Clear guidelines and tools for reliable measures of cognitive decline have yet to be established. This may be due to the absence of access to fully automated, self-administered, and scored cognitive screening tools.

Language disruption, especially at the pragmatic level, is a hallmark of schizophrenia, impacting functional outcome. While still poorly explored, electrophysiological (EEG) underpinnings of language in schizophrenia may disclose novel treatment targets, as well as insights on etiopathogenetic mechanisms. Furthermore, combining electrophysiological and linguistic markers could refine clinical stratification of patients within the same diagnostic category to guide customized treatment. In this study, we first explored the interplay between neurophysiological markers - i.e., mismatch Negativity (MMN) and the aperiodic component of the power spectrum (offset and exponent) - and pragmatics. Then we combined these features to identify electrophysiological and linguistic profiles and test their associations with symptom severity and functional impairment. Fifty patients with schizophrenia were assessed for pragmatics, vocabulary, symptoms, functioning and well-being. Their EEG was recorded during a resting state condition, to capture aperiodic activity, and a passive odd-ball task to evoke MMN. Correlation analyses showed significant associations between pragmatics and both MMN and aperiodic offset. A two-step cluster analysis including aperiodic offset, MMN, and pragmatic measures revealed two profiles, with Cluster 2 showing alteration in EEG indexes and pragmatics skills, as well as a more disrupted clinical and functional outcome. Overall, this study not only expands our knowledge of the electrophysiological correlates of pragmatic language impairment in schizophrenia, showing for the first time a meaningful link with MMN and the aperiodic component, but also highlights the utility of combining EEG and linguistic data to distinguish patients' profiles, paving the way to more personalized treatment strategies, tailored to individual specificities.

Individuals differ in both their navigation abilities and preferences. As children age, their spatial abilities develop, which allows for an increase in the use of survey knowledge to support navigation along novel routes or with shortcuts. Gender differences in navigation also emerge from preadolescence to adolescence, corresponding to changes in hormones and experience. The current study aimed to examine differences in navigation strategy in individuals aged 8-40. Participants completed the dual solution paradigm (DSP) where they learned a virtual environment with a layout of unique objects and were then tested on their ability to navigate back to those objects. We measured average time to complete trials, success, and strategies to take learned or novel routes to better understand the differences in spatial knowledge and strategy preference across a wide age range. We also grouped our child population (ages 8-12, 13-17) and performed additional analyses to examine the impact puberty has on these measures. The results showed that male participants navigated more efficiently and had higher rates of success than female participants, overall. For male participants, as age increased, average time to complete trials decreased. The categorical analyses showed gender differences in success and time in adolescents but not preadolescents. There were no age or gender differences in strategy usage. Our results suggest that certain spatial abilities develop at different ages depending on gender and that by adolescence children are performing at adult levels when tasked with navigating efficiently in a maze environment. These findings allow us to better understand how gender differences in navigation develop before and after the onset of puberty.

In the last decade, studies have indicated an association between Visual-Spatial Working Memory (VSWM) domain-general cognitive ability, and number processing. We aimed to further elaborate this relationship in adults behaviorally and neuro-cognitively via fMRI. Fifty one student were recruited from them forty students were included in the analysis (males, N=23; females, N=17). Based on an outside scanner VSWM task, the participants were divided into High and Low VSWM Groups. During an fMRI scan, participants performed a Number line estimation task. Data were analyzed at the individual-participant level and at the group level. Multiple comparisons between the groups were carried out on the whole brain level and at specific ROIs (Regions of Interest). Behavioral results showed that the Low VSWM Group exhibited longer reaction time as compared with the High VSWM Group, in symbolic numerical processing. Neuroanatomical comparisons revealed greater activation mainly in right fronto-parietal regions among the High VSWM Group during the Number line estimation task, while the Low VSWM group engaged the left hemisphere, in parietal, frontal and temporal regions. ROI analyses showed that the left IPS activation was positively correlated to the Number line Task, thus indicating its specific role in symbolic number processing. These results demonstrate hemispherical differences between the groups during number processing, suggesting that people with High VSWM recruit resources from a domain-general ability (VSWM) which enables them to process symbolic numbers more efficiently, while people with Low VSWM capacity rely more on verbal abilities to compensate for lower spatial abilities when processing symbolic numerals.

Aphantasia is the inability to experience mental imagery during full wakefulness without any prominent perceptual deficits. Visual aphantasia is associated with differences in distributed brain networks, but its neurobiological underpinnings remain a mystery. In particular, aphantasia may arise due to impairments in the top-down control over visual imagination. We predicted that this in turn would prevent the brains of aphantasic participants from differentiating neural activity encoding the contents of imagination from the background noise of resting activity, particularly within the ventral temporal lobes. To test this hypothesis, we re-analysed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data collected from aphantasics (n = 21), hyperphantasics (those with "photographic imagery"; n = 20), and controls (n = 17) during a simple perception and imagery task. We used two measures of informational complexity to quantify the complexity of the spatial pattern of thresholded BOLD signals in the participants' temporal lobes during visual perception and imagery. Both measures of spatial complexity showed significant correlations with imagery vividness. We then performed dynamic functional connectivity analyses on the same data revealing that the higher-order networks of aphantasics were abnormally coupled with the temporal lobes during imagery (p < 0.05). These results provide a novel perspective, reframing aphantasia as an inability of the visual system to selectively activate regions encoding object-specific visual categories above background levels of noise.

The early detection and continuous monitoring of psychosis is of utmost importance in ensuring timely and effective treatment. Current mental health care is unable to meet this demand, partially because methods to detect psychosis are relatively time-intensive and not scalable to large populations. Consequently, there has been an increasing focus on the potential of passive data collection from digital devices to overcome this issue. In the present article, we explore whether the analysis of social media (SM) posts through natural language processing (NLP) could improve the detection of psychosis. We first demonstrate how freely expressed speech can be processed automatically in the laboratory to predict and classify psychosis with high levels of accuracy. We further outline the current state of psychosis classification from SM-derived data and discuss methodological issues that are hampering progress in this field. Finally, we delve into potential pitfalls of such systems and provide insight into how these may be circumvented.

The detection of threatening information conveyed by faces is crucial for human survival and development, especially for children. Previous research has shown that adults perceive male faces with a high facial width-to-height ratio (fWHR) as more aggressive and process this information automatically. However, it is unclear whether children possess similarly. In this study, two experiments were conducted with children (9.61 ± .67 years) to explore their ability to perceive aggression based on fWHR and whether they automatically process this information. In Experiment 1, children were asked to rate the perceived level of aggression in adult faces with high and low fWHR. It was found that high fWHR faces were perceived as more aggressive than low fWHR. In Experiment 2, visual mismatch negativity (vMMN) was used as an indicator to explore automatic processing further in an oddball paradigm. Children were asked to detect fixation size while being presented with adult faces with high or low fWHR in the background. It was observed that high fWHR faces induced vMMN in the 270-330 ms time range, while low fWHR faces did not, suggesting that children are able to automatically process high fWHR faces but not low fWHR. These results suggest that children can detect aggression cues through fWHR and automatically process high fWHR faces.

A hallmark of successful aging is increased life experiences and knowledge. Yet how this additional information is incorporated into semantic memory is unclear. Network science has proven to be a useful tool for modeling semantic memory networks in younger and older adults. Previous research suggests that although vocabulary and knowledge are largely stable across adulthood, older adults may have semantic memory networks that are less efficient, less interconnected, and more segregated. However, prior work, including our own, has largely focused on semantic memory networks derived from highly salient, physical concepts (e.g., animals). Though words essential for natural conversation vary greatly in terms of their psycholinguistic characteristics. In the present study, we examine age-related differences in semantic memory networks derived from a free association task, using both abstract and concrete cues that varied in semantic diversity - the number of unique contexts in which they could appear. Across several analytic approaches, we found that including abstract words in semantic memory networks minimized age-related differences: there were no age differences in network efficiency, but older adults had more interconnected and less segregated semantic memory networks compared to younger adults. Looking at word-level characteristics of the semantic memory networks suggested that for both younger and older adults, words that were high in semantic diversity and were more abstract had stronger connections to other words and were more interconnected. These results suggest that abstract and semantically diverse words are a cornerstone in maintaining older adults' semantic memory networks.

Executive functions (EFs) are high-level cognitive processes essential for adaptive, goal-directed behavior. They are supported by oscillatory neural activity, particularly in the alpha and theta frequency bands, across local and distributed brain networks involving prefrontal regions. Previous studies have used transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) to modulate such activity and have reported significant performance improvement on EF tasks. However, most relied on single-task scores as outcome measures, which may reflect not only domain-general executive functioning but also task-specific or lower-level processes. This double-blind sham-controlled within-subject study examined the effects of online prefrontal tACS at alpha (10 Hz) and theta (6 Hz) frequencies on EF performance, measured via latent-variable scores that capture shared variance across multiple EF tasks, in healthy individuals (n = 24). Outcome measures were derived using the NIH EXAMINER battery, yielding latent scores for four EF components (common EF, cognitive control, working memory, and fluency) as well as task scores. Linear mixed models revealed significantly higher common EF and cognitive control scores during alpha-tACS, with large effect sizes, and smaller, more limited stimulation effects on task scores. Exploratory analyses suggested biological sex-specific response to stimulation, with alpha-tACS effects observed primarily in females. These findings support a causal role for prefrontal alpha-band oscillations in EFs and underscore the value of latent-variable measures of executive functioning in neuromodulation research.

Falsely remembering never-before-seen information can have significant negative consequences during everyday life, and can occur when novel information is semantically or perceptually similar to previously encoded experiences. The aim of the current research was to investigate the extent to which semantic and perceptual false memory are associated with overlapping vs distinct neural processes. To investigate this question, 30 younger adults encoded lists of images and words. At retrieval, participants underwent fMRI scanning and made memory judgments for items seen at encoding (targets) and new items that were perceptually or semantically similar to targets (lures). Consistent with our previous work showing that domain-general cognitive processes predict individual differences in false memory production (West et al., 2025) and consistent with past behavioral and neuroimaging false memory research, false memory activity, irrespective of domain, was associated with overlapping activity within the medial prefrontal cortex and inferior parietal cortex. At the same time, unique domain-specific activation was observed in frontal (e.g., middle and inferior frontal gyri) and parietal (e.g., superior and inferior parietal lobes) regions for semantic false memory and in frontal (e.g., middle and inferior frontal gyri) and occipital (e.g., middle occipital gyrus) regions for perceptual false memory. Multivariate analyses examining the neural patterns associated with falsely remembered and novel, yet related information indicated that semantic and perceptual items were represented as distinct and discriminable within frontoparietal regions commonly active during both semantic and perceptual false memory. Taken together, these results suggest that false memory formation is associated with both domain-general and domain-specific neural processes at retrieval.

Functional laterality manifests across motor and sensory domains, yet analysis of their combined organization within individuals remains underexplored. Gerrits' 2024 (doi: 10.1007/s11065-022-09575-y) segregation bias model provides theoretical support that allows testing specific predictions for the lateralization of brain functions and their phenotype distributions in the population. We applied this approach to investigate sensory-motor laterality on the behavioral level (handedness, footedness, and eyedness) using a large sample (n = 900; 11-70 years).

Accurate perception of visual motion is crucial for daily activities and develops rapidly from infancy to childhood. High-density electroencephalogram (EEG) was utilized longitudinally to study brain responses to structured optic flow and random visual motion in 10 full-term and 10 preterm children at 4 months, 12 months, and 6 years. Visual evoked potential (VEP) analysis showed improved sensitivity to structured optic flow in full-term infants by the end of the first year, indicating effective use of structured information, whereas preterm children showed delayed sensitivity and difficulty distinguishing between different forms of optic flow until early childhood. Temporal spectral evolution (TSE) analysis revealed desynchronizations predominantly in the theta band at 4 months, transitioning to the theta-alpha band at 12 months, and extending into the alpha-beta band at 6 years. Synchronizations were observed in older full-term infants and in 6-year-olds at higher frequencies, more so in full-term children. Coherence connectivity analysis demonstrated more widespread functional connectivity within occipital and parietal areas in full-term participants compared to their preterm peers when processing visual motion. Overall, full-term children showed vast progress from infancy, approaching an adult-like pattern for perceiving visual motion by early childhood. In contrast, preterm children experienced neurodevelopmental delays that persisted into school age, likely linked to dorsal visual stream vulnerabilities.

Whereas aphantasics report lacking voluntary conscious visual imagery, empirical findings indicate that they employ visual strategies to complete tasks. The discrepancy has led some researchers to propose that aphantasics rely on unconscious visual imagery. This paper instead motivates and defends a "conscious" view. Consciousness research uses both visibility and confidence measures. Participants in aphantasia studies are recruited based on their scores on the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ), which closely resembles a visibility measure. To assess whether aphantasics' task-relevant visual imagery is truly unconscious, we should also investigate their confidence in their first-order task performance. The few studies that have explored this suggest that they exhibit good metacognition. These findings therefore support the conscious interpretation.

When we retrieve memories of past navigational episodes, our brain reactivates cortical representations of the spatial information experienced along the way. Although navigation is temporally dynamic in nature, previous studies on cortical memory reactivation have mostly focused on single items or their associated contexts. In this study, we aimed to investigate whether sequential reactivation of navigational events can be measured from cortical electrophysiological activity and is influenced by factors such as age or the availability of spatial cues. Participants were passively navigated through virtual environments and then asked to remember the routes or destinations that they traveled to. Each navigational episodes contained an average of five turns and varied in the presence or absence of landmarks. Given the decline in navigational abilities in aging, we separately tested younger (ages 22-32) and middle-aged participants (ages 41-63) to identify age-related differences in cortical memory reactivation. Comparing EEG spectral patterns between navigational encoding and retrieval, we found that sequential reactivation of turn events was associated with successful spatial memory in younger adults. This sequential reactivation was correlated with the reinstatement of neural activity during distal landmark-viewing and was primarily driven by theta and alpha oscillations. Although middle-aged adults showed a decrease in sequential reactivation overall, those with preserved landmark reinstatement and sequential reactivation patterns exhibited better spatial memory. These results may have implications not only for our understanding of the electrophysiological correlates of navigation and its age-related changes but also for the broader importance of cortical reactivation in episodic memory retrieval.

When performing goal-directed tasks, mistakes can motivate changes in our choices and behaviours. This process of behavioural adaptation is assumed to be at least partly driven by error processing mechanisms in the brain marked by the error-related negativity (ERN). A recently observed perceptual consequence of errors is a temporal binding effect, which is the perceived compression of time between actions and outcomes and is commonly claimed to be an implicit marker for the sense of agency. Given that both phenomena are triggered by errors, we sought to investigate the relationship between ERN amplitude and error-related temporal binding and assess the extent to which each of these predicted several measures of task performance. Utilising a modified Eriksen Flanker task to increase error rates, we measured error-related changes in ERP amplitude (ERN difference wave) and action-outcome interval estimates (error-related temporal binding). Both measures were significantly affected by erroneous responses, and this was correlated between measures - participants with larger ERN amplitude also exhibited stronger error-related binding. When controlling for each other as predictors of task performance, ERN amplitude was shown to independently predict overall error rates, while error-related binding was shown to independently predict the rate of improvement. To our knowledge, this is the first study to observe error-related changes in temporal binding in a flanker task, and the first to measure the relationship between ERN amplitude and temporal binding. We discuss the distinction (and overlap) between the ERN and error-related binding, along with the potential links to the sense of agency.

Sleep plays a crucial role in consolidating recently acquired memories and preparing the brain for learning new ones, but the relationship between these two processes is currently unclear. According to the prominent Active Systems Consolidation model, memory representations that are initially reliant on the hippocampus are redistributed to neocortex during sleep for long-term storage. An indirect assumption of this model is that sleep-associated memory processing paves the way for next-day learning by freeing up hippocampal encoding resources. In this review, we evaluate two central tenets of this 'resource reallocation hypothesis': (i) sleep-associated memory consolidation reduces hippocampal engagement during retrieval, and (ii) this reduction in hippocampal burden enhances the brain's capacity for new learning. We then describe recent work that has directly tested the relationship between sleep-associated memory processing and next-day learning. In the absence of clear evidence supporting the resource reallocation hypothesis, we consider alternative accounts in which efficient learning is not contingent on prior overnight memory processing, but rather that sleep-associated consolidation and post-sleep learning rely on overlapping or independent mechanisms. We conclude by outlining how future research can rigorously test the resource reallocation hypothesis.

Individuals usually have superior memory for bizarre stimuli compared to common ones. However, the extent to which bizarreness influences memory for actions remains unclear. Recent evidence has shown that performed actions represented by an action phrase (verb-object pair) in subject-performed task (SPT) result in better associative memory than simply reading it in verbal task (VT). Here, we directly investigated the effect of bizarreness on associative memory for action components following SPT relative to VT and its underlying memory processes using EEGs. During studying, the participants studied ordinary and bizarre verb-object phrases (pairs) in an SPT or VT condition. During testing, they discriminated between intact, recombined, and new pairs. Behaviorally, associative recognition of verb-object phrases was better following SPT than VT for ordinary and bizarre phrases. Bizarreness improved associative recognition under VT (but not SPT). In the event related potentials (ERP), an early frontal old-new effect (FN400) for intact vs. new pairs was observed under SPT for ordinary and bizarre phrases, whereas for VT, this effect was only observed for bizarre phrase. The FN400 for intact vs. recombined pairs was only present under SPT for ordinary phrases. In the late time window, a parietal old-new effect (LPC) for intact vs. new pairs was obtained under all conditions. The LPC for intact vs. recombined pairs only occurred under VT for bizarre phrases. These results demonstrate that enactment and bizarreness enhance associative recognition through distinct mechanisms by differentially modulating the contributions of familiarity and recollection during retrieval of action-object associations.

Successful speech perception in noise likely involves inhibition of the background noise in order to improve the signal-to-noise ratio, and thereby, the perception. However, the nature and extent of the contributions of the inhibitory mechanisms to speech perception in noise and the interactions among them are currently unclear. The current study investigated the contribution of auditory inhibitory measures mediated by olivocochlear and cortico-cortical processes and working memory (closely associated with cognitive inhibition) on speech perception in noise using structural equation models. For this purpose, a group of 72 neurotypical adults over a wide age range (20-65 years) who were homogenous in terms of their socioeconomic and educational status and quality of life were recruited. The results revealed a strong and significant association between speech perception in noise and the working memory capacity. The brainstem inhibitory measure - the medial olivocochlear reflex - also contributed to speech perception in noise. There was no evidence of a direct contribution by the cortico-cortical inhibitory measures (auditory sensory gating and context-dependent cortical encoding of speech) on speech perception in noise. However, the auditory brainstem and cortico-cortical processes demonstrated a trend of an inverse relationship. An additional finding was that age significantly influenced working memory but not speech perception in noise. Overall, the study demonstrated the relationships among the different inhibitory mechanisms and their contributions to speech perception in noise. It was found that individuals with higher working memory capacity and higher strength of the medial olivocochlear reflex had better speech perception in noise. The findings suggest potential considerations for refining rehabilitation protocols for speech perception in noise deficits and pave path for future studies, which may be conducted using ecologically more valid stimulus paradigms.

Despite hundreds of neuroimaging studies examining the neural correlates of 3D shape perception (as opposed to 2D), there is no consensus because of the diversity of stimuli and depth cues used. We addressed this problem through an activation likelihood estimation (ALE) coordinate-based meta-analysis, pooling together studies that examined the 3D vs 2D shape contrast across multiple depth cues used to render the 3D shapes. A systematic review was performed using Medline, PsychInfo and Embase databases and yielded 25 empirical studies after screening. Articles were split into cue types-disparity (11), motion (10), mental rotation (1), shading (2) and texture (2). We performed three sets of ALE-based coordinate analysis-full-sample ALE analysis, sub-analyses testing individual depth cues separately, and a contrast analysis between disparity-defined 3D shapes and monocularly-defined 3D shapes. Results for the full-sample analysis showed that 3D shape perception is widespread throughout the high-level visual cortex regardless of depth cue. Although cue-specific analyses were underpowered, some trends were observed. Disparity-defined 3D shapes seem to engage higher-level dorsal stream areas, including bilateral intraparietal sulcus (IPS). Motion-defined 3D shape recruited ventral stream regions associated with object recognition processes. Monocularly-defined 3D shapes recruited ventral stream areas, mainly the bilateral inferior lateral cortex and dorsal stream IPS for the right hemisphere. W et al.hen contrasted with disparity, monocularly-defined 3D shapes recruited the left lateral occipital cortex. The results suggest laterality in 3D versus 2D shape representations and that 3D shape representations occur in both ventral and dorsal pathways regardless of the depth cues that define them.