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Summary Preschool children often have problems in remembering to carry out a planned behaviour. This study investigated the impact of napping on episodic foresight (planning for future events) and prospective memory (remembering to perform an action in the future) in 2–3‐year‐old children. In a quasi‐experimental design, we compared children who napped (nap condition, n = 20) after receiving information about an upcoming problem (episodic foresight task) and a delayed intention (prospective memory task) with those who stayed awake (wake condition, n = 43). We hypothesised that napping would improve performance in the episodic foresight and the prospective memory tasks. Contrary to the hypothesis, napping did not significantly affect children's episodic foresight or prospective memory performance, even after controlling for the group difference in age. Task performance was primarily explained by memory effects and age. Further research that incorporates stricter controls and evaluates pre‐nap memory strength is necessary fully to elucidate the complex interplay between napping, age, episodic foresight, and prospective memory performance in young children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cognitive aging researchers have long reported "paradoxical" age differences in prospective memory (PM), with age deficits in laboratory settings and age benefits (or no deficits) in real-world settings. We propose a theoretical account that explains this "age-PM-paradox" as a consequence of both methodological factors and developmental changes in cognitive abilities and personality traits. To test this account, young and older adults performed a series of naturalistic PM tasks in the lab and real world. Age-related PM deficits were observed in both lab-based tasks where demands were implemented using virtual reality and in-person role-playing. In contrast, older adults performed equal to or better than young adults on both real-world tasks, where demands were implemented in participants' daily lives. Consistent with our proposed account, an index of these "paradoxical" effects was partially predicted by age-related differences in working memory, vigilance, agreeableness, and neuroticism, whose predictive utility varied across task settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: This study aimed to evaluate the psychometric properties of the Arabic version of the Everyday Memory Questionnaire- Revised (EMQ-R-A) in a sample of Lebanese adults. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted in August 2023. A diverse sample of 483 Lebanese adults aged 18 to 60 years from all Lebanese governorates was recruited. Participants completed an Arabic-language questionnaire comprising three sections: socio-demographic characteristics, health-related inquiries, the EMQ-R-A and the Arabic version of the Prospective and Retrospective Memory Questionnaire (PRMQ). Results: The study's findings indicated that the EMQ-R-A displayed strong internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha = 0.925). Convergent validity was supported by a significant correlation with PRMQ. Test-retest results demonstrated strong reliability with a Cronbach's alpha of 0.925. Confirmatory factor analysis revealed a three-factor model including retrieval related factors, attentional tracking related factors, and other factors. The factors labeled "Retrieval" and "Attentional Tracking" elucidate aspects of memory retrieval system efficacy and attention-related challenges. Higher EMQ-R-A scores were found to be associated with the female gender, lower attention, physical inactivity, lower educational levels, and higher number of comorbid disorders. Conclusion: The EMQ-R-A exhibits good validity and reliability. The identified factors associated with memory decline underscore the importance of addressing lifestyle factors, such as promoting physical activity, better educational attainment, and addressing comorbid health conditions, to potentially mitigate memory challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prospective memory (PM) is the accurate execution of an intention in the future. PM may be negatively impacted by negative affect, but the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Rumination may increase the frequency of task-irrelevant thoughts, which deplete attentional capacity and reduce performance. To date, no studies have examined state and trait rumination on an online measure of PM. The present study examined the effects of state and trait rumination on an event-based, focal PM task embedded within a one-back task over multiple sessions. 95 non-depressed adults (18–53 years) completed measures of state/trait rumination, mood, and PM on at least two occasions. Using multi-level modelling, we found that a derived measure of trait rumination, but not an established trait rumination survey, nor negative mood, predicted poorer PM accuracy. These novel findings demonstrate that trait rumination may partially underlie the association between negative affect & PM in a non-clinical sample, and highlight the potential of online methods to study PM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prospective memory (PM) is the ability to remember and realize one’s intentions in the future; therefore, it is crucial for the daily functioning of children and adolescents and their ability to become independent from caregivers. PM errors can have repercussions during childhood, such as influencing school performance and social relationships. The aim of this systematic review was to synthesize studies analysing PM in children and adolescents (age range: 0–16 years) following PRISMA guidelines. The goal was to outline the most commonly used tasks, offering information on the development of PM, and— through a detailed analysis of the assessment of specific cognitive processes carried out in the primary studies included—providing information on the main cognitive processes involved in PM within this age group. Forty-nine studies were selected that examined PM in children and adolescents with typical development. The studies used many different tasks that can be traced back to eleven different main paradigms to evaluate PM, each structured into a PM and an ongoing task. Older children performed better on PM targets than younger children, suggesting a developmental trajectory of PM that follows a J-shaped function. Children as young as 2 years old exhibited the first signs of PM, while adolescents performed similarly to adults on PM tasks. Several factors are involved in PM development: retrospective memory, executive functions (planning, working memory, inhibitory control, monitoring), attention, metamemory, and motivation. This review May be considered a starting point to summarize the most used tools to evaluate PM in children and adolescents, and to shed light on the primary cognitive functions involved in PM, potentially offering indications to researchers in selecting optimal tasks for measuring PM across different age groups. Additionally, it underscores the importance of developing standardized measures for potential clinical applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Prospective memory (PM) is the ability to create and execute future tasks. It is comprised of two components: cue detection and intention retrieval. PM is essential for performing high-level goals, a proficiency extremely important in college populations. Anxiety is a prevalent psychological experience in college populations that may be associated with impairments in PM. The present study examined PM performance and anxiety in college students, using neurophysiology to measure the mechanism of impairment. Methods: After self-reporting anxiety levels, 80 participants completed an eventbased, focal PM task while two event-related potentials were recorded from an electroencephalogram: the N300 to assess cue detection, and the prospective positivity to assess intention retrieval. Results: The results demonstrated that, when controlling for age and gender, higher state anxiety was significantly associated with lower PM accuracy (β = -0.27, p = 0.020) and lower prospective positivity amplitude (β = -0.04, p = 0.021). Lower prospective positivity amplitude was significantly associated with lower PM accuracy (β = 0.27, p = 0.015). Higher state anxiety was significantly indirectly associated with lower PM accuracy mediated by lower prospective positivity amplitude (ab= -0.11, p = 0.047). Discussion: These findings suggest intention retrieval could be a key component in supporting PM for college students with high state anxiety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Searching for missing or wanted people is a crucial task in our society. Previous work on prospective person memory (PPM) has demonstrated that performance on this type of search task is worse relative to standard prospective memory tasks. Importantly, this process may be further affected by the race of the missing person, yet this has never been tested in laboratory settings. To test the effects of race on PPM, a convenience sample consisting primarily of self-identified Caucasian participants was asked to search for either a Caucasian or an Indian target person while judging the orientation of different Caucasian and Indian faces. Although the tasks were otherwise identical, 89% of Caucasian PPM targets were found while only 53% of Indian targets were found. Furthermore, relative to a control group with no PPM requirements, participants were slower and more error-prone when judging Indian faces relative to White faces, particularly if they were searching for an Indian face. We interpret these results as revealing other-race effects in prospective person memory, highlighting race as a critical factor for finding missing people. Importantly, this also emphasizes the need for real-world search efforts to factor in difficulty differences when people monitor for missing/wanted people from their own or different racial backgrounds. For example, media coverage of missing persons cases could perhaps be distributed more equitably by considering whether the missing person is from a racial minority in that region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the ways in which Dutch Extinction Rebellion activists discursively engage with the past, present and future on Instagram and leverage the platform's affordances for mnemonic purposes. We argue that Extinction Rebellion activists, in their communication on the platform, connect these temporal planes retrospectively and prospectively. First, Extinction Rebellion activists use the past as a resource for present action aimed at producing lasting change. This relates to cultural reservoirs and repertoires of past injustices. Second, the present is perceived by Extinction Rebellion activists as a concern for future memory. The recording and documenting of climate injustices and the actions of the movement itself are examples of this. Both positive and negative imagined futures are used by Extinction Rebellion activists to legitimise and delegitimise past and present (in)action. In other words, Extinction Rebellion activists' future imaginaries not just shape present action, but also shape their memory work. Instagram's affordances of archivability, connectivity and spreadability are used by Extinction Rebellion to support their digital memory work. These socio-technical affordances are thus appropriated as mnemonic affordances for rhetorical and practical purposes. We support these claims through in-depth interviews with Extinction Rebellion activists and a thematic analysis of Instagram content shared by them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People perform poorly at sighting missing and wanted persons in simulated searches due to attention and face recognition failures. We manipulated participants' expectations of encountering a target person and the within-person variability of the targets' photographs studied in a laboratory-based and a field-based prospective person memory task. We hypothesized that within-person variability and expectations of encounter would impact prospective person memory performance, and that expectations would interact with within-person variability to mitigate the effect of variability. Surprisingly, low within-person variability resulted in better performance on the search task than high within-person variability in Experiment one possibly due to the study–test images being rated as more similar in the low variability condition. We found the expected effect of high variability producing more hits for the target whose study–test images were equally similar across variability conditions. There was no effect of variability in Experiment two. Expectations affected performance only in the field-based study (Experiment two), possibly because performance is typically poor in field-based studies. Our research demonstrates some nuance to the effect of within-person variability on search performance and extends existing research demonstrating expectations affect search performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have received increasing attention due to their high biological plausibility and energy efficiency. The binary spike-based information propagation enables efficient sparse computation in event-based and static computer vision applications. However, the weight precision and especially the membrane potential precision remain as high-precision values (e.g., 32 bits) in state-of-the-art SNN algorithms. Each neuron in an SNN stores the membrane potential over time and typically updates its value in every time step. Such frequent read/write operations of high-precision membrane potential incur storage andmemory access overhead in SNNs, which undermines the SNNs' compatibility with resource-constrained hardware. To resolve this inefficiency, prior works have explored the time step reduction and low-precision representation of membrane potential at a limited scale and reported significant accuracy drops. Furthermore, while recent advances in on-device AI present pruning and quantization optimization with different architectures and datasets, simultaneous pruning with quantization is highly under-explored in SNNs. In this work, we present SpQuant-SNN, a fully-quantized spiking neural network with ultra-low precision weights, membrane potential, and high spatial-channel sparsity, enabling the end-to-end low precision with significantly reduced operations on SNN. First, we propose an integer-only quantization scheme for the membrane potential with a stacked surrogate gradient function, a simple-yet-effective method that enables the smooth learning process of quantized SNN training. Second, we implement spatial-channel pruning with membrane potential prior, toward reducing the layer-wise computational complexity, and floating-point operations (FLOPs) in SNNs. Finally, to further improve the accuracy of low-precision and sparse SNN, we propose a self-adaptive learnable potential threshold for SNN training. Equipped with high biological adaptiveness, minimal computations, and memory utilization, SpQuant-SNN achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple SNN models for both event-based and static image datasets, including both image classification and object detection tasks. The proposed SpQuant-SNN achieved up to 13× memory reduction and >4.7× FLOPs reduction with <1.8% accuracy degradation for both classification and object detection tasks, compared to the SOTA baseline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prospective memory helps us to remember to perform tasks in the future. Prospective memory can be either time or event based. The goal of this study was to determine time- and event-based prospective memory in autistic adults across the life span. Autistic (n = 82) and non-autistic (n = 111) adults, aged between 30 and 86 years, performed the lab-based Amsterdam Breakfast Task, and several naturalistic prospective memory tasks. Preregistered analyses (AsPredicted #34249) were performed using classical frequentist as well as Bayesian statistics. On none of the prospective memory tasks, group differences were observed. Our results show no effect of age on naturalistic tasks, but age did affect our lab-based measure, indicative of the age paradox often described in non-autistic adults. Moreover, we found evidence for a parallel age-related effect of lab-based and naturalistic prospective memory in autistic and non-autistic individuals. What is already known : Prospective memory is an important function for daily living. It is the cognitive function that helps you remember that you are meeting your friend for coffee at 2 pm tomorrow, or that you need to take your vitamins after breakfast. This cognitive function is particularly important in autistic adults, but how prospective memory is associated with increasing age, we currently do not know. What this paper adds : Although performance on experimental tasks that measure prospective memory decreases with age, this pattern is similar in autistic and non-autistic adults. No age effects were found for tasks that were performed outside the lab. Autistic adults and non-autistic adults perform similarly on prospective memory, and this performance remains similar when autistic and non-autistic adults age. Implications for practice, research, or policy : While our results show that prospective memory decreased with increasing age, our results do point to parallel development of prospective memory in autistic and non-autistic adults. This finding serves as a reassurance for those individuals concerned that older autistic individuals might show quicker cognitive decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Laboratory‐based studies have shown that children's ability to remember intentions (i.e., prospective memory; PM) can be improved by asking them to imagine performing the PM task beforehand (i.e., episodic future thinking; EFT) or to predict their PM performance. Moreover, combining the two strategies resulted in an additional improvement in children's PM performance. However, the effectiveness of these encoding strategies on real‐life PM tasks is still unknown. Aims: The aim of the present study was to evaluate the effect of EFT instructions, performance predictions, and of their combination on children's PM in a natural setting, namely in the classroom. Sample: Twelve classes composed by a total of 121 children (53% females) aged between seven and 9 years participated to the study. Methods: As a PM task, children were asked by their teachers to deliver a letter to their parents and to bring it back to school the next day. Children were divided into four groups: control, prediction, EFT, and the EFT + prediction group. Parent reports on children's everyday prospective and retrospective memory failures were also collected. Results: Results showed that encoding strategies were effective in enhancing children's PM performance. However, differences compared to previous laboratory‐based findings emerged since predicting PM performance resulted to be most effective in enhancing real‐life PM performance. Moreover, parent reports were related to children's PM performance. Conclusions: These novel findings highlight the importance of studying PM interventions in natural settings in order to increase their ecological validity and inform educational practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prospective memory (PM) is the ability to remember an intention in the future. Individuals with depression are candidates for PM failures, resulting in detrimental consequences, such as forgetting to take a medication or implement therapeutic techniques; inaccurate assessments of one's PM abilities can exacerbate these issues. The current study examined if appraisals about one's prospective memory (meta-PM) performance differs between healthy and depressed adults. Data were gathered from 137 adults and included self-reported depression, PM beliefs, objective PM, and assessment of executive functions (EFs). Participants were separated into depressed/healthy categories based on a self-report measure. There was a non-significant correlation between self-reported PM and objective PM for both depressed (r =.06, p =.61) and healthy (r =.08, p =.52) groups, suggesting both groups had inaccurate meta-PM. There were non-significant differences in meta-PM between these groups (Fisher's Z = −0.09, p =.93), but exploratory gender analyses revealed women's meta-PM was significantly less accurate than men's. Women had higher reports of depression and PM complaints compared to men. This study lends evidence that depression is not necessarily related to worse meta-PM accuracy, despite depression's association with memory complaints, and that women are at greater risk for inaccurate meta-PM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Caregivers can forget young children in the back of the car, thereby resulting in the tragic circumstance of infant death. The current exploratory study examined whether the public (N = 171) believes a memory explanation when the defendant caregiver relationship to the child is varied and when expert witness testimony is and is not provided regarding the processes by which these memory failures can occur. Adult participants believed that a memory failure played a role when the defendant caregiver was the grandfather as opposed to when the caregiver was the father. Expert witness testimony did not impact this belief. Other memory-related variables impacted perceptions of defendant guilt when defendant guilt was measured continuously but not dichotomously. Numerous non-memory related outcome variables were also studied. Defendant relationship and expert witness testimony impacted different memory-related and non-memory related outcome variables. Results are discussed in terms of age-related forgetting and collective vulnerability versus prospective memory failures. Implications regarding the legal system are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of studies have established a connection between musical anticipation and reward processing, yet the interrelated roles of the musical themes, their anticipatory cues, and the large-scale design of musical forms have not been adequately explored. To fill this gap, I present in this article a psychological model that focuses on listeners' anticipation of musical themes while listening to familiar pieces written in sonata form. Active listening may engage prospective memory, which refers to the ability to recall an intended action in the future. While listening to a piece in sonata form, an intended action is to monitor the recapitulation of the main theme in the home key. The retransition preceding the recapitulation may prompt listeners to engage in anticipatory imagery of the imminent theme. I identify four types of musical cues present in retransitions: dissonance-related, attention-related, goal-related, and time-based. These cues can foster listeners' attention allocation toward predicting the theme through sequence processing and subvocal humming along with the music. The confirmation of this prediction and the harmonic resolution at the beginning of the recapitulation can serve as positive reinforcers, strengthening the listening habit of anticipatory imagery of main themes. Drawing on recent brain-imaging studies, the proposed model suggests that sensitization to anticipatory musical cues and precise prediction/imagery of themes are essential for reward-based learning of music. Moreover, this model clarifies both the presence of themes in various musical forms and a critical attribute of effective musical themes, namely, their ease of memorization and imaginability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract People perform poorly at sighting missing and wanted persons in simulated searches due to attention and face recognition failures. We manipulated participants’ expectations of encountering a target person and the within-person variability of the targets’ photographs studied in a laboratory-based and a field-based prospective person memory task. We hypothesized that within-person variability and expectations of encounter would impact prospective person memory performance, and that expectations would interact with within-person variability to mitigate the effect of variability. Surprisingly, low within-person variability resulted in better performance on the search task than high within-person variability in Experiment one possibly due to the study–test images being rated as more similar in the low variability condition. We found the expected effect of high variability producing more hits for the target whose study–test images were equally similar across variability conditions. There was no effect of variability in Experiment two. Expectations affected performance only in the field-based study (Experiment two), possibly because performance is typically poor in field-based studies. Our research demonstrates some nuance to the effect of within-person variability on search performance and extends existing research demonstrating expectations affect search performance.

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A large body of evidence suggests that individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI) have significant difficulties with prospective memory (PM), the memory for future intentions. However, the processes underlying this cognitive deficit remain unclear. This study aimed to gather further evidence regarding PM functions in TBI and clarify the role of neuropsychological deficits, metamemory, and mood disorders. We used a laboratory‐based clinical measure, the Virtual Week, to examine PM function in 18 patients with TBI and 18 healthy control subjects. Measures of attention, processing speed, executive functions, episodic memory, and self‐report questionnaires were also administered. In line with prior literature, our findings indicate that individuals with TBI had a consistent deficit compared to controls across all PM tasks. In previous studies, TBI patients had more severe impairment on time‐based tasks; nevertheless, our results show that across all participants event‐based tasks were easier to perform compared to time‐based only when the retrospective memory demand was high. The patients were not only impaired on the prospective component of PM but also failed to recognise the content of their task (the retrospective component). Interestingly, the TBI group did not report higher levels of everyday memory problems, anxiety and depression compared to the control group. These measures also failed to correlate with PM and recognition memory performance. This study found that besides the neuropsychological deficits, a global impairment in PM functioning is present in individuals with TBI across various task types, tasks low and high in retrospective demands, and event versus time‐based. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the extent to which depressive symptoms mediate the link between childhood friendship (CF) and physical function among middle-aged and older adults in China. China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) data were used; specifically, CHARLS life history survey (conducted from June 1–December 31, 2014) and follow-up health survey (conducted from July 1–September 30, 2015) data were used. The Sobel test, Bootstrap test and multivariable logistic regression were performed to examine the mediating role of depressive symptoms (measured by the 10-item Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale) in the association between CF (measured by a standardized retrospective questionnaire) and physical function, which was measured by basic activities of daily living (BADL) disability, instrumental activities of daily living (IADL) disability, and grip strength. A total of 12,170 participants aged 45 years or older were included in this cross-sectional study. After controlling for covariates, low-quality CF was associated with an increased prevalence of BADL disability (OR = 1.18; 95 % CI = 1.05–1.32), IADL disability (OR = 1.25; 95 % CI = 1.12–1.40), and low grip strength (OR = 1.21; 95 % CI = 1.09–1.34). The proportion of the mediating effect of depressive symptoms was 48 % for CF and BADL, 40 % for CF and IADL, and 11 % for CF and grip strength. Depressive symptoms and worse CF have a joint effect on BADL disability (OR = 3.30; 95 % CI = 2.82–3.85), IADL disability (OR = 3.52; 95 % CI = 3.03–4.09), and low grip strength (OR = 1.65; 95 % CI = 1.43–1.92). Not all potential confounding factors (such as childhood behavioural problems, genetic factors, and memory function) were measured in the analysis, and there may have been recall bias in the retrospective collection of CF data. Individuals with high-quality CF were more likely to have a decreased prevalence of impaired physical function in later life. Depressive symptoms acted as a mediator associated with the development of CF. • High-quality childhood friendship can protect older people from impaired physical function. • Depression mediates the link between childhood friendship and physical function. • Joint effect of depression and childhood friendship on physical function were found. • We found that depression was more strongly associated with physical function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND Patients with brain injury who are Unresponsive to Commands may perform Cognigrees, tive tasks that are detected on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMILI) and electroencephalography (EEG). This phenomenon, known as cognitive motor dissociation, has not been systematically studied in a large cohort of persons with disorders of consciousness. METHODS In this prospective cohort study conducted at six international centers, we collected clinical, behavioral, and task-based fMRI and EEG data from a convenience sample of 353 adults with disorders of consciousness. We assessed the response to commands on task-based fMRI or EEG in participants without an observable response to verbal commands (i.e., those with a behavioral diagnosis of coma, vegetative state, or minimally conscious state-minus) and in participants with an observable response to verbal commands. The presence or absence of an observable response to commands was assessed with the use of the Coma Recovery Scale--Revised (CRS-R). RESULTS Data from fMRI only or EEG only were available for 65% of the participants, and data from both fMRI and EEG were available for 35%. The median age of the participants was 3Z9 years, the median time between brain injury and assessment with the CRS-R was 7.9 months (25°6 of the participants were assessed with the CRS-R within 28 days after injury), and brain trauma was an etiologic factor in 50%. We detected cognitive motor dissociation in 60 of the 241 participants (259/0) without an observable response to commands, of whom 11 had been assessed with the use of fMRI only, 13 with the use of EEG only, and 36 with the use of both techniques. Cognitive motor dissociation was associated with younger age, longer time since injury, and brain trauma as an etiologic factor. In contrast, responses on task-based fMRI or EEG occurred in 43 of 112 participants (38°/0) with an observable response to verbal commands. CONCLUSIONS Approximately one in four participants without an observable response to commands performed a cognitive task on fMRI or EEG as compared with one in three participants with an observable response to commands. (Funded by the James S. McDonnell Foundation and others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and Purpose Methods Results Conclusions This study evaluated associations of brain amyloid with 2‐year objective and subjective cognitive measures in a trial‐ready older general population at risk for dementia.Forty‐eight participants in the Finnish Geriatric Intervention Study to Prevent Cognitive Impairment and Disability underwent 11C‐Pittsburgh compound B (PiB) positron emission tomography (PET) scans and assessment of cognition (modified Neuropsychological Test Battery [NTB]) and subjective memory complaints (Prospective and Retrospective Memory Questionnaire).Mean age was 71.4 ± 5.06 years, and 20 participants (42%) had positive baseline PiB‐PET scans. Amyloid positivity was associated with lower NTB executive function at baseline and less favorable 2‐year NTB total score and memory trajectories, but not with other objective or subjective cognitive measures. Overall, there was little cognitive decline during 2 years.Amyloid accumulation may affect objective but not necessarily subjective cognition from a very early at‐risk stage, although substantial decline likely requires >2 years to occur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Elevated IL-6 levels correlate with reduced cortical and subcortical brain volumes. • Higher plasma IL-6 levels are linked to poorer cognitive performance. • Elevated IL-6 levels have 23–35% increased risk of all-cause dementia. • Peripheral immune activation significant in managing brain health and dementia risk. Recent studies have associated immune abnormalities with dementia. IL-6 is a crucial cytokine in inflammatory responses, and recent evidence has linked elevated IL-6 levels to changes in brain structure and cognitive decline. However, the connection between IL-6 levels, cognition, brain volumes, and dementia risk requires exploration in large prospective cohorts. This study utilized a longitudinal cohort from the UK Biobank to analyze the correlation between IL-6 expression levels, cognitive performance, and cortical and subcortical brain volumes through linear regression. Additionally, we assessed the association between IL-6 levels and long-term dementia risk using Cox regression analysis. We also used one-sample Mendelian randomization to analyze the impact of genetic predisposition of dementia on elevated IL-6 levels. A total of 50,864 participants were included in this study, with 1,391 new cases of all-cause dementia identified. Higher plasma IL-6 levels are associated with cortical and subcortical atrophy in regions such as the fusiform, thalamus proper, hippocampus, and larger ventricle volumes. IL-6 levels are negatively associated with cognitive performance in pair matching, numeric memory, prospective memory, and reaction time tests. Furthermore, elevated IL-6 levels are linked to a 23–35 % increased risk of all-cause dementia over an average follow-up period of 13.2 years. The one-sample Mendelian randomization analysis did not show associations between the genetic predisposition of dementia and elevated IL-6 levels. Increased IL-6 levels are associated with worse cognition, brain atrophy, and a heightened risk of all-cause dementia. Our study highlights the need to focus on the role of peripheral IL-6 levels in managing brain health and dementia risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and objective: Autoimmune encephalitis (AE) is often associated with clinically significant memory impairment. This study aimed to evaluate memory in a cross-sectional prospective AE cohort using multiple memory paradigms. Methods: 52 patients (50% seropositive) meeting Graus criteria for possible AE were prospectively recruited between October 2019 and August 202. A comprehensive examination of memory was performed, including tests of supraspan verbal memory (list learning), logicosemantic memory (story learning), figural memory (learning of geometric designs), and verbal associative learning (verbal paired associates). Memory scores were compared to demographically adjusted normative data. Pattern analysis was conducted to assist in the identification of patterns in memory performances. Results: Mean memory scores were not significantly below the normative mean. At an individual patient level, over 20% of the cohort exhibited impaired delayed figural memory, supraspan verbal memory learning and recall. Observed performances were significantly below expected performance for story learning (p = 0.017) and recall (p = 0.003), figural recall (p < 0.0001), initial acquisition (p < 0.001) and final acquisition of a list (p < 0.001) and all delayed recall measures of the list (p < 0.00001). 54.76% of patients exhibited intact psychometrics, and 16 distinct patterns of impairment emerged, indicating variability in memory outcomes. Discussion: While statistical evidence for memory impairment did not emerge at an aggregate level, a proportion of patients present with evidence of abnormal memory performance on psychometrics. Variability in impaired memory measures argues for an individualised patient-focused approach to clinical assessment in AE. Future research should validate these findings with a larger sample size and explore the relationships between memory profiles and other cognitive functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Key Points: Question: Do prospective and retrospective measures of childhood maltreatment show different associations with psychopathology? Findings: In this systematic review and meta-analysis of 24 studies (including 15 485 individuals), psychopathology was more strongly associated with retrospective than prospective measures of childhood maltreatment. The associations between retrospective measures of childhood maltreatment and psychopathology were stronger when the assessment of psychopathology was based on self-reports and was focused on internalizing (emotional) disorders. Meaning: The results support cognitive theories of childhood maltreatment-related psychopathology, which focus on subjective interpretation, conscious recall, and their associated schemas as key targets for intervention. This systematic review and meta-analysis evaluates associations between childhood maltreatment and psychopathology. Importance: Prospective and retrospective measures of childhood maltreatment identify largely different groups of individuals. However, it is unclear if these measures are differentially associated with psychopathology. Objective: To analyze the associations of prospective and retrospective measures of childhood maltreatment with psychopathology. Data Sources: Based on a preregistered protocol, Embase, PsycInfo, and MEDLINE were searched for peer-reviewed studies published by January 1, 2023, that measured the associations of prospective and retrospective measures of child maltreatment with psychopathology. Study Selection: Titles and abstracts of all articles captured by the search and full texts of potentially eligible studies were independently screened by 2 authors. Observational studies with measures of the association of prospective and retrospective measures of childhood maltreatment with psychopathology were included. Data Extraction and Synthesis: Multiple investigators independently extracted data. Multilevel random-effects meta-analyses were used to pool the results and test predictors of heterogeneity. Main Outcome and Measures: Associations between prospective or retrospective measures of child maltreatment and psychopathology, both unadjusted and adjusted (ie, the association between prospective measures of maltreatment and psychopathology adjusted for retrospective measures, and vice versa), and moderation of these associations by preselected variables. Results: The meta-analyses were based on 24 studies including 15 485 individuals (51.0% female; mean age, 21.3 years at retrospective report). Retrospective measures of childhood maltreatment showed stronger associations with psychopathology relative to prospective measures in both unadjusted analyses (retrospective measures: odds ratio [OR], 2.21; 95%, 1.94-2.42 vs prospective measures: OR, 1.56; 95% CI, 1.39-1.76) and adjusted analyses (retrospective measures: OR, 2.14; 95% CI, 1.90-2.42 vs prospective measures: OR, 1.27; 95% CI, 1.13-1.41). There was no statistically significant moderation of the unadjusted or adjusted associations between prospective measures of child maltreatment and psychopathology. The associations between retrospective measures and psychopathology were stronger when the assessment of psychopathology was based on self-reports and was focused on internalizing or emotional disorders. Conclusions and Relevance: Psychopathology is more strongly associated with retrospective measures—which capture the first-person, subjective appraisal of childhood events reflected in memory recall—compared to prospective measures—which essentially capture third-person accounts of such events. Maltreatment-related psychopathology may be driven by subjective interpretations of experiences, distressing memories, and associated schemas, which could be targeted by cognitive interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prospective memory (PM) refers to the ability to remember to execute an intention in the future without having a permanent reminder. These intentions can be performed when they are not relevant or become no-longer needed, the so-called "commission errors". The present study aims to understand the effect of cue salience on PM commission errors with unperformed intentions and on the ongoing task performance-associated costs. Through a between-subjects design, eighty-one participants were assigned to 3 conditions: the no-PM condition, which served as control, and the salient and nonsalient conditions, which were asked to perform a lexical decision task and an incomplete nonfocal prospective memory task (i.e. no PM cues were presented). Subsequently, participants were instructed to no longer execute the prospective intention. In the second phase, a lexical decision task occurred again, including irrelevant PM cues, which should not be answered as such. In the salient condition, cues were salient (i.e. presented in red or blue background). In contrast, in the nonsalient condition, PM cues appeared on a black background, as any other stimuli. In the no-PM control condition, participants only performed an LDT. A commission error occurred when the (irrelevant) intention was performed in this second phase. Results showed that more participants performed a commission error in the presence of salient cues, even when PM intentions became irrelevant. Additionally, when cues were not salient, participants took longer to answer the LDT, as reasoned by the spontaneous retrieval theory. These findings are discussed according to the dual-mechanism account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Adverse events (AEs) are commonly reported in clinical studies using the Medical Dictionary for Regulatory Activities (MedDRA), an international standard for drug safety monitoring. However, the technical language of MedDRA makes it challenging for patients and clinicians to share understanding and therefore to make shared decisions about medical interventions. In this project, people with lived experience of depression and antidepressant treatment worked with clinicians and researchers to co-design an online dictionary of AEs associated with antidepressants, taking into account its ease of use and applicability to real-world settings. Methods: Through a pre-defined literature search, we identified MedDRA-coded AEs from randomised controlled trials of antidepressants used in the treatment of depression. In collaboration with the McPin Foundation, four co-design workshops with a lived experience advisory panel (LEAP) and one independent focus group (FG) were conducted to produce user-friendly translations of AE terms. Guiding principles for translation were co-designed with McPin/LEAP members and defined before the finalisation of Clinical Codes (CCs, or non-technical terms to represent specific AE concepts). FG results were thematically analysed using the Framework Method. Results: Starting from 522 trials identified by the search, 736 MedDRA-coded AE terms were translated into 187 CCs, which balanced key factors identified as important to the LEAP and FG (namely, breadth, specificity, generalisability, patient-understandability and acceptability). Work with the LEAP showed that a user-friendly language of AEs should aim to mitigate stigma, acknowledge the multiple levels of comprehension in 'lay' language and balance the need for semantic accuracy with user-friendliness. Guided by these principles, an online dictionary of AEs was co-designed and made freely available (https://thesymptomglossary.com). The digital tool was perceived by the LEAP and FG as a resource which could feasibly improve antidepressant treatment by facilitating the accurate, meaningful expression of preferences about potential harms through a shared decision-making process. Conclusions: This dictionary was developed in English around AEs from antidepressants in depression but it can be adapted to different languages and cultural contexts, and can also become a model for other interventions and disorders (i.e., antipsychotics in schizophrenia). Co-designed digital resources may improve the patient experience by helping to deliver personalised information on potential benefits and harms in an evidence-based, preference-sensitive way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) is one of the cornerstones of modern information technologies. Bringing MTJ's operation beyond the conventional binary regime, enabled by tunneling magnetoresistance (TMR) effect, is highly promising for prospective memory technologies and neuromorphic hardware development. In this paper, we demonstrate multilevel magnetoresistance states in an all-perovskite-oxide La0.7Sr0.3MnO3 (LSMO)/BaTiO3/LSMO heterostructure grown on MgO substrates. Unlike traditional TMR, we observe four distinct regions of increased magnetoresistance, which result in three magnetic field-induced resistance states in total. We show that the observed phenomenon arises from the low-field magnetoresistance effect, which occurs in the two epitaxial LSMO layers, independently and at different values of the magnetic field. The effect is well simulated by a model based on the presence of structural defects and non-uniform deformations in the LSMO layers, induced by the large lattice mismatch of the LSMO with the MgO substrate. We believe that our findings contribute to the understanding of complex magnetoresistance effects in MTJs and can be taken into consideration for the design of multi-bit memory cells or neuromorphic devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The causal relationship between thyroid function variations within the reference range and cognitive function remains unknown. We aimed to explore this causal relationship using a Mendelian randomization (MR) approach. Summary statistics of a thyroid function genome-wide association study (GWAS) were obtained from the ThyroidOmics consortium, including reference range thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH) (N = 54,288) and reference range free thyroxine (FT4) (N = 49,269). GWAS summary statistics on cognitive function were obtained from the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium (SSGAC) and the UK Biobank, including cognitive performance (N = 257,841), prospective memory (N = 152,605), reaction time (N = 459,523), and fluid intelligence (N = 149,051). The primary method used was inverse-variance weighted (IVW), supplemented with weighted median, Mr-Egger regression, and MR-Pleiotropy Residual Sum and Outlier. Several sensitivity analyses were conducted to identify heterogeneity and pleiotropy. An increase in genetically associated TSH within the reference range was suggestively associated with a decline in cognitive performance (β = −0.019; 95%CI: −0.034 to −0.003; P = 0.017) and significantly associated with longer reaction time (β = 0.016; 95 % CI: 0.005 to 0.027; P = 0.004). Genetically associated FT4 levels within the reference range had a significant negative relationship with reaction time (β = −0.030; 95%CI:-0.044 to −0.015; P = 4.85 × 10−5). These findings remained robust in the sensitivity analyses. Low thyroid function within the reference range may have a negative effect on cognitive function, but further research is needed to fully understand the nature of this relationship. This study only used GWAS data from individuals of European descent, so the findings may not apply to other ethnic groups. • Higher TSH levels within the reference range may have a negative effect on cognitive function. • Increased levels of FT4 within the reference range are associated with better processing speed. • This study sheds new light on the relationship between thyroid function and cognitive function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Commonly heard statements such as "Christmas comes around more quickly each year" suggest that the passage of time between annual events can become distorted, leading to the sensation of time passing more quickly than normal. At present however, it is unclear how prevalent such beliefs are and, what factors are predictive of it. Aim: To explore the prevalence of beliefs that annual events such as Christmas (Study 1 UK sample) and Ramadan (Study 2 Iraqi sample) feel like they come around more quickly each year. To establish the association between distortions to the passage of time between annual events and emotional wellbeing, event specific enjoyment, memory function and self-reported attention to time. Methods: Participants completed an online questionnaire exploring their subjective experience of time in relation to Christmas and Ramadan. In addition, measures of attention to time, memory function, quality of life and event specific emotion were also taken. Findings: There was widespread agreement that Christmas and Ramadan appeared to come around more quickly each year. In both countries, this belief was associated with greater prospective memory errors, greater attention to time and greater enjoyment of the event. Furthermore, in the UK greater belief that Christmas comes around more quickly was associated with lower social quality of life and in Iraq, greater belief that Ramadan comes around more quickly each year was associated with lower age and female gender. Conclusions: Distortions to the passage of time for annual events are widespread, occur across multiple cultures and are consistently predicted by prospective function, event enjoyment and attention to time. The absence of an association between older age (above 55 years) and a faster passage of time suggests that caution should be taken when concluding that time passes more quickly with increasing age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blast-related mild traumatic brain injury (blast-mTBI) can result in a spectrum of persistent symptoms leading to substantial functional impairment and reduced quality of life. Clinical evaluation and discernment from other conditions common to military service can be challenging and subject to patient recall bias and the limitations of available assessment measures. The need for objective biomarkers to facilitate accurate diagnosis, not just for symptom management and rehabilitation but for prognostication and disability compensation purposes is clear. Toward this end, we compared regional brain [18F]fluorodeoxyglucose–positron emission tomography ([18F]FDG-PET) intensity-scaled uptake measurements and motor, neuropsychological, and behavioral assessments in 79 combat Veterans with retrospectively recalled blast-mTBI with 41 control participants having no lifetime history of TBI. Using an agnostic and unbiased approach, we found significantly increased left pallidum [18F]FDG-uptake in Veterans with blast-mTBI versus control participants, p < 0.0001; q = 3.29 × 10−9 [Cohen's d, 1.38, 95% confidence interval (0.96, 1.79)]. The degree of left pallidum [18F]FDG-uptake correlated with the number of self-reported blast-mTBIs, r2 = 0.22; p < 0.0001. Greater [18F]FDG-uptake in the left pallidum provided excellent discrimination between Veterans with blast-mTBI and controls, with a receiver operator characteristic area under the curve of 0.859 (p < 0.0001) and likelihood ratio of 21.19 (threshold:SUVR ≥ 0.895). Deficits in executive function assessed using the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function–Adult Global Executive Composite T-score were identified in Veterans with blast-mTBI compared with controls, p < 0.0001. Regression-based mediation analyses determined that in Veterans with blast-mTBI, increased [18F]FDG-uptake in the left pallidum-mediated executive function impairments, adjusted causal mediation estimate p = 0.021; total effect estimate, p = 0.039. Measures of working and prospective memory (Auditory Consonant Trigrams test and Memory for Intentions Test, respectively) were negatively correlated with left pallidum [18F]FDG-uptake, p < 0.0001, with mTBI as a covariate. Increased left pallidum [18F]FDG-uptake in Veterans with blast-mTBI compared with controls did not covary with dominant handedness or with motor activity assessed using the Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale. Localized increased [18F]FDG-uptake in the left pallidum may reflect a compensatory response to functional deficits following blast-mTBI. Limited imaging resolution does not allow us to distinguish subregions of the pallidum; however, the significant correlation of our data with behavioral but not motor outcomes suggests involvement of the ventral pallidum, which is known to regulate motivation, behavior, and emotions through basal ganglia–thalamo–cortical circuits. Increased [18F]FDG-uptake in the left pallidum in blast-mTBI versus control participants was consistently identified using two different PET scanners, supporting the generalizability of this finding. Although confirmation of our results by single-subject-to-cohort analyses will be required before clinical deployment, this study provides proof of concept that [18F]FDG-PET bears promise as a readily available noninvasive biomarker for blast-mTBI. Further, our findings support a causative relationship between executive dysfunction and increased [18F]FDG-uptake in the left pallidum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous prospective memory (PM) studies indicate that PM intentions remain active after completion and result in commission errors. In this study, we aimed to investigate the effect of adding a new PM intention in the finished phase on PM commission errors. Eighty-six participants were randomly allocated to one of three groups: a new PM group, a non-new PM group, and an implementation intention group. In the PM finished phase, the non-new PM group performed the 1-back task only, while the new PM group was asked to complete both the 1-back task and a new PM task simultaneously. The implementation intention group adopted the "if-then" encoding strategy to encode the new PM intention and executed a new PM task while performing an ongoing task. We found no difference in the 1-back task among the three groups, but the main difference was reflected in the commission error rate with the rate being highest in the non-new PM group, followed by the new PM group, and lowest in the implementation intention group. These findings suggest that executing a new PM task after the completion of a PM intention or adopting an implementation intention encoding strategy to form a new intention effectively reduces commission errors. Therefore, in real life, when we form new prospective memory intentions, we can strengthen them through encoding strategies during the encoding stage, in order to avoid the occurrence of commission errors as much as possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractObjective: Memory dysfunction is a persistent cognitive symptom following traumatic brain injury (TBI), negatively impacting capacity for independent living and productivity. Traditional scoring of neuropsychological memory tests does not allow for differentiation of specific impairments of encoding, consolidation and/or retrieval, or the potential impact of strategy deficits. Method: The current study examined performance of 142 moderate-to-severe TBI participants and 68 demographically matched healthy controls on the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test (RAVLT) using Item Specific Data Analysis (ISDA) and strategy use analyses. Results: Results revealed significantly greater impairments in encoding, consolidation, and retrieval in TBI participants, compared to controls. Encoding deficits significantly explained the most variance in the long-delayed recall of TBI participants, followed by consolidation, and then retrieval. Participants with TBI showed a reduced ability to spontaneously apply strategies during learning, evident in decreased subjective clusters and increased word omissions, compared to controls. No difference was found between groups in passive learning strategy application, shown through serial clustering. Spontaneous strategy measures both uniquely accounted for variance in the encoding ability of TBI participants. Conclusions: These findings highlight the potential value in using ISDA and strategy use measures to assess RAVLT results to better characterize individual memory profiles and inform rehabilitative interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Computer gaming has recently been suggested to be associated with benefits for cognition, but its impact on incident dementia remains uncertain. We aimed to investigate the observational associations of playing computer games with incident dementia, cognitive functions, and brain structural measures, and further explore the genetic associations between computer gaming and dementia. Methods: We included 471,346 White British participants without dementia at baseline based on the UK Biobank, and followed them until November 2022. We estimated the risk of dementia using Cox proportional hazard models, and assessed the changes of cognitive functions and brain structural measures using logistic regression models and linear regression models. Mendelian randomization (MR) analyses were performed to examine the association between genetically determined computer gaming and dementia. Results: High frequency of playing computer games was associated with decreased risk of incident dementia (HR, 0.81 [95% CI: 0.69, 0.94]). Individuals with high frequency of playing computer games had better performance in prospective memory (OR, 1.46 [1.26, 1.70]), reaction time (beta, -0.195 [-0.243, -0.147]), fluid intelligence (0.334 [0.286, 0.382]), numeric memory (0.107 [0.047, 0.166]), incorrect pairs matching (-0.253 [-0.302, -0.203]), and high volume of gray matter in hippocampus (0.078 [0.023, 0.134]). Genetically determined high frequency of playing computer games was associated with a low risk of dementia (OR, 0.37 [0.15, 0.91]). Conclusions: Computer gaming was associated with a decreased risk of dementia, favorable cognitive function, and better brain structure, suggesting that computer gaming could modulate cognitive function and may be a promising target for dementia prevention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Navigation is essential to life, and it is cognitively complex, drawing on abilities such as prospective and situated planning, spatial memory, location recognition, and real-time decision-making. In many cases, day-to-day navigation is embedded in a social context where cognition and behavior are shaped by others, but the great majority of existing research in spatial cognition has focused on individuals. The two studies we report here contribute to our understanding of social wayfinding, assessing the performance of paired and individual navigators on a real-world wayfinding task in which they were instructed to minimize time and distance traveled. In the first study, we recruited 30 pairs of friends (familiar dyads); in the second, we recruited 30 solo participants (individuals). We compare the two studies to the results of an earlier study of 30 pairs of strangers (unfamiliar dyads). We draw out differences in performance with respect to spatial, social, and cognitive considerations. Of the three conditions, solo participants were least successful in reaching the destination accurately on their initial attempt. Friends traveled more efficiently than either strangers or individuals. Working with a partner also appeared to lend confidence to wayfinders: dyads of either familiarity type were more persistent than individuals in the navigation task, even after encountering challenges or making incorrect attempts. Route selection was additionally impacted by route complexity and unfamiliarity with the study area. Navigators explicitly used ease of remembering as a planning criterion, and the resulting differences in route complexity likely influenced success during enacted navigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Familial caregivers typically have more trouble completing fundamental tasks of daily living compared with non-caregivers. The ability to complete tasks of daily living relies on prospective memory (PM). PM, however, is typically poorer in familial caregivers. It would make sense, therefore, that poorer PM would mediate caregivers’ greater difficulties completing tasks of daily living. This was explored here. A sample of n = 500 participants (196 caregivers of autistic children and 304 parents of non-autistic children) completed a questionnaire assessing PM failures. An abbreviated version of the Everyday Problems Test (EPT) was used to measure participants’ ability to complete tasks of daily living, such as managing medications and paying bills. Caregivers reported more PM failures. EPT scores were lower in caregivers, reflecting fewer problems completing tasks of daily living. PM failures were unrelated to EPT scores, ruling out mediation. Caregivers of autistic children were better at completing basic tasks of daily living despite their poorer PM. Whether quality of life for the autistic child might be related to caregivers’ ability to complete tasks of daily living should be the focus of future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Childhood and adolescence are pivotal periods for cognitive development. Executive functions are crucial for efficient cognitive functioning, so accurate assessment is important. One ecologically-valid virtual reality test is the Jansari assessment of Executive Functions for Children (JEF-C©). In a cross-sectional study, we aimed at translating, adapting and validating JEF-C into Persian, and at investigating whether this Persian version (JEF-C (P)) can identify stages of development of executive functions in children aged from 8 to 16. Children and adolescents (N = 146) falling into three age groups participated: 8–10, 11–13 and 14–16 years old. They completed JEF-C (P) and the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST). There were acceptable Cronbach's alpha coefficients for JEF-C(P) total score (α =.72) and all constructs, except action-based prospective memory, had a positive impact on total internal consistency. There was an effect of age group on overall JEF-C (P) performance and of age on four constructs. There was also a correlation between the number of categories on WCST and the prioritization construct of JEF-C (P). It seems that JEF-C (P) is an ecologically valid executive function assessment sensitive to age and could be useful for both researchers and clinicians working with children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To investigate the activity-based prospective memory performance in patients with insomnia, divided, on the basis of actigraphic evaluation, into sleep onset, maintenance, mixed and negative misperception insomnia. Methods: A total of 153 patients with insomnia (I, 83 females, mean age + SD = 41.37 + 16.19 years) and 121 healthy controls (HC, 78 females, mean age + SD = 36.99 + 14.91 years) wore an actigraph for one week. Insomnia was classified into sleep onset insomnia (SOI), maintenance insomnia (MaI), mixed insomnia (MixI) and negative misperception insomnia (NMI). To study their activity-based prospective memory performance, all the participants were required to push the actigraph event marker button twice, at bedtime (task 1) and at get-up time (task 2). Results: Only patients with maintenance and mixed insomnia had a significantly lower accuracy in the activity-based prospective memory task at get-up time compared with the healthy controls. Conclusion: The results show that maintenance and mixed insomnia involve an impaired activity-based prospective memory performance, while sleep onset and negative misperception insomnia do not seem to be affected. This pattern of results suggests that the fragmentation of sleep may play a role in activity-based prospective memory efficiency at wake-up in the morning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Donor-reactive memory cells represent a barrier to long-term kidney graft survival. A better understanding of regulatory mechanisms that counterbalance alloreactive memory responses may help to identify patients with operational tolerance. This prospective study investigated the equilibrium between memory T-cell subsets and regulatory T or B cells (Tregs, Bregs) in peripheral blood of kidney transplant recipients with operational tolerance (N = 8), chronic rejection (N = 8), and different immunosuppressive treatment regimens (N = 81). Patients on hemodialysis and healthy individuals served as controls (N = 50). In addition, the expression of Treg- and Breg-associated molecule genes was analyzed. Patients with chronic rejection showed a disrupted memory T-cell composition with a significantly higher frequency of circulating CD8+ terminally differentiated effector memory (TEMRA) T cells than patients with operational tolerance, patients on hemodialysis, or healthy controls (P < 0.001). Low frequency of CD8+ TEMRA and high frequency of Tregs and transitional Bregs were found in operationally tolerant patients. Consequently, operationally tolerant patients showed, as compared to all other transplant recipients with different immunosuppressive regiments, the lowest ratios between CD8+ TEMRA T cells and Tregs or Bregs (for both P < 0.001). Moreover, a specific peripheral blood transcription pattern was found in operationally tolerant patients with an increased expression of Breg- and Treg-associated genes CD22 and FoxP3 and a decreased FcγRIIA/FcγRIIB transcript ratio (for all P < 0.001). In conclusion, monitoring the balance between circulating CD8+ TEMRA T cells and regulatory cell subsets and their transcripts may help to distinguish transplant recipients with operational tolerance from recipients at risk of graft loss. We show that a balance between effector mechanisms mediated by CD8 + TEMRA T cells and regulatory cell populations such as Bregs, Tregs, or naive T cells determines long-term kidney graft survival. Monitoring the balance between circulating CD8 + TEMRA T cells and regulatory cell subsets and their transcripts may help to distinguish transplant recipients with OT from recipients at risk of graft loss. Our study provides evidence in favor of regulatory mechanisms that counterbalance alloreactive memory immune responses and may encourage further investigations whether the ratio between CD8 + TEMRA T cells and Tregs or Bregs can help to safely guide minimization of immunosuppression in selected patients. Graphical Abstract [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and Objectives: The most common problems of concussions are disorders of neuropsychological skills. Therefore, the aim of this study was to compare the effectiveness of direct electrical stimulation of the brain from the skull and psychodrama on the neuro-psychological skills of adolescents with mild concussions. Materials and Methods: In this quasi-experimental study, the statistical population was all teenagers with brain damage in Ardabil Province who referred to Fatemi Hospital in Ardabil City in 2021-2022 and received a score of 13-15 on the Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS). Forty five people were selected from this statistical population by convenience sampling method and were randomly divided into 3 groups of 15 people (experimental groups 1 and 2 and a control group). The experiment group 1 underwent electrical stimulation intervention (10 sessions of 15 minutes), the experiment group 2 underwent psychodrama intervention (13 sessions of 90 minutes), and the control group did not receive any training. Continuous Performance Test, Tower of London Test, and Crawford et al.'s Retrospective and Prospective Memory Questionnaire were used to collect data. Data were analyzed using multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA). Results: The findings showed that there was a statistically significant difference across the treatment methods. Electrical stimulation sessions were able to positively affect the components of sustained attention (correct response F=4.961, p=0.012 and response time F=2.398, p=0.001), Tower of London Test (errors F=6.518, p=0.004), and dimensions of memory functioning (prospective memory F=12.943, p<0.001 and retrospective memory F=5.984, p=0.005) and improve cognitive dysfunction. Conclusion: Based on the findings of the current study, the use of electrical stimulation of the brain as a neuro-rehabilitation intervention is recommended to improve the neuropsychological skills of adolescents with mild concussions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Time‐based prospective memory (TBPM) is the ability to remember to do a planned task at the right time. In social interactions, people are often motivated to do things for others, which reflects an important factor that influences prospective memory, namely prosocial motivation. According to the motivational cognitive model, prosocial motivation promotes TBPM by paying more attention or adopting more effective strategies. This study explored the effect of prosocial motivation on TBPM under different time‐monitoring conditions within the motivational cognitive model framework. One hundred and thirty‐one university students participated in this experiment that adopted a 2 (groups: control, prosocial motivation) × 2 (viewing time conditions: limited, unlimited) between‐subjects design. The results revealed that the prosocial motivation group had better TBPM performance than the control group under both limited and unlimited viewing time conditions. At the same time, compared with the control group, the prosocial motivation group consumed more internal attention and utilized more strategies under both viewing time conditions, and their external attention was more effective. In addition, the external attention of the prosocial motivation group was higher only when time‐monitoring was unlimited. The results of this study further extend knowledge of the motivational cognitive model and expand its scope of application, which has theoretical significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: While prospective memory (i.e., the ability to execute a future plan) has been extensively researched, little is known about negative prospective memory (i.e., the ability to remember not to execute a future plan) in Korsakoff's syndrome (KS). We thus evaluated both prospective memory and negative prospective memory in KS, as well as the relationship between both types of prospective memory and inhibition. Methods: Patients with KS and control participants were invited to press a button on the keyboard (i.e., prospective memory) or not to press a button when a cue word (e.g., negative prospective memory) was encountered. Results: The analysis demonstrated that patients with KS had more prospective memory errors (i.e., forgetting to click the keyboard when the instruction was to do so) than control participants. The analysis also demonstrated that patients with KS had more negative prospective memory errors (i.e., clicking the keyboard when the instruction was not to do so) than control participants. Similar levels of commissions and omissions were observed in patients with KS than in control participants. Interestingly, prospective and negative prospective performances were significantly correlated with performance on an inhibition assessment task. Discussion: Our study demonstrates that KS is characterized by not only difficulty in remembering to execute a future intention but also by difficulty in remembering not to execute a future intention. A decline in negative prospective memory in KS can be associated with difficulty in inhibiting no longer appropriate previously learned intentions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Offloading (e.g., using Google calendar reminders) has been shown to improve prospective memory (PM). One unstudied aspect of PM offloading is whether having reminders reduces our future-oriented thinking about PM intentions in contexts in which the intention cannot be fulfilled. In the current study, participants were given two blocks of an ongoing lexical decision task. Prior to beginning the task, participants formed an intention to make a special response to PM targets only in block 2. Participants in the reminder condition had the PM intention displayed at the top of the screen in block 2, whereas those in the no-reminder condition did not. To assess activation of the intention out of context, PM lures (Experiment 1) or thought probes (Experiments 2 and 3) were presented in block 1. Results showed that reminders improved PM performance in block 2 but did not reduce lure interference or PM-related thoughts in block 1. These findings suggest that offloaded memory representations remain as activated and accessible as non-offloaded representations outside the context in which intentions can be fulfilled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies using retrospective memory tasks have revealed that animates/living beings are better remembered than are inanimates/nonliving things (the animacy effect). However, considering that memory is foremost future oriented, we hypothesized that the animacy effect would also occur in prospective memory (i.e., memory for future intentions). Using standard prospective memory (PM) procedures, we explored this hypothesis by manipulating the animacy status of the PM targets. Study 1a reports data collected from an American sample; these results were then replicated with a Portuguese sample (Study 1b). Study 2 employed a new procedure, and data were collected from a broader English-speaking sample. In these three studies, animate (vs. inanimate) targets consistently led to a better PM performance, revealing, for the first time, that the animacy advantage extends to PM. These results strengthen the adaptive approach to memory and stress the need to consider animacy as an important variable in memory studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Part-set cuing facilitation and impairment effects are rarely found in spatial memory, which is a challenge to the theories of part-set cuing effects based on lexical stimulus. This study aims to investigate whether there part-set cuing facilitation and impairment effects are present in spatial memory by constructing two types of memory scenes with high and low degrees of interitem associations, achieved by manipulating the presentation of miniatures. This study examined the effects of different part-set cues on free recall, recognition, and reconstruction tasks. The results of two experiments revealed that matrix cues impaired the performance of three recall tasks in memory scenes with a high degree of interitem associations, and scene cues facilitated the reconstruction performance (Experiment 1). Conversely, in memory scenes with a low degree of interitem associations, the impairment effect of matrix cues was not observed in the three recall tasks, but scene cues still facilitated the reconstruction performance (Experiment 2). These findings supported the retrieval strategy disruption hypothesis, the two-mechanism and the multi-mechanism accounts, demonstrating the significance of interitem associations in spatial memory. Furthermore, the results provided direct evidence for the importance of the encoding-retrieval strategy matching principle in spatial memory tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The widespread use of English as a lingua franca (henceforth ELF), namely a contact language between speakers from different lingua-cultural backgrounds (Firth, 1996), has affected all aspects of human activity, including those of English language teaching and assessment. Regarding the latter, its reorientation towards an ELF-aware paradigm that meets the numerous non-native speakers' needs for effective intercultural communication is definitely called for as the number of multicultural EFL classes and the instances of ELF interaction outside the English class are steadily increasing. This reorientation could involve a shift from conventional testing based on Standard English norms towards alternative modes of assessment that reflect the features of intercultural communication and focus on the strategies employed by efficient ELF speakers as these are demonstrated in relevant literature and studies. When it comes to the assessment of oracy skills within a multicultural EFL context, which is the focus of this paper, learners' performance could be assessed through systematic observation and the use of ELF-aware speaking tasks and criteria, whose effectiveness was investigated in a relevant small-scale study, conducted within a multicultural Greek EFL context. This study indicated that despite its excessive demands on time, effort and concentration, observation-based assessment has significant potential in stimulating and promoting the development of communicative oracy skills and strategies. The elements of observation that contribute to its effectiveness are analysed in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Remembering intentions is critical for daily life, yet errors happen surprisingly often, even when there are fatal consequences (e.g., forgetting a baby in a car). To understand how people can forget personally important intentions, we took 192 students' cell phones while they participated in an unrelated experiment. We examined (a) how often students forgot to retrieve their cell phone when they left the lab compared to an experimenter-relevant task that required returning an activity tracker that we attached to their clothes to "monitor their amount of fidgeting" during the experiment and (b) whether it mattered if the instructions were explicitly encoded or not. Students only forgot the tracker 10%–13% more often than their cell phone, and explicit encoding did not reduce forgetting; neither did longer, more distracting ongoing tasks. Between 60% and 70% of participants said the intention "popped into mind." We suggest that prospective memory intentions are "autonomically" encoded, yet even explicitly encoded, personally important tasks are forgotten at surprising rates. General Audience Summary: How do people forget personally important intentions, like forgetting your sleeping baby in the back seat when you leave the car (or forgetting to turn off appliances or bring your cell phone, keys, etc. with you, for that matter)? We suggest that such intentions are autonomically encoded by the mind and brain by default, yet even when intentions are explicitly encoded forgetting happens surprisingly often, and it is not clear why. To understand what causes forgetting, we took ∼200 students' cell phones from them when they came into our labs to participate in an unrelated experiment. Students forgot their cell phones at surprising rates compared to a control condition, and it did not matter (a) how students formed or "encoded" the intention, (b) how long and involved the other experiment tasks were, or (c) if they said they thought of the intention during their other, ongoing tasks. Students who said the intention spontaneously "popped into mind" at the right time were less likely to forget than those who did not. This study suggests that forgetting occurs when environmental cues fail to elicit spontaneous retrieval at the appropriate moment, regardless of whether or not intentions are explicitly encoded. This study should help inform the public and judicial system about what does and does not cause such prospective memory errors to happen—even those with tragic consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prospective memory (PM) is the ability to remember to carry out intended actions in the future. The present study investigated the effects of episodic future thinking (EFT) and enactment encoding (EE) on PM performance in autistic adults (ASD). A total of 72 autistic individuals and 70 controls matched for age, gender, and cognitive abilities completed a computerized version of the Dresden breakfast Task, which required participants to prepare breakfast following a set of rules and time restrictions. A two (group: ASD vs. controls) by three (encoding condition: EFT vs. EE vs. standard) between‐subjects design was applied. Participants were either instructed to engage in EFT or EE to prepare to the different tasks prior to performing the Dresden breakfast or received standard instructions. Analyses of variance were conducted. Autism‐spectrum‐disorders (ASD) participants did not differ from control participants in their PM performance, regardless of which strategy they used. Compared to the standard condition, EE but not EFT improved time‐based PM performance in all participants. This is the first study to find spared time‐based PM performance in autistic individuals. The results confirm earlier results of beneficial effects of EE on PM performance. Findings are discussed with regards to the methodology used, sample composition as well as autistic characteristics. Lay Summary: The present study investigated the effects of the two encoding strategies episodic future thinking (EFT) and enactment encoding (EE) on prospective memory (PM) in autism spectrum disorders (ASD). A total of 72 ASD individuals and 70 controls matched for age, gender, and cognitive abilities completed a computerized PM task. Participants were either instructed to engage in EFT or EE to prepare to the different tasks prior to performing the PM task or received standard instructions. ASD participants did not differ from control participants in their PM performance, regardless of which strategy they used. Compared to the standard condition, EE but not EFT improved time‐based PM in all participants. The results confirm earlier results of beneficial effects of EE on PM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prospective memory (PM) is the ability to remember and realize one’s intentions in the future; therefore, it is crucial for the daily functioning of children and adolescents and their ability to become independent from caregivers. PM errors can have repercussions during childhood, such as influencing school performance and social relationships. The aim of this systematic review was to synthesize studies analysing PM in children and adolescents (age range: 0–16 years) following PRISMA guidelines. The goal was to outline the most commonly used tasks, offering information on the development of PM, and—through a detailed analysis of the assessment of specific cognitive processes carried out in the primary studies included—providing information on the main cognitive processes involved in PM within this age group. Forty-nine studies were selected that examined PM in children and adolescents with typical development. The studies used many different tasks that can be traced back to eleven different main paradigms to evaluate PM, each structured into a PM and an ongoing task. Older children performed better on PM targets than younger children, suggesting a developmental trajectory of PM that follows a J-shaped function. Children as young as 2 years old exhibited the first signs of PM, while adolescents performed similarly to adults on PM tasks. Several factors are involved in PM development: retrospective memory, executive functions (planning, working memory, inhibitory control, monitoring), attention, metamemory, and motivation. This review May be considered a starting point to summarize the most used tools to evaluate PM in children and adolescents, and to shed light on the primary cognitive functions involved in PM, potentially offering indications to researchers in selecting optimal tasks for measuring PM across different age groups. Additionally, it underscores the importance of developing standardized measures for potential clinical applications.