Behavioral fluency

Interventions aimed at teaching composite dressing skills assess individuals' current abilities and improve their performance at more independent and fluent levels. The current case study aims to report on the improvements observed when specific component motor skills are targeted for improved performance using frequency building techniques. We extend previous research by including the measure of escape-maintained behaviors during task completion. Similar to those of previous research, the results of this study reveal a significant increase in speed and accuracy across all targeted composite skills and a reduction in escape-maintained behaviors...

Interventions involving precision teaching (PT) and fluency-based instruction may promote the acquisition of intraverbal repertoires. We examined the effects of tact fluency training on the emergence of untrained intraverbal component-composite relations for three participants with autism and mild to moderate intellectual disability. We used a multiple-probes across participants design across the three participants, with additional replication across thematic clusters for one participant. The results suggest a relation between tact fluency training and the emergence of untrained intraverbal responses may exist...

BACKGROUND: Bilateral deep thalamic nucleus brain stimulation (STN-DBS) surgery is often used to treat the motor symptoms of patients with Parkinson's disease. The change of neurocognitive symptoms in patients is, however, still unclear. OBJECTIVE: We aimed at analyzing the deterioration of neurocognitive symptoms in patients with Parkinson's disease after deep brain stimulation surgery under different follow-up times. METHODS: A comprehensive literature review was conducted using Pubmed, Cochrane Library, and Web of Science to screen eligible study records, the meta-analysis was performed using an inverse variance method and a random-effects model...

This study investigated how different feedback sources, such as teacher and peer correction, affect students learning English as a foreign language (EFL) regarding speaking accuracy, fluency, and academic passion. The effects of online and face-to-face instruction and peer and teacher corrections were investigated in this study using a factorial design. Convenience sampling was used to choose six intact classes from Jinzhong University's Department of Foreign Languages. Academic passion and speaking tests were used before and after the treatment...

OBJECTIVE: We investigated neuropsychological outcome in patients with pharmacoresistant pediatric-onset epilepsy caused by focal cortical dysplasia (FCD), who underwent frontal lobe resection during adolescence and young adulthood. METHODS: Twenty-seven patients were studied, comprising 15 patients who underwent language-dominant side resection (LDR) and 12 patients who had languagenondominant side resection (n-LDR). We evaluated intelligence (language function, arithmetic ability, working memory, processing speed, visuo-spatial reasoning), executive function, and memory in these patients before and two years after resection surgery...

Random guessing behaviors are frequently observed in low-stakes assessments, often attributed to factors such as test-takers lacking motivation or experiencing time constraints and fatigue. Existing research suggests that responses stemming from random guessing behaviors introduce biases into the constructs and relationships of interest. This is particularly problematic when estimating the relationship between speed and ability. This study introduces a Mixture Fluency model designed to account for random guessing behaviors while utilizing valid response accuracy and response time to uncover students' latent attribute profiles...

PURPOSE: Developmental stuttering is a complex and multifaceted neurodevelopmental disorder that may cause pervasive negative consequences for adults who stutter (AWS). Historically, intervention for AWS has primarily addressed speech fluency, with less focus on the covert psychosocial aspects of the disorder. The purpose of this article is to report on a feasibility trial evaluating a novel integrated intervention that combines traditional stuttering management techniques with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) for AWS...

Postoperative cognitive dysfunction (POCD) commonly occurs after surgery, particularly in elderly individuals. It is characterized by a notable decline in cognitive performance, encompassing memory, attention, coordination, orientation, verbal fluency, and executive function. This reduction in cognitive abilities contributes to extended hospital stays and heightened mortality. The prevalence of POCD can reach 40% within 1 week following cardiovascular surgery and remains as high as 17% 3 months post-surgery...

Purpose: Enriching learners' motor repertoires in a complex pluri-articular task, such as climbing, could help learners' adaptation to various sets of task constraints. Promoting exploration with variable practice conditions is one solution recurrently proposed. However, recent studies have shown that a too elevated exploration-exploitation ratio during practice could impair learning. A proposed solution is to give learners some control over their practice schedule, which appeared to better respect the individual learning dynamic in comparison to the usual experimenter-imposed practice schedule...

BACKGROUND: Cognitive impairment is one of the most common and most troublesome comorbidities among people with epilepsy (PWE). Adherent use of antiseizure medications (ASM) can control seizure episodes in 70% of the cases. However, the relationship between adherent use of ASMs and cognitive impairment in epilepsy is complex. OBJECTIVE: To assess the association between adherence to ASMs and cognitive status among PWE. METHODS: We performed a cross-sectional observational study with prospective data collection from PWE using translated and content-validated Amharic versions of the Montreal cognitive assessment tool (MOCA-B) and a four-item Morisky Medication Adherence Scale (Morski-4)...

BACKGROUND: Cognitive changes in Huntington's disease (HD) precede motor manifestations. ENROLL-HD platform includes four cognitive measures of information processing speed (IPS). Our group is eager to seek clinical markers in the life stage that is as close as possible to the age of onset (ie, the so called prodromal HD phase) because this is the best time for therapeutic interventions. OBJECTIVES: Our study aimed to test whether cognitive scores in prodromal ENROLL-HD mutation carriers show the potential to predict the severity of motor and behavioral changes once HD became fully manifested...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: TARDBP patients are considered particularly prone to cognitive involvement, but no systematic studies of cognitive impairment in TARDBP patients are available. The aim of this article was to depict in depth the cognitive-behavioral characteristics of a cohort of patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) carrying TARDBP pathogenetic variants followed by an ALS referral center. METHODS: We enrolled all patients with ALS seen at the Turin ALS expert center in the 2009-2021 period who underwent extensive genetic testing and a neuropsychological battery encompassing executive function, verbal memory, language, visual memory, visuoconstructive abilities, attention/working memory, psychomotor speed, nonverbal intelligence, cognitive flexibility, social cognition, and behavior...

PURPOSE: Previous studies have shown increased prevalence of sleep problems among people who stutter. However, there is a lack of knowledge about what these sleep problems may specifically be. METHOD: Fifty children who stutter (CWS) from 6;0 to 12;9 years of age and 50 age- and gender-matched controls participated in this study. Parents did not report coexisting conditions, excepting stuttering and/or sleep problems. Sleep problems were investigated using a standardized questionnaire answered by parents...

OBJECTIVE: Bipolar disorder (BD) is a chronic mental disorder characterized by alternating or mixed episodes of mania or hypomania and depression. Cognitive function impairment is a frequent associated feature of the disease. While many BD patients also engage in non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI), there is a lack of studies on the cognitive function of BD patients with NSSI. This study aimed to evaluate cognitive functioning of BD patients with NSSI and provide a clinical basis for the differential diagnosis and treatment of BD and NSSI...

Lead is a well-known neurotoxicant that continues to affect children's cognition and behavior. With the aim to examine the associations of lead exposure with math performance in children at the beginning of formal schooling, we conducted a cross-sectional study of first-grade students from 11 schools in Montevideo, Uruguay. Math abilities were assessed with tests from the Batería III Woodcock-Muñoz (Calculation, Math Facts Fluency, Applied Problems, Math Calculation Skills and Broad Maths). Separate generalized linear models (GLM) tested the association of blood lead level (BLL) and each math ability, adjusting for key covariates including age and sex, maternal education, household assets and Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment Inventory score...

It has been proposed that a continuum of specificity exists between episodic and semantic autobiographical memory. Personal semantics have been theorized to situate intermediately on this continuum, with more "experience-near" personal semantics (enPS) closer to the episodic end. We used individual differences in behavior as a model to investigate brain networks associated with the access to episodic autobiographical (EAM) and enPS information, assessing the relation between performance in the EAM and enPS conditions of the Autobiographical Fluency Task (AFT) and intrinsic brain connectivity...

In this study, we examined the metaphorical association between aesthetic judgments of faces and horizontal hand movements as well as their cognitive neural mechanisms using a joint categorical response task. In the "aesthetic-action" metaphorical representation situation, participants were asked to classify beautiful/ugly faces by moving the mouse to the left or the right. The results showed that the joint categorization condition "judge beautiful-move mouse left, judge ugly-move mouse right" had a shorter reaction time than the "judge beautiful-move mouse right, judge ugly-move mouse left" condition, which was accompanied by larger amplitudes of the early component N170, EPN, and the late component P300...

BACKGROUND: Only few studies have focused on the metabolite differences between asymptomatic neurocognitive impairment (ANI) and cognitively normal people living with HIV (PLWH). The current study aims to examine whether brain metabolisms in basal ganglia (BG) by magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) were potential to discriminate ANI from cognitively normal PLWH. METHODS: According to neuropsychological (NP) test, 80 PLWH (37.4 ± 10.2 years) were divided into ANI group (HIV-ANI, n = 31) and NP normal group (HIV-normal, n = 49)...

The well-known arcuate fasciculus that connects the posterior superior temporal region with the language production region in the ventrolateral frontal cortex constitutes the classic peri-Sylvian dorsal stream of language. A second temporo-frontal white matter tract connects ventrally the anterior-to-intermediate lateral temporal cortex with frontal areas via the extreme capsule. This temporo-frontal extreme capsule fasciculus (TFexcF) constitutes the ventral stream of language processing. The precise origin, course, and termination of this pathway has been examined in invasive tract tracing studies in macaque monkeys, but there have been no standard protocols for its reconstruction in the human brain using diffusion imaging tractography...

INTRODUCTION: Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (TLE) has been associated with memory impairments, which are typically linked to hippocampal and mesial temporal cortex lesions. Considering the presence of extensive bidirectional frontotemporal connections, it can be hypothesized that executive dysfunction in TLE is modulated by the lateralization of the epileptic foci. MATERIAL AND METHODS: A comprehensive neuropsychological executive functions protocol was administered to 63 participants, including 42 individuals with temporal lobe epilepsy (20 with right-TLE and 22 with left-TLE) and 21 healthy controls aged 20-49...