Subtle Difficulties Research Articles

The mechanism of speech processing in congenital amusia: evidence from Mandarin speakers.

Congenital amusia is a neuro-developmental disorder of pitch perception that causes severe problems with music processing but only subtle difficulties in speech processing. This study investigated speech processing in a group of Mandarin speakers with congenital amusia. Thirteen Mandarin amusics and thirteen matched controls participated in a set of tone and intonation perception tasks and two pitch threshold tasks. Compared with controls, amusics showed impaired performance on word discrimination in natural speech and their gliding tone analogs. They also performed worse than controls on discriminating gliding tone sequences derived from statements and questions, and showed elevated thresholds for pitch change detection and pitch direction discrimination. However, they performed as well as controls on word identification, and on statement-question identification and discrimination in natural speech. Overall, tasks that involved multiple acoustic cues to communicative meaning were not impacted by amusia. Only when the tasks relied mainly on pitch sensitivity did amusics show impaired performance compared to controls. These findings help explain why amusia only affects speech processing in subtle ways. Further studies on a larger sample of Mandarin amusics and on amusics of other language backgrounds are needed to consolidate these results.

The process of decline in advanced activities of daily living: a qualitative explorative study in mild cognitive impairment

The notion of "minimal impairment in instrumental activities of daily living (i-ADL)" is important in the diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment (MCI), but is presently not adequately operationalized. ADL is stratified according to difficulty, complexity, and also to vulnerability to early cognitive changes in a threefold hierarchy: basic activities of daily living (b-ADL), i-ADL, and advanced activities of daily living (a-ADL). This study aims to gain a deeper understanding of the functional decline in the process of MCI. In a qualitative design, 37 consecutive patients diagnosed with amnestic (a)-MCI and their proxies were interviewed at two geriatric day hospitals. Constant comparative analysis was used for the analysis. The a-ADL-concept emerged as important in the diagnosis of MCI. All participants were engaged in a wide range of activities, which could be clustered according to the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF). Participants reported subtle difficulties in performance. A process of functional decline was identified in which adaptation and coping mechanisms interacted with the process of reduced skills, leading to an activity disruption and an insufficiency in functioning. This study asserts the inclusion of an evaluation of a-ADL in the assessment of older persons. When evaluating ADL at three levels (b-ADL, i-ADL, and a-ADL), all the activities one can perform in daily living are covered.

OPTIMAL DESIGN FOR EARLY-GENERATION PLANT-BREEDING TRIALS WITH UNREPLICATED OR PARTIALLY REPLICATED TEST LINES

Summary Some subtle difficulties in optimal design are highlighted by the example of unreplicated field trials laid out on plots with spatial errors defined by uniformity trials. There is a dual problem of the arrangement of control plots and maximizing the number of test-line entries. A simulation study is conducted by randomizing the allocation of genotypes to the plots of four uniformity trials in accordance with the rules defining a number of competing designs. Results are summarized in terms of the ‘SE ratio’, which reflects the improvement in precision of a given design relative to a completely random design on the same plots. The definition of the SE ratio overcomes problems induced by differential shrinkage and consequent precision of test and control lines. A general result applying to all designs shows a curvilinear improvement in SE ratio with increasing error degrees of freedom of the design. The actual arrangement of check plots is of less importance than their increasing number, which contributes to increasing error degrees of freedom. Overall measures, including expected genetic gain, are used to illustrate the choice of a balance between the total number of test-line entries and the error degrees of freedom.

Review: Shaping clinical academic careers for nurses and allied health professionals: the role of the educator

This very useful paper adds helpful insights to the agenda that surrounds clinical academic career development for nurses and allied health professionals. I welcome its publication as it offers some good descriptions of the systemic challenges facing non-medical health professionals who wish to advance research-based practice and competence. It can be argued, as this paper indeed does, that the necessary architecture is now in place to support career pathways for clinician researchers but the subtle difficulties experienced by those wishing to support the next generation of researchers are multiple and they are well described here. There are also telling and original insights offered from this work into the differences within and between the academic institutions. The study strongly echoes background consultation work that informed the UKCRC document ‘Developing the best research professionals’ (United Kingdom Clinical Research Collaboration, 2007). During 2006–2007 I had the privilege of providing research support to the consultation that shaped and informed the final document and during that consultation period, while my research team and I were analysing the views of the professions, people who provide services and service leaders, the themes described here were beginning to emerge from those consultations (Jackson and Butterworth, 2007). This study offers a further, and more detailed description of the landscape into which research policy has to be translated into practice, which is always challenging to clinicians and educators. What is clear from this work is that it is likely that significant numbers of educators who will become the culture carriers for the next generation recognise and have suffered from competing (and often confusing) demands on their time, and they know only too well the barriers that the new generation of clinician researchers face. To carry forward the possibilities offered by a new research career landscape will require some dogged determination for the respondents to this study. There are lessons from history. This paper is presented during the Centenary celebration year of Florence Nightingale. Often in the face of opposition, the determination she

Local and nonlocal weighted $p$-Laplacian evolution equations with Neumann boundary conditions

In this paper we study existence and uniqueness of solutions to the local diffusion equation with Neumann boundary conditions and a bounded nonhomogeneous diffusion coefficient g ≥ 0, {ut = div (g|∇u|p-2∇u) in ]0; T[×Ωg|∇u|p-2u·n = 0 on ]0; T[×∂Ω; for 1 ≤ p < ∞. We show that a nonlocal counterpart of this diffusion problem is ut(t; x)= ∫ω J(x-y)g(x+y/2)|u(t; y)-u(t; x)| p-2 (u(t; y)-u(t; x)) dy in ]0; T[× Ω,where the diffusion coefficient has been reinterpreted by means of the values of g at the point x+y/2 in the integral operator. The fact that g ≥ 0 is allowed to vanish in a set of positive measure involves subtle difficulties, specially in the case p = 1.

What's in a voice? Prosody as a test case for the Theory of Mind account of autism

The human voice conveys a variety of information about people's feelings, emotions and mental states. Some of this information relies on sophisticated Theory of Mind (ToM) skills, whilst others are simpler and do not require ToM. This variety provides an interesting test case for the ToM account of autism, which would predict greater impairment as ToM requirements increase. In this paper, we draw on psychological and pragmatic theories to classify vocal cues according to the amount of mindreading required to identify them. Children with a high functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder and matched controls were tested in three experiments where the speakers’ state had to be extracted from their vocalizations. Although our results confirm that people with autism have subtle difficulties dealing with vocal cues, they show a pattern of performance that is inconsistent with the view that atypical recognition of vocal cues is caused by impaired ToM.

Memory for Self-Performed Actions in Individuals with Asperger Syndrome

Memory for action is enhanced if individuals are allowed to perform the corresponding movements, compared to when they simply listen to them (enactment effect). Previous studies have shown that individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) have difficulties with processes involving the self, such as autobiographical memories and self performed actions. The present study aimed at assessing memory for action in Asperger Syndrome (AS). We investigated whether adults with AS would benefit from the enactment effect when recalling a list of previously performed items vs. items that were only visually and verbally experienced through three experimental tasks (Free Recall, Old/New Recognition and Source Memory). The results showed that while performance on Recognition and Source Memory tasks was preserved in individuals with AS, the enactment effect for self-performed actions was not consistently present, as revealed by the lower number of performed actions being recalled on the Free Recall test, as compared to adults with typical development. Subtle difficulties in encoding specific motor and proprioceptive signals during action execution in individuals with AS might affect retrieval of relevant personal episodic information. These disturbances might be associated to an impaired action monitoring system.

Thermodynamic consistency of the q-deformed Fermi–Dirac distribution in nonextensive thermostatics

The q-deformed statistics for fermions arising within the nonextensive thermostatistical formalism has been applied to the study of various quantum many-body systems recently. The aim of the present note is to point out some subtle difficulties presented by this approach in connection with the problem of thermodynamic consistency. Different possible ways to apply the q-deformed quantum distributions in a thermodynamically consistent way are considered.

The Relationship Between Behavior Ratings and Concurrent and Subsequent Mental and Motor Performance in Toddlers Born at Extremely Low Birth Weight

When predicting child developmental outcomes, reliance on children's scores on measures of developmental functioning alone might mask more subtle behavioral difficulties especially in children with developmental risk factors. The current study examined predictors and stability of examiner behavior ratings and their association with concurrent and subsequent mental and motor performance in toddlers born at extremely low birth weight. Toddlers were evaluated using the Behavior Rating scale (BRS) and the mental and psychomotor indexes of the Bayley-II at 18 and 30 months corrected age. BRS total and factor scores showed moderate stability between 18 and 30 months. These scores also predicted 30-month Mental Scale and Psychomotor Scale scores above and beyond prior mental and motor performance. Our findings suggest that early behavior ratings are associated with child mental and motor performance; therefore, behavior ratings might be useful in identifying toddlers at developmental risk and who might benefit from early intervention.

Detecting subtle movement difficulties present in Parkinson’s disease using a computer mouse

Detecting subtle movement difficulties present in Parkinson’s disease using a computer mouse

Towards Understanding the Role of Regulatory Feedback in Simultaneous Pattern Processing

Event Abstract Back to Event Towards Understanding the Role of Regulatory Feedback in Simultaneous Pattern Processing Tsvi Achler1* 1 Los Alamos National Labs, T5 Theoretical Division, United States Simultaneous Pattern Processing (SPP) is the ability to identify simultaneous-intermixed patterns without isolating them individually (e.g. without separating each pattern in space and processing it individually). This ability appears to separate human from artificial algorithm capabilities. Enhanced SPP ability is beneficial for many real-life applications such as scene understanding, separating simultaneous voices “cocktail party problem”, and identifying odorant or taste mixes. This work identifies the type of SPP scenarios that are problematic to artificial algorithms and quantifies how subtle difficulties lead to complex combinatorial issues. In SPP Test patterns are a superposition of multiple trained patterns. If random single patterns are trained labeled A..Z then simultaneous patterns are composed of combinations: A+B, A+C ... or A+B+C etc. All possible combinations of up to 8 simultaneously are evaluated. The second part of this work proposes an algorithm motivated by ubiquitous re-entrant “output to input” connections found throughout sensory processing regions of the brain. This architecture regulates the amount of input activity available to outputs (dynamically determining salience) and is demonstrated to have enhanced SPP ability. Thus, the brain may utilize this configuration for enhanced SPP performance. Figure 1 Keywords: computational neuroscience Conference: Bernstein Conference on Computational Neuroscience, Berlin, Germany, 27 Sep - 1 Oct, 2010. Presentation Type: Presentation Topic: Bernstein Conference on Computational Neuroscience Citation: Achler T (2010). Towards Understanding the Role of Regulatory Feedback in Simultaneous Pattern Processing. Front. Comput. Neurosci. Conference Abstract: Bernstein Conference on Computational Neuroscience. doi: 10.3389/conf.fncom.2010.51.00035 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 17 Sep 2010; Published Online: 23 Sep 2010. * Correspondence: Dr. Tsvi Achler, Los Alamos National Labs, T5 Theoretical Division, Los Alamos, United States, achler@gmail.com Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Tsvi Achler Google Tsvi Achler Google Scholar Tsvi Achler PubMed Tsvi Achler Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.

Right-sided spatial difficulties in ADHD demonstrated in continuous movement control

Children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) often show spatial attentional deficits, exhibiting a subtle rightwards bias, possibly due to dysfunction within the right hemisphere fronto-parietal network. Approximately 50% of children with ADHD also show signs of movement dysfunction. The nature of this movement dysfunction and possible interactions with spatial attention difficulties has not been clearly described. This study compared 31 children with and 31 children without ADHD on a movement kinematic task that tested hand-drawing movement precision. Participants used an electronic pen on a digitizing tablet. The pen tip position was sampled as X and Y coordinates at 200Hz. The task was to join targets of either 10 or 20mm diameter that were separated by a distance of 62.5 or 125mm. Constant error in the X and Y planes, peak absolute velocity and acceleration, movement time, the number of pauses and pause time were analysed. Apart from a significantly increased rate of acceleration across all conditions, the children with ADHD demonstrated no temporal difficulties with the task; rather they showed subtle spatial difficulties, possibly suggestive of cerebellar involvement. The children with ADHD showed difficulties in accuracy of movement towards the right. They were less accurate in the X plane when moving towards the right-sided targets over the long distance. Greater variability in target accuracy was shown when moving towards the small target on the right side. The children with ADHD made significantly more pauses on the left target, when preparing the right movement, than the control group. These results suggest that the subtle spatial bias towards the right that has been demonstrated in ADHD in spatial attention also extends into the continuous movement domain.

Spoken sentence comprehension in children with dyslexia and language impairment: The roles of syntax and working memory

ABSTRACTWe examined spoken sentence comprehension in school-age children with developmental dyslexia or language impairment (LI), compared to age-matched and younger controls. Sentence–picture matching tasks were employed under three different working memory (WM) loads, two levels of syntactic difficulty, and two sentence lengths. Phonological short-term memory (STM) skills and their relation to sentence comprehension performance were also examined. When WM load was minimized, the LI group performed more poorly on the sentence comprehension task compared to the age-matched control group and the dyslexic group. Across groups, sentence comprehension performance generally decreased as the WM load increased, but this effect was somewhat more pronounced in the dyslexic group compared to the age-matched group. Moreover, both the LI and dyslexic groups showed poor phonological STM compared to the age-matched control group, and a significant correlation was observed between phonological STM and sentence comprehension performance under demanding WM loads. The results indicate subtle sentence processing difficulties in dyslexia that might be explained as resulting from these children's phonological STM limitations.

Neurosarcoidosis and Associated Neuropsychological Sequelae: A Rare Case Of Isolated Intracranial Involvement

We present a case study of an individual diagnosed with isolated neurosarcoidosis, a rare granulomatous condition of unknown aetiology. Although the extant medical literature on this disease is adequate, no study has focused on the neuropsychological sequelae involved with such an inflammatory disorder. The case described herein is of a 57-year-old woman who participated in a neuropsychological evaluation following complaints of recurring cognitive difficulties. Results of the assessment revealed moderate difficulties in effortful word retrieval and recall of unstructured verbal information, as well as some mild mental rigidity, slowing, and subtle difficulties with attention. Her neuropsychological profile is discussed in terms of neuroanatomic lesion localization and clinical diagnostic implications.

Developmental Outcomes of Offspring of Adults Treated with Hydroxyurea in the Multicenter Study of Hydroxyurea.

Abstract 1543Poster Board I-566Between 1992-1995, the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute sponsored a multi-center, double blind, randomized, placebo-controlled Phase III clinical trial of hydroxyurea (Multicenter Study of Hydroxyurea-MSH). This trial examined whether hydroxyurea, a myelosuppressive chemotherapeutic agent that also stimulates the production of fetal hemoglobin (HbF), would reduce pain episodes in adults with sickle cell anemia. The trial was stopped early because of significant benefits of pain reduction that was sustained in a nine-year follow-up. This also suggested that patients taking hydroxyurea had improved survival. Despite our best attempts to promote contraception among MSH patients, women had children and men fathered children.One of the concerns about using hydroxyurea was that it might have teratogenic effects on offspring, particularly in the area of brain development and cognitive outcome. To address this question, all eligible adults in the MSH trial were contacted to provide consent to obtain developmental outcome data using telephone interview administration of the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales, 2nd Edition, Survey Form (VABS). The population mean for the VABS is 100 with a standard deviation of 15. Interviews were conducted by a trained psychologist using an interactive question and answer process, with probes to clarify any information that was unclear.Consent was obtained for parents of 22 offspring meeting criteria for inclusion. A number of the parents had multiple offspring; eight of the study parents were male and three were female. The children ranged from 6-months to 17 years of age at the time of the VABS interview. Four of the parents could not be reached for the interview. Of the remaining 18, four were ineligible because the birth occurred before hydroxyurea was started. As a group, the offspring were functioning in the average range of development in all areas: Adaptive Behavior Composite (M=102.3), Communication Domain (M=98.5), Daily Living Domain (M=103.8), Socialization Domain (M=100.2), and Motor Domain (for children under age 5; M=108.3). One child was functioning below the average range; follow-up determined that this child was in a special education program but had a developmental disability that had occurred in other family members.The number of children who met criteria for this study and whose parents could be contacted was very small, severely limiting any definitive conclusions about developmental risk for offspring. Studies of teratogenicity for prenatal substance abuse have used standardized observational tests of neurodevelopment; this study relied on parent report, which can be biased if not confirmed. When standardized tests have been used in studies of prenatal drug exposure (not hydroxyurea), subtle difficulties in executive function of offspring have been reported, sometimes years after the exposure. While our results are encouraging in that the offspring in this limited group are functioning in the average range, this observation is not conclusive and there is a need to study a larger sample of children who are offspring of adults treated with hydroxyurea according to community standards. DisclosuresNo relevant conflicts of interest to declare.

A 54-year-old woman with progressive gait disturbance and MRI abnormalities

A 54-year-old right-handed woman initially presented in her 30s with a prolonged flu-like viral illness that began abruptly with fever, chills, and myalgias. She had sore throat and fatigue with a relapsing/remitting course over a year with some remission for several months and then another relapse. She had very high titers of Epstein-Barr virus on serologic testing and was given a diagnosis of chronic fatigue syndrome. She had depression and insomnia that responded to fluoxetine and doxepin. Gradually, this illness and other symptoms subsided over several years and she was symptom-free. She began to have some subtle difficulties with balance 3 years prior to presentation at age 51. The gait problem became more apparent 19 months prior to evaluation when she was unable to ballroom dance because of falls. An extensive workup including visual evoked potentials and CSF were reportedly normal. An initial outside brain MRI 1 year before presentation to our clinic showed an unusual pattern of patchy areas of confluent white matter lesions associated with punctate enhancement. Progressively she had difficulty with normal ambulation throughout the day. Repeat brain MRI done 8 months after the first one showed worsening lesions with increasing enhancement. At this point she also started to use a cane for safety and she was treated with 2 weeks of oral corticosteroids without improvement. At the time of presentation, she was using a cane; her gait was mildly wide-based with some accompanying stiffness in the left leg. She also reported numbness in the left arm and leg over the last 6 weeks. She had occasional night sweats, but denied fever, chills, weight loss, or recent travel outside the United States. She denied dry eyes, dry mouth, focal arthralgias, cough, or rash. Her father and sister had migraines and her father had mild cognitive problems. Her …

Speech disruptions in the sentence formulation of school‐age children with specific language impairment

Many school-age children with specific language impairment produce sentences that appear to conform to the adult grammar. It may be premature to conclude from this, however, that their language formulation ability is age appropriate. To determine whether a more subtle measure of language use, speech disruptions during sentence formulation, might serve to distinguish children with specific language impairment from their typically developing peers at an age when grammatical accuracy was high. We analysed the rate of speech disruptions in simple sentence production in school-age children with specific language impairment and typically developing age-matched peers. We predicted that: (1) the specific language impairment group would exhibit more speech disruptions than the typically developing group as a result of reduced language proficiency even when grammatical accuracy was high; and (2) the specific language impairment group would demonstrate greater reductions in disruption frequency as compared with the typically developing group when given sentences that model the target syntactic structures. Twenty-eight children (17 specific language impairment, 11 typically developing, mean = 8;10 years) with no history of stuttering were presented with a series of picture pairs. The examiner described the first picture using a simple sentence and asked the child to repeat the sentence; the child then described the second picture. There were two priming conditions: Matching Syntax condition (paired pictures requiring different syntactic structures) and Different Syntax condition (paired pictures requiring different syntax structures). All testing was audio-recorded and speech disruptions (repetitions, revisions, fillers, long silent pauses) were transcribed and tabulated for each target response. The data were analysed by analysis of variance (ANOVA). The specific language impairment group demonstrated a significantly greater number of speech disruptions when compared with the typically developing group. There was no effect for priming. School-age children with specific language impairment appear to have difficulty with sentence formulation when compared with typically developing peers even when grammatical accuracy is high. We concluded that school-age children with specific language impairment may demonstrate subtle but persistent language formulation difficulties.

Visuoperceptive impairment in adult patients with occipital lobe epilepsies

The aim of the study was to verify whether adult patients with occipital lobe epilepsy (OLE) are at risk for cognitive impairment compared with controls. Twenty patients with OLE and 20 controls, matched as closely as possible to the epilepsy group in terms of gender, age, education, and intelligence, were administered a battery of tests based on visuoperceptive domains. None of the participants was affected by progressive pathologies, received any medication other than antiepileptic drugs, nor had a psychiatric background. We noted a statistically significant difference between patients with OLE and controls in the following tasks: Perceptive Differences Test, and Object Denomination Test, and Famous Faces Test ( P < 0.05). No difference was noted between symptomatic and nonsymptomatic patients with respect to neuropsychological results ( P > 0.05). The linear regression analysis performed did not show any statistically significant contribution by clinical variables. Our data confirm that patients with OLE manifest subtle difficulties in processing and mental manipulation of visual spatial data.

Leadership: A categorical mistake?

As growing numbers of scholars become disaffected by the research traditions laid down by leadership psychology, there is a steady turn towards treating leadership as a discursive phenomenon. In response, leadership researchers are increasingly adopting interpretive and observational methods in the search for the practices of leadership in everyday life. This article suggests that while there are many advantages to an interest in discourse and action, there are also many subtle difficulties in making leadership observable and knowable in the field. Taking Louis Pondy's notion of leadership as a language-game as its starting point, this article argues that leadership studies as a discipline suffers from a persistent category mistake; a category mistake that some recent interpretive studies of leadership reveal, but inadvertently reproduce in the search for leadership's essential character. Instead, this article takes Pondy's thesis to its logical conclusion and outlines a programme of research that confronts this category mistake, whilst demonstrating the potential for, and limitations of, treating leadership as a language-game.

Mild traumatic brain injury and its sequelae: Characterisation of divided attention deficits

Deficits in divided attention occur after a mild traumatic brain injury (MTBI) but many extant tasks lack sensitivity for detecting subtle cognitive difficulties. We use the Test d'Attention Partagée Informatisé (TAPI), a novel dual-task paradigm, to investigate the impact of MTBI on the ability to divide attention between two stimuli sources. Individuals with MTBI (n = 37) were evaluated within the first week following head trauma and at three months post-injury. A healthy control (HC) group (n = 79) was also assessed. The primary outcome was reaction time and there were three different conditions that included visual target detection and auditory digit span tasks. Analyses utilised repeated measures ANOVA and ANCOVA models that adjusted for relevant variables including post-concussive and affective symptoms. Results indicated that at both baseline and follow-up, the MTBI group had significantly slower reaction time than the HC group. Also, both the MTBI and HC groups had slower reaction times as participants progressed through each of the more challenging TAPI conditions. This study supports the usefulness of this novel instrument and allows clinicians and researchers to assess for subtle divided attention deficits that may persist in those with MTBI even three months post-injury.