The relationship between performance validity testing, external incentives, and cognitive functioning in long COVID.

INTRODUCTION: Performance validity test (PVT) failures occur in clinical practice and at higher rates with external incentives. However, little PVT research has been applied to the Long COVID population. This study aims to address this gap. METHODS: Participants were 247 consecutive individuals with Long COVID seen for neuropsychological evaluation who completed 4 PVTs and a standardized neuropsychological battery. The sample was 84.2% White and 66% female. The mean age was 51.16 years and mean education was 14.75 years. Medical records were searched for external incentive (e.g., disability claims). Three groups were created based on PVT failures (Pass [no failures], Intermediate [1 failure], and Fail [2+ failures]). RESULTS: A total of 8.9% participants failed 2+ PVTs, 6.4% failed one PVT, and 85% passed PVTs. From the full sample, 25.1% were identified with external incentive. However, there was a significant difference between the rates of external incentives in the Fail group (54.5%) compared to the Pass (22.1%) and Intermediate (20%) groups. Further, the Fail group had lower cognitive scores and higher frequency of impaired range scores, consistent with PVT research in other populations. External incentives were uncorrelated with cognitive performance. CONCLUSIONS: Consistent with other populations, results suggest Long COVID cases are not immune to PVT failure and external incentives are associated with PVT failure. Results indicated that individuals in the Pass and Intermediate groups showed no evidence for significant cognitive deficits, but the Fail group had significantly poorer cognitive performance. Thus, PVTs should be routinely administered in Long COVID cases and research.

Control of memory retrieval alters memory-based eye movements.

Past work has shown that eye movements are affected by long-term memory across different tasks and instructional manipulations. In the current study, we tested whether these memory-based eye movements persist when memory retrieval is under intentional control. Participants encoded multiple scenes with six objects (three faces; three tools). Next, they completed a memory regulation and visual search task, while undergoing eye tracking. Here, scene cues were presented and participants either retrieved the encoded associate, suppressed it, or substituted it with a specific object from the other encoded category. Following a delay, a search display consisting of six dots intermixed with the six encoded objects was presented. Participants' task was to fixate one remaining dot after five had disappeared. Incidental viewing of the objects was of interest. Results revealed that performance in a final recognition phase was impaired for suppressed pairs, but only when the associate was a tool. During the search task, incidental associate viewing was lower when participants attempted to control retrieval, whereas one object from the nonassociate category was most viewed in the substitute condition. Additionally, viewing patterns in the search phase were related to final recognition performance, but the direction of this association differed between conditions. Overall, these results suggest that eye movements are attracted to information retrieved from long-term memory and held active (the associate in the retrieve condition, or an object from the other category in the substitute condition). Furthermore, the level of viewing may index the strength of the representation of retrieved information. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Relational memory weakness in autism despite the use of a controlled encoding task.

Introduction: Recent work challenged past findings that documented relational memory impairments in autism. Previous studies often relied solely on explicit behavioral responses to assess relational memory integrity, but successful performance on behavioral tasks may rely on other cognitive abilities (e.g., executive functioning) that are impacted in some autistic individuals. Eye-tracking tasks do not require explicit behavioral responses, and, further, eye movements provide an indirect measure of memory. The current study examined whether memory-specific viewing patterns toward scenes differ between autistic and non-autistic individuals. Methods: Using a long-term memory paradigm that equated for complexity between item and relational memory tasks, participants studied a series of scenes. Following the initial study phase, scenes were re-presented, accompanied by an orienting question that directed participants to attend to either features of an item (i.e., in the item condition) or spatial relationships between items (i.e., in the relational condition) that might be subsequently modified during test. At test, participants viewed scenes that were unchanged (i.e., repeated from study), scenes that underwent an "item" modification (an exemplar switch) or a "relational" modification (a location switch), and scenes that had not been presented before. Eye movements were recorded throughout. Results: During study, there were no significant group differences in viewing directed to regions of scenes that might be manipulated at test, suggesting comparable processing of scene details during encoding. However, there was a group difference in explicit recognition accuracy for scenes that underwent a relational change. Marginal group differences in the expression of memory-based viewing effects during test for relational scenes were consistent with this behavioral outcome, particularly when analyses were limited to scenes recognized correctly with high confidence. Group differences were also evident in correlational analyses that examined the association between study phase viewing and recognition accuracy and between performance on the Picture Sequence Memory Test and recognition accuracy. Discussion: Together, our findings suggest differences in the integrity of relational memory representations and/or in the relationships between subcomponents of memory in autism.

Conscious awareness and memory systems in the brain.

The term "memory" typically refers to conscious retrieval of events and experiences from our past, but experience can also change our behaviour without corresponding awareness of the learning process or the associated outcome. Based primarily on early neuropsychological work, theoretical perspectives have distinguished between conscious memory, said to depend critically on structures in the medial temporal lobe (MTL), and a collection of performance-based memories that do not. The most influential of these memory systems perspectives, the declarative memory theory, continues to be a mainstay of scientific work today despite mounting evidence suggesting that contributions of MTL structures go beyond the kinds or types of memory that can be explicitly reported. Consistent with these reports, more recent perspectives have focused increasingly on the processing operations supported by particular brain regions and the qualities or characteristics of resulting representations whether memory is expressed with or without awareness. These alternatives to the standard model generally converge on two key points. First, the hippocampus is critical for relational memory binding and representation even without awareness and, second, there may be little difference between some types of priming and explicit, familiarity-based recognition. Here, we examine the evolution of memory systems perspectives and critically evaluate scientific evidence that has challenged the status quo. Along the way, we highlight some of the challenges that researchers encounter in the context of this work, which can be contentious, and describe innovative methods that have been used to examine unconscious memory in the lab. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Memory Psychology > Theory and Methods Philosophy > Consciousness.

Attention capture by episodic long-term memory.

Everyday behavior depends upon the operation of concurrent cognitive processes. In visual search, studies that examine memory-attention interactions have indicated that long-term memory facilitates search for a target (e.g., contextual cueing), but the potential for memories to capture attention and decrease search efficiency has not been investigated. To address this gap in the literature, five experiments were conducted to examine whether task-irrelevant encoded objects might capture attention. In each experiment, participants encoded scene-object pairs. Then, in a visual search task, 6-object search displays were presented and participants were told to make a single saccade to targets defined by shape (e.g., diamond among differently colored circles; Experiments 1, 4, and 5) or by color (e.g., blue shape among differently shaped gray objects; Experiments 2 and 3). Sometimes, one of the distractors was from the encoded set, and occasionally the scene that had been paired with that object was presented prior to the search display. Results indicated that eye movements were made, in error, more often to encoded distractors than to baseline distractors, and that this effect was greatest when the corresponding scene was presented prior to search. When capture did occur, participants looked longer at encoded distractors if scenes had been presented, an effect that we attribute to the representational match between a retrieved associate and the identity of the encoded distractor in the search display. In addition, the presence of a scene resulted in slower saccade deployment when participants made first saccades to targets, as instructed. Experiments 4 and 5 suggest that this slowdown may be due to the relatively rare and therefore, surprising, appearance of visual stimulus information prior to search. Collectively, results suggest that information encoded into episodic memory can capture attention, which is consistent with the recent proposal that selection history can guide attentional selection.