RECOVER-NEURO: study protocol for a multi-center, multi-arm, phase 2, randomized, active comparator trial evaluating three interventions for cognitive dysfunction in post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection (PASC).

BACKGROUND: Post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection (PASC) symptoms have broad impact, and may affect individuals regardless of COVID-19 severity, socioeconomic status, race, ethnicity, or age. A prominent PASC symptom is cognitive dysfunction, colloquially referred to as "brain fog" and characterized by declines in short-term memory, attention, and concentration. Cognitive dysfunction can severely impair quality of life by impairing daily functional skills and preventing timely return to work. METHODS: RECOVER-NEURO is a prospective, multi-center, multi-arm, phase 2, randomized, active-comparator design investigating 3 interventions: (1) BrainHQ is an interactive, online cognitive training program; (2) PASC-Cognitive Recovery is a cognitive rehabilitation program specifically designed to target frequently reported challenges among individuals with brain fog; (3) transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a noninvasive form of mild electrical brain stimulation. The interventions will be combined to establish 5 arms: (1) BrainHQ; (2) BrainHQ + PASC-Cognitive Recovery; (3) BrainHQ + tDCS-active; (4) BrainHQ + tDCS-sham; and (5) Active Comparator. The interventions will occur for 10 weeks. Assessments will be completed at baseline and at the end of intervention and will include cognitive testing and patient-reported surveys. All study activities can be delivered in Spanish and English. DISCUSSION: This study is designed to test whether cognitive dysfunction symptoms can be alleviated by the use of pragmatic and established interventions with different mechanisms of action and with prior evidence of improving cognitive function in patients with neurocognitive disorder. If successful, results will provide beneficial treatments for PASC-related cognitive dysfunction. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT05965739. Registered on July 25, 2023.

The association between implicit and explicit affective inhibitory control, rumination and depressive symptoms.

Inhibitory control underlies one's ability to maintain goal-directed behavior by inhibiting prepotent responses or ignoring irrelevant information. Recent models suggest that impaired inhibition of negative information may contribute to depressive symptoms, and that this association is mediated by rumination. However, the exact nature of this association, particularly in non-clinical samples, is unclear. The current study assessed the relationship between inhibitory control over emotional vs. non-emotional information, rumination and depressive symptoms. A non-clinical sample of 119 participants (mean age: 36.44 ± 11.74) with various levels of depressive symptoms completed three variations of a Go/No-Go task online; two of the task variations required either explicit or implicit processing of emotional expressions, and a third variation contained no emotional expressions (i.e., neutral condition). We found reductions in inhibitory control for participants reporting elevated symptoms of depression on all three task variations, relative to less depressed participants. However, for the task variation that required implicit emotion processing, depressive symptoms were associated with inhibitory deficits for sad and neutral, but not for happy expressions. An exploratory analysis showed that the relationship between inhibition and depressive symptoms occurs in part through trait rumination for all three tasks, regardless of emotional content. Collectively, these results indicate that elevated depressive symptoms are associated with both a general inhibitory control deficit, as well as affective interference from negative emotions, with implications for the assessment and treatment of mood disorders.

Alertness Training Improves Spatial Bias and Functional Ability in Spatial Neglect.

OBJECTIVE: We conducted a multisite, randomized, double-blinded, controlled trial to examine the effectiveness of a digital health intervention targeting the intrinsic regulation of goal-directed alertness in patients with chronic hemispatial neglect. METHODS: Forty-nine participants with hemispatial neglect, who demonstrated significant spatially biased attention after acquired brain injury, were randomly assigned to the experimental attention remediation treatment or the active control group. The participants engaged with the remotely administered interventions for 12 weeks. The primary outcome was spatial bias on the Posner cueing task (response time difference: left minus right target trials). Secondary outcomes included functional abilities (measured via the Catherine Bergego scale and Barthel index), spatial cognition, executive function, quality of life, and sleep. Assessments were conducted before and immediately after participation in the experimental intervention or control condition, and again after a 3-month no-contact period. RESULTS: Compared with the active control group, the intervention group exhibited a significant improvement in the primary outcome, a reduction in spatially biased attention on the Posner cueing task (p = 0.010, Cohen's d = 0.96), in addition to significant improvements in functional abilities as measured on the Catherine Bergego and Barthel indices (p = 0.027, Cohen's d = 0.24). INTERPRETATION: Our results demonstrate that our attention training program was effective in improving the debilitating attention deficits common to hemispatial neglect. This benefit generalized to improvements in real-world functional abilities. This safe, highly scalable, and self-administered treatment for hemispatial neglect might serve as a useful addition to the existing standard of care. ANN NEUROL 2020;88:747-758.

Biases in processing of mood-congruent facial expressions in depression.

Cognitive models of depression suggest that depressed individuals exhibit a tendency to attribute negative meaning to neutral stimuli, and enhanced processing of mood-congruent stimuli. However, evidence thus far has been inconsistent. In this study, we sought to identify both differential interpretation of neutral information as well as emotion processing biases associated with depression. Fifty adult participants completed standardized mood-related questionnaires, a novel immediate mood scale questionnaire (IMS-12), and a novel task, Emotion Matcher, in which they were required to indicate whether pairs of emotional faces show the same expression or not. We found that overall success rate and reaction time on the Emotion Matcher task did not differ as a function of severity of depression. However, more depressed participants had significantly worse performance when presented with sad-neutral face pairs, as well as increased reaction times to happy-happy pairs. In addition, accuracy of the sad-neutral pairs was found to be significantly associated with depression severity in a regression model. Our study provides partial support for the mood-congruent hypothesis, revealing only a potential bias in interpretation of sad and neutral expressions, but not a general deficit in processing of facial expressions. The potential of such bias in serving as a predictor for depression should be further examined in future studies.

An Amygdala-Hippocampus Subnetwork that Encodes Variation in Human Mood.

Human brain networks that encode variation in mood on naturalistic timescales remain largely unexplored. Here we combine multi-site, semi-chronic, intracranial electroencephalography recordings from the human limbic system with machine learning methods to discover a brain subnetwork that correlates with variation in individual subjects' self-reported mood over days. First we defined the subnetworks that influence intrinsic brain dynamics by identifying regions that showed coordinated changes in spectral coherence. The most common subnetwork, found in 13 of 21 subjects, was characterized by ß-frequency coherence (13-30 Hz) between the amygdala and hippocampus. Increased variability of this subnetwork correlated with worsening mood across these 13 subjects. Moreover, these subjects had significantly higher trait anxiety than the 8 of 21 for whom this amygdala-hippocampus subnetwork was absent. These results demonstrate an approach for extracting network-behavior relationships from complex datasets, and they reveal a conserved subnetwork associated with a psychological trait that significantly influences intrinsic brain dynamics and encodes fluctuations in mood.

Immediate Mood Scaler: Tracking Symptoms of Depression and Anxiety Using a Novel Mobile Mood Scale.

BACKGROUND: Mood disorders are dynamic disorders characterized by multimodal symptoms. Clinical assessment of symptoms is currently limited to relatively sparse, routine clinic visits, requiring retrospective recollection of symptoms present in the weeks preceding the visit. Novel advances in mobile tools now support ecological momentary assessment of mood, conducted frequently using mobile devices, outside the clinical setting. Such mood assessment may help circumvent problems associated with infrequent reporting and better characterize the dynamic presentation of mood symptoms, informing the delivery of novel treatment options. OBJECTIVES: The aim of our study was to validate the Immediate Mood Scaler (IMS), a newly developed, iPad-deliverable 22-item self-report tool designed to capture current mood states. METHODS: A total of 110 individuals completed standardized questionnaires (Patient Health Questionnaire, 9-item [PHQ-9]; generalized anxiety disorder, 7-Item [GAD-7]; and rumination scale) and IMS at baseline. Of the total, 56 completed at least one additional session of IMS, and 17 completed one additional administration of PHQ-9 and GAD-7. We conducted exploratory Principal Axis Factor Analysis to assess dimensionality of IMS, and computed zero-order correlations to investigate associations between IMS and standardized scales. Linear Mixed Model (LMM) was used to assess IMS stability across time and to test predictability of PHQ-9 and GAD-7 score by IMS. RESULTS: Strong correlations were found between standard mood scales and the IMS at baseline (r=.57-.59, P<.001). A factor analysis revealed a 12-item IMS ("IMS-12") with two factors: a "depression" factor and an "anxiety" factor. IMS-12 depression subscale was more strongly correlated with PHQ-9 than with GAD-7 (z=1.88, P=.03), but the reverse pattern was not found for IMS-12 anxiety subscale. IMS-12 showed less stability over time compared with PHQ-9 and GAD-7 (.65 vs .91), potentially reflecting more sensitivity to mood dynamics. In addition, IMS-12 ratings indicated that individuals with mild to moderate depression had greater mood fluctuations compared with individuals with severe depression (.42 vs .79; P=.04). Finally, IMS-12 significantly contributed to the prediction of subsequent PHQ-9 (beta=1.03, P=.02) and GAD-7 scores (beta =.93, P=.01). CONCLUSIONS: Collectively, these data suggest that the 12-item IMS (IMS-12) is a valid tool to assess momentary mood symptoms related to anxiety and depression. Although IMS-12 shows good correlation with standardized scales, it further captures mood fluctuations better and significantly adds to the prediction of the scales. Results are discussed in the context of providing continuous symptom quantification that may inform novel treatment options and support personalized treatment plans.

Targeting alertness to improve cognition in older adults: A preliminary report of benefits in executive function and skill acquisition.

Efficient self-regulation of alertness declines with age exacerbating normal declines in performance across multiple cognitive domains, including learning and skill acquisition. Previous cognitive intervention studies have shown that it is possible to enhance alertness in patients with acquired brain injury and marked attention impairments, and that this benefit generalizes to improvements in more global cognitive functions. In the current preliminary studies, we sought to test whether this approach, that targets both tonic (over a period of minutes) and phasic (moment-to-moment) alertness, can improve key executive functioning declines in older adults, and enhance the rate of skill acquisition. The results of both Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrate that, compared to active control (AC) training, alertness training significantly enhanced performance in several validated executive function measures. In Experiment 2, alertness training significantly improved skill acquisition compared to AC training in a well-characterized speed of processing (SOP) task, with the largest benefits shown in the most challenging SOP blocks. The results of the current study suggest that targeting intrinsic alertness through cognitive training provides a novel approach to improve executive functions in older adults and may be a useful adjunct treatment to enhance benefits gained in other clinically validated treatments.

Tonic and phasic alertness training: a novel treatment for executive control dysfunction following mild traumatic brain injury.

Many individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI) suffer difficulty regulating fundamental aspects of attention (focus, sustained attention) and may also exhibit hypo- or hyper-states of alertness. Deficits in the state of attention may underlie or exacerbate higher order executive dysfunction. Recent studies indicate that computerized cognitive training targeting attentional control and alertness can ameliorate attention deficits evident in patients with TBI or acquired brain injury. The current study examined whether improvements in attentional state following training can also influence performance on higher-order executive function and mood in individuals with mild TBI (mTBI). The current study examined five patients with executive control deficits as a result of mTBI, with or without persistent anxiety. Three patients engaged in ~5 hours of an executive control training task targeting inhibitory control and sustained attention; two additional patients were re-tested following the same period of time. Performance on standard neuropsychological measures of attention, executive function, and mood were evaluated pre- and post-training. The results indicate that tonic and phasic alertness training may improve higher-order executive function and mood regulation in individuals with TBI.

Brain plasticity-based therapeutics.

The primary objective of this review article is to summarize how the neuroscience of brain plasticity, exploiting new findings in fundamental, integrative and cognitive neuroscience, is changing the therapeutic landscape for professional communities addressing brain-based disorders and disease. After considering the neurological bases of training-driven neuroplasticity, we shall describe how this neuroscience-guided perspective distinguishes this new approach from (a) the more-behavioral, traditional clinical strategies of professional therapy practitioners, and (b) an even more widely applied pharmaceutical treatment model for neurological and psychiatric treatment domains. With that background, we shall argue that neuroplasticity-based treatments will be an important part of future best-treatment practices in neurological and psychiatric medicine.

The nonspatial side of spatial neglect and related approaches to treatment.

In addition to deficits in spatial attention, individuals with persistent spatial neglect almost universally exhibit nonspatially lateralized deficits in sustained and selective attention, and working memory. However, nonspatially lateralized deficits in neglect have received considerably less attention in the literature than deficits in spatial attention. This is in spite of the fact that nonspatially lateralized deficits better predict the chronicity and functional disability associated with neglect than spatially lateralized deficits. Furthermore, only a few treatment studies have specifically targeted nonspatially lateralized deficits as a means to improve spatial neglect. In this chapter, we will briefly review several models of spatial attention bias in neglect before focusing on nonspatial deficits and the mechanisms of nonspatial-spatial interactions and implications for treatment. Treatment approaches that more completely address nonspatial deficits and better account for their interactions with spatial attention will likely produce better outcomes.

Cross-training in hemispatial neglect: auditory sustained attention training ameliorates visual attention deficits.

Prominent deficits in spatial attention evident in patients with hemispatial neglect are often accompanied by equally prominent deficits in non-spatial attention (e.g., poor sustained and selective attention, pronounced vigilance decrement). A number of studies now show that deficits in non-spatial attention influence spatial attention. Treatment strategies focused on improving vigilance or sustained attention may effectively remediate neglect. For example, a recent study employing Tonic and Phasic Alertness Training (TAPAT), a task that requires monitoring a constant stream of hundreds of novel scenes, demonstrated group-level (n=12) improvements after training compared to a test-retest control group or active treatment control condition on measures of visual search, midpoint estimation and working memory (DeGutis and Van Vleet, 2010). To determine whether the modality of treatment or stimulus novelty are key factors to improving hemispatial neglect, we designed a similar continuous performance training task in which eight patients with chronic and moderate to severe neglect were challenged to rapidly and continuously discriminate a limited set of centrally presented auditory tones once a day for 9 days (36-min/day). All patients demonstrated significant improvement in several, untrained measures of spatial and non-spatial visual attention, and as a group failed to demonstrate a lateralized attention deficit 24-h post-training compared to a control group of chronic neglect patients who simply waited during the training period. The results indicate that TAPAT-related improvements in hemispatial neglect are likely due to improvements in the intrinsic regulation of supramodal, non-spatial attentional resources.

Shifting attention in viewer- and object-based reference frames after unilateral brain injury.

The aims of the present study were to investigate the respective roles that object- and viewer-based reference frames play in reorienting visual attention, and to assess their influence after unilateral brain injury. To do so, we studied 16 right hemisphere injured (RHI) and 13 left hemisphere injured (LHI) patients. We used a cueing design that manipulates the location of cues and targets relative to a display comprised of two rectangles (i.e., objects). Unlike previous studies with patients, we presented all cues at midline rather than in the left or right visual fields. Thus, in the critical conditions in which targets were presented laterally, reorienting of attention was always from a midline cue. Performance was measured for lateralized target detection as a function of viewer-based (contra- and ipsilesional sides) and object-based (requiring reorienting within or between objects) reference frames. As expected, contralesional detection was slower than ipsilesional detection for the patients. More importantly, objects influenced target detection differently in the contralesional and ipsilesional fields. Contralesionally, reorienting to a target within the cued object took longer than reorienting to a target in the same location but in the uncued object. This finding is consistent with object-based neglect. Ipsilesionally, the means were in the opposite direction. Furthermore, no significant difference was found in object-based influences between the patient groups (RHI vs. LHI). These findings are discussed in the context of reference frames used in reorienting attention for target detection.

Modulation of non-spatial attention and the global/local processing bias.

Amelioration of the rightward spatial attention bias in patients with hemispatial neglect following manipulations of non-spatial attention suggests that spatial attention and mechanisms related to the regulation of attention are interrelated. Studies in normal, healthy subjects have shown similar modulation in spatial bias following tonic and phasic changes in attention suggesting that this interaction is a general mechanism of attention rather than a curiosity of the neglect disorder. The current study examined this attentional interaction to determine if perceptual processes favoring one hemisphere over the other are affected by this relationship. Participants first made rapid discriminations of Navon figures presented at central fixation. As expected, when participants attended to either the local or global dimension, incongruence in the orthogonal dimension resulted in longer reaction times for accurate discrimination compared to congruent trials. However, following a brief (16-min) continuous performance task designed to elicit behaviors associated with greater tonic and phasic alertness, participants showed significantly less local interference when attending the global dimension and more global interference when attending the local dimension on the Navon discrimination task compared to a control task condition. The results indicate that exercising tonic and phasic alertness produces a global processing bias.

Tonic and phasic alertness training: a novel behavioral therapy to improve spatial and non-spatial attention in patients with hemispatial neglect.

Hemispatial neglect is a debilitating disorder marked by a constellation of spatial and non-spatial attention deficits. Patients' alertness deficits have shown to interact with lateralized attention processes and correspondingly, improving tonic/general alertness as well as phasic/moment-to-moment alertness has shown to ameliorate spatial bias. However, improvements are often short-lived and inconsistent across tasks and patients. In an attempt to more effectively activate alertness mechanisms by exercising both tonic and phasic alertness, we employed a novel version of a continuous performance task (tonic and phasic alertness training, TAPAT). Using a between-subjects longitudinal design and employing sensitive outcome measures of spatial and non-spatial attention, we compared the effects of 9 days of TAPAT (36 min/day) in a group of patients with chronic neglect (N = 12) with a control group of chronic neglect patients (N = 12) who simply waited during the same training period. Compared to the control group, the group trained on TAPAT significantly improved on both spatial and non-spatial measures of attention with many patients failing to exhibit a lateralized attention bias at the end of training. TAPAT was effective for patients with a range of behavioral profiles and lesions, suggesting that its effectiveness may rely on distributed or lower-level attention mechanisms that are largely intact in patients with neglect. In a follow-up experiment, to determine if TAPAT is more effective in improving spatial attention than an active treatment that directly trains spatial attention, we trained three chronic neglect patients on both TAPAT and search training. In all three patients, TAPAT training was more effective in improving spatial attention than search training suggesting that, in chronic neglect, training alertness is a more effective treatment approach than directly training spatial attention.

Implicit representation and explicit detection of features in patients with hemispatial neglect.

Despite profound inattention to the side of space opposite a brain lesion in patients with unilateral neglect, priming studies demonstrate that undetected stimuli are capable of influencing subsequent behaviour. However, the nature of implicit processing of neglected stimuli is poorly understood. In the current study, we examined implicit processing in five patients with neglect using both visual search and priming methods. A psychophysical staircase method varying time of presentation was first used to establish a high (75%) and low (25%) detection probability for targets in both a feature and a conjunction search array. The arrays were then used in a priming task to examine how a difference in the level of overt detection of a feature or a conjunction presented in neglected space influenced subsequent discrimination speed to a single probe presented at fixation. The results showed that priming effects with feature primes were independent of their explicit detection rates (high versus low), but priming effects with conjunction primes reflected the pattern of explicit detection. These findings are discussed as they relate to availability versus accessibility of neglected stimuli.

Cross-modal interactions in time and space: auditory influence on visual attention in hemispatial neglect.

Recent studies indicate that auditory tone presentation and auditory alerting can temporarily ameliorate visuospatial attention deficits in patients with unilateral neglect [Frassinetti, F., Pavani, F., & Ladavas, E. Acoustical vision of neglected stimuli: Interaction among spatially converging audiovisual inputs in neglect patients. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 14, 62-69, 2002; Robertson, I. H., Mattingley, J. B., Rorden, C., & Driver, J. Phasic alerting of neglect patients overcomes their spatial deficit in visual awareness. Nature, 395, 169-172, 1998]. The current study investigated proposed mechanisms of cross-modal interaction to determine conditions in which auditory stimulation affects spatial and nonspatially lateralized attention deficits in a patient with hemispatial neglect. In Experiment 1, a target was presented among related distracters (conjunction search) while a tone was presented either bilaterally or in a congruent or incongruent spatial location with respect to the visual target. Whereas the results suggest a benefit of both general alerting and cross-modal spatial integration on visual search efficiency, the most significant improvement occurred when the target and tone were both presented in contralesional space. In Experiment 2, the effect of auditory alerting on selective attention was examined in a rapid serial visual search procedure with visual targets embedded in a stream of distracters presented at central fixation. When two targets were presented without an alerting tone, the patient missed the second target for up to 1000 msec after the first target appeared (a finding known as the "attentional blink" [AB] and, on average, about 400-500 msec in normals). An alerting tone presented at a fixed temporal location significantly reduced the AB in a tone-duration-dependent manner. Experiment 3 examined the effect of cross-modal space on selective attention in an AB paradigm in which T2 occurred randomly to the left or right of T1 with a spatially congruent or incongruent tone. Discrimination of T2 in contralesional space significantly improved when the tone was presented in the same location, and was impaired when the tone was presented on the ipsilesional side. The findings are discussed as they relate to cross-modal interactions and their influence on spatial and nonspatially lateralized attention deficits in neglect.