Complex visual discrimination is impaired after right, but not left, anterior temporal lobectomy.

The prevailing view in human cognitive neuroscience associates the medial temporal lobes (MTLs) with declarative memory. Compelling experimental evidence has, however, demonstrated that these regions are specialized according to the representations processed, irrespective of the cognitive domain assessed. This account was supported by the study of patients with bilateral medial temporal amnesia, who exhibit impairments in perceptual tasks involving complex visual stimuli. Yet, little is known regarding the impact of unilateral MTL damage on complex visual abilities. To address this issue, we administered a visual matching task to 20 patients who underwent left (N = 12) or right (N = 8) anterior temporal lobectomy for drug-resistant epilepsy and to 38 healthy controls. Presentation viewpoint was manipulated to increase feature ambiguity, as this is critical to reveal impairments in perceptual tasks. Similar to control participants, patients with left-sided damage succeeded in all task conditions. In contrast, patients with right-sided damage had decreased accuracy compared with that of the other two groups, as well as increased response time. Notably, the accuracy of those with right-sided damage did not exceed chance level when feature ambiguity was high (i.e., when stimuli were presented from different viewpoints) for the most complex classes of stimuli (i.e., scenes and buildings, compared with single objects). The pattern reported in bilateral patients in previous studies was therefore reproduced in patients with right, but not left, resection. These results suggest that the complex visual-representation functions supported by the MTL are right-lateralized, and raise the question as to how the representational account of these regions applies to representations supported by left MTL regions.

Word and Face Recognition Processing Based on Response Times and Ex-Gaussian Components.

The face is a fundamental feature of our identity. In humans, the existence of specialized processing modules for faces is now widely accepted. However, identifying the processes involved for proper names is more problematic. The aim of the present study is to examine which of the two treatments is produced earlier and whether the social abilities are influent. We selected 100 university students divided into two groups: Spanish and USA students. They had to recognize famous faces or names by using a masked priming task. An analysis of variance about the reaction times (RT) was used to determine whether significant differences could be observed in word or face recognition and between the Spanish or USA group. Additionally, and to examine the role of outliers, the Gaussian distribution has been modified exponentially. Famous faces were recognized faster than names, and differences were observed between Spanish and North American participants, but not for unknown distracting faces. The current results suggest that response times to face processing might be faster than name recognition, which supports the idea of differences in processing nature.

Impact of emotionally negative information on attentional processes in normal aging and Alzheimer's disease.

Impairments of emotional processing have been reported in Alzheimer's disease (AD), consistently with the existence of early amygdala atrophy in the pathology. In this study, we hypothesized that patients with AD might show a deficit of orientation toward emotional information under conditions of visual search. Eighteen patients with AD, 24 age-matched controls, and 35 young controls were eye-tracked while they performed a visual search task on a computer screen. The target was a vehicle with implicit (negative or neutral) emotional content, presented concurrently with one, three, or five non-vehicle neutral distractors. The task was to find the target and to report whether a break in the target frame was on the left or on the right side. Both control groups detected negative targets more efficiently than they detected neutral targets, showing facilitated engagement toward negative information. In contrast, patients with AD showed no influence of emotional information on engagement delays. However, all groups reported the frame break location more slowly for negative than for neutral targets (after accounting for the last fixation delay), showing a more difficult disengagement from negative information. These findings are the first to highlight a selective lack of emotional influence on engagement processes in patients with AD. The involvement of amygdala alterations in this behavioral impairment remains to be investigated.

Effect of Emotion and Type of Encoding on Memory for Actions: Verbal and Subject-Performed Tasks.

BACKGROUND: The present study examines whether the interaction between emotion and the enactment effect (body involvement) improves memory in people with Alzheimer disease (AD). METHODS: Two experiments with drawings of actions were conducted, in which two types of encoding were used: motor and verbal. In experiment 1, with 13 AD patients and 13 older healthy adults, the encoding was incidental. In experiment 2, with 17 mild AD patients and 21 older healthy adults, it was intentional. RESULTS: In experiment 1, no effect of enactment or emotion was observed in the AD patients. In experiment 2, effects of enactment and emotion (better recall for negative actions) were observed in the AD patients. This pattern of results was also observed in the elderly control adults in both experiments. CONCLUSION: These results confirm effects observed in normal ageing and indicate a more subtle effect on AD.

Retrieving autobiographical experience of painful events in a phantom limb: brain concomitants in a case report.

We report the case of a patient who had an important experience with painful events, allowing the investigation of brain concomitants to painful (P) memories in fMRI. The patient had to recall P events that were contrasted with non-painful (NP) memories. Painful memories of the right lower limb activated the left paracentral lobule,fronto-insular operculum and superior parietal cortex. Additionally, whilst the recall of non-painful events activated the hippocampus, the recall of painful events did not enhance the hippocampal signal to significant levels. These suggest that brain activations differ for the autobiographical recall of painful and non-painful memories.

Attentional focus on subjective interoceptive experience in patients with fibromyalgia.

OBJECTIVES: The hypervigilance model of pain perception states that patients with fibromyalgia (FM) have an enhanced sensitivity to aversive and non-aversive stimuli. Few studies have focused on enhanced interoceptive sensitivity in FM. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to investigate spontaneous sensations (SPS) in FM. DESIGN: SPS are those tingling, tickly and other kind of sensations usually perceived on the skin during periods of rest and without any external trigger. Therefore, we have investigated SPS by requiring participants to focus attention on each hand. METHODS: Eighteen patients with a diagnosis of FM and 18 matched healthy participants had to direct their gaze toward the hand tested for a period of 10s. Subsequently, they had to map and report the intensity, the number and the qualitative properties of sensations arising spontaneously. Finally, participants had to fill out questionnaires assessing cognitive and affective status that may influence the interoceptive sensations feedback. RESULTS: Patients with FM perceived SPS as significantly more intense than controls did. Additionally, SPS were perceived by the FM group as occupying an overall larger area on the hand than those reported by controls. Importantly, entering scores of pain and catastrophism as covariates produced a relative effect on the feeling of SPS. CONCLUSIONS: The outcome of this study supports the generalized hypervigilance model, suggesting that patients with FM have a perceptual style of amplification of non-aversive interoceptive stimulation, modulated by pain and catastrophizing. This is discussed in relationship to interoceptive awareness.

Emergence of hyper empathy after right amygdalohippocampectomy.

We report a fascinating case of a patient with a hyper empathy that appeared after resective epilepsy surgery. This behavioral modification has remained unchanged since the surgery took place 13 years ago. Recent neuropsychological objective assessments confirmed hyper empathy in a self-report questionnaire, and revealed higher affective theory of mind than controls in a "Reading the Mind in the Eyes Task." Temporal lobe epilepsy is the most common form of epilepsy and the investigation of emotional processes after surgery in these patients deserves to be related.

Decision-making and ageing: everyday life situations under risk and under ambiguity.

Cognitive modifications during ageing can affect decision-making competence (DMC). As this ability is central to the preservation of autonomy, our study aims to investigate how it changes in elderly adults and to determine whether such changes are linked to the deterioration of executive functions and working memory. To this end, 50 young adults and 50 elderly adults were assessed with executive, working memory, and DMC tasks. The latter comprised the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) and a scenario task based on situations inspired by everyday life, under conditions of both risk and ambiguity. The results revealed lower performances in old than in young adults for the updating, inhibition, and working memory tasks. The IGT failed to distinguish between the two age groups. However, the scenario task did permit such a distinction, with young adults seeking more risky and ambiguous choices than elderly adults. Moreover, updating and inhibition capacities appeared to influence DMC.

Impaired emotional processing in a patient with a left posterior insula-SII lesion.

The present case-report investigated the influence of a lesion in the left posterior insula-SII cortices on the processing of emotions. MB and 16 normal controls explicitly rated the valence and the intensity of both facial expressions and emotional words. In addition, they had to perform a number comparison task and a lexical decision task without focusing their attention on emotional components of stimuli. MB identified the valence of emotional words as well as the control group. Nevertheless, she provided higher intensity scores for disgusted words and her responses in the lexical decision task were significantly delayed for these stimuli. In addition, MB's response times were not differently influenced by the presence of irrelevant emotional faces. However, she explicitly identified fewer facial expressions of disgust and she assessed them as significantly less intense. This pattern of results contributes to highlight the psychological and behavioral disorders observed after a left posterior insular stroke.

Fear recognition impairment in early-stage Alzheimer's disease: when focusing on the eyes region improves performance.

A decline in the ability to identify fearful expression has been frequently reported in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD). In patients with severe destruction of the bilateral amygdala, similar difficulties have been reduced by using an explicit visual exploration strategy focusing on gaze. The current study assessed the possibility of applying a similar strategy in AD patients to improve fear recognition. It also assessed the possibility of improving fear recognition when a visual exploration strategy induced AD patients to process the eyes region. Seventeen patients with mild AD and 34 healthy subjects (17 young adults and 17 older adults) performed a classical task of emotional identification of faces expressing happiness, anger, and fear in two conditions: The face appeared progressively from the eyes region to the periphery (eyes region condition) or it appeared as a whole (global condition). Specific impairment in identifying a fearful expression was shown in AD patients compared with older adult controls during the global condition. Fear expression recognition was significantly improved in AD patients during the eyes region condition, in which they performed similarly to older adult controls. Our results suggest that using a different strategy of face exploration, starting first with processing of the eyes region, may compensate for a fear recognition deficit in AD patients. Findings suggest that a part of this deficit could be related to visuo-perceptual impairments. Additionally, these findings suggest that the decline of fearful face recognition reported in both normal aging and in AD may result from impairment of non-amygdalar processing in both groups and impairment of amygdalar-dependent processing in AD.

Normative Data for a Neuropsychological Test Battery in the French Aging Population: 20-Year Follow-Up From the "PROgnostic OF Cardiovascular and Cerebrovascular Events" Study.

OBJECTIVE: The study aimed to present relevant norms for the evaluation of pathological aging in the French population over a 20-year period, utilizing the "PROgnostic OF cardiovascular and cerebrovascular events" test and questionnaire. METHODS: Three neuropsychological evaluations were administered over 20 years with 929 participants at the first cognitive evaluation (62-69 years old), 631 at the second (71-78 years old), and 293 at the third (81-88 years old). The tests and questionnaires were administered in the following order: McNair's Cognitive Complaints Questionnaire, Depression Questionnaire of Pichot, Mini Mental State Examination, Free and Cued Selective Reminding test, Benton Visual Retention Test, Digit-Symbol Substitution Test of the WAIS-III, Trail Making Test, Stroop Test, Verbal Fluency, and the Similarities subtest of the WAIS-III. RESULTS: Normative data were presented at three time points of the repeated evaluation over 20 years (62-69 years, 71-78 years, and 81-88 years) and four educational levels (no diploma, primary school certificate, certificate of professional aptitude, and baccalaureate and above). The data showed a significant effect of educational level in all neuropsychological tests regardless of age. Gender primarily affected memory, Stroop scores, and Similarities scores. CONCLUSION: This study highlights the importance of educational level and gender in the evaluation of the memory and executive function of elderly persons. Furthermore, the presented norms consider the self-report cognitive complaints and depression symptoms over a long period of life.

Perceived eye region and the processing of fearful expressions in mild cognitive impairment patients.

BACKGROUND: The aim of the present study was to assess the possibility of compensating early facial expression recognition impairments in amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment (a-MCI) patients. METHODS: Twelve patients with a-MCI and 17 healthy participants matched according to age and education participated in the study. The originality of the present study was to cue the recognition of facial expressions (happiness, anger, fear, and neutral) by comparing eye region expressions and entire facial expressions. RESULTS: A deficit in the recognition of fearful expressions was observed in a-MCI patients relative to the control group, whereas recognition of all the other emotional expressions was spared. Nevertheless, when eye expressions cued the recognition of fearful facial expressions, the performance of normal controls and a-MCI patients was comparable. CONCLUSION: The present paper indicates a selective impairment in fear recognition in the prodromal state of Alzheimer's disease, and the possibility of compensating this deficit by orienting selective attention on specific facial features.

Decision-Making in Alzheimer's Disease: The Role of Working Memory and Executive Functions in the Iowa Gambling Task and in Tasks Inspired by Everyday Situations.

BACKGROUND: Alzheimer's disease (AD) negatively impacts patients' ability to make advantageous decisions, i.e., a core ability contributing to the preservation of autonomy. OBJECTIVE: The present study aims to analyze the changes that occur in the decision-making competence (DMC) in AD patients and to determine if these changes are related to the deterioration of executive functions and working memory. METHOD: To this end, 20 patients with AD and 20 elderly control adults were assessed using executive, working memory, and DMC tasks. The latter comprised the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) and a scenarios task based on situations inspired by everyday life and performed under conditions of risk and ambiguity. RESULTS: Results revealed lower performances in AD patients than in elderly control adults for all the tasks assessing cognitive functions. The AD patients also made more strategy changes during the IGT. In the scenarios tasks, the two groups took as many ambiguous or risky decisions, but AD patients tended to take more risks in the context of gain than elderly control adults did. Switching and updating ability, as well as working memory, appeared to be involved in decisions in tasks inspired by everyday life, while inhibition was more related to the IGT performances. CONCLUSION: Working memory and executive functions seem to be involved in decision-making, but in different ways in gambling and daily-life situations.

Embodied cognition and emotion, two variables improving memory abilities in Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases.

OBJECTIVE: This study investigated whether emotions and enactment can jointly increase memory performance in nondemented Parkinson's disease (PD) and Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients. METHOD: Actions' drawings with negative, positive, or neutral valence were presented to 17 PD patients, 17 AD patients, and 37 elderly controls, matched to age. Two conditions of intentional encoding were proposed to each participant: one verbal, in which participants had to name the represented actions; and one motor, in which they had to mime the displayed actions. Thereafter, participants were submitted to an immediate free recall task and a delayed recognition task. RESULTS: The enactment effect was found in all three groups. The effect of emotion was also observed in that all three groups recalled negative actions better than both neutral and positive (PD patients), only neutral (AD patients), or only positive actions (elderly controls). Positive actions were not recalled better than neutral actions in any group. CONCLUSIONS: These results constitute an evidence for the preservation of the enactment effect and of the emotion effect on memory in AD and PD patients. However, they do not support the hypothesis of the combined effect of emotion and enactment on memory, neither in AD and PD patients nor in normal aging. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Processing of Facial Expressions of Emotions and Pain in Alzheimer's Disease.

BACKGROUND: Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative pathology that disrupts processing of facial expressions of emotion. The impairment was demonstrated for negative emotions in tasks of matching, discriminating, and labeling facial expressions but no study has included the expression of pain in its protocol. OBJECTIVE: The objective was to study the processing of emotional facial expressions in AD with a particular interest in pain expression. METHODS: Twenty-seven controls, 15 mild AD patients, and 15 moderate AD patients had to perform four emotional tasks: identification of facial expressions, matching pain expressions, discriminating the intensity of pain expressions, and judging pain intensity. RESULTS: Some emotions were less efficiently recognized by AD patients compared to controls (p < 0.001), specifically fear from the mild stage (p < 0.05), pain and disgust from the moderate stage (p < 0.05 and p < 0.001 respectively). The Exploratory Factor Analysis showed that recognition of pain and recognition of other discreet emotions were underpinned by two different latent factors. Performances on pain expression matching task and pain intensity discrimination task did not differ by group. (p = 0.334 and p = 0.787 respectively). Finally, moderate AD patients judged the pain less intensively than the Control group for both, moderate, and severe pain intensity (p < 0.001). CONCLUSION: Our data suggest that AD disrupts the recognition of pain expression along with recognition of fear and disgust. Additionally, AD patients seem to underestimate pain intensity compared to controls. The self-rated pain scales should be adapted to the pain processing deficit of AD patients.

Association between depressive symptoms and long-term heart rate variability in older women: Findings from a population-based cohort.

INTRODUCTION: Cross-sectional studies highlighted changes in autonomic nervous system (ANS) activity in geriatric depression. However, few longitudinal studies assessed this link which remains still debated. We examined the longitudinal association between lifetime depression history, current depressive disorders, and the evolution of ANS activity in older community women. METHODS: The present data stemmed from the PROOF study, a population-based cohort of 1011 community-dwellers followed-up at 2-year intervals for 10 years. Only data from female participants was analyzed (n = 508, mean age 68.5 ± 0.88 years), as very few men had depression in our population. Depressive symptoms and depression history were collected at baseline. Participants were classified in four groups according to presence or absence of history of depression (HD) or current depressive symptomatology (CD): HD+/CD+, HD-/CD+, HD+/CD- and HD-/CD-. ANS activity was assessed during the follow-up through 24-h heart rate variability (HRV). Longitudinal associations between depressive status and HRV indices during the follow-up were investigated using multivariate linear mixed models. RESULTS: Compared to HD-/CD- group, women belonging to HD-/CD+ group had greater baseline parasympathetic tone, as measured by lower LF index and LF/HF balance. The longitudinal analysis exhibited a significant enhancement of LF/HF balance with time, measuring an increase of sympathetic tone in HD-/CD+ group. CONCLUSION: Our findings suggest that late-onset depressive symptoms may be associated with subsequent autonomic dysregulation in older women. These results highlight the importance of detecting and managing depressive symptoms to limit their consequences on ANS functioning, and the risk of cardiovascular events.

Interoception and social cognition in chronic low back pain: a common inference disturbance? An exploratory study.

Aim: Lower interoceptive abilities are a characteristic of chronic pain conditions. Social support plays an important role in chronic low back pain (cLBP) but social cognitive skills have rarely been investigated. This study aimed to characterize interoceptive and social cognitive abilities in cLBP and to study the relationship between both domains that have been brought closer together by brain predictive coding models. Materials & methods: Twenty-eight patients with cLBP and 74 matched controls were included. Interoceptive accuracy (Heart Beat Perception Task), sensibility/awareness (Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness) and mental-states inference abilities (Mini-Social Cognition and Emotional Assessment) were assessed. Results: cLBP Patients had lower interoceptive accuracy and mentalizing performance. Conclusion: Less efficient interoceptive accuracy and mentalizing abilities were found in cLBP patients without correlation between these performances.

Interoception, allowing to perceive body sensations such as heartbeats, has been reported to be decreased in chronic pain. This ability has been recently related to social cognition, because we need inferential mechanisms to decode others' emotions or our own sensations. The link between interoception and social cognition in chronic pain, however, is unknown. We aimed to study key interoceptive & social abilities in 28 participants with chronic low back pain and 74 control participants. Participants with chronic low back pain had lower performance in some interoceptive and social cognitive dimensions, but performances in these domains were unrelated. Interoception should be a target for therapeutic interventions.

Explicit and implicit emotional processing modifications in pharmacoresistant left temporal lobe epilepsy and anxiodepressive disorders.

We examined whether anxiodepressive patients with left temporal lobe epilepsy could be differentiated from those with depression but without epilepsy on tasks that investigate attentional bias toward and explicit judgment of emotional stimuli. Eight depressive patients, eight anxiodepressive patients with epilepsy, and eight controls participated in the present study. Anxiodepressive with epilepsy and depressive patients had comparable depression scores and the same cognitive profile. Two distinct emotional tasks were used: the decision lexical task and the number comparison task. Three emotional connotations were presented: neutral, positive, and negative. The pattern of results showed an attentional bias toward negative words and pictures in depressive patients and only toward negative words in anxiodepressive patients with epilepsy. Moreover, depressive patients explicitly judged negative stimuli with lower intensity and anxiodepressive patients judged neutral stimuli with higher intensity. The present study specifies the emotional functioning in depression with or without left temporal lobe epilepsy.

How emotional pictures influence visuospatial binding in short-term memory in ageing and Alzheimer's disease?

The present study examines the prediction that emotion can facilitate short-term memory. Nevertheless, emotion also recruits attention to process information, thereby disrupting short-term memory when tasks involve high attentional resources. In this way, we aimed to determine whether there is a differential influence of emotional information on short-term memory in ageing and Alzheimer's disease (AD). Fourteen patients with mild AD, 14 healthy older participants (NC), and 14 younger adults (YA) performed two tasks. In the first task, involving visual short-term memory, participants were asked to remember a picture among four different pictures (negative or neutral) following a brief delay. The second task, a binding memory task, required the recognition by participants of a picture according to its spatial location. The attentional cost involved was higher than for the first task. The pattern of results showed that visual memory performance was better for negative stimuli than for neutral ones, irrespective of the group. In contrast, binding memory performance was essentially poorer for the location of negative pictures in the NC group, and for the location of both negative and neutral stimuli in the AD group, in comparison to the YA group. Taken together, these results show that emotion has beneficial effects on visual short-term memory in ageing and AD. In contrast, emotion does not improve their performances in the binding condition.

COVID-19: Association Between Increase of Behavioral and Psychological Symptoms of Dementia During Lockdown and Caregivers' Poor Mental Health.

BACKGROUND: From March 2020, the support and care systems for caregivers and people with dementia (PWD) were suspended or dramatically changed due to the lockdown during the world pandemic of COVID-19. Thus, these changes in living conditions have had deleterious consequences on the behavior of PWD and subsequently on their caregivers' mental health, the two being linked. OBJECTIVE: Our study aimed to examine changes in behavior among PWD and to look for associations between the evolution of behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia (BPSD) and caregivers' mental health in the context of COVID-19. METHODS: The study was conducted among caregivers of PWD living at home in France. Caregivers were interviewed via an anonymous cross-sectional online survey during the first lockdown between April 15 and June 15, 2020. RESULTS: Three hundred and eighty-nine caregivers accompanying a relative living at home participated in the study; 43.3%of the PWD presented a worsening of BPSD during the lockdown. With multivariate logistic regressions, a significant association was observed between "more BPSD" and burden, anxiety and depression, between "BPSD equivalent" and anxiety and depression, and between "emerging BPSD" and only depression. CONCLUSION: The lockdown seems to have an impact on behavioral disorders in PWD and these disorders are associated with poorer mental health of caregivers. Our findings suggest attention should be given to caregivers of PWD who have BPSD before lockdown and the need for continued consultations and professional help in case of new lockdowns.