Search

Cognitive deficits are considered to be one of the core features of schizophrenia, but their course in late-life schizophrenia is still controversial. Specifically, it remains unclear whether schizophrenia patients show accelerated aging despite the importance of this question for cognitive remediation. Moreover, although the diversity of executive functions is well established, most studies continue to use general, unspecific tests. The aim of this study was to determine how each of the four specific executive functions (shifting, updating, inhibition and access to long-term memory) described in Miyake et al. (2000) and Fisk and Sharp (2004) is affected by aging in schizophrenia compared to healthy aging. 20 younger (age 18-34), 17 middle-aged (age 35-49) and 25 older (age 59-76) schizophrenia patients and 62 healthy comparison subjects matched for gender, age and education performed a neurocognitive battery evaluating the four specific executive functions. Results showed that schizophrenia patients performed worse than comparison subjects on shifting, updating and access, whereas inhibition seemed preserved. Age affected the four functions with increased degradation of shifting and access in schizophrenia patients, whereas updating and inhibition showed a normal decline with age. As age affected the specific executive functions differently, remediation programs should be adapted to older patients by targeting shifting abilities and strategic access to memory. Our results also stress the need to assess executive functioning accurately before admitting patients to remediation programs. Models of specific executive functions are very interesting for understanding the complexity of cognition in schizophrenia and its course during later life so that healthcare can be adapted accordingly.

In many species, a difference in the optimal number of copulations for males and females leads to sexual conflict. This is well documented in the bean beetle Callosobruchus maculatus, where both sexes mate multiply and females incur fitness costs from injuries caused by the male genitalia. Here, we demonstrate that sexual conflict also decreases female fitness due to male harassment. We hypothesized that harassment costs would come as 1) decreased clutch size, egg size, or both and by 2) disruption of female preference for higher-quality oviposition substrate. Mated females were housed with two bean types—cowpeas, their preferred natal hosts, and toxic pinto beans. They were then submitted to either no, moderate, or high male harassment in the oviposition site. Females under harassment produced smaller clutch sizes but not smaller eggs, resulting in the absence of an egg-size/clutch-size trade-off. Additionally, females did not exhibit a preference for their natal cowpeas hosts over toxic pinto beans when males were present at the oviposition site, although they do so when harassing males are not present. Harassment disrupted female responses to variation in oviposition substrate quality, resulting in considerable fitness consequences in the form of lower offspring production and survival.

Introduction Alcohol, tobacco, and illegal drug usage is pervasive throughout the world, and abuse of these substances is a major contributor to the global disease burden. Many pharmacotherapies have been developed over the last 50 years to target addictive disorders. While the efficacy of these pharmacotherapies is largely recognized, their cognitive impact is less known. However, all substance abuse disorders are known to promote cognitive disorders like executive dysfunction and memory impairment. These impairments are critical for the maintenance of addictive behaviors and impede cognitive behavioral therapies that are regularly administered in association with pharmacotherapies. It is also unknown if addictolytic medications have an impact on preexisting cognitive disorders, and if this impact is modulated by the indication of prescription, i.e. abstinence, reduction or substitution, or by the specific action of the medication. Method We reviewed the cognitive effects of labeled medications for tobacco addiction (varenicline, bupropion, nicotine patch and nicotine gums), alcohol addiction (naltrexone, nalmefene, baclofen, disulfiram, sodium oxybate, acamprosate), and opioid addiction (methadone, buprenorphine) in human studies. Studies were selected following MOOSE guidelines for systematic reviews of observational studies, using the keywords [Cognition] and [Cognitive disorders] and [treatment] for each medication. Results 971 articles were screened and 77 studies met the inclusion criteria and were reported in this review (for alcohol abuse, n = 21, for tobacco n = 22, for opioid n = 34. However, very few comparative clinical trials have explored the chronic effects of addictolytic medications on cognition in addictive behaviors, and there are no clinical trials on the cognitive impact of nalmefene in patients suffering from alcohol use disorders. Discussion Although some medications seem to enhance cognition in patients suffering from cognitive disorders, others could promote cognitive impairments, and our work highlights a lack of literature on this subject. In conclusion, more comparative clinical trials are needed to better understand the cognitive impact of addictolytic medications.

Resume L’addiction est une pathologie complexe, sous-tendue par des mecanismes cognitifs en lien avec des anomalies neurobiologiques. La mise en place d’une addiction repose sur l’association cognitive entre un contexte et une substance. La persistance de cette association est a l’origine de la dependance, c’est-a-dire de l’incapacite du sujet a se sevrer de cette substance. Les mecanismes cognitifs mnesiques sont particulierement importants pour la mise en place de l’association substance–contexte, renforcee, par exemple, par le plaisir eprouve lors de la prise de substance (renforcement positif) et par la necessite d’eviter les effets physiques et psychiques lies au sevrage (renforcement negatif). Les mecanismes renforcateurs sont responsables de la persistance de cette association. Par ailleurs, la persistance de cette association est entretenue par d’autres mecanismes cognitifs comme la surestimation de la duree. Cette alteration conduit les sujets a preferer les gratifications immediates aux gratifications plus tardives mais plus importantes. Ainsi, le sujet choisit preferentiellement la recompense immediate generee par la consommation de la substance et presente des difficultes a construire un projet dans le futur, source de recompense differee. Si les mecanismes mnesiques et temporels semblent avoir une place centrale dans l’initiation et la persistance des addictions, ils sont par ailleurs en lien avec des anomalies neurobiologiques a court et a long terme. Ainsi, ameliorer notre connaissance des mecanismes cognitifs des addictions est un atout pour comprendre comment les anomalies neurobiologiques sont liees aux addictions et devrait permettre de developper des outils de prise en charge des patients, comme par exemple des programmes personnalises de remediation cognitive.

The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of aging on inhibitory processes and attentional resources in a long-lasting Go/No-Go sustained attention task using the event-related potential (ERP) technique. In line with recent studies, our results showed that older adults were able to maintain sustained attention performance throughout the duration of the task, whereas younger subjects exhibited a vigilance decrement. Regarding ERP results, older adults had larger P2 and Go-P3 amplitudes, components related to resource allocation, suggesting that the older subjects invested more resources in task performance. In addition, the No-Go P3 component, related to inhibitory processes, was more frontally distributed in older than in younger participants. This age-related frontal scalp overrecruitment may have played a compensatory role, enabling older subjects to perform better than younger subjects throughout the duration of the task.

Subjective reports and theories about memory may have an influence on other beliefs and behaviours. Patients with schizophrenia suffer a wide range of deficits affecting their awareness of daily life, including memory. With the Metamemory Inventory in Adulthood (MIA) we ascertained patients' memory knowledge and thoughts about their own cognitive capacities and about several aspects of cognitive functioning: personal capacities, knowledge of processes, use of strategies, perceived change with ageing, anxiety, motivation and mastery. The participants' ratings were correlated with their intellectual, cognitive and psychiatric data. Patients felt they had a lower capacity and marginally lower mastery over their memory than comparison subjects. They reported less recourse to strategies, and higher levels of memory-related anxiety. However, their knowledge of basic memory processes, motivation to succeed, and perception of ageing effects were similar. So patients with schizophrenia do not suffer a general and non specific impairment of their metacognitive knowledge.

In this paper, curriculum design and development for computer science and similar disciplines as a formal model is introduced and analysed. Functions of education process as knowledge delivery and assessment are analysed. Structural formation of curriculum design is presented using definitive, characteristic and predictive functions. The process of changes in the discipline is also described and analysed. The authors then develop an algorithm to determine the core of the discipline and functions of the core moving and merging are introduced.

This study examined effects of intensive memory use during one's profession on metamemory beliefs. Fifty-one actors and 60 controls aged from 20 to 73 years were compared with the Metamemory Inventory in Adulthood. Both intensive job-related memory practice and younger age were associated with stronger memory self-efficacy beliefs. Irrespective of age, actors reported a higher stability of their memory with time and a higher controllability. No significant effect was found on metamemory knowledge. These findings show the relevance of the dissociation between metamemory knowledge and metamemory beliefs. Both memory practicing during occupation and age appear to influence only metamemory beliefs.

The aim of the study was to explore the processes underlying schizophrenia patients' reflections on their own memory. Cognitive deficits and insight problems are considered core symptoms of schizophrenia. Even when people fail to recall a solicited target, they can provide feeling of knowing (FOK) judgments that reflect their ability to judge the accessibility of the target in memory. The metamemory approach allows for direct and experimental quantification of the correspondence between the subjective judgments and the objective measures of memory performance. According to the accessibility hypothesis, FOK evaluations rely on the accessibility of partial and/or contextual information relevant to the memory target.The accessibility of partial information relating to a memory target was investigated in 21 patients and 21 healthy comparison subjects matched for age, gender, and level of education. The material to be learned consisted of four-letter nonsense tetragrams, with each letter providing partial information about the four-letter target.The results show that despite memory recall (p.01) and recognition impairments (p = .02) and lower FOK ratings (p.05), patients' metamemory judgments increased linearly with the amount of partial information recalled (from one letter to four letters, p.01). The products of memory retrieval were predictive of both their FOK judgments and their subsequent memory performance.Schizophrenia patients are as capable as comparison subjects of relying on the products of memory retrieval to monitor accurately their awareness of what they do or do not know. The finding may be of interest for cognitive remediation.

TOT states may be viewed as a temporary and reversible microamnesia. We investigated the effects of lorazepam on TOT states in response to general knowledge questions. The lorazepam participants produced more commission errors and more TOTs following commission errors than the placebo participants (although the rates did not change). The resolution of the TOTs was unimpaired by the drug. Neither feeling-of-knowing accuracy nor recognition were affected by lorazepam. The higher level of incorrect recalls produced by lorazepam participants may be due to the fact that they were more frequently temporarily unable to access a known item. For some of these items, the awareness of the retrieval failure resulted in a commission TOT (phenonemological TOT after a commission error). The resolution of the TOT conflict is discussed in the light of the anxiolytic and anticonflict effects of lorazepam. The data are discussed in terms of contemporary theories of TOTs and the effects that benzodiazepines have on semantic memory.

Previous studies examining sustained attention ability in older adults have yielded inconsistent results: age-related decline in studies using traditionally formatted tasks (TFT), in which subjects have to respond to rare targets, and preservation in studies using Go/No-Go tasks, in which subjects have to withhold response to rare targets. The purpose of this study was to examine whether these discrepancies could be explained by a differential use of automatic and controlled processes according to age. To that end, we used two versions of the same task differing in response mode (TFT, Go/No-Go), and the event-related potential (ERP) technique. The within-task comparison first revealed that older adults exhibited a vigilance decrement in the TFT SART, while their performance actually improved in the Go/No-Go SART. Secondly, in both tasks, ERP results notably evidenced increased P2s and non-target P3s in older adults, components related to the allocation of attentional resources. Altogether, our results suggest that in both tasks older adults adopted a controlled processing mode, which resulted in opposite effects on performance according to the nature of the task.

International audience

Recent studies have shown that schizophrenia may be a disease affecting the states of consciousness. The present study is aimed at investigating metamemory, i.e., the knowledge about one's own memory capabilities, in patients with schizophrenia. The accuracy of the Confidence level (CL) in the correctness of the answers provided during a recall phase, and the predictability of the Feeling of Knowing (FOK) when recall fails were measured using a task consisting of general information questions and assessing semantic memory. Nineteen outpatients were paired with 19 control subjects with respect to age, sex, and education. Results showed that patients with schizophrenia exhibited an impaired semantic memory. CL ratings as well as CL and FOK accuracy were not significantly different in the schizophrenic and the control groups. However, FOK ratings were significantly reduced for the patient group, and discordant FOK judgments were also observed more frequently. Such results suggest that FOK judgments are impaired in patients with schizophrenia, which confirms that schizophrenia is an illness characterized by an impaired conscious awareness of one's own knowledge.

The effects of lorazepam (0.026 or 0.038 mg/kg), a benzodiazepine, and of a placebo on metamemory, i.e. knowledge about one's own memory capabilities, were investigated in 36 healthy volunteers. Accuracy of confidence levels (CL) in the correctness of recalled answers and accuracy of feeling of knowing (FOK) the answers when recall fails were measured using a sentence memory task assessing episodic memory and a task consisting of general information questions and assessing semantic memory. Lorazepam impaired episodic memory. Unexpectedly, it also impaired performance in both the recall and recognition phases of the task assessing semantic memory, suggesting that it decreased the ability to distinguish between correct and incorrect information. In episodic memory, lorazepam 0.038 mg/kg-treated subjects exhibited an impaired CL accuracy, compared to placebo-treated subjects, and their FOK accuracy was at chance. In semantic memory, their overall CL and FOK accuracy was apparently spared. However, these subjects selectively overestimated their CL judgements for incorrect answers; moreover, secondary analyses showed that FOK accuracy for a subset of low-accuracy items was virtually nil. These results suggest that lorazepam impairs metamemory for both episodic and semantic memory.

We examined ERP indices of proactive and reactive cognitive control processes in younger and older adults performing a sustained attention Go/No-Go task. Behavioral results showed that older adults were able to maintain a stable level of performance over time, while younger adults exhibited a vigilance decrement. The main ERP findings showed that in older adults, the amplitude of the pre-stimulus slow wave, a marker of proactive control, remained stable with time on task, and that the amplitude of the sustained potential, a marker of reactive control, increased with time on task. On the other hand, in younger adults, the amplitudes of both components decreased over time. Overall, older participants also exhibited larger amplitudes of the error negativity than their younger counterparts. These results suggest that age-related differences in the recruitment of proactive and reactive control over the course of the task can explain age differences in sustained attention performance.

The feeling of knowing (FOK) predicts the likelihood of eventually recognizing currently unrecalled items. Koriat (1993, 1995) showed that retrieval of partial target information influences FOK ratings. Building on Koriat's view, the noncriterial-recollection hypothesis contends that contextual information influences FOKs (Brewer, Marsh, Clark-Foos, & Meeks, 2010). Our study assessed the validity of the noncriterial-recollection hypothesis by controlling the amount of potentially-retrievable contextual information presented to participants. We varied the amount of contextual information accompanying the name and image of imaginary animals. There were three information conditions: minimum (name and image), medium (name, image, and country), and maximum (name, image, country, diet and weight). Information condition did not affect recall accuracy. The minimum condition resulted in greater response output (recall and commission errors together). FOKs for unrecalled items were lower in the minimum condition than the other conditions. Consistent with the noncriterial-recollection hypothesis, FOKs were positively correlated with the retrieval of contextual information.

The aim of this study was to gain a better understanding of schizophrenia patients' strategic use of learning time allocation during encoding, and determine whether they are able to use their monitoring and previous performances to adapt their learning behavior efficiently. Schizophrenia is considered to be a pathology of consciousness as well as being associated with impaired awareness of cognitive processes. In this study, after a learning session, individuals may express a Judgment of Learning (JOL), which reflects their sense of being able to retrieve the information later and which forms the basis for their decision whether or not to carry on learning. The introspective abilities of schizophrenia patients and subsequent strategic control of study time during the encoding of easy or difficult word pairs were investigated in 23 patients and 23 healthy comparison subjects. In spite of their memory impairment, patients were able to judge the difficulty of the word pairs with accuracy and adapt their learning time accordingly. Schizophrenia patients are sensitive to difficulty when rating JOLs and afterwards controlling study time. Monitoring their knowledge at the start helped patients to adapt their learning efficiently. These findings may be of value for cognitive remediation.

OBJECTIVE: The relationship between subjective experience and behavior abnormalities in schizophrenia was investigated. METHOD: Eighteen patients with schizophrenia and 18 normal comparison subjects completed a general knowledge task with two incentive conditions to measure monitoring effectiveness, control sensitivity, and response criterion setting. RESULTS: The patients’ levels of monitoring effectiveness and control sensitivity were lower than those of the comparison subjects. The effect of incentives on response criterion values was similar in the two groups. CONCLUSIONS: Patients were impaired in subjectively assessing the correctness of their knowledge, and their behavior was less determined by subjective experience than that of normal subjects. The patients’ intact sensitivity to incentives has implications for cognitive remediation.

Schizophrenia is a common mental disease with a lifetime risk of about 1%. It has been closely linked to a wide range of cognitive deficits. In addition to cognitive deficits, patients with schizophrenia also manifest deficits in awareness of their memory capacity. The study of metamemory permits an experimental approach to metacognition in schizophrenia. Two studies with schizophrenia patients are reported. The first study is on FOK, a metamemory judgment that is expressed at the time of retrieval. The second study examines JOL, which is expressed at the time of learning and allows the studying of the strategic regulation of learning. Thus, the relationship between monitoring and control can be revealed. The findings of the two reported studies showed preservation of the accuracy of prospective metamemory judgments in schizophrenia. The first study demonstrated that the accuracy of FOK, the judgments elicited at the time of retrieval regarding the future recallability of unrecalled items, is preserved in an episodic task. Evidence from the second study indicates that the accuracy of judgments elicited at the time of encoding (i.e., JOLs) is also relatively preserved but the strategic regulation (i.e., control) of study time is impaired in schizophrenia.

The tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) state may be viewed as temporary and reversible micro-amnesia. Amnesic drugs, such as benzodiazepines, may be used as tools to reveal functional principles of normal cognitive processes. We investigated the effects of lorazepam on TOT state. With general information questions, Lorazepam participants provided more commission errors and more TOT states following commissions than placebo participants, whereas the resolution of the TOTs was unimpaired. The higher amount of incorrect recalls provided by lorazepam participants may partially result from the fact that they are more frequently in a state of transitory inaccessibility of a known item, identifiable as a commission TOT (participants provide a persistent alternate and experience the phenomenological TOT only after having been informed of the error). This way of resolving the TOT conflict is discussed in light of the anxiolytic effect of the drug. Lorazepam led the participants to generate more persistent alternates when in a TOT while preserving the cognitive process of TOT, that is, the temporary failure to retrieve a known word.

An approach to curriculum design for Computer Science and similar disciplines as a formal model is introduced. Functions of education process as knowledge delivery and assessment are considered. The structural formation of curriculum design using definitive, characteristic and predictive functions is presented. Influences on the process of changes in a discipline are described and functions of the core moving and merging are introduced. Initial considerations on the development of the algorithm to determine the core of a discipline are presented.

There is a general consensus that benzodiazepines affect attentional processes, yet only few studies have tried to investigate these impairments in detail. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effects of a single dose of Lorazepam on performance in a target cancellation task with important time constraints. We measured correct target detections and correct distractor rejections, misses and false positives. The results show that Lorazepam produces multiple kinds of shifts in performance, which suggests that it impairs multipLe processes: (a) the evolution of performance over time was not the same between the placebo and the Lorazepam groups, with the Lorazepam affecting performance quite early after the beginning of the test. This is suggestive of a depletion of attentional resources during sequential attentional processing; (b) Lorazepam affected differently target and distractor processing, with target detection being the most impaired; (c) misses were more frequent under Lorazepam than under placebo, but no such difference was observed as far as false positives were concerned. Signal detection analyses showed that Lorazepam (d) decreased perceptual discrimination, and (e) reliably increased response bias. Our results bring new insights on the multiple effects of Lorazepam on selective attention which, when combined, may have deleterious effects on human performance.

The ability to monitor memory performance has considerable importance in everyday life and is among the proposed metamemory dimensions which has been widely investigated. The ability to monitor memory performance accurately was examined in 16 patients with schizophrenia and 16 control subjects by using a Feeling-of-Knowing task on episodic information. Feeling-of-Knowing judgments are predictions made about the likelihood of subsequent recognition of currently non-recallable information. Participants were given cued recall and recognition tests of 50 sentence-target words. Feeling-of-knowing judgments were made for non-recalled targets. Our results first confirm that schizophrenia is associated with episodic memory impairment. By using the Feeling-of-Knowing task, patients with schizophrenia were found to predict accurately their subsequent recognition performance, suggesting an interesting dissociation between a preserved metamemory and an altered memory.

When asked "How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the ark?", people fail to notice the distortion introduced by the impostor "Moses" and respond "two". It has been argued that the effect must be due to the existence of a partial-match process. In most situations, the form of a question is not likely to closely match the memory representation it queries. Thus, for the partial match hypothesis people ignore some semantic distortions. In the same vein, it has been shown that the benzodiazepine lorazepam drug induces some impairments of semantic memory as participants under lorazepam provide more incorrect recalls than placebo do with general information questions.The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of the benzodiazepine lorazepam on the Moses illusion paradigm.The effects of lorazepam (0.038 mg/kg) and of a placebo were investigated in 28 healthy volunteers. Twenty-two illusory questions were presented along with 72 normal general information questions.Lorazepam impaired the ability to detect the Moses illusion. Moreover, lorazepam participants appeared less biased to consider a question distorted than placebo participants.The temporary and reversible semantic memory impairments experienced by participants when falling into the Moses illusion are more frequent under lorazepam. The amnesic drug lorazepam may impair semantic processing as well as the strategic control of memory.

Introduction Cognitive deficits are today considered as core symptoms of schizophrenia. The most classical techniques aimed at enhancing learning and retention focus on repetition of learning, and are not very efficient on a long time scale. On the other hand, the subjective knowledge and feelings about memory provide the basis for regulating one's memory-related behavior. Metamemory refers to the subjective awareness of one's memory capacity (monitoring), and the control of the related memory behavior. The self monitoring approach is based on having learners judge which material have been learned or not well learned. It has been successfully used to enhance learning in young and older healthy participants. Monitoring ability has been shown to be relatively spared in schizophrenia. Aims The aim of this study was to assess the efficiency in patients with schizophrenia of this potential learning method, self-monitoring, including a single learning session, in comparison with relearning. Methods After a single word pair encoding phase (60 pairs), patients took part in a single session devoted to either re-study, or self-monitoring. The strength of the cue-target association was manipulated. 48 hours later, there was a final cued-recall test. Results Preliminary results show that, regarding difficult material, most of the patients having used the self-monitoring procedure had better levels of performance (8/10: performance > 50%) than those having re-studied (3/9: performance > 50%). Conclusions If the results are confirmed with greater patient's samples, then self-monitoring could represent an interesting and novel, less stressful learning strategy for patients with schizophrenia.

Lorazepam has been repeatedly shown to induce memory impairments. The effects of this benzodiazepine on the processes involved in the strategic regulation of memory accuracy have not as yet been explored. An experimental procedure that delineates the role of monitoring and control processes was used. Fifteen lorazepam and 15 placebo subjects were examined using a semantic memory task that combined both a forced- and a free-report option and a no-incentive and an incentive condition. Memory accuracy was lower in the lorazepam than in the placebo group. Lorazepam impaired control sensitivity (the extent to which volunteering of answers is affected by the confidence judgments). While the absolute aspect of monitoring was impaired (calibration scores), both the discriminative aspect (the ability to distinguish between correct and incorrect answers) and the response criterion setting (the confidence threshold set for volunteering a report) were spared. The pharmacological dissociation between monitoring effectiveness and control sensitivity indicates that these two components involve distinct processes.

The aim of the study is to investigate the different levels of the popularization of scientific research and medical information in the written press. The research is based on an attempt to popularize scientific knowledge by a scientific researcher. The information concerns the effects of the anxiolytic drugs on memory. Several articles were written on this subject and submitted to various newspapers addressing different audiences (medical journals, a daily newspaper, women’s journals). The research comprises the recordings, progressively, of the events and negociations with the various journals.*

This paper is concerned with a systematic approach to knowledge base maintenance using an application in magnetic resonance (MR) imaging. The aim is to allow an expert to make changes to the knowledge base, always leaving it consistent and correct. The changes may be necessary for three reasons: (a) to correct any errors found in the knowledge base (b) to accommodate new research findings and (c) to adapt the knowledge base to the individual preferences of different experts. The types of changes considered range from minor modifications of the menu driven user interface to the introduction of new concepts and associated facts and production rules. In this context the paper discusses the following points: (a) Basic design and functionality of the expert system, (b) Modification of the menu system, facts and rules; consistency checks and on-line help, (c) Explanation facilities to help explore the implications of changes, (d) Debugging and trace facilities to follow the reasoning of the system, (e) Testing procedures to ensure the correctness of the modified knowledge base.