A Novel Approach to Assessing Infant and Child Mental Rotation.

Mental rotation is a critically important, early developing spatial skill that is related to other spatial cognitive abilities. Understanding the early development of this skill, however, requires a developmentally appropriate assessment that can be used with infants, toddlers, and young children. We present here a new eye-tracking task that uses a staircase procedure to assess mental rotation in 12-, 24-, and 36-month-old children (N = 41). To ensure that all children understood the task, the session began with training and practice, in which the children learned to fixate which of two houses a giraffe, facing either left or right, would approach. The adaptive two-up, one-down staircase procedure assessed the children's ability to fixate the correct house when the giraffe was rotated in 30° (up) or 15° (down) increments. The procedure was successful, with most children showing evidence of mental rotation. In addition, the children were less likely to succeed as the angle of rotation increased, and the older children succeeded at higher angles of rotation than the younger children, replicating previous findings with other procedures. The present study contributes a new paradigm that can assess the development of mental rotation in young children and holds promise for yielding insights into individual differences in mental rotation.

An investigation of mental rotation in infancy using change detection.

Two experiments were conducted to examine mental rotation in 6- to 12-month-old infants (N = 166) using a change detection task. These experiments were replications of Lauer and Lourenco (Lauer et al., 2015; Lauer & Lourenco, 2016), using identical stimuli and variations of their procedure, including an exact replication conducted in a laboratory setting (Experiment 1), and an online assessment using Lookit (Scott et al.,2017; Scott & Schulz, 2017) (Experiment 2). Both experiments failed to replicate the results of the original study; in neither experiment did infants' behavior provide evidence that they mentally rotated the object. Results are discussed in terms of the robustness of mental rotation in infancy and about limits in our experimental procedures for uncovering perceptual and cognitive abilities in infants.

Infant Eye Gaze While Viewing Dynamic Faces.

Research using eye tracking methods has revealed that when viewing faces, between 6 to 10 months of age, infants begin to shift visual attention from the eye region to the mouth region. Moreover, this shift varies with stimulus characteristics and infants' experience with faces and languages. The current study examined the eye movements of a racially diverse sample of 98 infants between 7.5 and 10.5 months of age as they viewed movies of White and Asian American women reciting a nursery rhyme (the auditory component of the movies was replaced with music to eliminate the influence of the speech on infants' looking behavior). Using an analytic approach inspired by the multiverse analysis approach, several measures from infants' eye gaze were examined to identify patterns that were robust across different analyses. Although in general infants preferred the lower regions of the faces, i.e., the region containing the mouth, this preference depended on the stimulus characteristics and was stronger for infants whose typical experience included faces of more races and for infants who were exposed to multiple languages. These results show how we can leverage the richness of eye tracking data with infants to add to our understanding of the factors that influence infants' visual exploration of faces.

Brain structure and symptom dimensions in borderline personality disorder.

BACKGROUND: Borderline personality disorder (BPD) presents with symptoms across different domains, whose neurobiology is poorly understood. METHODS: We applied voxel-based morphometry on high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging scans of 19 female BPD patients and 50 matched female controls. RESULTS: Group comparison showed bilateral orbitofrontal gray matter loss in patients, but no significant changes in the hippocampus. Voxel-wise correlation of gray matter with symptom severity scores from the Borderline Symptom List (BSL-95) showed overall negative correlation in bilateral prefrontal, right inferior temporal/fusiform and occipital cortices, and left thalamus. Significant (negative) correlations with BSL-95 subscores within the patient cohort linked autoaggression to left lateral prefrontal and insular cortices, right inferior temporal/temporal pole, and right orbital cortex; dysthymia/dysphoria to right orbitofrontal cortex; self-perception to left postcentral, bilateral inferior/middle temporal, right orbitofrontal, and occipital cortices. Schema therapy-based Young Schema Questionnaire (YSQ-S2) scores of early maladaptive schemas on emotional deprivation were linked to left medial temporal lobe gray matter reductions. CONCLUSIONS: Our results confirm orbitofrontal structural deficits in BPD, while providing a framework and preliminary findings on identifying structural correlates of symptom dimensions in BPD, especially with dorsolateral and orbitofrontal cortices.

Applying the D50 disease progression model to gray and white matter pathology in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

Therapeutic management and research in Amyotrophic Laterals Sclerosis (ALS) have been limited by the substantial heterogeneity in progression and anatomical spread that are endemic of the disease. Neuroimaging biomarkers represent powerful additions to the current monitoring repertoire but have yielded inconsistent associations with clinical scores like the ALS functional rating scale. The D50 disease progression model was developed to address limitations with clinical indices and the difficulty obtaining longitudinal data in ALS. It yields overall disease aggressiveness as time taken to reach halved functionality (D50); individual disease covered in distinct phases; and calculated functional state and calculated functional loss as acute descriptors of local disease activity. It greatly reduces the noise of the ALS functional rating scale and allows the comparison of highly heterogeneous disease and progression subtypes. In this study, we performed Voxel-Based Morphometry for 85 patients with ALS (60.1 ± 11.5 years, 36 female) and 62 healthy controls. Group-wise comparisons were performed separately for gray matter and white matter using ANCOVA testing with threshold-free cluster enhancement. ALS-related widespread gray and white matter density decreases were observed in the bilateral frontal and temporal lobes (p < 0.001, family-wise error corrected). We observed a progressive spread of structural alterations along the D50-derived phases, that were primarily located in frontal, temporal and occipital gray matter areas, as well as in supratentorial neuronal projections (p < 0.001 family-wise error corrected). ALS patients with higher overall disease aggressiveness (D50 < 30 months) showed a distinct pattern of supratentorial white matter density decreases relative to patients with lower aggressiveness; no significant differences were observed for gray matter density (p < 0.001 family-wise error corrected). The application of the D50 disease progression model separates measures of disease aggressiveness from disease accumulation. It revealed a strong correlation between disease phases and in-vivo measures of cerebral structural integrity. This study underscores the proposed corticofugal spread of cerebral pathology in ALS. We recommend application of the D50 model in studies linking clinical data with neuroimaging correlates.

Autoimmune encephalitis with anti-IgLON5 and anti-GABAB-receptor antibodies: A case report.

RATIONALE: Anti-IgLON5 disease is a complex neurological illness which is characterized by progressive sleep and movement disorders and defined by specific autoantibodies to IgLON5. We here describe the first case of a patient with coexisting anti-IgLON5 as well as anti-γ-aminobutyric acid B (GABAB)-receptor antibodies and predominant clinical features of anti-IgLON5 disease. PATIENT CONCERNS: The patient initially presented with subacute symptoms of severe sleep disorder, gait stability, dysarthria, cognitive impairment, depressive episode and hallucinations. DIAGNOSES: The patient was diagnosed with autoimmune encephalitis, based on clinical features and positive anti-IgLON5 antibodies in serum as well as in cerebrospinal fluid and anti-GABAB-receptor antibodies in serum only. INTERVENTIONS: Initially, the patient was treated with high dosages of methylprednisolone and subsequently with plasmapheresis. Due to the lack of clinical improvement immunosuppressive treatment with intravenous cyclophosphamide was initiated. OUTCOMES: Following the first year of cyclophosphamide treatment, neurological examination revealed an improvement in gait instability, visual and acoustic hallucinations and sleep disorder. LESSONS: The case report demonstrates that anti-IgLON5 and anti-GABAB-receptor antibodies can coexist in the same patient whereas clinical leading symptoms are determined by those antibodies that were tested positive in cerebrospinal fluid.

First use of high-frequency intensity modulation of narrow-linewidth laser light and its application in determination of 206,205,204Fr ground-state properties.

Collinear laser spectroscopy was performed on the nuclear ground states of the neutron-deficient isotopes (206,205,204)Fr. A new technique was developed to suppress hyperfine pumping in collinear laser spectroscopy of atoms. This involved high-frequency intensity modulation of narrow-linewidth laser light using fast-switching electro-optical modulators. The nuclear ground-state spins of (206,205,204)Fr were determined to be 3, 9/2, and 3, respectively. Both the changes in mean-squared charge radii and nuclear magnetic dipole moments indicate a departure from single-particle estimates.

Measurement of the translational and rotational Brownian motion of individual particles in a rarefied gas.

We measured the free Brownian motion of individual spherical and the Brownian rotation of individual nonspherical micrometer-sized particles in rarefied gas. Measurements were done with high spatial and temporal resolution under microgravity conditions in the Bremen drop tower so that the transition from diffusive to ballistic motion could be resolved. We find that the translational and rotational diffusion can be described by the relation given by Uhlenbeck and Ornstein [Phys. Rev. 36, 823 (1930)]. Measurements of rotational Brownian motion can be used for the determination of the moments of inertia of small particles.