The influence of the down- and upscaling of activities in long-term care facilities during the COVID-19 visitor ban on caregivers' exhaustion and ability to provide care and support: A questionnaire study.

In the Netherlands, a national visitor-ban was in place in LTCFs during the first outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020. Meaningful activities were cancelled or downscaled, while others were performed more often. It is known that a lack of activities has several negative effects on residents, while the impact on caregivers remains largely unexplored. Here we investigate the influence of the down- and upscaling of activities on caregivers' physical and emotional exhaustion and their perceived ability to provide care and support. Downscaling of activities for residents, in particular watching television and musical activities, had a negative impact on caregivers' emotional exhaustion. The downscaling of watching television increased caregivers 'physical exhaustion. Furthermore, the downscaling of both activities had a negative impact on caregivers' perceived ability to provide ADL care and emotional support. This study triggers the need for more knowledge about the function of meaningful activities for residents, from a LTCF caregivers' perspective.

Processing of Prediction Errors in Mentalizing Areas.

When seeing people perform actions, we are able to quickly predict the action's outcomes. These predictions are not solely based on the observed actions themselves but utilize our prior knowledge of others. It has been suggested that observed outcomes that are not in line with these predictions result in prediction errors, which require additional processing to be integrated or updated. However, there is no consensus on whether this is indeed the case for the kind of high-level social-cognitive processes involved in action observation. In this fMRI study, we investigated whether observation of unexpected outcomes causes additional activation in line with the processing of prediction errors and, if so, whether this activation overlaps with activation in brain areas typically associated with social-cognitive processes. In the first part of the experiment, participants watched animated movies of two people playing a bowling game, one experienced and one novice player. In cases where the player's score was higher or lower than expected based on their skill level, there was increased BOLD activity in areas that were also activated during a theory of mind task that participants performed in the second part of the experiment. These findings are discussed in the light of different theoretical accounts of human social-cognitive processing.

Encoding of Novel Verbal Instructions for Prospective Action in the Lateral Prefrontal Cortex: Evidence from Univariate and Multivariate Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Analysis.

Verbal instructions are central to humans' capacity to learn new behaviors with minimal training, but the neurocognitive mechanisms involved in verbally instructed behaviors remain puzzling. Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) evidence suggests that the right middle frontal gyrus and dorsal premotor cortex (rMFG-dPMC) supports the translation of symbolic stimulus-response mappings into sensorimotor representations. Here, we set out to (1) replicate this finding, (2) investigate whether this region's involvement is specific to novel (vs. trained) instructions, and (3) study whether rMFG-dPMC also shows differences in its (voxel) pattern response indicative of general cognitive processes of instruction implementation. Participants were shown instructions, which they either had to perform later or merely memorize. Orthogonal to this manipulation, the instructions were either entirely novel or had been trained before the fMRI session. Results replicate higher rMFG-dPMC activation levels during instruction implementation versus memorization and show how this difference is restricted to novel, but not trained, instruction presentations. Pattern similarity analyses at the voxel level further reveal more consistent neural pattern responses in rMFG-dPMC during the implementation of novel versus trained instructions. In fact, this more consistent neural pattern response seemed to be specific to the first instruction presentation and disappeared after the instruction had been applied once. These results further support a role of rMFG-dPMC in the implementation of novel task instructions and highlight potentially important differences in studying this region's gross activation levels versus (the consistency of) its response patterns.

There is more into 'doing' than 'knowing': The function of the right inferior frontal sulcus is specific for implementing versus memorising verbal instructions.

In the present study we examine the mechanism underlying the human ability to implement newly instructed stimulus-response mappings for their future application. We introduce a novel procedure in which we can investigate the processes underlying such implementation while controlling for more general working-memory demands. The results indicate that a region within the dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) in the vicinity of the inferior frontal sulcus (IFS) is specifically recruited when new instructions are implemented compared to when new instructions are memorised. In addition, we observed that this area is more strongly activated when task performance is effective. Together, these findings suggest that the DLPFC, and more specific the IFS, plays an important role during the formation of procedural representations in working memory.

Domain-general involvement of the posterior frontolateral cortex in time-based resource-sharing in working memory: An fMRI study.

Working memory is often defined in cognitive psychology as a system devoted to the simultaneous processing and maintenance of information. In line with the time-based resource-sharing model of working memory (TBRS; Barrouillet and Camos, 2015; Barrouillet et al., 2004), there is accumulating evidence that, when memory items have to be maintained while performing a concurrent activity, memory performance depends on the cognitive load of this activity, independently of the domain involved. The present study used fMRI to identify regions in the brain that are sensitive to variations in cognitive load in a domain-general way. More precisely, we aimed at identifying brain areas that activate during maintenance of memory items as a direct function of the cognitive load induced by both verbal and spatial concurrent tasks. Results show that the right IFJ and bilateral SPL/IPS are the only areas showing an increased involvement as cognitive load increases and do so in a domain general manner. When correlating the fMRI signal with the approximated cognitive load as defined by the TBRS model, it was shown that the main focus of the cognitive load-related activation is located in the right IFJ. The present findings indicate that the IFJ makes domain-general contributions to time-based resource-sharing in working memory and allowed us to generate the novel hypothesis by which the IFJ might be the neural basis for the process of rapid switching. We argue that the IFJ might be a crucial part of a central attentional bottleneck in the brain because of its inability to upload more than one task rule at once.

Errors and conflict at the task level and the response level.

In the last decade, research on error and conflict processing has become one of the most influential research areas in the domain of cognitive control. There is now converging evidence that a specific part of the posterior frontomedian cortex (pFMC), the rostral cingulate zone (RCZ), is crucially involved in the processing of errors and conflict. However, error-related research has focused primarily on a specific error type, namely, response errors. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether errors on the task level rely on the same neural and functional mechanisms. Here we report a dissociation of both error types in the pFMC: whereas response errors activate the RCZ, task errors activate the dorsal frontomedian cortex. Although this last region shows an overlap in activation for task and response errors on the group level, a closer inspection of the single-subject data is more in accordance with a functional anatomical dissociation. When investigating brain areas related to conflict on the task and response levels, a clear dissociation was perceived between areas associated with response conflict and with task conflict. Overall, our data support a dissociation between response and task levels of processing in the pFMC. In addition, we provide additional evidence for a dissociation between conflict and errors both at the response level and at the task level.

The implementation of verbal instructions: dissociating motor preparation from the formation of stimulus-response associations.

Only recently, brain imaging research has started to investigate the transformation of verbal instructions into efficient behavior. A frontal-parietal network has been consistently shown to be involved in this context. The existing studies, however do not allow distinguishing brain regions that are involved in creating the stimulus response link (S-R link) and brain areas involved in response preparation proper. The aim of the current study was to dissociate brain regions associated with these different functions. In order to do so, we adopted a paradigm in which instructions were given using two successive instruction cues. Each cue instructing one component of an S-R mapping, enabling the identification of areas that are involved in representing response information and areas that play a role in setting up the link between stimulus and response information. Results show that premotor cortices, pre-supplementary motor area (pre-SMA) and anterior intraparietal sulcus (IPS) are engaged in representing and preparing the instructed response. Importantly, the left inferior frontal sulcus (IFS, including the inferior frontal junction (IFJ)) was engaged in the formation of the stimulus and response link. It is concluded that during the implementation of verbal instructions IFS/IFJ transforms these instructions to guide modality specific areas needed to perform the upcoming task.

The implementation of verbal instructions: an fMRI study.

In everyday life, our actions are often guided by verbal instructions. Usually, we can implement such instructions immediately without trial and error learning. This raises the fundamental question how verbal instructions are transformed into efficient motor behavior. The aim of this study was to gain deeper insights into the implementation of verbal instructions both on a neural and a cognitive level. To this end, we devised an fMRI experiment in which participants were required to permanently implement new stimulus-response (S-R) mappings and object-color (O-C) mappings. This enabled us to test whether there are brain areas that are specific to the implementation of newly instructed S-R mappings or whether newly instructed rules are represented independently from the specific content. Furthermore, we could test which brain areas are involved in the processing of S-R mappings when compared with O-C mappings. Our results suggest that only one brain area, the left inferior frontal junction (IFJ), was sensitive to the novelty of instructions regardless of whether these instructions conveyed S-R or O-C mappings. Furthermore, our results show that instructions conveying S-R mapping involve a network of brain areas, including pre-PMd, M1, and IPS that was not sensitive to the novelty of the instructions. Therefore, we conclude that the implementation of verbal instructions results from an interplay of a brain areas that represent novel rulelike information in domain general terms and brain areas that are specific to S-R rules.

Neural mechanisms of predicting individual preferences based on group membership.

Successful social interaction requires humans to predict others' behavior. To do so, internal models of others are generated based on previous observations. When predicting others' preferences for objects, for example, observations are made at an individual level (5-year-old Rosie often chooses a pencil) or at a group level (kids often choose pencils). But previous research has focused either on already established group knowledge, i.e. stereotypes, or on the neural correlates of predicting traits and preferences of individuals. We identified the neural mechanisms underlying predicting individual behavior based on learned group knowledge using fMRI. We show that applying learned group knowledge hinges on both a network of regions commonly referred to as the mentalizing network, and a network of regions implicated in representing social knowledge. Additionally, we provide evidence for the presence of a gradient in the posterior temporal cortex and the medial frontal cortex, catering to different functions while applying learned group knowledge. This process is characterized by an increased connectivity between medial prefrontal cortex and other mentalizing network regions and increased connectivity between anterior temporal lobe and other social knowledge regions. Our study provides insights into the neural mechanisms underlying the application of learned group knowledge.