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Background and Objectives: There are several tests to determine the type and severity of aphasia, but they take a long time to administer when assessing aphasic patients. In recent years, the analysis of spontaneous speech has gained great attention because it is important to diagnose and follow post-treatment improvement in aphasic patients. This study was done to assess some parameters of connected speech in aphasic patients. In addition, the correlation between connected speech parameters and the type and severity of aphasia was measured. Methods: We compared the connected speech parameters of 27 aphasics (10 fluent and 17 non-fluent), Persian speakers, compared with the control group. There were two groups matched by age, sex, and education. Nest’s bird story pictures were used to elicit a speech sample. In the next step, the connected speech was analyzed to define speech parameters, including speech rate, mean length of utterance, number of utterances, total words, content words, function words, nouns, and verbs. Moreover, the severity of aphasia was measured using a Persian Western Aphasia Battery (WAB). Results: The findings showed significant differences between groups in all parameters of the connected speech (P0.71) with the severity of aphasia (P

Introduction: Studies have documented both executive functions (EF) impairment in children with Attention Deficit / Hyperactivity Disorders (ADHD) and Theory of Mind (ToM), yielding mixed results, possibly because of a variety of tasks used, all requiring different levels of language skills.Aim: To investigate the relationship between ToM and EF with non-language-based tasks.Methods: Thirty ADHD (7-9 years old) were compared to thirty controls (age and IQ matched). Participants' ToM was assessed using the Animated Triangles task and two EF tasks, namely spatial control test, the Stockings Of Cambridge (SOC) and rule and acquisition test, the Intra-Extra Dimensional set shift (IED)-from the neuropsychological battery of the Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery (CANTAB).Results: ADHD group had a significant ToM and EF impairment relative to the control group. ToM was not significantly correlated with EF; however, the performance on IED tasks affected the performance on ToM tasks.Discussion: The study provides evidence for a link between the abilities to attribute correct mental states to others, planning and shifting attention in ADHD children, suggesting the ability to rely on cognitive flexibility in the face of a changing environment plays a role in explaining the association between ToM and EF.

This study aimed to compare working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility, the core components of executive functions, among two prevalent subtypes of preschool children with speech sound disorder, i.e., phonological delay (n = 16) and consistent phonological disorder (n = 15), and a group of typically developing children (n = 18). The correlation between executive function components and the accuracy of speech sound production were also investigated. Nonword repetition task and syllable repetition task were used to evaluate the phonological loop of working memory. Backward digit span was administered to examine the central executive of working memory. Cognitive flexibility was assessed using the second selection of the flexible item selection task and inhibitory control using Stroop-like and Go/No-Go tasks. The percentage consonants correct was applied to calculate the accuracy of speech sound production. Results of a one-way multivariate analysis of covariance revealed statistically significant differences between groups in the combined dependent variables after controlling for age (F(14, 80) = 17.289, p < .001, Pillai’s trace = 1.503, partial ηƞ2 = .752). Typically developing children outperformed in all measurements of executive functions than both speech sound disorder subgroups. Moreover, children with phonological delay performed better in nonword repetition and corrected responses of Stroop-like than consistent phonological disorder group. All executive function measurements also correlated with speech sound production. The results of the present study highlight the importance of including domain-general cognitive skills in current assessment protocols for children with phonological delay and consistent phonological disorders.

Objective: Moving Shapes paradigm is a test that evaluates intentionality as a theory of mind (ToM) component. This study aimed to assess the normative data and reliability of this test in a community sample of 9-11-year-old children. Method: A total of 398 children aged between 9 and 11 years were recruited from mainstream elementary schools through a random cluster sampling. All participants were evaluated using the Moving Shapes paradigm. To evaluate test-retest reliability, the test was administered again after 2-4 weeks. Results: The intentionality mean score was 29.70 (+5.88) out of 60. There was no significant difference between girls and boys in test scores. Age was not significantly related to the paradigm variables scores. Ten percent of the participants achieved the scores below 22, and 10% above 37. Cronbach’s Alfa was 0.40 for the intentionality score. The test-retest reliability was fair to good (0.43 - 0.79) for different groups of animations. The inter-rater agreement was 80%. Conclusion: The study found that the Moving shapes paradigm is a reliable instrument to evaluate intentionality in normal school-aged children.

Background and objective The Strange Stories test is one of the most commonly used tests to evaluate advanced “theory of mind,” i.e. attribution of mental states. Normative data and psychometric properties of a new Farsi translation of this test were evaluated in a large community-based sample of Iranian school-aged children. Methods: Through randomized cluster sampling, 398 children aged 9–11 years studying at 20 elementary schools were recruited from 4 central regions of Tehran, Iran. The mean age of the students was 9.96 years (SD = 0.92), and 51% were girls (n = 202). The Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) was completed by parents. The Strange Stories test was completed by all children and repeated for 20% of them after 2–4 weeks to assess the test-retest reliability. Findings: Students in upper grades had higher scores (P

Event related potentials (ERPs) are conventionally extracted by averaging EEG signals over many trials but some characteristics of these signals are lost as a result. Recently single-trial ERP extraction has become one of the main research areas in neuroscience. Spatiotemporal filtering method which uses more than one channel is one of these extraction methods. A modified spatiotemporal filtering method is proposed here for single-trial estimation of correlated ERP component parameters (peak latency and peak amplitude). The error of this method in extracting the peak amplitude and peak latency of ERP components is less than 10% and changing the temporal correlation coefficient of the main ERP components, does not change the results notably. Our proposed method for peak amplitude and peak latency estimation is proved to be better than other reported methods (especially for peak amplitude estimation) and has less computational cost in comparison with other spatiotemporal methods. The ability of our method to generalize to any number of correlated ERP components is one of the key points in our work.

Background: Post-stroke persons with aphasia (PWA) may suffer from deficits in executive function (EF). Cognitive flexibility, as an important element of EF, may be affected by PWA. As a task of cognitive flexibility, set-shifting can be measured by the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST). Assessing these EF basics may have important implications for cognitive-communicative rehabilitation of PWA. Objectives: The aim of the current study was to examine set-shifting skills and their correlation with language components of Persian-speaking PWA. Methods: Nineteen Persian-speaking, non-fluent PWA (13 males and six females; mean age was 54.26 ± 8.88 years, and age range was 32 to 69 years old) participated in this study. The bedside version of the Persian Western Aphasia Battery (P-WAB-1) and the WCST were performed to assess language and set-shifting abilities, respectively. The Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient test was used to examine the correlation between the variables. Statistical analyses were performed using the SPSS 18.0 software. Results: The results showed that the P-WAB-1 score was inversely correlated with perseverative errors index of WCST (r = -0.48, P < 0.05). Also, there was a significant correlation between the “fluency of spontaneous speech” subtest of P-WAB-1 and WCST indices, including number of categories completed (r = 0.54, P < 0.05), total number of correct responses (r = 0.61, P < 0.05), total number of errors (r = -0.60, P < 0.05), and non-perseverative errors (r = - 0.44, P < 0.05). Conclusions: Based on these results, it appears that decreased cognitive flexibility of PWA may coincide with decreased language ability. This study broadens current understanding of the complex relationship between language and EF by measuring set-shifting in a sample of non-fluent PWA. These results may be beneficial to cognitive-communicative rehabilitation programs for PWA.

Objectives: Lexical access is the process by which the basic conceptual, syntactical and morpho-phonological information of words are activated. Most studies of lexical access have focused on picture naming. There is hardly any previous research on other parameters of lexical access such as verbal fluency and analysis of connected speech in Persian normal participants. This study investigates the lexical access performance in normal speakers in different issues such as age, sex and education. Methods: The performance of 120 adult Persian speakers in three tasks including picture naming, verbal fluency and connected speech, was examined using "Persian Lexical Access Assessment Package”. The performance of participants between two gender groups (male/female), three education groups (below 5 years, above 12 years, between 5 and 12 years) and three age groups (18-35 years, 36-55 years, 56-75 years) were compared. Results: According to findings, picture naming increased with increasing education and decreased with increasing age. The performance of participants in phonological and semantic verbal fluency showed improvement with age and education. No significant difference was seen between males and females in verbal fluency task. In the analysis of connected speech there were no significant differences between different age and education groups and just mean length of utterance in males was significantly higher than females. Discussion: The findings could be a primitive scale for comparison between normal subjects and patients in lexical access tasks, furthermore it could be a horizon for planning of treatment goals in patients with word finding problem according to age, gender and education.

The Strange Stories test is one of the most commonly used tests to evaluate advanced "theory of mind," i.e. attribution of mental states. Normative data and psychometric properties of a new Farsi translation of this test were evaluated in a large community-based sample of Iranian school-aged children.Through randomized cluster sampling, 398 children aged 9-11 years studying at 20 elementary schools were recruited from 4 central regions of Tehran, Iran. The mean age of the students was 9.96 years (SD = 0.92), and 51% were girls (n = 202). The Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) was completed by parents. The Strange Stories test was completed by all children and repeated for 20% of them after 2-4 weeks to assess the test-retest reliability.Students in upper grades had higher scores (P .01); age predicted 2% of variance on the mental state score. Girls had significantly higher mentalizing scores than boys (P = .003). The split-half internal reliability coefficient was good (0.73). The test-retest reliability was fair to good. Item-scale score correlations were all significant (P .01).This new translation of the Strange Stories test is a reliable and valid instrument to evaluate higher level theory of mind abilities in community samples of Farsi speaking children. Autism Res 2017, 10: 1960-1967. © 2017 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. LAY SUMMARY: "Mentalizing" or "theory of mind," the ability to recognize others' mental states, is a key aspect of social understanding. Mentalizing problems are characteristic of some clinical conditions such as autism. The Strange Stories is a test evaluating mentalizing in every day social situations. It was translated into Farsi language and administered to a group of Iranian school-aged children. The instrument was useful in assessing children's mind reading. Older children and girls were better in mentalizing ability.

The aim of this study is to implement an automatic system to detect the activation phases of Cyclic Alternating Pattern (CAP). CAP is a sleep phenomenon composed of consecutive sequences of activations and non-activations observed during the sleep time. Statistical Behavior of Local Extrema (SBLE) method is used for feature extraction and similarity index is used for decision making. SBLE is a symbolic technique that can characterize behavior of chaotic signals. The C4-A1 EEG lead of six healthy adult subjects was used. SBLE features are extracted from delta EEG band. By using this method and second by second comparison output of the system with sleep expert visual scoring, sensitivity of 75.83%, specificity of 81.30% and accuracy of 80.51% is achieved.

The ability to understand others’ mental states is called theory of mind (ToM). One of the main aspects of ToM is intentionality, which refers to people's intention in their behaviours. The aim of this study was to evaluate intentionality in a community sample of Iranian primary school children. One hundred boys of ages 7 to 9 without any mental disorders participated in this study. All participants were assessed using Moving Shapes Paradigm. Children's descriptions were rated in accordance to the accuracy of their answers, use of mental states, emotional words, and length of phrases. Iranian children used descriptions which were similar to children's in other countries.

Introduction: Judgment in Cognitive Continuum Theory is assumed as a continuum between intuition pole and analysis pole. This study has accessed speed and accuracy in three modes of judgment. Method: Professional judgments have been provided by 56 participants through an experimental group (under stress) and a control group (without stress). Result: Accuracy was significantly higher in control group in all three judgments. Reaction times had difference significantly just in quasi-rational judgments. Conclusion: stressor lowered accuracy in the three modes of judgments in the experimental group. Noise stressor seemed to have increased reaction times in middle of judgment continuum.

Introduction According to the pain research literature, attentional bias for pain is the mechanism responsible for the development and maintenance of fear of pain in patients with chronic pain. However, there is still some debate about the exact mechanism and the role of faster engagement versus difficulty in disengagement in the development of attentional bias. Methods To investigate attentional bias in patients with chronic pain, we used an eye-tracker with the pictures of pain-provoking activities and compared the results with an age- and gender-matched group of pain-free participants. In addition, other measures of pain-related cognition and pain severity ratings were included to assess their contribution to the attentional bias toward pain-related information. Results Calculating the frequency of the first fixations showed that both groups fixated initially on pain-provoking pictures compared to neutral one. Calculating the speed of fixations showed that control participants were faster in fixating on neutral stimuli, but patients with pain were faster in fixating on pain-provoking pictures, indicating a relative vigilance for the pain-related stimuli among them. These patients reported that the intensity of pain in the previous week was positively correlated with the speed of their fixation on the painful stimuli. Conclusion Although these results did not provide unequivocal support for the vigilance-avoidance hypothesis, they are generally consistent with the results of studies using eye tracking technology. Furthermore, our findings put a question over characterization of attentional biases in patients with chronic pain by simply relating that to difficulty in disengaging from pain-related stimuli.