A Brief Period of Wakeful Rest after Learning Enhances Verbal Memory in Stroke Survivors.

OBJECTIVE: Accumulating evidence suggests that wakeful rest (a period of minimal cognitive stimulation) enhances memory in clinical populations with memory impairment. However, no study has previously examined the efficacy of this technique in stroke survivors, despite the high prevalence of post-stroke memory difficulties. We aimed to investigate whether wakeful rest enhances verbal memory in stroke survivors and healthy controls. METHOD: Twenty-four stroke survivors and 24 healthy controls were presented with two short stories; one story was followed by a 10-minute period of wakeful rest and the other was followed by a 10-minute visual interference task. A mixed factorial analysis of variance (ANOVA) with pairwise comparisons was used to compare participants' story retention at two time points. RESULTS: After 15-30 minutes, stroke survivors (p = .002, d = .73), and healthy controls (p = .001, d = .76) retained more information from the story followed by wakeful rest, compared with the story followed by an interference task. While wakeful rest remained the superior condition in healthy controls after 7 days (p = .01, d = .58), the beneficial effect was not maintained in stroke survivors (p = .35, d = .19). CONCLUSIONS: Wakeful rest is a promising technique, which significantly enhanced verbal memory after 15-30 minutes in both groups; however, no significant benefit of wakeful rest was observed after 7 days in stroke survivors. Preliminary findings suggest that wakeful rest enhances early memory consolidation processes by protecting against the effects of interference after learning in stroke survivors.

Retrieval practice enhances memory for names in survivors of stroke.

Objective: Accumulating evidence suggests that retrieval practice (testing during learning) enhances memory in clinical populations. However, no study to date has examined the efficacy of retrieval practice in stroke survivors, despite the negative impact of poststroke memory difficulties. We investigated whether retrieval practice enhances memory for names in stroke survivors and healthy controls. Method: Using a within- and between-subjects design, 20 stroke survivors and 20 healthy controls completed an experimental paradigm that required them to learn 18 name-face pairs divided across 3 learning conditions (spaced restudy, retrieval practice, massed study). A mixed analysis of variance compared participants' name recall across conditions after 30 min and 7 days. Results: There was a main effect of learning condition (p < .001, ηp² = .67) and a significant Time × Condition interaction (p < .001, ηp² = .25). Post hoc comparisons revealed that retrieval practice was the superior learning condition in both groups after 30 min. After 7 days, there was no significant difference between the retrieval practice and spaced restudy conditions in stroke survivors (p = .08, d = 0.41), although retrieval practice remained superior to massed study (p = .001, d = 0.88). Conclusions: Retrieval practice is a promising memory technique that significantly enhanced stroke survivors' memory for names. Given similar performance in the retrieval practice and spaced restudy conditions after 7 days, stroke survivors may benefit from multiple presentations of information during learning, rather than 1 prolonged exposure. Future studies should investigate whether additional retrieval opportunities might prolong the beneficial effect of testing during learning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

What are the most common memory complaints following stroke? A frequency and exploratory factor analysis of items from the Everyday Memory Questionnaire-Revised.

Objective: Memory problems are commonly reported following stroke; however, the specific nature and frequency of memory complaints experienced by stroke survivors has not been sufficiently investigated. We aimed to investigate the factor structure of the Everyday Memory Questionnaire-Revised (EMQ-R) in stroke survivors with memory complaints, and identify the most commonly endorsed items.Method: A total of 91 stroke survivors completed the EMQ-R prior to participation in a memory rehabilitation trial. A principal components analysis was carried out on the EMQ-R data and reliability analyses were conducted on the resulting subscales. We described the average frequency of occurrence of specific memory complaints in one month, as reported by stroke survivors.Results: The factor analysis yielded a two-component solution which accounted for 60.12% of the variance, suggesting that two subscales termed Forgetting and Attention would be most appropriate for clinical use with stroke survivors. These subscales demonstrated strong internal reliability. A total of 87.9% of the participants reported having word-finding difficulties more than once monthly. Of all EMQ-R items, participants rated word-finding problems as occurring at the highest frequency (once or more daily).Conclusions: Stroke survivors' everyday memory complaints fall into two distinct categories relating to memory and attentional processes. Calculating scores on the two EMQ-R subscales separately may assist clinicians to understand the nature of memory complaints reported by stroke survivors who participate in memory rehabilitation programs, and may enable more targeted outcome measurement in research trials.

Emotion recognition in Parkinson's disease: Static and dynamic factors.

OBJECTIVE: The authors tested the hypothesis that Parkinson's disease (PD) participants would perform better in an emotion recognition task with dynamic (video) stimuli compared to a task using only static (photograph) stimuli and compared performances on both tasks to healthy control participants. METHOD: In a within-subjects study, 21 PD participants and 20 age-matched healthy controls performed both static and dynamic emotion recognition tasks. The authors used a 2-way analysis of variance (controlling for individual participant variance) to determine the effect of group (PD, control) on emotion recognition performance in static and dynamic facial recognition tasks. RESULTS: Groups did not significantly differ in their performances on the static and dynamic tasks; however, the trend was suggestive that PD participants performed worse than controls. CONCLUSIONS: PD participants may have subtle emotion recognition deficits that are not ameliorated by the addition of contextual cues, similar to those found in everyday scenarios. Consistent with previous literature, the results suggest that PD participants may have underlying emotion recognition deficits, which may impact their social functioning. (PsycINFO Database Record

The Functional Significance of Chiral Genitalia: Patterns of Asymmetry, Functional Morphology and Mating Success in the Praying Mantis Ciulfina baldersoni.

Genital asymmetry is relatively common and widespread throughout the animal kingdom. The functional significance of genital asymmetry is however, poorly understood for most species. Male praying mantids of the genus Ciulfina are remarkable in possessing complex and directionally asymmetric genital phallomeres in some species, and chirally dimorphic/antisymmetric genitalia in others. Here we explore the chiral dimorphism in male genitalia of Ciulfina baldersoni which appear to exhibit genital antisymmetry. We test whether genital orientation influences mating success, copulation duration and the attachment duration of spermatophores. Additionally we investigate genital interactions between male and females using x-ray micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). Lastly we assess whether genital asymmetry is associated with non-genital morphological asymmetry of a range of traits. Our results highlight the complex functional morphology of genitalia in this praying mantis species and yet demonstrate no functional difference between dextral and sinistral morphs other than the direction of attachment with both morphs enjoying equal levels of mating success. Chiral morphs also did not strongly associate with any other forms of asymmetry. We therefore conclude that genital chirality in Ciulfina baldersoni is a likely case of antisymmetry with no functional significance to genital orientation, and is likely to be selectively neutral.