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Cognitive reserve (CR) represents the adaptive response of the cognitive system responsible for preserving normal functioning in the face of brain damage. Experiential factors such as education, occupation, and leisure activities influence the development of CR. Theoretically, such factors build up from childhood and across adulthood. Thus, appropriate tools to define and measure CR as early as adolescence are essential to understand its developmental processes. To this aim, we introduce the construct of "Cognitive Reserve Potential" (CRP) and its corresponding index of experiential factors tailored to youth. We investigated prototypical youth exposures potentially associated with the lifelong development of CR (e.g., sport practice, musical experiences, cultural activities, and relationships with peers and family). Principal component analysis and confirmatory factor analysis identified and replicated the CRP factor structure on two independent samples of Italian students: N = 585 (295 F) and N = 351 (201 F), ages 11 to 20. CRP was associated mainly with family socio-cultural status (i.e., socioeconomic status [SES], Home Possessions, and Books at Home). Results confirmed the strength of the factorial model and warranted the proposal of the CRP-questionnaire as an innovative tool for understanding CR evolutionary dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a fervent debate about the processes underpinning false memories formation. Seminal theories have suggested that semantic memory would be involved in false memories production, while episodic memory would counter their formation. Yet, direct evidence corroborating such view is still lacking. Here, we tested this possibility by asking participants to perform the Deese–Roediger–McDermott (DRM) task, a typical false memory paradigm, in which they had to study lists of words and subsequently to recognize and distinguish them from new words (i.e., the false memory items). The same participants were also required to perform a semantic task and an episodic-source memory task. Our results showed that a higher number of false memories in the DRM task occurred for those participants with better semantic memory abilities, while a lower number of false memories occurred for participants with better episodic abilities. These findings support a key role of semantic processes in false memory formation and, more generally, help clarify the specific contribution of different memory systems to false recognitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Sepsis still represents a major public health issue worldwide, and the immune system plays a main role during infections; therefore, its activity is mandatory to resolve this clinical condition. In this report, we aimed to retrospectively verify in a real-life setting the possible usefulness of pentameric IgM plus antibiotics in recovering patients with sepsis after major abdominal surgery. Materials/methods: We reviewed, from January 2013 until December 2019, all adult patients admitted to the ICU for sepsis or septic shock (2) after major abdominal surgery. Among these patients, were identified those that, according to legal indication and licenses in Italy, were treated with pentameric IgM plus antibiotics (Group A) or with antibiotics alone (Group B). The following parameters were evaluated: blood gas analysis, lactate, CRP, procalcitonin, endotoxin activity, liver and renal function, coagulation and blood cell count at different time points (every 48 h for at least 7 days). Differences between groups were analyzed using Fisher's exact test or a chi-square test for categorical variables. A Mann–Whitney U test or Kruskal–Wallis test were instead been performed to compare continuous variables. Univariate and multivariate analysis were also performed. Results: Over a period of 30 months, 24 patients were enrolled in Group A and 20 patients in Group B. In those subjects, no statistical differences were found in terms of bacterial or fungal infection isolates, when detected in a blood culture test, or according to inflammatory index, a score, lactate levels and mortality rate. A 48 h response was statistically more frequent in Group B than in Group A, while no differences were found in other clinical and laboratory evaluations. Conclusions: Based on our results, the use of pentameric IgM does not seem to give any clinical advantages in preventing sepsis after major abdominal surgery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transient elastography by FibroScan® (Echosens, Paris, France) is a non-invasive method that can provide a reliable measurement of liver fibrosis through the evaluation of liver stiffness. Despite its limitations and risks, liver biopsy has thus far been the only procedure able to provide data to quantify fibrosis. Scientific evidence and clinical practice have made it possible to use FibroScan® in the diagnostic work-up of several liver diseases to monitor patients' long-term treatment response and for complication prevention. For these reasons, this procedure is widely used in clinical practice and is still being investigated for further applications. The aim of this narrative review is to provide a comprehensive overview of the main applications of transient elastography in the current clinical practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an intense debate surrounding the origin of spatial–numerical associations (SNAs), according to which small numbers are mapped onto the left side of the space and large numbers onto the right. Despite evidence suggesting that SNAs would emerge as an innate predisposition to map numerical information onto a left-to-right spatially oriented mental representation, alternative accounts have challenged these proposals, maintaining that such a mapping would be the result of a mere spatial frequency (SF) coding of any visual image. That is, any smaller or larger array of objects would naturally contain more low or high SF information and, accordingly, each hemisphere would be preferentially tuned only for one SF range (e.g., right hemisphere tuned for low SF and left hemisphere tuned for high SF). This would determine the typical SNA (e.g., faster RTs for small numerical arrays with the left hand and for large numerical arrays with the right hand). To directly probe the role of SF coding in SNAs, we tested participants in a typical dot-arrays comparison task with two numerical sets: one in which SFs were confounded with numerosity (Experiment 1) and one in which the full SF power spectrum was equalized across all stimuli, keeping this cue uninformative about numerosity (Experiment 2). We found that SNAs emerged in both experiments, independently of whether SF was confounded or not with numerosity. Taken together, these findings suggest that SNAs cannot simply originate from SF power spectrum alone, and, thus, they rule out the brain's asymmetric SF tuning as a primary cause of such an effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an ongoing, vibrant debate about whether numerical information in both nonsymbolic and symbolic notations would be supported by different neurocognitive systems or rather by a common preverbal approximate number system, which is ratio dependent and follows Weber's law. Here, we propose that the similarities between nonsymbolic and symbolic number processing can be explained based on the principle of efficient coding. To probe this hypothesis we employed a new empirical approach, by predicting the behavioural performance in number comparison tasks with symbolic (i.e., number words) and nonsymbolic (i.e., arrays of dots) information not only from numerical ratio, but for the first time also from natural language data. That is, we used data extracted from vector-space models that are informative about the distributional pattern of number-words usage in natural language. Results showed that linguistic estimates predicted the behavioural performance in both symbolic and nonsymbolic tasks. However, and critically, our results also showed a task-dependent dissociation: linguistic data better predicted the performance in the symbolic task, whereas real numerical ratio better predicted the performance in the nonsymbolic task. These findings indicate that efficient coding of environmental regularities is an explanatory principle of human behavior in tasks involving numerical information. They also suggest that the ability to discriminate a stimulus from similar ones varies as a function of the specific statistical structure of the considered learning environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Large-scale linguistic data is nowadays available in abundance. Using this source of data, previous research has identified redundancies between the statistical structure of natural language and properties of the (physical) world we live in. For example, it has been shown that we can gauge city sizes by analyzing their respective word frequencies in corpora. However, since natural language is always produced by human speakers, we point out that such redundancies can only come about indirectly and should necessarily be restricted cases where human representations largely retain characteristics of the physical world. To demonstrate this, we examine the statistical occurrence of words referring to body parts in very different languages, covering nearly 4 billions of native speakers. This is because the convergence between language and physical properties of the stimuli clearly breaks down for the human body (i.e., more relevant and functional body parts are not necessarily larger in size). Our findings indicate that the human body as extracted from language does not retain its actual physical proportions; instead, it resembles the distorted human-like figure known as the sensory homunculus, whose form depicts the amount of cortical area dedicated to sensorimotor functions of each body part (and, thus, their relative functional relevance). This demonstrates that the surface-level statistical structure of language opens a window into how humans represent the world they live in, rather than into the world itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The exact semantic processes subserving the formation of false memories are still poorly understood. Here, we directly probed the semantic origins of false memories in a typical Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) task, by predicting participants' performance in this task through data-driven distributional semantic models. Participants were required to study lists of words and then to perform a recognition task. Our findings indicate that the participants' performance is better accounted for by a local rather than a global strategy on the task at hand: the single lists composing the task activate specific semantic clusters that are responsible for the occurrence of false memories. In particular, memory performance followed a continuous semantic gradient, with higher false recognitions occurring for higher sematic similarity between the lures (i.e., the false memory items) and the words in the relative lists. Crucially, our findings also show that semantic memory is differently involved in veridical and false memories, with this pattern being consistent across two reanalyses of data from previous studies and being replicated in an independent experiment. We thus outline an empirically-driven theoretical framework to account for the semantic processes supporting veridical and false memories formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The visual mechanisms underlying approximate numerical representation are still intensely debated because numerosity information is often confounded with continuous sensory cues (e.g., texture density, area, convex hull). However, numerosity is underestimated when a few items are connected by illusory contours (ICs) lines without changing other physical cues, suggesting in turn that numerosity processing may rely on discrete visual input. Yet, in these previous works, ICs were generated by black-on-gray inducers producing an illusory brightness enhancement, which could represent a further continuous sensory confound. To rule out this possibility, we tested participants in a numerical discrimination task in which we manipulated the alignment of 0, 2, or 4 pairs of open/closed inducers and their contrast polarity. In Experiment 1, aligned open inducers had only one polarity (all black or all white) generating ICs lines brighter or darker than the gray background. In Experiment 2, open inducers had always opposite contrast polarity (one black and one white inducer) generating ICs without strong brightness enhancement. In Experiment 3, reverse-contrast inducers were aligned but closed with a line preventing ICs completion. Results showed that underestimation triggered by ICs lines was independent of inducer contrast polarity in both Experiment 1 and Experiment 2, whereas no underestimation was found in Experiment 3. Taken together, these results suggest that mere brightness enhancement is not the primary cause of the numerosity underestimation induced by ICs lines. Rather, a boundary formation mechanism insensitive to contrast polarity may drive the effect, providing further support to the idea that numerosity processing exploits discrete inputs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How quantifiers are represented in the human mind is still a topic of intense debate. Seminal studies have addressed the issue of how a subclass of quantifiers, that is, number words, is spatially coded displaying the Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes (SNARC) effect; yet, none of these studies have explored the spatial representation of nonnumerical quantifiers such as "some" or "many." The aim of the present study is to investigate whether nonnumerical quantifiers are spatially coded in the human mind. We administered two typical comparison tasks to 52 participants: the first task involved nonnumerical quantifiers; the second task involved number words. Results showed a response-side compatibility effect for both number words and nonnumerical quantifiers, suggesting that both types of quantifiers are encoded in a spatial format; quantifiers referring to "small" quantities are responded to faster with the left hand and quantifiers referring to "large" quantities are responded to faster with the right hand. We labeled this effect for nonnumerical quantifiers as the Spatial-Linguistic Association of Response Codes (SLARC) effect. Notably, we found that the SNARC and the SLARC effects were strictly related to each other, namely the more a participant was sensitive to the SNARC effect in the number-word task, the more a SLARC effect was detectable in the nonnumerical quantifier task. These findings add evidence to the tendency of humans to align magnitude information on a mental line that is coded from left to right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditionally, the cerebellum has been linked to motor coordination, but growing evidence points to its involvement in a wide range of non-motor functions. Though the number of studies using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to investigate cerebellar involvement in cognitive processes is growing exponentially, these findings have not yet been synthesized in a meta-analysis. Here, we used meta-analysis to estimate the effects of cerebellar TMS on performance in cognitive tasks for healthy participants. Outcomes included participants' accuracy and response times (RTs) of several non-motor tasks performed either during or after the administration of TMS. We included overall 41 studies, of which 44 single experiments reported effects on accuracy and 41 on response times (RTs). The meta-analyses showed medium effect sizes (for accuracy: d = 0.61 [95% CI = 0.48,.073]; for RTs: d = 0.40 [95% CI = 0.30, 0.49]), with leave-one-out analyses indicating that cumulative effects were robust, and with moderate heterogeneity. For both accuracy and RTs, the effect of TMS was moderated by the stimulation paradigm adopted but not by the cognitive function investigated, while the timing of the stimulation moderated only the effects on RTs. Further analyses on lateralization revealed no moderation effects of the TMS site. Taken together, these findings indicate that TMS administered over the cerebellum is able to modulate cognitive performance, affecting accuracy or RTs, and suggest that the various stimulation paradigms play a key role in determining the efficacy of cerebellar TMS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

INTRODUCTION: We assessed the performance of direct-acting antivirals (DAAs) in hepatitis C virus (HCV)-infected people who use drugs (PWUDs) in terms of sustained virological response (SVR) and adherence rates in comparison to a location-matched cohort of non-PWUD HCV patients. METHODS: All consecutive HCV RNA-positive PWUDs were enrolled between 2015 and 2019. All subjects underwent DAA treatment according to international guidelines and then followed, at least, up to 12 weeks after the end of treatment (SVR12). The SVR and adherence to treatment was compared with that of non-PWUD HCV patients observed at hepatological units of the CLEO platform. Intention-to-treat analysis was performed. RESULTS: A total of 1,786 PWUDs who were followed up were available for assessment. Most PWUDs (85.4%) were managed inside the specialized outpatient addiction clinics (SerDs). The overall SVR rate was 95.4%. The SerDs group achieved an SVR rate of 96.2%compared with 91.6% of the non-SerDs group (P < 0.001). Comparison with the non-SerDs group and the control HCV group showed a significant difference in the dropout rate (0.6% in the SerDs group versus 2.8% in the non-SerDs group and 1.2% in the control group; P < 0.001). At multivariate analysis, factors independently associated with SVR were use of the most recent regimens (elbasvir/grazoprevir, glecaprevir/pibrentasvir, and sofosbuvir/velpatasvir; odds ratio: 3.126; P = 0.000) and belonging to the SerDs group (odds ratio: 2.356; P = 0.002). DISCUSSION: The performance of DAAs in PWUD is excellent, if 2 conditions are met: (i) that the latest generation drugs are used and (ii) that the patients are managed within the SerDs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past few years have witnessed a fervent theoretical debate about the exact visual mechanisms supporting nonsymbolic number processing. The idea that quantity information is extracted through a primitive visual segmentation algorithm has been challenged by recent models, which rather tap on low-level features confounded with numerosity (i.e., density, convex hull, or total area). Here we used an original manipulation based on visual illusions to disentangle whether visual numerosity processing operates over discrete units or rather over continuous variables. In particular, we generated a set of stimuli composed by open inducers (e.g., like a pac-man shape) that simulate physical connections with Kanizsa-like illusory contours (ICs). Test sets contained pairs of collinear open inducers items that prompted 0 IC, 2 IC, or 4 IC lines connecting 2 objects. Critically, low-level visual features were fully controlled across connectedness levels. We found a systematic underestimation as we increased the IC connections when participants had to select the larger between 2 sets of objects (Experiment 1) but not in the case of aligned closed inducers preventing illusory lines (Experiments 2A and 2B). We also found a systematic numerosity underestimation when both IC connections and continuous features (e.g., convex hull) were independently manipulated in test stimuli (Experiment 3). Finally, these results were shown to be task independent because the same effects of IC connections were replicated in an estimation task (Experiment 4). Taken together, our findings indicate that numerosity perception relies on basic visual-segmentation mechanisms, pointing out the need of new theoretical frameworks integrating both continuous and discrete perceptual number signals. Public Significance Statement: This study indicates that our brain is endowed with the ability to rapidly extract approximate information about the number of discrete items in a visual collection. In contrast with previous proposals, however, we show that this visual ability is not merely driven by continuous physical information (e.g., density, item size, convex hull, etc.) that may be correlated or confounded with numerosity itself. Rather, our study demonstrates a crucial role of perceptual organization and visual segmentation in number processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cognitive benefits of closed-skill sports practice have so far been scantily investigated. Here, we thus focused on the potential impact of swimming and running - two sports that highly rely on a precise control of timing - on time processing. To investigate the impact of these closed-skill sports on time perception and estimation, three groups of participants (for a total of eighty-four young adults) took part in the present study: expert swimmers, expert runners, and non-athletes. The ability to process temporal information in the milliseconds and seconds range was assessed through a time reproduction and a finger-tapping tasks, while a motor imagery paradigm was adopted to assess temporal estimation of sport performance in a wider interval range. We also employed the Vividness of Movement Imagery Questionnaire to assess the individual's ability of motor imagery. Results showed that closed-skill sports, specifically time-related disciplines, enhance motor imagery and time perception abilities. Swimmers were more accurate and consistent in perceiving time when compared to runners, probably thanks to the sensory muffled environment that leads these athletes to be more focused on the perception of their internal rhythm. • Swimmers were more accurate and consistent in time reproduction and finger-tapping tasks than both runners and non-athletes. • Runners outperformed non-athletes in mental vividness, while swimmers' advantage over controls did not reach significance. • The individual level of mental vividness affected the temporal estimation ability in tasks employing motor imagery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Unusual clinical course Background: Fascioliasis is a zoonotic disease caused by Fasciola hepatica (F. hepatica). This infection is associated with a broad spectrum of clinical symptoms such as fever, eosinophilia, and gastrointestinal symptoms. Case Report: We report a case of F. hepatica abdominal mass in the peri-pancreatic region in a 58-year-old man, returned from Venezuela. The patient developed abdominal pain, nausea, anorexia, and weakness. Radiological investigations showed hepatomegaly, as well as mild intra-hepatic and extrahepatic ductal dilatation. The increase in eosinophilia, elevated total IgE titer, and anamnestic data suggested the hypothesis of parasitic infection. The diagnosis was established by high serological titer against F. hepatica. Conclusions: The development of abdominal mass, with jaundice and dilation of the biliary tract, does not always suggest the presence of heteroplasia. Systemic parasitosis represents a not negligible event, especially considering the personal history of life in endemic areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Actor-based programming model is largely used in the context of distributed systems for its message-passing semantics and neat separation between the concurrency model and the underlying hardware platform. However, in the context of a single multi-core node where the performance metric is the primary optimization objective, the "pure" Actor Model is generally not used because Actors cannot exploit the physical shared-memory, thus reducing the optimization options. In this work, we propose to enrich the Actor Model with some well-known Parallel Patterns to face the performance issues of using the "pure" Actor Model on a single multi-core platform. In the experimental study, conducted on two different multi-core systems by using the C++ Actor Framework, we considered a subset of the Parsec benchmarks and two Savina benchmarks. The analysis of results demonstrates that the Actor Model enriched with suitable Parallel Patterns implementations provides a robust abstraction layer capable of delivering performance results comparable with those of thread-based libraries (i.e. Pthreads and FastFlow) while offering a safer and versatile programming environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been suggested that the origins of number words can be traced back to an evolutionarily ancient approximate number system, which represents quantities on a compressed scale and complies with Weber's law. Here, we use a data-driven computational model, which learns to predict 1 event (a word in a text corpus) from associated events, to characterize verbal behavior relative to number words in natural language, without appeal to perception. We show that the way humans use number words in spontaneous language reliably depends on numerical ratio--a clear signature of Weber's law--thus, perfectly mirroring the human and nonhuman psychophysical performance in comparative judgments of numbers. Most notably, the adherence to Weber's law is robustly replicated in a wide range of different languages. Together, these findings suggest that the everyday use of number words in language rests upon a preverbal approximate number system, which would affect the handling of numerical information not only at the input level but also at the level of verbal production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior studies have shown that strabismic amblyopes do not exhibit pseudoneglect in visual line bisection, suggesting that the right-hemisphere dominance in the control of spatial attention may depend on a normally developing binocular vision. In this study, we aimed to investigate whether an abnormal binocular childhood experience also affects spatial attention in the haptic modality, thus reflecting a supramodal effect. To this aim, we compared the performance of normally sighted, strabismic and early monocular blind participants in a visual and a haptic line bisection task. In visual line bisection, strabismic individuals tended to err to the right of the veridical midpoint, in contrast with normally sighted participants who showed pseudoneglect. Monocular blind participants exhibited high variability in their visual performance, with a tendency to bisect toward the direction of the functioning eye. In turn, in haptic bisection, all participants consistently erred towards the left of the veridical midpoint. Taken together, our findings support the view that pseudoneglect in the visual and haptic modality relies on different functional and neural mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a large body of evidence suggests positive effects of playing action video games and practising sports on various visual attentional skills, the impact of these activities on the ability to maintain attention over prolonged periods of time (i.e., sustained attention) has been largely neglected. Here, we first explored free-time habits on a group of 310 adolescents by means of a self-reported questionnaire. We found an inverse relationship between the time spent with sports and video games, but not with other extra-scholastic activities: the time spent practising sports and playing video games clearly competed with each other, with the more-intensive-sport practitioners being less involved in video game play. Next, we directly measured sustained attention and other attentional skills in a subgroup of 76 participants, divided as a function of their time spent in sports and action video games. In particular, sustained attention was assessed by means of two tasks: a classic exogenous task, requiring participants to attend to a flashing visual stimulus; and an internal (endogenous) sustained attention task, requiring participants to synchronise their manual responses to the rhythm of auditory pulses presented in an earlier phase. As previously documented, we found that action video game players displayed worse ability to maintain attention over time, as compared with non-action players. In striking contrast, intensive sports practice was associated with an increased ability to maintain attention over time. Overall, these findings unveil distinct cascading effects on sustained attention induced by doing sport and playing action video games. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and objective: The aim of this study was to assess the role of lung ultrasound (LUS) in a diagnostic algorithm of respiratory diseases, and to establish the accuracy of LUS compared with chest radiography (CXR). Methods: Over a period of 2 years, 509 consecutive patients admitted for respiratory‐related symptoms to both emergency and general medicine wards were enrolled and evaluated using LUS and CXR. LUS was conducted by expert operators who were blinded to the medical history and laboratory data. Computed tomography (CT) of the chest was performed in case of discordance between the CXR and LUS, suspected lung cancer and an inconclusive diagnosis. Diagnosis made by CT was considered the gold standard. Results: The difference in sensitivity and specificity between LUS and CXR as demonstrated by ROC curve analyses (LUS‐AUROC: 0.853; specificity: 81.6%; sensitivity: 93.9% vs CXR‐AUROC: 0.763; specificity: 57.4%; sensitivity: 96.3%) was significant (P = 0.001). Final diagnosis included 240 cases (47.2%) of pneumonia, 44 patients with cancer (8.6%), 20 patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD, 3.9%), 24 patients with heart failure (4.7%) and others (6.1%). In 108 patients (21.2%) with any lung pathology, a CT scan was performed with a positive diagnosis in 96 cases (88.9%); we found that CXR and LUS detected no abnormality in 24 (25%) and 5 (5.2%) cases, respectively. LUS was concordant with the final diagnosis (P < 0.0001), and in healthy patients, there was a low percentage of false positives (5.9%). Conclusion: The results support the routine use of LUS in the clinical context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Models that represent meaning as high-dimensional numerical vectors—such as latent semantic analysis (LSA), hyperspace analogue to language (HAL), bound encoding of the aggregate language environment (BEAGLE), topic models, global vectors (GloVe), and word2vec—have been introduced as extremely powerful machine-learning proxies for human semantic representations and have seen an explosive rise in popularity over the past 2 decades. However, despite their considerable advancements and spread in the cognitive sciences, one can observe problems associated with the adequate presentation and understanding of some of their features. Indeed, when these models are examined from a cognitive perspective, a number of unfounded arguments tend to appear in the psychological literature. In this article, we review the most common of these arguments and discuss (a) what exactly these models represent at the implementational level and their plausibility as a cognitive theory, (b) how they deal with various aspects of meaning such as polysemy or compositionality, and (c) how they relate to the debate on embodied and grounded cognition. We identify common misconceptions that arise as a result of incomplete descriptions, outdated arguments, and unclear distinctions between theory and implementation of the models. We clarify and amend these points to provide a theoretical basis for future research and discussions on vector models of semantic representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The aim of this study was to evaluate the relationship between the liver stiffness measurement and the risk of developing hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) in HCV cirrhotic patients undergoing new direct-acting antivirals. Methods: From April 2015 to April 2017, all consecutive HCV cirrhotic patients treated by direct-acting antivirals were enrolled. A liver stiffness measurement was computed at baseline, and an ultrasound evaluation was provided for all patients at baseline and every 6 months until 1 year after the stopping of the antiviral therapy. The diagnosis of HCC was performed according to international guidelines by imaging technique workup. Results: Two hundred and fifty-eight HCV patients with a diagnosis of cirrhosis were identified. The median liver stiffness was 25.5 kPa. Thirty-five patients developed HCC. Patients were divided into three groups, based on their liver stiffness: < 20 kPa (n = 72), between 20 and 30 kPa (n = 92) and > 30 kPa (n = 94). Compared to the < 20 kPa and 20–30 kPa groups, the > 30 kPa group showed a statistically significant increased risk of HCC (p = 0.019; HR 0.329; 95% CI 0.131–0.830). A ROC curve analysis to assess the overall predictive performance of liver stiffness measurement on the HCC risk was performed. The results allow us to identify a cutoff value of liver stiffness measurement equal to 27.8 kPa, which guarantees the highest sensitivity and specificity (respectively, 72% and 65%). Conclusions: The data underline that the baseline liver stiffness measurement and ultrasound surveillance is a valuable tool for assessing the risk of HCC in cirrhotic patients undergoing the direct-acting antivirals treatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we investigated whether auditory deprivation leads to a more balanced bilateral control of spatial attention in the haptic space. We tested four groups of participants: early deaf, early blind, deafblind, and control (normally hearing and sighted) participants. Using a haptic line bisection task, we found that while normally hearing individuals (even when blind) showed a significant tendency to bisect to the left of the veridical midpoint (i.e., pseudoneglect), deaf individuals did not show any significant directional bias. This was the case of both deaf signers and non-signers, in line with prior findings obtained using a visual line bisection task. Interestingly, deafblind individuals also erred significantly to the left, resembling the pattern of early blind and control participants. Overall, these data critically suggest that deafness induces changes in the hemispheric asymmetry subtending the orientation of spatial attention also in the haptic modality. Moreover, our findings indicate that what counterbalances the right-hemisphere dominance in the control of spatial attention is not the lack of auditory input per se, nor sign language use, but rather the heavier reliance on visual experience induced by early auditory deprivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both incidence and mortality of acute coronary syndrome (ACS) among diabetic patients are much higher than those among nondiabetics. Actually, there are many studies that addressed glycemic control and CV risk, whilst the literature on the role of tight glycemic control during ACS is currently poor. Therefore, in this review, we critically discussed the studies that investigated this specific topic. Hyperglycemia is implicated in vascular damage and cardiac myocyte death through different molecular mechanisms as advanced glycation end products, protein kinase C, polyol pathway flux, and the hexosamine pathway. Moreover, high FFA concentrations may be toxic in acute ischemic myocardium due to several mechanisms, thus leading to endothelial dysfunction. A reduction in free fatty acid plasma levels and an increased availability of glucose can be achieved by using a glucose-insulin-potassium infusion (GIKi) during AMI. The GIKi is associated with an improvement of either long-term prognosis or left ventricular mechanical performance. DIGAMI studies suggested blood glucose level as a significant and independent mortality predictor among diabetic patients with recent ACS, enhancing the important role of glucose control in their management. Several mechanisms supporting the protective role of tight glycemic control during ACS, as well as position statements of Scientific Societies, were highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • The mental representation of numbe r and time is mapped onto different spatial frames of reference across development. • The Mental Time Line exclusively relies upon external coordinates by age 6. • The Mental Number Line relies on both body-centred and external frames of reference by age 6. • Sensorimotor experience during childhood may lead number and time to be merged into a common representation format later in development. • The Mental Number Line becomes fully anchored on external frames of reference by age 10. Abstract Space-number and space-time associations have been a timely topic in the cognitive sciences for years, but evidence from developmental populations is still scarce. In particular, it remains to be established whether space-number and space-time mappings are anchored onto the same spatial frame of reference across development. To explore this issue, we manipulated visual and proprioceptive feedback in a Number Comparison task (Experiment 1) and a Time Comparison task (Expriment 2), in which 6- and 10-year-old children had to classify numerical and temporal words by means of a lateralised response with or without a blindfold (visual manipulation), and with hands uncrossed or crossed over the body midline (proprioceptive manipulation). Results revealed that 10-year-old children were more efficient in associating smaller numbers and past events with the left key, and larger numbers and future events with the right key, irrespective of the visual and proprioceptive manipulations. On the contrary, younger children did so only in the Time Comparison task, but not in the Number Comparison task. In the latter task, 6-year-olds associated small/large numbers with the left/right side of space only in the presence of visual feedback, but not when blindfolded. Taken together, our findings unveil that in school-aged children the spatial representation of number and time develop on different spatial frames of reference: while space-time associations exclusively rely on external coordinates at age 6, space-number associations shift from mixed internal and external coordinates at age 6 to more adult-like external coordinates by age 10. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although mouse‐tracking has been taken as a real‐time window on different aspects of human decision‐making processes, whether purely semantic information affects response conflict at the level of motor output as measured through mouse movements is still unknown. Here, across two experiments, we investigated the effects of semantic knowledge by predicting participants' performance in a standard keyboard task and in a mouse‐tracking task through distributional semantics, a usage‐based modeling approach to meaning. In Experiment 1, participants were shown word pairs and were required to perform a two‐alternative forced choice task selecting either the more abstract or the more concrete word, using standard keyboard presses. In Experiment 2, participants performed the same task, yet this time response selection was achieved by moving the computer mouse. Results showed that the involvement of semantic components in the task at hand is observable using both standard reaction times (Experiment 1) as well as using indexes extracted from mouse trajectories (Experiment 2). In particular, mouse trajectories reflected the response conflict and its temporal evolution, with a larger deviation for increasing word semantic relatedness. These findings support the validity of mouse‐tracking as a method to detect deep and implicit decision‐making features. Additionally, by demonstrating that a usage‐based model of meaning can account for the different degrees of cognitive conflict associated with task achievement, these findings testify the impact of the human semantic memory on decision‐making processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spatial representation of numerical and temporal information is thought to be rooted in our multisensory experiences. Accordingly, we may expect visual or auditory deprivation to affect the way we represent numerical magnitude and time spatially. Here, we systematically review recent findings on how blind and deaf individuals represent abstract concepts such as magnitude and time (e.g., past/future, serial order of events) in a spatial format. Interestingly, available evidence suggests that sensory deprivation does not prevent the spatial “re-mapping” of abstract information, but differences compared to normally sighted and hearing individuals may emerge depending on the specific dimension considered (i.e., numerical magnitude, time as past/future, serial order). Herein we discuss how the study of sensory deprived populations may shed light on the specific, and possibly distinct, mechanisms subserving the spatial representation of these concepts. Furthermore, we pinpoint unresolved issues that need to be addressed by future studies to grasp a full understanding of the spatial representation of abstract information associated with visual and auditory deprivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Line bisection studies generally find a left-to-right shift in bisection bias with increasing distance between the observer and the target line, which may be explained by hemispheric differences in the processing of proximo-distal information. In the present study, the segregation between near and far space was further characterized across the motor system and contextual cues. To this aim, 20 right-handed participants were required to perform a manual bisection task of simple lines presented at three different distances (60, 90, 120 cm). Importantly, the horizontal spatial location of the line was manipulated along with the viewing distance to investigate more deeply the hemispheric engagement in the transition from near to far space. As the motoric component of the manual task producing activations of left premotor and motor areas may be partially responsible for the observed transition, participants were also involved in an ocular bisection task. Further, participants were required to bisect Judd variants of the target lines, which are known to elicit a Müller-Lyer-type illusion. Since the Judd illusion depends on areas in the ventral visual stream, we predicted that line bisections of Judd-type lines would be unaffected by viewing distance. Results showed that manual bisection of simple lines was modulated separately by viewing distance and the hemispace of presentation, with this pattern being similar for ocular bisection. Critically, bisections in the Judd illusion task were not modulated by viewing distance, whether performed by hand or by eye. Overall, these findings support the hypothesis that the right hemisphere plays a dominant role in the processing of space close to the body. They also present novel evidence for a general reduction of this dominance at farther distances, whether hand motor actions are involved or not. Finally, our study documents a dissociation between the processing of pure visuospatial information and that of a visual illusion as a function of viewing distance, supporting more generally the dorsal/near space and the ventral/far space segregation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many cultures, humans conceptualize the past as behind the body and the future as in front. Whether this spatial mapping of time depends on visual experience is still not known. Here, we addressed this issue by testing early-blind participants in a space-time motor congruity task requiring them to classify a series of words as referring to the past or the future by moving their hand backward or forward. Sighted participants showed a preferential mapping between forward movements and future-words and backward movements and past-words. Critically, blind participants did not show any such preferential time-space mapping. Furthermore, in a questionnaire requiring participants to think about past and future events, blind participants did not appear to perceive the future as psychologically closer than the past, as it is the case of sighted individuals. These findings suggest that normal visual development is crucial for representing time along the sagittal space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The occurrence of time processing problems in individuals with Development Dyscalculia (DD) has favored the view of a general magnitude system devoted to both numerical and temporal information. Yet, this scenario has been partially challenged by studies indicating that time difficulties can be attributed to poor calculation or counting skills, which can support reasoning on time in school-aged children and adults. Here, we tackle this debate by exploring the performance of young children before they fully develop the symbolic number system. Preschoolers at risk of developing DD were compared with typically developing children in a series of tasks investigating time processing and in their ‘sense of time’, evaluated by parents and teachers. Results yielded a poorer performance in time reproduction of 5-second intervals and in time discrimination, as well as a weaker ‘sense of time’, in children at risk of DD. These findings provide evidence of a common magnitude system that would be responsible for deficits in both numerical and temporal domains, already at early stages of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been compelling evidence favoring the idea that human adults similarly represent number and time along a horizontal mental number line (MNL) and mental time line (MTL), respectively. Yet, analogies drawn between the MNL and MTL have been challenged by recent studies suggesting that adults’ representations of number and time arise from different spatial frames of reference; whereas the MNL relies on both hand-centered and object-centered coordinates, the MTL appears to be exclusively anchored on object-centered coordinates. To directly test this possibility, here we explored the extent to which visual feedback and proprioceptive feedback affect children’s performance in a Number Comparison task (Experiment 1) and a Time Comparison task (Experiment 2), in which participants needed to associate a lateralized key with numerical and temporal words, respectively. Children (5- and 6-year-olds) performed the task with their hands either uncrossed or crossed over the body midline (i.e., manipulation of proprioceptive feedback) and with either visual control over their hands allowed or precluded under blindfolds (i.e., manipulation of visual feedback). Results showed that children were facilitated in associating smaller/larger numbers with the left/right side of the external space, but only when hands were uncrossed and visual feedback was available. On the contrary, blindfolding and crossing their hands over the midline did not affect spatial time mapping, with 6-year-olds showing facilitation in associating words referring to the past/future with the left/right side of the external space irrespective of visual and proprioceptive feedback. This same effect was also present in 5-year-olds despite their difficulty in performing the Time Comparison task. Together, these findings show, for the first time, that—just like adults—young children (a) map temporal events onto space in a rightward direction as they do for numbers and (b) anchor their spatial representation of time and numbers to different spatial frames of reference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humans show a systematic tendency to perceive the future as psychologically closer than the past. Based on the clinical hypothesis that anxiety would be associated more with future threat life events, whereas depression with past loss events, here we explored whether people with anxiety- and depression-related personality traits perceive differently the psychological distance of temporal events. Results showed that the common tendency to perceive the future as psychologically closer than the past is exaggerated in individuals with anxiety-related personality traits, whereas this asymmetry drastically shrinks in individuals with depression-related personality traits. Beyond substantiating the hypothesis that the past and the future are differently faced by people with depression- and anxiety-related personality traits, the present findings suggest that temporal orientation of one’s self may be greatly altered in anxiety and depression. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The concept of intelligence encompasses the mental abilities necessary to survival and advancement in any environmental context. Attempts to grasp this multifaceted concept through a relatively simple operationalization have fostered the notion that individual differences in intelligence can often be expressed by a single score. This predominant position has contributed to expect intelligence profiles to remain substantially stable over the course of ontogenetic development and, more generally, across the life-span. These tendencies, however, are biased by the still limited number of empirical reports taking a developmental perspective on intelligence. Viewing intelligence as a dynamic concept, indeed, implies the need to identify full developmental trajectories, to assess how genes, brain, cognition, and environment interact with each other. In the present paper, we describe how a neuroconstructivist approach better explains why intelligence can rise or fall over development, as a result of a fluctuating interaction between the developing system itself and the environmental factors involved at different times across ontogenesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Liver transplanted patients need close surveillance for early signs of graft disease. Objectives: Transient elastography can safely be repeated overtime, offering serial liver stiffness measurement values. Serial stiffness measurements were compared to single baseline stiffness measurements in predicting the appearance of liver-related clinical events and guiding subsequent clinical decisions. Methods: One hundred and sixty liver transplanted patients were observed for three years in our real-life practice. Results: Liver stiffness measurements were stable in 75% of patients, decreased in 4% of patients, and increased in 21% of patients. The pattern of increased stiffness measurements was associated with both HCV-RNA positive status and the presence of an active biliary complication of liver transplantation and was more predictive of a clinically significant event resulting from any disease of the transplanted liver when compared to a stable pattern or to a single liver stiffness measurement. The procedures that were consequently performed were often diagnostic for unexpected situations, both in HCV-RNA positive and HCV-RNA negative patients. Conclusions: The pattern of longitudinally increased liver stiffness measurements efficiently supported clinical decisions for individualized management strategies. Repeated transient elastography in real-life clinical practice appears to have a practical role in monitoring liver transplanted patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theories of embodied cognition emphasize the importance of sensorimotor schemas linked to external world experience for representing conceptual knowledge. Accordingly, some researchers have proposed that the spatial representation of numerical and non-numerical sequences relies on visuomotor routines, like reading habit and finger counting. There is a growing interest in how these two routines contribute to the spatial representation of ordinal sequences, although no investigation has so far directly compared them. The present study aims to investigate how these routines contribute to represent ordinal information in space. To address this issue, bilingual participants reading either from left-to-right or right-to-left were required to map ordinal information to all fingers of their right dominant hand. Critically, we manipulated both the direction of the mapping and the language of the verbal information. More specifically, a finger-mapping compatibility task was adopted in three experiments to explore the spatial representation of numerical (digit numbers and number words) and non-numerical (days of the week, presented in Hebrew and in English) sequences. Results showed that numerical information was preferentially mapped according to participants' finger counting habits, regardless of hand posture (prone and supine), number notation and reading habit. However, for non-numerical ordinal sequences, reading and finger counting directions both contributed to determine a preferential spatial mapping. These findings indicate that abstract knowledge representation relies on multiple over-trained visuomotor routines. More generally, these results highlight the capacity of our cognitive system to flexibly represent abstract ordered information, by relying on different directional experiences (finger counting, reading direction) depending on the stimuli and on the task at hand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to review and up to date the prevalence of hepatitis C virus (HCV)-associated non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) and their significance in both accelerating progression of HCV-related liver disease and development of HCV-associated extrahepatic diseases. The reported mean prevalence of HCV-related NAFLD was 55%, whereas NASH was reported in 4%-10% of cases. HCV genotype 3 directly induces fatty liver deposition, namely "viral steatosis" and it is associated with the highest prevalence and degree of severity, whereas, HCV non-3 genotype infection showed lower prevalence of steatosis, which is associated with metabolic factors and insulin resistance. The host's genetic background predisposes him or her to the development of steatosis. HCV's impairment of lipid and glucose metabolism causes fatty liver accumulation; this seems to be a viral strategy to optimize its life cycle. Irrespective of insulin resistance, HCV-associated NAFLD, in a degree-dependent manner, contributes towards accelerating the liver fibrosis progression and development of hepatocellular carcinoma by inducing liver inflammation and oxidative stress. Furthermore, NAFLD is associated with the presence of metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, and atherosclerosis. In addition, HCV-related "metabolic steatosis" impairs the response rate to interferon-based treatment, whereas it seems that "viral steatosis" may harm the response rate to new oral direct antiviral agents. In conclusion, a high prevalence of NAFLD occurs in HCV infections, which is, at least in part, induced by the virus, and that NAFLD significantly impacts progression of the liver disease, therapeutic response, and some extrahepatic diseases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the existence of an association between numbers and space has been largely documented in educated adults, the origin of this association still remains debated. Recent evidence suggests that associations between numbers and space might originate during the preschool years from the repeated action of counting in peripersonal space. However, it is also possible that preschoolers may additionally acquire directional preferences by counting on their own body, specifically on their fingers. To address this hypothesis, the present study explores the presence of early directional indexes in processing numerical information in both peripersonal and personal space in a sample of 90 preschoolers. We identified children who consistently exhibited a counting directional bias and generalized it to their processing of numbers in space. Moreover, given the tight connection between counting routine and numerical knowledge, we investigated the relation between these indexes and numerical achievement, evaluated by means of various tasks. Results indicate that distinct spatial-numerical associations, in both peripersonal and personal space, coexist from an early age and can be used flexibly. However, regardless of its directionality, the presence of a consistent spatial-numerical association appears to be related to numerical comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growing evidence shows that individuals consistently match auditory pitch with visual size. For instance, high-pitched sounds are perceptually associated with smaller visual stimuli, whereas low-pitched sounds with larger ones. The present study explores whether this crossmodal correspondence, reported so far for perceptual processing, also modulates motor planning. To address this issue, we carried out a series of kinematic experiments to verify whether actions implying size processing are affected by auditory pitch. Experiment 1 showed that grasping movements toward small/large objects were initiated faster in response to high/low pitches, respectively, thus extending previous findings in the literature to more complex motor behavior. Importantly, auditory pitch influenced the relative scaling of the hand preshaping, with high pitches associated with smaller grip aperture compared with low pitches. Notably, no effect of auditory pitch was found in case of pointing movements (no grasp implied, Experiment 2), as well as when auditory pitch was irrelevant to the programming of the grip aperture, that is, in case of grasping an object of uniform size (Experiment 3). Finally, auditory pitch influenced also symbolic manual gestures expressing "small" and "large" concepts (Experiment 4). In sum, our results are novel in revealing the impact of auditory pitch on motor planning when size processing is required, and shed light on the role of auditory information in driving actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study examined whether traveling through serially-ordered verbal memories exploits overt visuospatial attentional resources. In a three-phase behavioral study, five single-digits were presented sequentially at one spatial location in phase 1, while recognition and verbal recall were tested in phases 2 and 3, respectively. Participants’ spontaneous eye movements were registered along with the verbal responses. Results showed that the search and the retrieval of serially-ordered information were mediated by spontaneous ocular movements. Specifically, recognizing middle items of the memorized sequence required longer inspection times and, importantly, a greater involvement of overt attentional resources, than recognizing the serially first-presented item and, to a lesser extent, the last-presented item. Moreover, serial order was found to be spatially encoded from left-to-right, as eye position during vocal responses deviated the more to the right, the later the serial position of the retrieved item in the sequence. These findings suggest that overt spatial attention mediates the scanning of serial order representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing amount of evidence confirms the influence of reading and writing habits on visuospatial processing, although this phenomenon has been so far testified mainly as a lateralized shift of a single behavioral sign (e.g., line bisection), with lack of proof from pure right-to-left readers. The present study contributed to this issue by analyzing multiple attentional and motor indexes in monolingual Italian (i.e., reading from left-to-right), and monolingual (i.e., reading from right-to-left) and bilingual Israeli (i.e., reading from right-to-left in Hebrew but also from left-to-right in English) participants' visuospatial performance. Subjects were administered a computerized standard star cancellation task and a modified version in which English letters and words were replaced by Hebrew ones. Tasks were presented on a graphics tablet, allowing recording of both chronometric and spatial parameters (i.e., measured in (x, y) vector coordinates). Results showed that reading direction modulated the on-line visuomotor performance (i.e., left-to-right vs. right-to-left shifts) from the beginning (i.e., first mark) to the end of the task (i.e., spatial distribution of omissions and subjective epicenter). Additionally, the spatial bias observed in a computerized line bisection task was also related to the participants' habitual reading direction. Overall, the results favor the proposal of an Interactive Account of visuospatial asymmetries, according to which both cultural factors, such as the directional scanning associated with language processing, and biological factors, such as hemispheric specialization, modulate visuospatial processing. Results are discussed in light of recent behavioral and neuroanatomical findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nonarbitrary phenomena in language, such as systematic association in the form-meaning interface, have been widely reported in the literature. Exploiting such systematic associations previous studies have demonstrated that pseudowords can be indicative of meaning. However, whether semantic activation from words and pseudowords is supported by the very same processes, activating a common semantic memory system, is currently not known. Here, we take advantage of recent progresses from computational linguistics models allowing to induce meaning representations for out-of-vocabulary strings of letters via domain-general associative-learning mechanisms applied to natural language. We combined these models with data from priming tasks, in which participants are showed two strings of letters presented sequentially one after the other and are then asked to indicate if the latter is a word or a pseudoword. In Experiment 1 we reanalyzed the data of the largest behavioral database on semantic priming, while in Experiment 2 we ran an independent replication on a new language, Italian, controlling for a series of possible confounds. Results were consistent across the two experiments and showed that the prime-word meaning interferes with the semantic pattern elicited by the target pseudoword (i.e., at increasing estimated semantic relatedness between prime word and target pseudoword, participants' reaction times increased and accuracy decreased). These findings indicate that the same associative mechanisms governing word meaning also subserve the processing of pseudowords, suggesting in turn that human semantic memory can be conceived as a distributional system that builds upon a generalpurpose capacity of extracting knowledge from complex statistical patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the cerebellum has long been believed to be involved uniquely in sensorimotor processes, recent research works pointed to its participation in a wide range of cognitive predictive functions. Here, we review the available evidence supporting a generalized role of the cerebellum in predictive computation. We then discuss the anatomo-physiological properties that make the cerebellum the ideal hub of the predictive brain. We further argue that cerebellar involvement in cognition may follow a continuous gradient, with higher cerebellar activity occurring for tasks relying more on predictive processes, and outline the empirical scenarios to probe this hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid spread of SARS-CoV-2 and the resulting pandemic has led to a spasmodic search for approaches able to limit the diffusion of the disease. The epigenetic machinery has aroused considerable interest in the last decades, and much evidence has demonstrated that this type of modification could regulate the early stages of viral infection. Recently it was reported that N6-methyladenosine (m6A) influences SARS-CoV-2 replication, although its role remains to be further investigated. The knockdown of enzymes involved in the m6A pathway could represent an optimal strategy to deepen the epigenetic mechanism. In the present study, we blocked the catalytic activity of the fat mass and obesity-associated protein (FTO) by using the selective inhibitor rhein. We observed a strong broad-spectrum reduction of infectivity caused by various coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2. This effect could be due to the modulation of m6A levels and could allow identification of this modification as a new therapeutic target to treat SARS-CoV-2 infection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The human cerebral cortex is asymmetrically organized with hemispheric lateralization pervading nearly all neural systems of the brain. Whether the lack of normal visual development affects hemispheric specialization subserving the deployment of visuospatial attention asymmetries is controversial. In principle, indeed, the lack of early visual experience may affect the lateralization of spatial functions, and the blind may rely on a different sensory input compared to the sighted. In this review article, we thus present a current state-of-the-art synthesis of empirical evidence concerning the effects of visual deprivation on the lateralization of various spatial processes (i.e., including line bisection, mirror symmetry, and localization tasks). Overall, the evidence reviewed indicates that spatial processes are supported by a right hemispheric network in the blind, hence, analogously to the sighted. Such a right-hemisphere dominance, however, seems more accentuated in the blind as compared to the sighted as indexed by the greater leftward bias shown in different spatial tasks. This is possibly the result of the more pronounced involvement of the right parietal cortex during spatial tasks in blind individuals compared to the sighted, as well as of the additional recruitment of the right occipital cortex, which would reflect the cross-modal plastic phenomena that largely characterize the blind brain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While seminal theories suggest that nonsymbolic visual numerosity is mainly extracted from segmented items, more recent views advocate that numerosity cannot be processed independently of nonnumeric continuous features confounded with the numerical set (i.e., such as the density, the convex hull, etc.). To disentangle these accounts, here we employed two different visual illusions presented in isolation or in a merged condition (e.g., combining the effects of the two illusions). In particular, in a number comparison task, we concurrently manipulated both the perceived object segmentation by connecting items with Kanizsa-like illusory lines, and the perceived convex-hull/density of the set by embedding the stimuli in a Ponzo illusion context, keeping constant other low-level features. In Experiment 1, the two illusions were manipulated in a compatible direction (i.e., both triggering numerical underestimation), whereas in Experiment 2 they were manipulated in an incompatible direction (i.e., with the Ponzo illusion triggering numerical overestimation and the Kanizsa illusion numerical underestimation). Results from psychometric functions showed that, in the merged condition, the biases of each illusion summated (i.e., largest underestimation as compared with the conditions in which illusions were presented in isolation) in Experiment 1, while they averaged and competed against each other in Experiment 2. These findings suggest that discrete nonsymbolic numerosity can be extracted independently from continuous magnitudes. They also point to the need of more comprehensive theoretical views accounting for the operations by which both discrete elements and continuous variables are computed and integrated by the visual system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Right-handed Western children before and after literacy acquisition were involved. • Children were administered with a digitized cancellation task. • We further assessed the influence of handedness, by involving left-handed second graders. • Results favour the view of an Interactive Account. • Biological, biomechanical and cultural factors all contribute to visuospatial attention. A tendency to over-attend the left side of the space (i.e., pseudoneglect) has been repeatedly reported in Western adult populations and is supposed to reflect a right hemisphere dominance in the control of visuospatial attention. This neurobiological hypothesis has been partially challenged by growing evidence showing that pseudoneglect is profoundly triggered by cultural practices such as reading and writing habits. Accordingly, more recent theoretical accounts suggest a strict coupling between nature and nurture dimensions at the origins of such bias. To further explore this possibility, here we first administered a digitized cancellation task to right-handed Western children before and after literacy acquisition. Results showed an incremental leftward shift of attention in the cancellation of the first target and an increasing preference for a left-to-right visual search from preschoolers to second graders. Yet, despite these differences, the overall distribution of visuospatial attention was biased to the left in both groups. To explore the role of handedness in visuospatial asymmetries, we also tested a group of left-handed second graders. Results showed an impact of handedness on visuospatial performance, with an accentuated rightward-oriented visual search for left-handed children, although the overall distribution of attention was again biased to the left hemispace. Taken together, these findings do not provide support to a pure neurobiological view of visuospatial biases. Rather, our study indicates that the control of visuospatial attention is mediated by a dynamic interplay among biological (i.e., right hemisphere dominance), biomechanical (i.e., hand dominance), and cultural (i.e., reading habits) factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Direct-acting antivirals (DAAs) induce a rapid virologic response (SVR) in up to 99% of chronic hepatitis C patients. The role of SVR by DAAs on the incidence or recurrence of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is still a matter of debate, although it is known that SVR does not eliminate the risk of HCC. In this review, we made an updated analysis of the literature data on the impact of SVR by DAAs on the risk of HCC as well as an assessment of risk factors and the role of epigenetics. Data showed that SVR has no impact on the occurrence of HCC in the short–medium term but reduces the risk of HCC in the medium–long term. A direct role of DAAs in the development of HCC has not been demonstrated, while the hypothesis of a reduction in immune surveillance in response to the rapid clearance of HCV and changes in the cytokine pattern influencing early carcinogenesis remains to be further elucidated. HCV induces epigenetic alterations such as modifications of the histone tail and DNA methylation, which are risk factors for HCC, and such changes are maintained after HCV clearance. Future epigenetic studies could lead to identify useful biomarkers and therapeutic targets. Cirrhosis has been identified as a risk factor for HCC, particularly if associated with high liver stiffness and α-fetoprotein values, diabetes and the male sex. Currently, considering the high number and health cost to follow subjects' post-HCV clearance by DAAs, it is mandatory to identify those at high risk of HCC to optimize management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]