Cognitive stimulation of executive functions through computational thinking.

The healthy development of cognitive functions, including executive functions, has been shown to depend mainly on the experiences and learning opportunities of people, especially during childhood. Over the past few years, researchers have been studying the impacts of diverse types of interventions on children's cognitive development in which computational thinking programs are a recent field. This pilot study evaluated the effect of computational thinking training based on the "Programming for Children" program on the executive functions of children aged 10 and 11 years: working memory, inhibition, and planning (N = 30). The results showed that children in the experimental group improved on tests of visuospatial working memory, cognitive inhibition, and sequential planning compared with the control group. However, tests of verbal working memory, memory strategy, and visual spatial planning did not show any observed changes. Although this was an exploratory study, and its findings should be interpreted cautiously due to the small sample size, the findings support the relevance and feasibility of conducting similar larger studies with larger samples.

Artificial Cognitive Systems Applied in Executive Function Stimulation and Rehabilitation Programs: A Systematic Review.

This article presents a systematic review of studies on cognitive training programs based on artificial cognitive systems and digital technologies and their effect on executive functions. The aim has been to identify which populations have been studied, the characteristics of the implemented programs, the types of implemented cognitive systems and digital technologies, the evaluated executive functions, and the key findings of these studies. The review has been carried out following the PRISMA protocol; five databases have been selected from which 1889 records were extracted. The articles were filtered following established criteria, to give a final selection of 264 articles that have been used for the purposes of this study in the analysis phase. The findings showed that the most studied populations were school-age children and the elderly. The most studied executive functions were working memory and attentional processes, followed by inhibitory control and processing speed. Many programs were commercial, customizable, gamified, and based on classic tasks. Some more recent initiatives have begun to incorporate user-machine interfaces, robotics, and virtual reality, although studies on their effects remain scarce. The studies recognize multiple benefits of computerized neuropsychological stimulation and rehabilitation programs for executive functions in different age groups, but there is a lack of studies in specific population sectors and with more rigorous research designs. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s13369-022-07292-5.

Netlang: A software for the linguistic analysis of corpora by means of complex networks.

To date there is no software that directly connects the linguistic analysis of a conversation to a network program. Networks programs are able to extract statistical information from data basis with information about systems of interacting elements. Language has also been conceived and studied as a complex system. However, most proposals do not analyze language according to linguistic theory, but use instead computational systems that should save time at the price of leaving aside many crucial aspects for linguistic theory. Some approaches to network studies on language do apply precise linguistic analyses, made by a linguist. The problem until now has been the lack of interface between the analysis of a sentence and its integration into the network that could be managed by a linguist and that could save the analysis of any language. Previous works have used old software that was not created for these purposes and that often produced problems with some idiosyncrasies of the target language. The desired interface should be able to deal with the syntactic peculiarities of a particular language, the options of linguistic theory preferred by the user and the preservation of morpho-syntactic information (lexical categories and syntactic relations between items). Netlang is the first program able to do that. Recently, a new kind of linguistic analysis has been developed, which is able to extract a complexity pattern from the speaker's linguistic production which is depicted as a network where words are inside nodes, and these nodes connect each other by means of edges or links (the information inside the edge can be syntactic, semantic, etc.). The Netlang software has become the bridge between rough linguistic data and the network program. Netlang has integrated and improved the functions of programs used in the past, namely the DGA annotator and two scripts (ToXML.pl and Xml2Pairs.py) used for transforming and pruning data. Netlang allows the researcher to make accurate linguistic analysis by means of syntactic dependency relations between words, while tracking record of the nature of such syntactic relationships (subject, object, etc). The Netlang software is presented as a new tool that solve many problems detected in the past. The most important improvement is that Netlang integrates three past applications into one program, and is able to produce a series of file formats that can be read by a network program. Through the Netlang software, the linguistic network analysis based on syntactic analyses, characterized for its low cost and the completely non-invasive procedure aims to evolve into a sufficiently fine grained tool for clinical diagnosis in potential cases of language disorders.