam's left significantly more often than chance (between 70% and 83%), particularly in pre-1600 artworks. We interpret this asymmetry as reflecting the perceived lesser status of women in relation to men, since the allegorical incipit of humankind. We also provide experimental evidence that this asymmetry, although pervasive, has not been internalized by modern viewers. Cognitive sciences account for this spatial asymmetry in terms of preference for figures placed within the left visual field of the observer, i.e., within the right space of the objective scene.

Memory markers in the continuum of the Alzheimer's clinical syndrome.

BACKGROUND: The individual and complementary value of the Visual Short-Term Memory Binding Test (VSTMBT) and the Free and Cued Selective Reminding Test (FCSRT) as markers to trace the AD continuum was investigated. It was hypothesised that the VSTMBT would be an early indicator while the FCSRT would inform on imminent progression. METHODS: Healthy older adults (n=70) and patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) (n=80) were recruited and followed up between 2012 and 2017. Participants with at least two assessment points entered the study. Using baseline and follow-up assessments four groups were defined: Older adults who were healthy (HOA), with very mild cognitive but not functional impairment (eMCI), and with MCI who did and did not convert to dementia (MCI converters and non-converters). RESULTS: Only the VSTMBT predicted group membership in the very early stages (HOA vs eMCI). As the disease progressed, the FCSRT became a strong predictor excluding the VSTMB from the models. Their complementary value was high during the mid-prodromal stages and decreased in stages closer to dementia. DISCUSSION: The study supports the notion that neuropsychological assessment for AD needs to abandon the notion of one-size-fits-all. A memory toolkit for AD needs to consider tools that are early indicators and tools that suggest imminent progression. The VSTMBT and the FSCRT are such tools.

Similar mechanisms of temporary bindings for identity and location of objects in healthy ageing: an eye-tracking study with naturalistic scenes.

The ability to maintain visual working memory (VWM) associations about the identity and location of objects has at times been found to decrease with age. To date, however, this age-related difficulty was mostly observed in artificial visual contexts (e.g., object arrays), and so it is unclear whether it may manifest in naturalistic contexts, and in which ways. In this eye-tracking study, 26 younger and 24 healthy older adults were asked to detect changes in a critical object situated in a photographic scene (192 in total), about its identity (the object becomes a different object but maintains the same position), location (the object only changes position) or both (the object changes in location and identity). Aging was associated with a lower change detection performance. A change in identity was harder to detect than a location change, and performance was best when both features changed, especially in younger adults. Eye movements displayed minor differences between age groups (e.g., shorter saccades in older adults) but were similarly modulated by the type of change. Latencies to the first fixation were longer and the amplitude of incoming saccades was larger when the critical object changed in location. Once fixated, the target object was inspected for longer when it only changed in identity compared to location. Visually salient objects were fixated earlier, but saliency did not affect any other eye movement measures considered, nor did it interact with the type of change. Our findings suggest that even though aging results in lower performance, it does not selectively disrupt temporary bindings of object identity, location, or their association in VWM, and highlight the importance of using naturalistic contexts to discriminate the cognitive processes that undergo detriment from those that are instead spared by aging.