Deficits In Representation Research Articles

A generalized reward processing deficit pathway to negative symptoms across diagnostic boundaries.

Negative symptoms are a key feature of several psychiatric disorders. Difficulty identifying common neurobiological mechanisms that cut across diagnostic boundaries might result from equifinality (i.e., multiple mechanistic pathways to the same clinical profile), both within and across disorders. This study used a data-driven approach to identify unique subgroups of participants with distinct reward processing profiles to determine which profiles predicted negative symptoms. Participants were a transdiagnostic sample of youth from a multisite study of psychosis risk, including 110 individuals at clinical high-risk for psychosis (CHR; meeting psychosis-risk syndrome criteria), 88 help-seeking participants who failed to meet CHR criteria and/or who presented with other psychiatric diagnoses, and a reference group of 66 healthy controls. Participants completed clinical interviews and behavioral tasks assessing four reward processing constructs indexed by the RDoC Positive Valence Systems: hedonic reactivity, reinforcement learning, value representation, and effort-cost computation. k-means cluster analysis of clinical participants identified three subgroups with distinct reward processing profiles, primarily characterized by: a value representation deficit (54%), a generalized reward processing deficit (17%), and a hedonic reactivity deficit (29%). Clusters did not differ in rates of clinical group membership or psychiatric diagnoses. Elevated negative symptoms were only present in the generalized deficit cluster, which also displayed greater functional impairment and higher psychosis conversion probability scores. Contrary to the equifinality hypothesis, results suggested one global reward processing deficit pathway to negative symptoms independent of diagnostic classification. Assessment of reward processing profiles may have utility for individualized clinical prediction and treatment.

Probabalistic reinforcement learning impairments predict negative symptom severity and risk for conversion in youth at clinical high-risk for psychosis.

Elucidation of transphasic mechanisms (i.e., mechanisms that occur across illness phases) underlying negative symptoms could inform early intervention and prevention efforts and additionally identify treatment targets that could be effective regardless of illness stage. This study examined whether a key reinforcement learning behavioral pattern characterized by reduced difficulty learning from rewards that have been found to underlie negative symptoms in those with a schizophrenia diagnosis also contributes to negative symptoms in those at clinical high-risk (CHR) for psychosis. CHR youth (n=46) and 51 healthy controls (CN) completed an explicit reinforcement learning task with two phases. During the acquisition phase, participants learned to select between pairs of stimuli probabilistically reinforced with feedback indicating receipt of monetary gains or avoidance of losses. Following training, the transfer phase required participants to select between pairs of previously presented stimuli during the acquisition phase and novel stimuli without receiving feedback. These test phase pairings allowed for inferences about the contributions of prediction error and value representation mechanisms to reinforcement learning deficits. In acquisition, CHR participants displayed impaired learning from gains specifically that were associated with greater negative symptom severity. Transfer performance indicated these acquisition deficits were largely driven by value representation deficits. In addition to negative symptoms, this profile of deficits was associated with a greater risk of conversion to psychosis and lower functioning. Impairments in positive reinforcement learning, specifically effectively representing reward value, may be an important transphasic mechanism of negative symptoms and a marker of psychosis liability.

Local roots and rebellion: Constituency connections and legislative behaviour of British MPs, 2010–21

Abstract This study explores the relationship between the local roots of Westminster MPs and parliamentary party discipline, a central principle of the British system of responsible party government. While recently the local base of MPs has attracted increasing academic attention, only little effort has been put into investigating how this might influence the political behaviour of parliamentarians. In order to do so, this study utilizes a comprehensive database on the local base of British parliamentarians, which includes data on all Westminster MPs from 2010 to 2021, supplemented with information on parliamentary dissent. Contrary to theoretical assumptions and existing international studies, localness is shown to have no positive influence on MPs propensity for parliamentary rebellion. This suggests that the increasing recruitment of local candidates does not challenge the traditional functionality of the responsible party system of government, yet nor should localness be seen as a panacea for the perceived representational deficits of British democracy.

In the gray zone: How representational deficit moderates the effect of openness on protest participation

This article investigates how the governmental status quo alters the effect of individuals’ openness as a predisposition for protest participation. We define the governmental status quo as individuals’ standing or position within the political system, contingent upon their party’s current status in government. Based on this, we clasify voters into three groups: Opposition voters, junior coalition partners’ voters (JCPV), and senior coalition partners’ voters (SCPV) or single-party government voters (SPGV). SCPV and SPGV are expected to have lower protest motivation due to their substantial governmental representation, whereas opposition voters, with lacking any governmental representation, are more likely to be motivated to protest. Nevertheless, given their fuzzy position that alleviates the effect of the representational deficit on their protest behavior, we argue that the protest participation of JCPV is more likely to be driven by their basic values belonging to the openness dimension. Statistical analyses based on data from the European Social Survey support our hypothesis, highlighting the stronger effect of stimulation, one of the components of the openness dimensions in Schwart's basic human values, for the JCPV compared to other voter categories.

Extent of magnitude representation deficit and relationship with arithmetic skills in children with 22q11.2DS

BackgroundPrevious studies have produced conflicting results concerning the extent of magnitude representation deficit and its relationship with arithmetic achievement in children with 22q11.2 deletion syndrome. More specifically, it remains unclear whether deficits are restricted to visuospatial content or are more general and whether they could explain arithmetical impairment.MethodsFifteen 5- to 12-year-old children with 22q11.2 deletion syndrome and 23 age-matched healthy controls performed a non-symbolic magnitude comparison task. Depending on the trial, participants had to compare stimuli with high or low visuospatial load (visuospatial stimuli or temporal sequence of visual stimuli). The participants also completed a battery of arithmetic skills (ZAREKI-R) and a battery of global cognitive functioning (WISC-V or WPPSI-IV), from which working memory and visuospatial indices were derived.ResultsChildren with 22q11.2DS responded as fast as healthy controls did but received fewer correct responses, irrespective of visuospatial load. In addition, their performance in the non-symbolic magnitude comparison task did not correlate with the ZAREKI total score, while the working memory index did.ConclusionChildren with 22q11.2DS might suffer from a global magnitude representation deficit rather than a specific deficit due to visuospatial load. However, this deficit alone does not seem to be related to arithmetic achievement. Working memory might be a better concern of interest in favoring arithmetic skills in patients with 22q11.2 deletion syndrome.Trial registrationClinicaltrials, NCT04373226. Registered 16 September 2020.

Production of relative clauses in Cantonese-speaking children with and without Developmental Language Disorder

Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) has been explained as either a deficit deriving from an abstract representational deficit or as emerging from difficulties in acquiring and coordinating multiple interacting cues guiding learning. These competing explanations are often difficult to decide between when tested on European languages. This paper reports an experimental study of relative clause (RC) production in Cantonese-speaking children with and without DLD, which enabled us to test multiple developmental predictions derived from one prominent theory − emergentism. Children with DLD (N = 22; aged 6;6–9;7) were compared with age-matched typically-developing peers (N = 23) and language-matched, typically-developing children (N = 21; aged 4;7–7;6) on a sentence repetition task. Results showed that children’s production across multiple RC types was influenced by structural frequency, general semantic complexity, and the linear order of constituents, with the DLD group performing worse than their age-matched and language-matched peers. The results are consistent with the emergentist explanation of DLD.

Unlocking the potential of 'passive' modulation: How sensory stimulation shapes hand and face size.

Knowledge of the body size is intricately tied to multisensory integration processes that rely on the dynamic interplay of top-down and bottom-up mechanisms. Recent years have seen the development of passive sensory stimulation protocols aimed at investigating the modulation of various cognitive functions, primarily inducing perceptual learning and behaviour change without the need for extensive training. Given that reductions in sensory input have been associated with alterations in body size perception, it is reasonable to hypothesize that increasing sensory information through passive sensory stimulation could similarly influence the perception of the size of body parts. The primary aim of this study was to investigate the potential modulatory effects of passive sensory stimulation on the perception of hand and face size in a group of young adults. Passive sensory stimulation effectively modulated the size representation of the stimulated hand, supporting the notion that access to somatosensory and proprioceptive information is prioritised for the hands but may not extend to the face. Increased somatosensory input resulted in a reduction of distortion, providing evidence for bottom-up modulation of size representation. Passive sensory stimulation can induce subjective changes in body size perception without the need for extensive training. This paradigm holds promise as a potential alternative for modulating distorted size representation in individuals with body representational deficits.

Neural computations in prosopagnosia.

We report an investigation of the neural processes involved in the processing of faces and objects of brain-lesioned patient PS, a well-documented case of pure acquired prosopagnosia. We gathered a substantial dataset of high-density electrophysiological recordings from both PS and neurotypicals. Using representational similarity analysis, we produced time-resolved brain representations in a format that facilitates direct comparisons across time points, different individuals, and computational models. To understand how the lesions in PS's ventral stream affect the temporal evolution of her brain representations, we computed the temporal generalization of her brain representations. We uncovered that PS's early brain representations exhibit an unusual similarity to later representations, implying an excessive generalization of early visual patterns. To reveal the underlying computational deficits, we correlated PS' brain representations with those of deep neural networks (DNN). We found that the computations underlying PS' brain activity bore a closer resemblance to early layers of a visual DNN than those of controls. However, the brain representations in neurotypicals became more akin to those of the later layers of the model compared to PS. We confirmed PS's deficits in high-level brain representations by demonstrating that her brain representations exhibited less similarity with those of a DNN of semantics.

The Innate Capacity for Representing Subjective Experience: The Infant's Mind is Neither Primitive nor Prerepresentational.

The author cites the prominence of theories that locate serious adult psychopathology in the preverbal infant's inability to formulate or represent traumatic experience. The work of two such authors, H. Levine and D. B. Stern, is briefly considered. The frame of reference for this investigation is that clinical and academic research findings are highly relevant to psychoanalytic theorizing. It is argued that when such findings are considered, a view of the infant with "primordial and unrepresented" states of mind has little evidence to support it. In fact, research findings summarized herein point to an opposite view: that of the "competent infant," one with highly accurate perceptual discrimination capacities and an innate ability to register and represent subjective experience in both procedural and declarative memory, even prenatally. Given the infant's competencies, it seems implausible to hold that representational deficits are at the heart of serious adult psychopathology, which is instead seen to be the result of defensive maneuvers against unknowable and unspeakable truth rather than the absence of a preverbal representational capacity. Current research findings seem to pose a significant challenge for psychoanalytic theories that espouse "primitive mental states"; "unrepresented," "unformulated," or "unsymbolized" experience; or "nonconscious" states.

Integrating Social Cognition Into Domain-General Control: Interactive Activation and Competition for the Control of Action (ICON).

Social cognition differs from general cognition in its focus on understanding, perceiving, and interpreting social information. However, we argue that the significance of domain-general processes for controlling cognition has been historically undervalued in social cognition and social neuroscience research. We suggest much of social cognition can be characterized as specialized feature representations supported by domain-general cognitive control systems. To test this proposal, we develop a comprehensive working model, based on an interactive activation and competition architecture and applied to the control of action. As such, we label the model "ICON" (interactive activation and competition model for the control of action). We used the ICON model to simulate human performance across various laboratory tasks. Our simulations emphasize that many laboratory-based social tasks do not require socially specific control systems, such as those that are argued to rely on neural networks associated with theory-of-mind. Moreover, our model clarifies that perceived disruptions in social cognition, even in what appears to be disruption to the control of social cognition, can stem from deficits in social representation instead. We advocate for a "default stance" in social cognition, where control is usually general, but representation is specific. This study underscores the importance of integrating social cognition within the broader realm of domain-general control processing, offering a unified perspective on task processing.

Exploring Democracy Beyond the State: Students’ Union Democracy in Chilean Colleges

Political scientists have studied state democracy for decades using sophisticated methods for conceptualization and measurement to evaluate the explanatory power of various theories. They have paid little attention, however, to democracy in nonstate political systems. This paper fills this gap by characterizing democracy in college student government and investigating the factors affecting the levels of students’ union democracy (SUD) in Chilean colleges. Utilizing concepts from political science and sociology, the study identifies different dimensions of SUD with data from 162 campuses in 2018. The dimensions are aggregated to build an index of democracy for students’ unions. Although the majority of Chilean university students attended colleges with democratic unions, our findings reveal a deficit in democratic student representation in most institutions. The article also draws from the comparative politics, trade union democracy, and higher education literatures to explore the factors that vary by institution that could explain differences in levels of SUD. Ordered logistic regression analyses suggest that SUD is associated with institutional quality, membership in inter-university organizations, and student body size and socioeconomic makeup. The results increase our understanding of the features, status, and correlates of democracy beyond the state.

Talking representation: How legislators re‐establish responsiveness in cases of representational deficits

AbstractA close connection between public opinion and policy is considered a vital element of democracy. However, legislators cannot be responsive to all voters at all times with regard to the policies the latter favour. We argue that legislators use their speaking time in parliament to offer compensatory speech to their constituents who might oppose how they voted on a policy, in order to re‐establish themselves as responsive to the public's wishes. Leveraging the case of Brexit, we show that legislators pay more attention to constituents who might be dissatisfied with how they voted. Furthermore, their use of rhetorical responsiveness is contingent on the magnitude of the representational deficit they face vis‐à‐vis their constituency. Our findings attest to the central role of parliamentary speech in maintaining responsiveness. They also demonstrate that communicative responsiveness can substitute for policy responsiveness.

Relative clause comprehension in Cantonese-speaking children with and without developmental language disorder.

Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), present in 2 out of every 30 children, affects primarily oral language abilities and development in the absence of associated biomedical conditions. We report the first experimental study that examines relative clause (RC) comprehension accuracy and processing (via looking preference) in Cantonese-speaking children with and without DLD, testing the predictions from competing domain-specific versus domain-general theoretical accounts. We compared children with DLD (N = 22) with their age-matched typically-developing (TD) children (AM-TD, N = 23) aged 6;6-9;7 and language-matched (and younger) TD children (YTD, N = 21) aged 4;7-7;6, using a referent selection task. Within-subject factors were: RC type (subject-RCs (SRCs) versus object-RCs (ORCs); relativizer (classifier (CL) versus relative marker ge3 RCs). Accuracy measures and looking preference to the target were analyzed using generalized linear mixed effects models. Results indicated Cantonese children with DLD scored significantly lower than their AM-TD peers in accuracy and processed RCs significantly slower than AM-TDs, but did not differ from the YTDs on either measure. Overall, while the results revealed evidence of a SRC advantage in the accuracy data, there was no indication of additional difficulty associated with ORCs in the eye-tracking data. All children showed a processing advantage for the frequent CL relativizer over the less frequent ge3 relativizer. These findings pose challenges to domain-specific representational deficit accounts of DLD, which primarily explain the disorder as a syntactic deficit, and are better explained by domain-general accounts that explain acquisition and processing as emergent properties of multiple converging linguistic and non-linguistic processes.

“Whenever big changes come, big talks don't” – An examination of the police experience of recruitment and promotion positive action processes

Policing in England Wales is currently experiencing a large uplift in police recruitment. This has been due to the Government's target to uplift officers by 20,000. As a result, police forces are implementing large scale, sustained recruitment drives. These are accompanied by positive action schemes to address deficits in officer representation. Current statistics now indicate that representation in forces is rising slowly, as these initiatives are employed. There is little literature that examines the impact of positive action on existing police officers' perceptions, despite the initiative's relative proliferation. Procedural Justice theoretical literature is utilised to situate this in the research context.This study represents 17 theoretically informed, long form, phenomenological interviews conducted with serving officers in a uniform, response policing environment. The interviews were semi-structured, open ended and participant led, allowing the officers to present and explore their own thoughts and feelings about positive action, developed through their lived experience in an active police role. These interviews were conducted in an operational environment, from an insider-outsider perspective with total privacy. Officers openly discussed how they felt about the implementation of such policies and procedures.The findings indicate that a taboo exists with regards to the discussion of positive action processes in the police workplace. A juxtaposition also exists between the existence of positive action initiatives and the theme of meritocracy amongst the police officers. Officers strongly refuted the need for positive action to remedy issues with representation, but similarly criticised the current representation levels within forces. Theoretically this indicates an informational gap between police implementation of positive action interventions, and the perceived need for them to exist at all amongst rank and file. Implications for the study's findings are explored and possible remedies discussed.

“A Bias Recognized is A Bias Sterilized”: A Literature Review on How Biased Datasets Have Led to the Long-standing Misdiagnosing of People of Color (POC) and Female Patients

Introduction: Health disparities disproportionately impact minority group patients. Various factors perpetuate health inequity, including socioeconomic status, prejudice and discrimination. Historically, sample biases favoring White males in healthcare literature have led to the underrepresentation of certain groups in scientific literature, particularly people of color (POC) and female populations. Many revolutionary studies in healthcare research have used biased samples, which challenges their generalizability to POC and female populations. This review explores the mechanisms by which these gaps in the literature have led to the misdiagnoses of POC and female patients in psychiatric and biomedical settings. Methods: A comprehensive literature review was conducted to investigate: (1) misrepresentation of minority groups in literature, (2) variation in the symptomatology and etiology of disorders and diseases in female and POC populations; and (3) biases within accepted diagnostic measures and criteria. Electronic databases such as PubMed, PsychINFO and Google Scholar were used to search key terms including ‘health inequity’, ‘cross-cultural validity’, ‘racial disparities’, ‘sex disparities’, ‘diagnostic delays’, ‘misdiagnosis’, ‘clinical heterogeneity’. Results: Eighty-seven studies were examined, and 38 studies were included in the review. Findings suggest that misclassification of group membership, poor conceptualizations of minority identities, inadequate understanding of symptomatology variation, exclusion of social context, lack of culturally sensitive approaches, biased diagnostic tools and an absence of diverse samples in historical datasets have resulted in a harmful deficit in minority representation within medical literature. Discussion: Bias in healthcare literature has led to the systematic underrepresentation of minority populations in medical research and contributes to the misdiagnosis and subsequent health inequities within these groups. Present findings emphasize the necessity to regard past health research with reasonable skepticism and a call for prioritization of inclusive and diverse research. Conclusion: This review sheds light on how to bridge the literature deficit caused by biased research through highlighting how minority populations are differentially impacted within the healthcare field and identifying factors that perpetuate these disparities. Further research on the examined factors must be conducted to develop approaches to mitigate misdiagnosis rates and subsequent health inequities among POC and female patients.

Body Image and Emotional Status in Patients with Acquired Brain Injury.

Emotional experiences can lead to a real or distorted self-representation. After brain damage, altered self-perception of one's own body image is frequent. This study evaluates the relationship of mood disorders and lesion sites on body image in a cohort of ABI patients. A total of 46 patients (26 men, 20 women) without severe physical impairments were found eligible for this study. Patients underwent Beck's Depression Inventory and the Hamilton Rating Scale for Anxiety to assess mood disorders, whereas the Body Image Scale and Human Figure Drawing were used to evaluate body dissatisfaction and implicit body image. The Montreal Cognitive Assessment was used to assess patients' cognitive condition. We found a moderate correlation between depression and body image (r = 0.48), as well as between anxiety and body image (r = 0.52), and the regression model also reported the right lesion site as a predictive variable for body image score. In addition, the regression model built by Human Figure Drawing scores showed anxiety, cognitive functioning, and a marital status of single to be significant predictors. The study confirmed that participants with acquired brain injury have deficits in body representation associated with mood disorders, regardless of the side of the lesions. A neuropsychological intervention could be useful for these patients to improve their cognitive performance and learn to manage emotional dysfunction in order to increase their self-perception of body image and improve their quality of life.

Health information equity: Rebalancing healthcare collections for racial diversity in UK public service contexts

COVID-19 illustrated health disparities experienced by racially minoritised people, with heightened risks faced by Black and South Asian communities lending the issue transparency and urgency. Despite efforts to decolonise medical education, deficits in racial representation in research and resources remain. This study investigates the potential and imperatives for healthcare information services to contribute to health equity through their collections. The literature analysis explores collection management, decolonisation, social justice in librarianship, and Critical Race Theory (CRT) as a framework for change in information contexts. A survey of UK National Health Service (NHS) librarians provides a snapshot of awareness of health information inequity. Semi-structured interviews explore information professionals’ experiences of anti-racism in the system. The findings indicate strong engagement with the need for equitable resources but highlight some barriers to success. Opportunities identified include potential for addressing systemic racism in collection policy, capability of information services to influence, or engage in, authorship and publishing to address gaps, and the need for race-based data standards in healthcare. Synthesis of the findings through a framework of CRT tenets illustrates the relevance and utility of CRT as a tool for pursuit of equity in information practice, scholarship, and education.

Selective effects of a brain tumor on the metric representation of the hand: a pre- versus post-surgery comparison

Body representation disorders are complex, varied, striking, and very disabling in most cases. Deficits of body representation have been described after lesions to multimodal and sensorimotor cortical areas. A few studies have reported the effects of tumors on the representation of the body, but little is known about the changes after tumor resection. Moreover, the impact of brain lesions on the hand size representation has been investigated in few clinical cases. Hands are of special importance, as no other body part has the ability for movement and interaction with the environment that the hands have, and we use them for a multitude of daily activities. Studies with clinical population can add further knowledge into the way hands are represented. Here, we report a single case study of a patient (AM) who was an expert bodybuilder and underwent a surgery to remove a glioblastoma in the left posterior prefrontal and precentral cortex at the level of the hand’s motor region. Pre- (20 days) and post- (4 months) surgery assessment did not show any motor or cognitive impairments. A hand localization task was used, before and after surgery (12 months), to measure possible changes of the metric representation of his right hand. Results showed a post-surgery modulation of the typically distorted hand representation, with an overall accuracy improvement, especially on width dimension. These findings support the direct involvement of sensorimotor areas in the implicit representation of the body size and its relevance on defining specific size representation dimensions.

Multiple Mechanisms of Word Learning in Late-Talking Children: A Longitudinal Study.

The aim of this study was to identify variability in word-learning mechanisms used by late-talking children using a longitudinal study design, which may explain variability in late-talking children's outcomes. A cohort of typically developing children (n = 40) and children who were classified as late-talking children at age 2;0 (years;months; ≤ 10th percentile on expressive vocabulary, n = 21) were followed up at ages 3;0 and 3;6. We tested the cohort across tasks designed to isolate different mechanisms involved in word learning: encoding and producing spoken forms of words (using a nonword repetition task), identifying referents for words (using a fast mapping task), and learning associations between words and referents (using a cross-situational word-learning task). Late-talking children had lower accuracy on nonword repetition than typically developing children, despite most of the sample reaching typical ranges for expressive vocabulary at age 3;6. There were no between-groups differences in fast mapping and retention accuracy; however, both were predicted by concurrent expressive vocabulary. Late-talking children performed less accurately than typically developing children on cross-situational word-learning retention trials, despite showing no between-groups differences during training trials. Combining performance across all three tasks predicted approximately 45% of the variance in vocabulary outcomes at the last time point. Late-talking children continue to have deficits in phonological representation that impact their word-learning ability and expressive language abilities but do not show difficulties in fast mapping novel words. Late-talking children may also struggle to retain associative information about word-referent mappings. Late-talking children thus use some, but not all, word-learning mechanisms differently than typically developing children. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.20405856.

Publish or Procreate: The Effect of Motherhood on Academic Performance (WITHDRAWN)

Women are underrepresented in science and representation deficits are even greater for more senior positions and in STEM fields. The dominant explanation is that male and female scientists, even within the same field, publish at unequal rates. Prior studies on select fields suggest that the gender gap in academic productivity reflects differential effects of childbearing on men and women, as women face tensions between the two greedy institutions of family and academia. We study the full population of STEM academics in Denmark and investigate parenthood penalties on scientific productivity of mothers and fathers, who are active in research after the birth of their first child. We employ an event-study approach on annual research publications, an outcome especially relevant in the science domain, and rely on a unique combination of Danish registers and granular bibliometric data on publications from the database Scopus. We find that, on average, the first childbirth results in an annual penalty of 24 percent on scientific productivity of mothers in STEM fields relative to fathers in the first 5 years after birth. This reflects a drop in annual research publications of mothers relative to their own pre-birth productivity. Hence, unequal impacts of parenthood may be an important driver of gender inequality in Science.