Hope for brain health: impacting the life course and society.

Hope is a cognitive process by which an individual can identify their personal goals and develop actionable steps to achieve results. It has the potential to positively impact people's lives by building resilience, and can be meaningfully experienced at both the individual and group level. Despite this significance, there are sizable gaps in our understanding of the neurobiology of hope. In this perspective paper, the authors discuss why further research is needed on hope and its potency to be harnessed in society as a "tool" to promote brain health across healthy and patient populations. Avenues for future research in hope and the brain are proposed. The authors conclude by identifying strategies for the possible applications of hope in brain health promotion within the areas of technology, arts, media, and education.

Predicting Risky Decision Making (Odds Selection) in Regular Soccer Gamblers from Nigeria using Cognitive Tasks Combined with Non-Cognitive Measures.

As real time soccer gambling is becoming a game of choice for many Nigerian youths, there is need to examine some predictive factors that could account for risky decision making in the population. We combined some cognitive tasks (memory, concentration, executive function and problem solving) and non-cognitive measures (time taken to complete a bet, years of gambling and addiction tendency measures) to derive a more parsimonious model of predicting risky decision making in this population. Twenty-eight undergraduate students that endorsed regular involvement (at least once a week) in soccer betting and were willing to come to the psychology lab for testing were recruited. Four neuropsychological measures (Craft Story 21: Immediate and delayed, Number Span Test: Forward and backward, Trail Making Test: A&B, Tower of Hannoi and a gambling questionnaire (Gamblers Anonymous Questionnaire) were used for the study. Study design was correlational and linear regression (step wise method) was used for data analysis. Step wise regression statistics yielded nine possible model combinations with high predictive strengths. Overall, model 9 (with adjusted R2 = 0.57) that has 6 measures including one from non-cognitive and 5 from cognitive measures was adjudged to be most parsimonious putting into consideration its predictive strength and number of tasks required. The tasks in our most parsimonious model were: time taken to complete a bet (non-cognitive), Craft Story 21: immediate (cognitive: memory), Number Span Forward: Total correct and longest correct (cognitive: concentration), Trail Making Test: B (cognitive: executive function) and Tower of Hannoi: Time taken to complete (cognitive: problem solving). Pearson product moment correlation between the predictor variables and the dependent variable (number of odds selected) showed inverse correlation of Craft Story Immediate, Number Span total correct and Number span longest correct suggesting strong divergence of these variables to odd selection. Time taken to complete bet, Trail Making Test: B and time taken to complete Tower of Hannoi respectively had positive correlations with number of odds selected. Our results suggest that multiple domains of cognitive abilities and time taken to complete a bet are important for predicting gamblers at risk for poor decision making. It further suggests that use of single task for a particular cognitive domain could be sufficient in predicting persons at risk for decision making. Overall, our study suggests that risky decision making in real time sports betting could be predicted using fewer neuropsychological tasks measuring wider domains of brain behaviour and a non-cognitive measure.

Daily Training efficiency during computerized cognitive rehabilitation training (CCRT): an analysis from a randomized trial in Ugandan children with and without severe malaria.

Children in Uganda are at risk for significant cognitive sequelae from severe malaria. Computerized cognitive rehabilitation training (CCRT) represents a potential method to improve working memory, behavior, and executive functioning, cognitive domains most at risk following severe malaria. The primary aim of this study was to complete a secondary analysis of data from a concluded CCRT randomized control trial in order to compare the training efficiency of a commonly used CCRT program under conditions of titrated (adaptive) or non-titrated (non-adaptive) training and with children with increasing malaria severity to determine how various factors may affect potential CCRT improvement. A total of 201 school-aged children (66.2% boys) who were either healthy (n = 102) or previously diagnosed with severe or cerebral malaria (n = 99) were randomized into two active treatment arms (titrated and non-titrated learning). Each child received 24 one-hour sessions of training over 8 weeks using Captain's Log® CCRT by BrainTrain, which includes a comprehensive set of CCRT tasks. Children generally benefited from CCRT over the 24 training sessions, but titrated CCRT showed a clear advantage over non-titrated. Severity of illness or factors such as BMI, did not moderate CCRT performance indicators. These findings support our hypothesis that titrated CCRT would result in steeper improvement in learning, but do not support our hypothesis that history of recent significant illness would affect learning proficiency. Findings were evident across all CCRT performance scores, even given that children were from generally rural, low-resource settings and were generally unfamiliar with computers.ABBREVIATIONS:Computerized Cognitive Rehabilitation Training (CCRT); Mental Processing Index (MPI); Home Observation for the Measurement of the Environment (HOME); Socioeconomic Status (SES); least square means (LSM).

Attention Test Improvements from a Cluster Randomized Controlled Trial of Caregiver Training for HIV-Exposed/Uninfected Ugandan Preschool Children.

OBJECTIVE: To report vigilance attention outcomes from a cluster randomized controlled trial of early childhood development caregiver training for perinatally HIV-exposed/uninfected preschool-age children in rural Uganda. The Early Childhood Vigilance Test (ECVT) provides a webcam recording of proportion of time a child views an animation periodically moving across a computer screen. STUDY DESIGN: Sixty mothers/caregivers received biweekly year-long training sessions of the Mediational Intervention for Sensitizing Caregivers (MISC), and 59 mothers received biweekly training about nutrition, hygiene, and health care. Children were tested for attention at baseline, 6 months, and 12 months with the ECVT, in terms of proportion of time spent viewing a 6-minute animation of animals greeting the child and moving across the computer monitor screen. Time viewing the animation were scored by trained observers using ProCoder program for webcam scoring of proportion of time the child faced the animation. Mixed-effects modeling was used to compare ECVT outcomes for the 2 intervention groups. RESULTS: Unadjusted and adjusted (for age, sex, height, and ECVT at baseline) group differences on ECVT significantly favored the MISC arm at 6 months (P = .03; 95% CI (0.01, 0.11), effect size = 0.46) but not at 12 months. Both groups made significant gains in sustained attention across the year-long intervention (P = .021) with no significant interaction effects between time and treatment arms or sex. CONCLUSIONS: Caregiver early childhood development training enhanced attention in at-risk Ugandan children, which can be foundational to improved working memory and learning, and perhaps related to previous language benefits reported for this cohort. TRIAL REGISTRATION: Clinicaltrials.gov: NCT00889395.

Some Neuropsychological Profiles and Personality Traits of Undergraduate Regular Online Football Gamblers (a New Online Gambling Game) in Nigeria.

Online football (soccer) gambling is among the relatively new sports betting games in Nigeria that use internet connections. Like other gambling games, some psychological profiles either propel or sustain the behavior. We tested some neuropsychological profiles and personality traits that distinguish the regular online football gamblers from non-gamblers. Using a between group design, we tested 140 (60: online football gamblers; 80: non-gamblers) university undergraduate students between the ages of 18-26 years on specific neuropsychological domains (i.e., attention, inhibition and executive function) and personality traits. The neuropsychological tasks used were the Series Addition Task (a modified version of Paced Auditory Serial Addition Task), Stroop-Word Color Test and Trail Making Test (TMT), Parts A and B. The personality traits were assessed using the Big Five Personality Inventory. The findings showed significant differences between the online football gamblers and non-gamblers, reflecting greater agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness to experience for the football gamblers. However, on the attention tasks, the non-gamblers made significantly fewer errors on forward addition and backward subtraction tasks, but did take more time to complete the backward counting task as compared to gamblers. On the other hand, online football gamblers took significantly less time to complete the Stroop congruence task and made significantly fewer errors on Stroop incongruence task. Similarly, the online football gamblers took less time to complete the TMT B and made fewer errors on TMT A. University undergraduate regular online football gamblers, as compared to non-gamblers, demonstrate stronger personality traits of ambition and gregariousness, and perform better on tasks of executive function, though they had more difficulty on tasks of divided and sustained attention.