The Value of a Virtual Assistant to Improve Engagement in Computerized Cognitive Training at Home: Exploratory Study.

BACKGROUND: Impaired cognitive function is observed in many pathologies, including neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer disease. At present, the pharmaceutical treatments available to counter cognitive decline have only modest effects, with significant side effects. A nonpharmacological treatment that has received considerable attention is computerized cognitive training (CCT), which aims to maintain or improve cognitive functioning through repeated practice in standardized exercises. CCT allows for more regular and thorough training of cognitive functions directly at home, which represents a significant opportunity to prevent and fight cognitive decline. However, the presence of assistance during training seems to be an important parameter to improve patients' motivation and adherence to treatment. To compensate for the absence of a therapist during at-home CCT, a relevant option could be to include a virtual assistant to accompany patients throughout their training. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this exploratory study was to evaluate the interest of including a virtual assistant to accompany patients during CCT. We investigated the relationship between various individual factors (eg, age, psycho-affective functioning, personality, personal motivations, and cognitive skills) and the appreciation and usefulness of a virtual assistant during CCT. This study is part of the THERADIA (Thérapies Digitales Augmentées par l'Intelligence Artificielle) project, which aims to develop an empathetic virtual assistant. METHODS: A total of 104 participants were recruited, including 52 (50%) young adults (mean age 21.2, range 18 to 27, SD 2.9 years) and 52 (50%) older adults (mean age 67.9, range 60 to 79, SD 5.1 years). All participants were invited to the laboratory to answer several questionnaires and perform 1 CCT session, which consisted of 4 cognitive exercises supervised by a virtual assistant animated by a human pilot via the Wizard of Oz method. The participants evaluated the virtual assistant and CCT at the end of the session. RESULTS: Analyses were performed using the Bayesian framework. The results suggest that the virtual assistant was appreciated and perceived as useful during CCT in both age groups. However, older adults rated the assistant and CCT more positively overall than young adults. Certain characteristics of users, especially their current affective state (ie, arousal, intrinsic relevance, goal conduciveness, and anxiety state), appeared to be related to their evaluation of the session. CONCLUSIONS: This study provides, for the first time, insight into how young and older adults perceive a virtual assistant during CCT. The results suggest that such an assistant could have a beneficial influence on users' motivation, provided that it can handle different situations, particularly their emotional state. The next step of our project will be to evaluate our device with patients experiencing mild cognitive impairment and to test its effectiveness in long-term cognitive training.

Limited time horizons lead to the positivity effect in attention, but not to more positive emotions: An investigation of the socioemotional selectivity theory.

A positivity effect in attention (i.e., an attentional bias in favor of positive over negative stimuli) has been frequently reported in older adults. Based on the postulates of socioemotional selectivity theory (SST), the present study tested whether this positivity effect: (a) depends on the subjective perception of a limited future time perspective (FTP) independently of chronological age, (b) involves controlled processes, and (c) contributes to optimizing positive emotions. Thirty-one older adults (aged 75-93) and 92 younger adults (aged 18-23) were recruited. Young adults were divided into a control group (N = 52) and a group with limited FTP (N = 40), where their subjective perception of the time left to live was experimentally reduced. All participants performed a dot-probe task involving positive, negative and neutral pictures displayed with different presentation durations (500 ms, 1,000 ms). Reaction time bias scores were calculated, and emotional state was measured several times during the task. Analyses revealed attentional biases toward positive (compared to negative) pictures in older adults and young adults with limited FTP, but not in young adults in the control group. These positivity effects appeared from 500 ms of stimulus presentation, did not increase over time, and did not correlate with participants' emotions. These findings support SST predictions that positivity effects occur when individuals perceive a limited FTP, regardless of their actual age. However, our data also suggest that the positivity effect may be a more automatic than controlled process that does not influence emotional state. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Using event-related potentials to study food-related cognition: An overview of methods and perspectives for future research.

Electroencephalography (EEG), and the measure of event-related potentials (ERPs) in particular, are useful methods to study the cognitive and cerebral mechanisms underlying the perception and processing of food cues. Further research on these aspects is necessary to better understand how cognitive functioning may influence food choices in different populations (e.g. obese individuals, individuals with eating disorders). To help researchers in designing future studies, this article provides an overview of the methods used in the current literature on ERPs and food-related cognition. Several methodological aspects are explored to outline interesting perspectives for future research, including discussions on the main experimental tasks used, the cognitive functions assessed (e.g. inhibitory control, attentional processing), the characteristics of the participants recruited (e.g. weight status, eating behaviors), and the stimuli selected (e.g. food pictures, odors). The issues generated by some of these methodological choices are discussed, and a few guidelines are provided.

Do Food Odors Differently Influence Cerebral Activity Depending on Weight Status? An Electroencephalography Study of Implicit Olfactory Priming Effects on the Processing of Food Pictures.

Attentional automatic processes and cerebral activity may differ between individuals with different weight statuses in the presence of food stimuli (e.g. odors, pictures). In the present study, we used an implicit olfactory priming paradigm to test the influence of non-attentively perceived food odors on the cerebral activity underlying the processing of food pictures, in normal-weight, overweight, and obese adults. A pear odor and a pound cake odor were used as primes, respectively priming sweet low-energy-density foods and high-energy-density foods. Event-related potentials were recorded while the participants passively watched pictures of sweet low and high-energy-density foods, under the two priming conditions plus an odorless control condition. The amplitude and latency of several peaks were measured (P100, N100, P200, N400). As a major result, we found that weight status influences the cerebral activity underlying the processing of food cues outside of consciousness, as early as the first detectable P100 peak.

Automatic and Controlled Emotion Regulation in Aging: The Case of Expressive Suppression.

Background/Study Context: To explain the high levels of well-being reported by older adults, socioemotional selectivity theory suggests that emotion regulation becomes more automated with age. Hence, the objective of the present study was to determine whether automatic emotion regulation becomes indeed more efficient with age, as controlled regulation becomes less efficient. We tested this hypothesis with regard to a specific emotion regulation strategy, expressive suppression, and a discrete emotion: disgust. METHODS: Disgusting videos were presented to 74 young adults (mean (SD) age: 20.1 (1.8)) and 52 older adults (mean (SD) age: 73.6 (9.3)), randomly assigned to one of three conditions: the control condition, the implicit condition (assessing automatic suppression), and the explicit condition (assessing controlled suppression). The disgust expressed and the disgust felt were analyzed separately with factorial analyses of variance that included age group and regulation condition as between-subject variables. RESULTS: Our results suggest that automatic and controlled expressive suppression may both be altered in healthy aging. Relative to young adults, older adults do not suppress their facial expressions as much but report feeling less disgust. CONCLUSION: Expressive suppression may not become more automated with age. However, the older adults' ability to suppress facial expressions did not appear to be directly associated with the intensity of their emotions.

Age-related differences in brain activity during implicit and explicit processing of fearful facial expressions.

Age-related differences in neural correlates underlying implicit and explicit emotion processing are unclear. Within the framework of the Frontoamygdalar Age-related Differences in Emotion model (St Jacques et al., 2009), our objectives were to examine the behavioral and neural modifications that occur with age for both processes. During explicit and implicit processing of fearful faces, we expected to observe less amygdala activity in older adults (OA) than in younger adults (YA), associated with poorer recognition performance in the explicit task, and more frontal activity during implicit processing, suggesting compensation. At a behavioral level, explicit recognition of fearful faces was impaired in OA compared with YA. We did not observe any cerebral differences between OA and YA during the implicit task, whereas in the explicit task, OA recruited more frontal, parietal, temporal, occipital, and cingulate areas. Our findings suggest that automatic processing of emotion may be preserved during aging, whereas deliberate processing is impaired. Additional neural recruitment in OA did not appear to compensate for their behavioral deficits.

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.