Product development and X-Ray microtomography of a traditional white pan bread from plasma functionalized flour.

Cold plasma (CP) technology has emerged as a novel non-thermal technology with the potential to improve food quality or impart functionality to ingredients. Our previous studies on wheat flour demonstrated how the structure and functionality of wheat flour might be modified using CP to provide an alternative to chemical additives (Chaple et al., 2020). However, understanding of the further effects of plasma functionalized ingredients in existing or new product formulation is limited. This study investigated the effects of CP treatment of wheat flour on traditional white pan bread development. The bread was formulated using plasma functionalized flour (PFF), and critical product characteristic responses were analyzed. Plasma treatment of flour positively affected the bread's expansion ratio, crust color, and water activity. Farinograph analysis suggests improvement in water absorption capacity, dough development time, and dough stability. X-Ray Microtomography (XRMT) analysis was conducted to understand how plasma functionalising the flour impacted the microstructure of bread. The 3D scans suggested no macro-change in the bread matrix compared to control; however, the porosity decreased in line with the increasing plasma treatment duration of the flour. The texture profile analysis showed an improvement in the gluten network developed in the dough developed from PFF. Sensory analysis results showed overall acceptance for bread formulated with PFF compared with a commercial sample. Overall, CP treatment of the flour improved the functionality in relation to dough and bread preparation and can thus provide an alternative to chemical additives in bread making. The CP processes may be modulated to deliver tailored effects for bread product development.

Are there distinct dimensions of apathy? The argument for reappraisal.

Apathy is widely accepted to be a multidimensional syndrome. Assessment scales typically probe one or more dimensions but there is no consensus on the precise nature of these domains. Existing major theoretical frameworks include cognitive, behavioural, and emotional dimensions of apathy. While a social domain has also been suggested, it is far less well studied. Here we argue that although most assessment scales have been developed with these theoretical frameworks in mind, few findings actually support the existence of some of the dimensions that have been proposed, with the evidence for separation of cognitive and behavioural dimensions particularly lacking. In our opinion, although there is evidence for behavioural and emotional domains of apathy, the contention that there might be a separate dimension of cognitive or executive apathy is far less robust. Further, while there is some evidence for a social dimension of apathy, this has not been investigated sufficiently to make any definitive conclusion. We argue that there is a pressing need to reconsider different domains of apathy using robust analyses of proposed theoretical dimensions.

Assessment of apathy in neurological patients using the Apathy Motivation Index caregiver version.

Apathy is a common, disabling neuropsychiatric syndrome that occurs across many brain disorders and may be associated with diminished motivation in behavioural, cognitive, emotional and social domains. Assessment is complicated by the variability of symptoms across apathy domains and self-report from patients, which can be misleading due to their lack of insight. Independent evaluation by clinicians also has limitations though if it has to be performed with limited time. Caregiver reports are a viable alternative, but current assessments for them either do not distinguish between different apathy domains or are interview-based and take long to administer. In this study, we developed a brief caregiver questionnaire version of the recently developed Apathy Motivation Index (AMI), which is a self-report tool. We confirmed three apathy factors in this new caregiver measure (AMI-CG) that were also present in the AMI: Behavioural Activation, Emotional Sensitivity and Social Motivation. Furthermore, we validated the scores against more extensive caregiver interviews using the established Lillle apathy rating scale as well as patient self-reports of apathy, measures of depression, anhedonia, cognition, activities of daily living and caregiver burden across four different neurological conditions: Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, subjective cognitive impairment and limbic encephalitis. The AMI-CG showed good internal reliability, external validity and diagnostic accuracy. It also uncovered cases of social apathy overlooked by traditional instruments. Crucially, patients who under-rated their apathy compared to informants were more likely to have difficulties performing everyday activities and to be a greater burden to caregivers. The findings provide evidence for a multidimensional conceptualization of apathy and an instrument for efficient detection of apathy based on caregiver reports for use in clinical practice.

Vividness of visual imagery questionnaire scores and their relationship to visual short-term memory performance.

Mechanisms underlying visual imagery, the ability to create vivid mental representations of a scene in the absence of sensory input, remain to be fully understood. Some previous studies have proposed that visual imagery might be related to visual short-term memory (STM), with a common mechanism involving retention of visual information over short periods of time. Other observations have shown a strong relationship between visual imagery and functional activity in the hippocampus and primary visual cortex, both regions also associated with visual STM. Here we examined the relationship of visual imagery to STM and hippocampal and primary visual cortex volumes, first in a large sample of healthy people across a large age range (N = 229 behavioural data; N = 56 MRI data in older participants) and then in patients with Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease (N = 19 in each group compared to 19 age-matched healthy controls). We used a variant of the "What was where?" visual object-location binding task to assess the quality of remembered information over short delays. In healthy people, no evidence of a relationship between the vividness of visual imagery and any visual STM performance parameter was found. However, there was a significant positive correlation between visual imagery and the volumes of the hippocampus and primary visual cortex. Although visual STM performance was significantly impaired in patients with Alzheimer's disease, their vividness of visual imagery scores were comparable to those of age-matched elderly controls and patients with Parkinson's disease. Despite hippocampal volumes also being reduced in Alzheimer's patients, there appeared to be no impact on their self-reported visual imagery. In conclusion, visual imagery was not significantly related to visual STM performance, either in healthy controls or Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease but it was related to hippocampal and visual cortex volume in healthy people.

Impact of processing demands at encoding, maintenance and retrieval in visual working memory.

There has been surprisingly little examination of how recall performance is affected by processing demands induced by retrieval cues, how manipulations at encoding interact with processing demands during maintenance or due to the retrieval cue, and how these are affected with aging. Here, we investigate these relationships by examining the fidelity of working memory recall across two delayed reproduction tasks with a continuous measure of report across the adult lifespan. Participants were asked to remember and subsequently reproduce from memory the identity and location of a probed item from the encoding display. In Experiment 1, we examined the effect of filtering irrelevant information at encoding and the impact of filtering distracting information at retrieval simultaneously. In Experiment 2, we tested how ignoring distracting information during maintenance or updating current contents with new information during this period affects recall. The results reveal that manipulating processing requirements induced by retrieval cues (by altering the nature of the retrieval foil) had a significant impact on memory recall: the presence of two previously viewed features from the encoding display in the retrieval foil led to a decrease in identification accuracy. Although irrelevant information can be filtered out well at encoding, both ignoring irrelevant information and updating the contents of memory during the maintenance delay had a detrimental effect on recall. These effects were similar across the lifespan, but older individuals were particularly affected by manipulations of processing demands at encoding as well as increasing set size of information to be retained in memory. Finally, analyses revealed that there were no systematic relationships between filtering performance at encoding, maintenance and retrieval suggesting that these processing demands are independent of each other. Rather than filtering being a single, monolithic entity, the data suggest that it is better accounted for as distinctly dissociable cognitive processes that engage and articulate with different phases of working memory.