Are Dietary Patterns Related to Cognitive Performance in 7-Year-Old Children? Evidence from a Birth Cohort in Friuli Venezia Giulia, Italy.

Research from different sources supports a link between nutrition and neurodevelopment, but evidence is still sparse regarding the relationship between a posteriori dietary patterns (DPs) and cognitive performance in school-aged children. Within the Northern Adriatic Cohort II, Friuli Venezia Giulia, Italy, 379 7-year-old children were cross-sectionally evaluated. Dietary patterns were identified through a principal component factor analysis based on 37 nutrients from children's 3-day dietary records. The Wechsler Intelligence Scale of Children (WISC-IV) test provided measures of cognitive performance, including the full-scale intelligence quotient (FSIQ) and single index scores. Each DP was related to FSIQ or single index scores through multiple robust linear regression models. We identified five DPs named "Dairy Products", "Plant-based Foods", "Fats", "Meat and Potatoes", and "Seafood" (63% of variance explained). After adjustment, no significant relationship was observed with the FSIQ score; positive associations were found between the "Seafood" DP and Verbal Comprehension Index or Perceptual Reasoning Index. The "Meat and Potatoes" and "Dairy Products" DPs were inversely associated with the Verbal Comprehension Index and Processing Speed Index scores, respectively. In the absence of a relation with the overall FSIQ score, single DPs might influence specific cognitive functions, including verbal and reasoning abilities, as targeted by single indexes, in the expected direction.

Wakeful rest benefits before and after encoding in anterograde amnesia.

Objective: Studies have shown that patients with anterograde amnesia forget less episodic information after a delay if encoding is immediately followed by an unfilled period of wakeful rest. This benefit has been attributed to the reduced interference with the consolidation process. However, this account cannot directly explain improved retention in healthy adults resulting from pre-encoding rest. While benefits resulting from pre- and post-encoding rest can be alternatively explained via improved distinctiveness at retrieval, it has yet to be established whether both benefits are observable in amnesics. The aim of the current study was to assess whether amnesic patients showed improved retention of prose material after 10 min following both pre- and post-encoding unfilled intervals of wakeful rest. Method: Twelve patients with anterograde amnesia were recruited. Participants completed four conditions. A short prose passage was aurally presented in each condition. Prose presentation was preceded and followed by a 9-min delay interval. Delay intervals were either filled (spot-the-difference task) or unfilled (wakeful rest). Prose retention was assessed immediately after presentation and after 10 min. Results: Prose retention was consistently better when wakeful rest followed prose encoding in comparison to a condition where an effortful task was encountered both before and after encoding. Conclusions: Post-encoding wakeful rest alone substantially improves retention in amnesic patients. While pre-encoding wakeful rest elicits inconsistent benefits in amnesics, reduced retention following both pre- and post-encoding task engagement suggests that pre-encoding activity may still be relevant. Overall, our findings support consolidation interference explanations of forgetting in anterograde amnesia. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).