Background: People with Down syndrome (DS) are deficient in verbal memory but relatively preserved in visuospatial perception. Verbal memories are related to semantic knowledge. Receptive ability is better than expressive ability in people with DS but still seriously lags behind their age-matched controls. This lag may result in the weak semantic integration of people with DS. Aims: This study aimed to examine the ability of semantic integration of people with DS by using false-memory tasks. Possible differences in the number of false memories induced by nouns and verbs were of focus. Methods and Procedures: Two phases were involved in the false-memory task. In the study phase, ten-word lists with semantically related associates were presented. In the recognition phase, judgments were to be made about whether the words presented had been heard before. Three types of words were tested: previously presented associates, semantically related lures, and semantically unrelated new words. Outcomes and Results: People with DS overall showed the lowest accuracy among groups in response to tested word types. In the processing of lures, people with DS were worse in recognition than MA controls. In processing unrelated words, people with DS responded least accurately to all types of words compared to control groups. In the processing of associates, people with DS showed similar recognition rates as the MA controls but were less accurate than the CA controls. No difference was observed between nouns and verbs in recognizing word types among groups, though faster responses to nouns than to verbs emerged in college students. Further analyses on topic-wised comparisons of errors across syntactic categories revealed differences in specific concepts among groups, suggesting people with DS were atypical in semantic organization. Conclusions and Implications: People with DS showed mixed patterns in semantic integration by false-memory tasks with delay to associates and deviance to lures together with unrelated words. People with DS showed distinct patterns in processing nouns and verbs while conducting topic-wise comparisons, suggesting that they formed false memories differently based on distinct syntactic categories. We concluded that people with DS develop a deviant semantic structure, hence showing problems in language and social cognition. Category-based rehabilitation is suggested to be implemented for people with DS to improve their semantic knowledge through lexical connections.

Although most category learning studies use feedback for training, little attention has been paid to how individuals utilize feedback implemented as gains or losses during categorization. We compared skilled categorization under three different conditions: Gain (earn points for correct answers), Gain and Loss (earn points for correct answers and lose points for wrong answers) and Correct or Wrong (accuracy feedback only). We also manipulated difficulty and point value, with near boundary stimuli having the highest number of points to win or lose, and stimuli far from the boundary having the lowest point value. We found that the tail of the caudate was sensitive to feedback condition, with highest activity when both Gain and Loss feedback were present and least activity when only Gain or accuracy feedback was present. We also found that activity across the caudate was affected by distance from the decision bound, with greatest activity for the near boundary high value stimuli, and lowest for far low value stimuli. Overall these results indicate that the tail of the caudate is sensitive not only to positive rewards but also to loss and punishment, consistent with recent animal research finding tail of the caudate activity in aversive learning.

OBJECTIVE: This scoping review maps the extant literature on students\' and graduates\' mental health experiences throughout their university-to-work transitions. The current review investigates the methodological features of the studies, the main findings, and the theories that the studies draw on to conceptualise mental health and transitions.
METHODS: This project used a scoping review methodology created and developed by Peters and colleagues and the Joanna Briggs Institute. The review searched academic databases and screened existing studies that met predetermined inclusion criteria.
METHODS: Seven academic databases and Google Scholar were searched with sets of search terms.
UNASSIGNED: The included studies examined participants who were final-year university students or those who had graduated from university within a 3-year period. Studies published in English since 2000 and from any country were included. The review included studies examining the negative dimensions of mental health. The review excluded studies focusing on medical students and graduates.
METHODS: Basic information about the studies and their findings on mental health and university-to-work transitions was retrieved. The findings are presented in tables and in a qualitative thematic summary.
RESULTS: The scoping review included 12 studies. Mental health was often not explicitly defined and it\'s theoretical foundations were not clearly articulated. The review identified factors, including a lack of social support and economic precarity, as sources of adverse mental health. Other protective factors in these studies-variables that guard against mental health problems-were identified, such as career preparedness and having a good job.
CONCLUSIONS: Despite the methodological focus on the negative aspects of mental health, people\'s mental health experiences during university-to-work transitions are not uniformly negative. Clear conceptualisations of mental health in future studies will aid in developing resources to improve well-being.
BACKGROUND: This scoping review adhered to a protocol previously published in this journal and that is registered on the Open Science Framework website (https://osf.io/gw86x).

Existing evidence has revealed that humans can spontaneously categorize many geometric shapes without formal education. Children around 4 years could distinguish between intersecting lines and parallel lines. Three features can be used to identify parallel lines, namely \"translational congruence,\" \"never meet,\" and \"constant distance.\" This study separated them by using pairs of curves that possess only one of these features. Two experiments across 2021-2023, respectively, compared the relative priority of \"translational congruence\" with \"constant distance,\" and \"never meet\" with \"constant distance\" among 3- to 5-year-old Chinese preschoolers (Ntotal = 314, 48% female). The results showed that preschoolers consistently grouped \"constant distance\" curves with parallel lines. This suggests that the core feature of intuitive parallel category is \"constant distance\" at this age.

The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is associated with many cognitive functions, including planning. In the neuropsychology literature planning is reduced to \"look ahead\" ability and most extensively studied with the \"tower\" tasks. The most influential theoretical explanation is that planning is required in the absence of a routine solution and PFC patients have difficulty coping with novelty. There is an alternate view of planning that emphasizes the distinction between real world tasks and laboratory tower tasks. This account focuses on the structure of problem spaces and why patients with lesions to right PFC have difficulty navigating ill-structured problem spaces. To further explore these issues we administered two real world travel planning tasks to 56 Vietnam War veterans with penetrating brain lesions and 14 matched normal controls. One planning task involved familiar knowledge while the other involved knowledge unfamiliar to our participants. Participants also completed the D-KEFS tower task. A subset of 18 patients-with lesions to right anterior prefrontal cortex (BA 10)-were impaired in the travel planning task compared to normal controls. The task familiarity/novelty dimension affected performance across participant groups (familiar-task scores were higher than unfamiliar-task scores), but it did not differentially affect any group. An examination of cognitive strategies utilized by participants revealed that the impaired patient group had difficulty maintaining a sufficient level of abstraction and engaged the task at a much more concrete level than other participants. Interestingly, patients impaired in the real-world planning tasks were not impaired in the tower tasks. We conclude that patients with lesions to right BA 10 have difficulty in real-world planning tasks that can be attributed to difficulties in engaging problems at the appropriate level of abstraction.

Experience replay (ER) is a widely-adopted neuroscience-inspired method to perform lifelong learning. Nonetheless, existing ER-based approaches consider very coarse memory modules with simple memory and rehearsal mechanisms that cannot fully exploit the potential of memory replay. Evidence from neuroscience has provided fine-grained memory and rehearsal mechanisms, such as the dual-store memory system consisting of PFC-HC circuits. However, the computational abstraction of these processes is still very challenging. To address these problems, we introduce the Dual-Memory (Dual-MEM) model emulating the memorization, consolidation, and rehearsal process in the PFC-HC dual-store memory circuit. Dual-MEM maintains an incrementally updated short-term memory to benefit current-task learning. At the end of the current task, short-term memories will be consolidated into long-term ones for future rehearsal to alleviate forgetting. For the Dual-MEM optimization, we propose two learning policies that emulate different memory retrieval strategies: Direct Retrieval Learning and Mixup Retrieval Learning. Extensive evaluations on eight benchmarks demonstrate that Dual-MEM delivers compelling performance while maintaining high learning and memory utilization efficiencies under the challenging experience-once setting.

BACKGROUND: The debate on using concrete versus abstract materials in learning mathematics has been longstanding. For decades, research has focused on the physical characteristics of materials when defining them as concrete or abstract.
OBJECTIVE: This study extends the field by proposing a two-dimensional classification, which defines materials as concrete or abstract based on the two dimensions of representation, namely object (i.e., appearance) and language (i.e., label).
METHODS: A total of 120 university students participated in the study.
METHODS: Participants were randomly assigned to learn the concept of modular arithmetic with one of four types of learning materials: concrete object labelled with concrete language, concrete object labelled with abstract language, abstract object labelled with concrete language and abstract object labelled with abstract language. They were also divided into high and low maths anxiety groups.
RESULTS: Results showed that the students who learnt with abstract objects, regardless of the level of maths anxiety, outperformed their peers who learnt with concrete objects. However, for students with low maths anxiety only, those who learnt with materials labelled with abstract language showed better far-transfer performance compared with those who learnt with materials labelled with concrete language.
CONCLUSIONS: The findings offer a new direction in the conceptualization of concrete and abstract learning materials by specifying the dimensions of representation.

A crucial ability of the human brain is to learn and exploit probabilistic associations between stimuli to facilitate perception and behavior by predicting future events. Although studies have shown how perceptual relationships are used to predict sensory inputs, relational knowledge is often between concepts rather than percepts (e.g., we learned to associate cats with dogs, rather than specific images of cats and dogs). Here, we asked if and how sensory responses to visual input may be modulated by predictions derived from conceptual associations. To this end we exposed participants of both sexes to arbitrary word-word pairs (e.g., car-dog) repeatedly, creating an expectation of the second word, conditional on the occurrence of the first. In a subsequent session, we exposed participants to novel word-picture pairs, while measuring fMRI BOLD responses. All word-picture pairs were equally likely, but half of the pairs conformed to the previously formed conceptual (word-word) associations, whereas the other half violated this association. Results showed suppressed sensory responses throughout the ventral visual stream, including early visual cortex, to pictures that corresponded to the previously expected words compared with unexpected words. This suggests that the learned conceptual associations were used to generate sensory predictions that modulated processing of the picture stimuli. Moreover, these modulations were tuning specific, selectively suppressing neural populations tuned toward the expected input. Combined, our results suggest that recently acquired conceptual priors are generalized across domains and used by the sensory brain to generate category-specific predictions, facilitating processing of expected visual input.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Perceptual predictions play a crucial role in facilitating perception and the integration of sensory information. However, little is known about whether and how the brain uses more abstract, conceptual priors to form sensory predictions. In our preregistered study, we show that priors derived from recently acquired arbitrary conceptual associations result in category-specific predictions that modulate perceptual processing throughout the ventral visual hierarchy, including early visual cortex. These results suggest that the predictive brain uses prior knowledge across various domains to modulate perception, thereby extending our understanding of the extensive role predictions play in perception.

This study aims to combine deep learning technology and user perception to propose an efficient design method that can meet the perceptual needs of users and enhance the competitiveness of products in the market. Firstly, the application development of sensory engineering and the research on sensory engineering product design by related technologies are discussed, and the background is provided. Secondly, the Kansei Engineering theory and the algorithmic process of the convolutional neural network (CNN) model are discussed, and theoretical and technical support is provided. A perceptual evaluation system is established for product design based on the CNN model. Finally, taking a picture of the electronic scale as an example, the testing effect of the CNN model in the system is analyzed. The relationship between product design modeling and sensory engineering is explored. The results show that the CNN model improves the \"logical depth\" of perceptual information of product design and gradually increases the abstraction degree of image information representation. There is a correlation between the user perception impression of electronic weighing scales of different shapes and the design effect of product design shapes. In conclusion, the CNN model and perceptual engineering have in-depth application significance in the image recognition of product design and the perceptual combination of product design modeling. Combined with the CNN model of perceptual engineering, product design is studied. From the perspective of product modeling design, perceptual engineering has been deeply explored and analyzed. In addition, the product perception based on the CNN model can accurately analyze the correlation between product design elements and perceptual engineering and reflect the rationality of the conclusion.

Willems (this issue) proposes a neurocognitive model with a central role allotted to ambiguity in perceived morality and emotion in driving involvement of reflective/mentalizing processes. We argue that abstractness of representation has more explanatory power in this respect. We illustrate this with examples from the verbal and non-verbal domain showing a) concrete-ambiguous emotions processed through reflexive systems and b) abstract-unambiguous emotions processed through the mentalizing system, counter to MA-EM model predictions. However, due to the natural correlation between ambiguity and abstractness, both accounts will typically make convergent predictions.