Information Processing In Individuals Research Articles

Analysis of functional connectivity using machine learning and deep learning in different data modalities from individuals with schizophrenia

Objective. Schizophrenia (SCZ) is a severe mental disorder associated with persistent or recurrent psychosis, hallucinations, delusions, and thought disorders that affect approximately 26 million people worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. Several studies encompass machine learning (ML) and deep learning algorithms to automate the diagnosis of this mental disorder. Others study SCZ brain networks to get new insights into the dynamics of information processing in individuals suffering from the condition. In this paper, we offer a rigorous approach with ML and deep learning techniques for evaluating connectivity matrices and measures of complex networks to establish an automated diagnosis and comprehend the topology and dynamics of brain networks in SCZ individuals. Approach. For this purpose, we employed an functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalogram (EEG) dataset. In addition, we combined EEG measures, i.e. Hjorth mobility and complexity, with complex network measurements to be analyzed in our model for the first time in the literature. Main results. When comparing the SCZ group to the control group, we found a high positive correlation between the left superior parietal lobe and the left motor cortex and a positive correlation between the left dorsal posterior cingulate cortex and the left primary motor. Regarding complex network measures, the diameter, which corresponds to the longest shortest path length in a network, may be regarded as a biomarker because it is the most crucial measure in different data modalities. Furthermore, the SCZ brain networks exhibit less segregation and a lower distribution of information. As a result, EEG measures outperformed complex networks in capturing the brain alterations associated with SCZ. Significance. Our model achieved an area under receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 100% and an accuracy of 98.5% for the fMRI, an AUC of 95%, and an accuracy of 95.4% for the EEG data set. These are excellent classification results. Furthermore, we investigated the impact of specific brain connections and network measures on these results, which helped us better describe changes in the diseased brain.

Mechanisms in Emotional Information Processing in Individuals with Major Depressive Disorder: An Event-Related Potential Study of an Information Processing Model.

Individuals with major depressive disorder have a cognitive bias toward emotional stimuli, which influences the quality and speed of emotional information processing. This study aimed to understand the factors underlying this bias by identifying when it occurs during information processing using an information processing model. A total of 57 participants-19 each [ (16 (84.21%) females and 3 (15.79%) males per group)], for the first-episode MDD (FMDD), recurrent episodes MDD (RMDD), and healthy controls (HCs) - matched for sex and hand preference, completed event-related potentials (ERP) to perform psychological function and a choice response time task. Results revealed that recurrent episodes major depressive disorder participants had decreased N2b and P3b amplitudes but increased contingent negative variation during the processing of happy and neutral facial stimuli, relative to their counterparts. Both recurrent episodes major depressive disorder and first-episode major depressive disorder participants used a parallel information processing strategy for happy information at P3a latency, while healthy controls used a linear information processing strategy. The use of a parallel processing strategy among individuals with major depressive disorder may have led to impaired "happy" information processes, possibly explaining why individuals with major depressive disorder are less efficient than healthy controls. The results suggest the possibility that biases related to the processing of "happy" information among individuals with major depressive disorder may be related to a tendency for these individuals to engage in superficial decision-making. Future research is needed to examine the processes contributing to people with major depressive disorder having challenges with inhibition-facilitation of emotional stimuli.

The novel narrative technique uncovers emotional scripts in individuals with psychopathy and high trait anxiety.

Mental representations are of great importance for understanding human behaviour. The aim of this article is to present an innovative way to assess emotional scripts, which are a form of mental representations of emotional events, based on an analysis of narratives and their contents. Theoretical background on emotional schemas and scripts is provided along with information about types of related measures. Then, a rationale is presented for introducing an assessment of scripts related to specific emotions such as love, hate, and anxiety in a psychopathological context. This is followed by a perspective explaining the procedure of the relevant technique based on narrative data analysis. The technique has been successfully applied in two studies [I study (n- 200), II study (n- 280)]. A total of 1440 narratives about specific emotions have been analyzed to identify the indicators of scripts. The psychometric properties of the proposed technique have been established such as reliability, inter-rater agreement, and accuracy. The results show the value of the assessment of emotional script in individuals, particularly with high psychopathy and high trait anxiety. The contents of love and hate scripts are an illustration of cognitive distortions and deficits in the emotional information processing in individuals with psychopathy. The method enables the collection of informative data on romantic love, hate, and anxiety scripts which provides insight into how people may perceive and experience emotions and how they behave emotionally. Future research should focus on verification of the technique in other types of psychopathology and on the improvement of computer software dedicated to the narrative technique described in this paper.

Cultivation of Humanity: How we can stagnate within the eternal flow

By introducing Taoism— the understanding of flow—and the meaning of cultivation as a basic human ability, an essential challenge in our current understanding of science can be discovered. Human interaction with nature is a meaningful process, which can reveal a better understanding of the inner cultivation processes and with it a multidimensional field of endless inputs triggering an ongoing process of growth. For this purpose, MyCu-cultivation ( My cultural cultivation) is introduced as new terminology. A construct that allows to separately elaborate the social concepts of culture and the process of metaphysical reality perception—generated in our mind. At the same time, the layers of physical experienced reality and imagination are reintroduced in an alternative interrelation, leading to new insights in the layers of metaphysical understandings. Therefore, the central manifestation of meaning-making will be elaborated through the metaphorical use of bookshelves, allowing to perceive new insights in the raw information processing of individuals—underlining the human limitations, in processing the overwhelming meaning flow. This theoretical knowledge leads us further to a new possibility of understanding the constructive externalization of the imagination, highlighting the diversity of phenomenological insights in our everyday life, resulting in a complex theoretical repositioning between semiotics, cultural psychology, and Naturwissenschaften.

The Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status, While Useful for Measuring Cognitive Changes in Manifest Huntington Disease, May Show Limited Utility in Premanifest Disease.

The Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status (RBANS) is a brief, standardized neuropsychological test that assesses several areas of cognitive function. Recent studies, although sparse, have examined the use of the RBANS to detect cognitive deficits in individuals with manifest Huntington disease (HD); however, no studies have investigated its utility to detect cognitive deficits in individuals with premanifest HD (PreHD), where cognitive symptoms are thought to be more subtle. To assess cognitive deficits in individuals with HD, particularly in individuals with PreHD, using an easily administered, brief but comprehensive, neuropsychological test. We administered the RBANS to 31 individuals with HD, 29 individuals with PreHD, and 22 healthy controls (HC) at an academic HD clinical research center and collected RBANS Total, Index, and subtest scores for group comparisons. The HD group had significantly lower RBANS Total, Index, and subtest scores than the HC. The PreHD group had significantly lower RBANS Total scores and Coding subtest scores than the HC, but no other significant group differences were identified. Our results substantiate previous findings of significant impairment on the RBANS in individuals with HD. In addition, we are the first to demonstrate that, although the RBANS can identify deficits in psychomotor speed and information processing in individuals with PreHD, it does not appear to have the ability to detect impairment in any additional cognitive domains in individuals with PreHD.

Neuronal responses in social-emotional information processing in impulsive aggressive individuals.

How we perceive and interpret signals from others' behavior, known as social-emotional information processing (SEIP), is key when responding to social threat. Impulsively aggressive individuals, behaviorally, demonstrate impaired SEIP for encoding relevant social stimuli, attribution of intent of the other person in the interaction, and responding negatively to potentially threatening social situations. In this study, we sought to explore how neural processing differs between healthy controls (HC) and individuals with impulsive aggressive behavior (individuals with Intermittent Explosive Disorder, I-IED), during a validated SEIP paradigm. Forty-five adults (19 I-IED, 26 HC) participants underwent a validated SEIP tasks during an fMRI scan. The task utilized video clips depicting a socially ambiguous, but possibly aggressive (AGG), act by one person to another and control video clips in which where possibly aggressive act does not occur (CON). Behavioral anomalies in SEIP are also manifest in altered neural activation in distributed networks/brain regions in each phase of SEIP examined. Overall, neural responses during the SEIP paradigm were characterized as reduced discrimination of the AGG vs. CON videos for I-IEDs compared to HCs. These data suggest the presence of compromised neural circuits underlying impaired social cognition in individuals with IED and highlights potential neural targets of intervention for impaired social cognition in I-IED and other behavioral disorders as well.

Is intuition allied with jumping to conclusions in decision-making? An intensive longitudinal study in patients with delusions and in non-clinical individuals.

Research suggests that a jumping-to-conclusions (JTC) bias, excessive intuition, and reduced analysis in information processing may favor suboptimal decision-making, both in non-clinical and mentally disordered individuals. The temporal relationship between processing modes and JTC bias, however, remains unexplored. Therefore, using an experience sampling methodology (ESM) approach, this study examines the temporal associations between intuitive/analytical information processing, JTC bias, and delusions in non-clinical individuals and patients with schizophrenia. Specifically, we examine whether a high use of intuitive and/or a low use of analytical processing predicts subsequent JTC bias and paranoid conviction. In a smartphone-based ESM study, participants will be prompted four times per day over three consecutive days to answer questionnaires designed to measure JTC bias, paranoid conviction, and preceding everyday-life intuition/analysis. Our hierarchical data will be analyzed using multilevel modelling for hypothesis testing. Results will further elucidate the role of aberrant human reasoning, particularly intuition, in (non-)clinical delusions and delusion-like experiences, and also inform general information processing models.

Dysfunction of pre-attentive information processing in impulsive aggressive individuals: acoustic startle-response and P50 study

Dysfunction of pre-attentive information processing in impulsive aggressive individuals: acoustic startle-response and P50 study

The Influence of Situational Regulation on the Information Processing of Promotional and Preventive Self-Regulatory Individuals: Evidence From Eye Movements.

Regulatory focus theory uses two different motivation focus systems—promotional and preventive—to describe how individuals approach positive goals and avoid negative goals. Moreover, the regulatory focus can manifest as chronic personality characteristics and can be situationally induced by tasks or the environment. The current study employed eye-tracking methodology to investigate how individuals who differ in their chronic regulatory focus (promotional vs. preventive) process information (Experiment 1) and whether an induced experimental situation could modulate features of their information processing (Experiment 2). Both experiments used a 3 × 3 grid information-processing task, containing eight information cells and a fixation cell; half the information cells were characterized by attribute-based information, and the other half by alternative-based information. We asked the subjects to view the grid based on their personal preferences and choose one of the virtual products presented in this grid to “purchase” by the end of each trial. Results of Experiment 1 show that promotional individuals do not exhibit a clear preference between the two types of information, whereas preventive individuals tend to fixate longer on the alternative-based information. In Experiment 2, we induced the situational regulatory focus via experimental tasks before the information-processing task. The results demonstrate that the behavioral motivation is significantly enhanced, thereby increasing the depth of the preferred mode of information processing, when the chronic regulatory focus matches the situational focus. In contrast, individuals process information more thoroughly, using both processing modes, in the non-fit condition, i.e., when the focuses do not match.

Emergence of time‐asymptotic flocking for a general Cucker–Smale‐type model with distributed time delays

In this paper, we analyze the asymptotic flocking behavior for a Cucker–Smale‐type model with a disturbed delayed coupling, where delays are information processing and reactions of individuals. By constructing a new energy functional combined with L2‐analysis, we obtain the uniform bound of particle velocities, and then by establishing a system of dissipative differential inequalities together with L∞‐analysis, we prove the existence of asymptotic flocking solutions when the maximum value of time delays is sufficiently small.

Asymptotic Flocking Behavior of the General Finite-Dimensional Cucker–Smale Model with Distributed Time Delays

In this paper, we study a Cucker–Smale-type flocking model with distributed time delays, in which individuals interact with each other through general communication weights, and delays are information processing and reactions of individuals. By constructing two dissipative differential inequalities on position and velocity together with a continuity argument, and using the Lyapunov functional approach, we present some sufficient conditions for the existence of asymptotic flocking solutions to two classes of different communication weights. All results are novel and can be illustrated by numerical simulations using some concrete influence functions.

On the Relationship between P3 Latency and Mental Ability as a Function of Increasing Demands in a Selective Attention Task.

The mental speed approach to individual differences in mental ability (MA) is based on the assumption of higher speed of information processing in individuals with higher than those with lower MA. Empirical support of this assumption has been inconsistent when speed was measured by means of the P3 latency in the event-related potential (ERP). The present study investigated the association between MA and P3 latency as a function of task demands on selective attention. For this purpose, 20 men and 90 women performed on a standard continuous performance test (CPT1 condition) as well as on two further task conditions with lower (CPT0) and higher demands (CPT2) on selective attention. MA and P3 latency negatively correlated in the standard CPT, and this negative relationship even increased systematically from the CPT1 to the CPT2 condition but was absent in the CPT0 condition. The present results indicate that task demands on selective attention are decisive to observe the expected shorter P3 latency in individuals with higher compared to those with lower MA.

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Symptoms and Their Predictors in Earthquake or Fire Survivors

In this study, we aimed to investigate the relationship between post-traumatic stress disorder and previous knowledge of emergency management, sense of control over the stressor, perceived threat, and somatic symptoms in earthquake and fire survivors.. The data were obtained from the 2009-database of the Izmir Province Fire Department to include the people who had experienced domestic fire (n=92), from the people who had applied to the Health Group Directory after the 2005 earthquake in Seferihisar (n=38) and from the staff of a third step hospital who experienced a fire in public building in 2010 (n=34). The Impact of Events Scale-revised version (IES-R) was used to determine the traumatic stress levels of the participants; and the Behavior, Security, and Culture - Survivor (BeSeCu- S) questionnaire was used to acquire information on factors before and after the traumatic events. Compared to the fire survivors, the earthquake survivors perceived higher levels of threat and lower levels of control during the event gender, perceived threat, somatic symptoms experienced during the event and perceived control over the event were found to predict the post-traumatic stress disorder. Results of the research suggested that control-focused treatment METHODS could be effective in treatment of people who had experienced earthquake and fire. It is observed that informing the public about emergency management would be protective for mental health by increasing the sense of control of the individuals at the time of the incident. On the other hand, the positive relationship between PTSD and previous knowledge on emergency suggests that the ringing alarms and practice errors during the fire and earthquake drills could traumatize people. Future research is recommended on the relationship between information processing, somatic symptoms and emotional processes in individuals during earthquake, fire and their drills.

Adoption of Population-Level Statistical Methods Did Transform Psychological Science but For the Better: Commentary on Lamiell (2018)

Abstract Lamiell presents a case that differential psychology (the study of individual differences) and experimental psychology should properly be classified as a form of demography (psychodemography) rather than psychology. He indicates that individual differences pertain to correlations in a population and maintains that mainstream psychology misinterprets such correlations as attributes of individuals. Lamiell also claims that because experimental psychology uses group designs, it too is demography, and he recommends that experimental psychology return to “genuinely appropriate” methods of deriving general laws from the study of individuals. We disagree with Lamiell’s assessment and classifications, and we emphasize that group experiments have yielded considerable knowledge about the nature of information processing in individuals.

Emergent behavior of Cucker–Smale flocking particles with heterogeneous time delays

We analyze the flocking behavior of a Cucker–Smale-type system with a delayed coupling, where delays are information processing and reactions of individuals. By constructing a system of dissipative differential inequalities together with a continuity argument, we provide a sufficient condition for the flocking behavior showing the velocity alignment between particles as time goes to infinity when the maximum value of time delays is sufficiently small.

Association between daily activities, process skills, and motor skills in community-dwelling patients after left hemiparetic stroke.

[Purpose] The purpose of this study was to evaluate the relationships between daily activities, information processing, and motor skills in individuals with hemineglect after having a left hemiparetic stroke. [Subjects and Methods] The instrumental activities of daily living of 35 patients (22 male and 13 female; age: 57.1 ± 16.9 years) with hemineglect after having a left hemiparetic stroke were assessed by using three clinical measurement tools, including activity card sorting, assessment of motor and process skills, and the modified Barthel Index. [Results] The results of the regression analysis indicated that the patients’ processing skills in instrumental activities of daily living after having a left hemiparetic stroke were reduced. Participation in leisure and social activities was also affected as assessed by using the modified Barthel Index. [Conclusion] This study supports the clinical need for rehabilitation intervention after a left hemiparetic stroke to improve patients’ processing skills and independence in performing activities of daily living.

Increased Functional Connectivity Between Subcortical and Cortical Resting-State Networks in Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exhibit severe difficulties in social interaction, motor coordination, behavioral flexibility, and atypical sensory processing, with considerable interindividual variability. This heterogeneous set of symptoms recently led to investigating the presence of abnormalities in the interaction across large-scale brain networks. To date, studies have focused either on constrained sets of brain regions or whole-brain analysis, rather than focusing on the interaction between brain networks. To compare the intrinsic functional connectivity between brain networks in a large sample of individuals with ASD and typically developing control subjects and to estimate to what extent group differences would predict autistic traits and reflect different developmental trajectories. We studied 166 male individuals (mean age, 17.6 years; age range, 7-50 years) diagnosed as having DSM-IV-TR autism or Asperger syndrome and 193 typical developing male individuals (mean age, 16.9 years; age range, 6.5-39.4 years) using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Participants were matched for age, IQ, head motion, and eye status (open or closed) in the MRI scanner. We analyzed data from the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange (ABIDE), an aggregated MRI data set from 17 centers, made public in August 2012. We estimated correlations between time courses of brain networks extracted using a data-driven method (independent component analysis). Subsequently, we associated estimates of interaction strength between networks with age and autistic traits indexed by the Social Responsiveness Scale. Relative to typically developing control participants, individuals with ASD showed increased functional connectivity between primary sensory networks and subcortical networks (thalamus and basal ganglia) (all t ≥ 3.13, P < .001 corrected). The strength of such connections was associated with the severity of autistic traits in the ASD group (all r ≥ 0.21, P < .0067 corrected). In addition, subcortico-cortical interaction decreased with age in the entire sample (all r ≤ -0.09, P < .012 corrected), although this association was significant only in typically developing participants (all r ≤ -0.13, P < .009 corrected). Our results showing ASD-related impairment in the interaction between primary sensory cortices and subcortical regions suggest that the sensory processes they subserve abnormally influence brain information processing in individuals with ASD. This might contribute to the occurrence of hyposensitivity or hypersensitivity and of difficulties in top-down regulation of behavior.

Loneliness and hypervigilance to social cues in females: an eye-tracking study.

The goal of the present study was to examine whether lonely individuals differ from nonlonely individuals in their overt visual attention to social cues. Previous studies showed that loneliness was related to biased post-attentive processing of social cues (e.g., negative interpretation bias), but research on whether lonely and nonlonely individuals also show differences in an earlier information processing stage (gazing behavior) is very limited. A sample of 25 lonely and 25 nonlonely students took part in an eye-tracking study consisting of four tasks. We measured gazing (duration, number of fixations and first fixation) at the eyes, nose and mouth region of faces expressing emotions (Task 1), at emotion quadrants (anger, fear, happiness and neutral expression) (Task 2), at quadrants with positive and negative social and nonsocial images (Task 3), and at the facial area of actors in video clips with positive and negative content (Task 4). In general, participants tended to gaze most often and longest at areas that conveyed most social information, such as the eye region of the face (T1), and social images (T3). Participants gazed most often and longest at happy faces (T2) in still images, and more often and longer at the facial area in negative than in positive video clips (T4). No differences occurred between lonely and nonlonely participants in their gazing times and frequencies, nor at first fixations at social cues in the four different tasks. Based on this study, we found no evidence that overt visual attention to social cues differs between lonely and nonlonely individuals. This implies that biases in social information processing of lonely individuals may be limited to other phases of social information processing. Alternatively, biased overt attention to social cues may only occur under specific conditions, for specific stimuli or for specific lonely individuals.

El impacto del insomnio en el rendimiento académico

The objective of this study was to determinate the impact of insomnia of university students and their school performance. It was done under a qualitative-descriptive approach.We applied a test named “insomnia instrument measures”. ISI (Insomia Severity Index) with their respective correction and interpretation of the kind of insomia and its values. There were 300 students in the initial simple, but only 97 were taken as study objects.Subsequently, we made another test to these subjects for the purpose of knowing in which areas they were having problems. The results established that the cognitive processes and the information processing of the individuals are affected by sleep deprivation, which it was producing negative progressive changes in these functions. Referring that these changes aren’t favorable for retention and development of attention in their reality, much less in academic performance.

Enhanced parietal cortex activation during location detection in children with autism.

BackgroundVisuospatial processing has been found to be mediated primarily by two cortical routes, one of which is unique to recognizing objects (occipital-temporal, ventral or “what” pathway) and the other to detecting the location of objects in space (parietal-occipital, dorsal or “where” pathway). Considering previous findings of relative advantage in people with autism in visuospatial processing, this functional MRI study examined the connectivity in the dorsal and ventral pathways in high-functioning children with autism.MethodsSeventeen high-functioning children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and 19 age-and-IQ-matched typically developing (TD) participants took part in this study. A simple visual task involving object recognition and location detection was used. In the MRI scanner, participants were shown grey scale pictures of objects (e.g., toys, household items, etc.) and were asked to identify the objects presented or to specify the location of objects relative to a cross at the center of the screen.ResultsChildren with ASD, relative to TD children, displayed significantly greater activation in the left inferior parietal lobule (especially the angular gyrus) while detecting the location of objects. However, there were no group differences in brain activity during object recognition. There were also differences in functional connectivity, with the ASD participants showing decreased connectivity of the inferior temporal area with parietal and occipital areas during location detection.ConclusionsThe results of this study underscore previous findings of an increased reliance on visuospatial processing (increased parietal activation) for information processing in ASD individuals. In addition, such processing may be more local, focal, and detailed in ASD as evidenced from the weaker functional connectivity.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/1866-1955-6-37) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.