UNASSIGNED: Aging is a natural process and is often associated with an increased incidence of cognitive impairment. Physical exercise, diet, and leisure activities (music, dance, and art) are some of the lifestyle factors that contribute to healthy aging. The present study aims to explore the differences in cognitive functioning between aging individuals involved in musical activity throughout their lifetime and the ones who were not.
UNASSIGNED: Fifty-one healthy elderly individuals (50-80 years of age) residing in an urban locality were selected for the study from the Tata Longitudinal Study of Aging cohort. Participants were divided into two groups: Active musicians trained in Carnatic music for more than five years (n = 18) and age-matched non-musicians (n = 33). Addenbrooke cognitive examination-III, Hindi mental status examination, and trail-making test-B (TMT-B) were used to assess cognitive functioning. A Generalized Linear Regression Model was performed including covariates such as gender, age, and years of education. We also looked at the available brain magnetic resonance imaging data of a subset of our study population to inspect the volumetric differences between musicians and non-musicians.
UNASSIGNED: Our results showed that musicians had significantly better visuospatial abilities as compared to non-musicians (P = 0.043). Musicians (130.89 ± 45.16 s) also took less time to complete the TMT-B task than non-musicians (148.73 ± 39.65 s), although it was not a statistically significant difference (P =0.150). In addition, brain imaging data suggested that musicians had increased gray matter volumes in the right precuneus, right post-central gyrus, right medial and superior frontal gyrus, right orbital gyrus, left middle temporal gyrus, left cuneus, left fusiform gyrus, and bilateral cingulate gyrus.
UNASSIGNED: Our findings are indicative of music being an important attribute in improving cognitive reserve and predicting cognitive resilience. These findings pave the way to explore the utility of non-pharmacological interventions, such as Music Therapy (especially Carnatic music in the Indian context), as a potential factor for improving cognitive reserve in elderly individuals.

While fronto-posterior underconnectivity has often been reported in autism, it was shown that different contexts may modulate between-group differences in functional connectivity. Here, we assessed how different task paradigms modulate functional connectivity differences in a young autistic sample relative to typically developing children. Twenty-three autistic and 23 typically developing children aged 6 to 15 years underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning while completing a reasoning task with visuospatial versus semantic content. We observed distinct connectivity patterns in autistic versus typical children as a function of task type (visuospatial vs. semantic) and problem complexity (visual matching vs. reasoning), despite similar performance. For semantic reasoning problems, there was no significant between-group differences in connectivity. However, during visuospatial reasoning problems, we observed occipital-occipital, occipital-temporal, and occipital-frontal over-connectivity in autistic children relative to typical children. Also, increasing the complexity of visuospatial problems resulted in increased functional connectivity between occipital, posterior (temporal), and anterior (frontal) brain regions in autistic participants, more so than in typical children. Our results add to several studies now demonstrating that the connectivity alterations in autistic relative to neurotypical individuals are much more complex than previously thought and depend on both task type and task complexity and their respective underlying cognitive processes.

Background/Objectives: Premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) is an understudied psychiatric condition affecting reproductive-age women who experience negative mood in the luteal phase of the menstrual cycle. Cognitive functions in PMDD are not well understood as patients have been tested in the luteal phase. This may confound study results due to noted emotional interferences, as well as the potential opposing effects of the sex hormones estradiol and progesterone. In the present study, we evaluated visuospatial function in the follicular phase in women with PMDD and healthy controls, and further examined the effect of estradiol as research into the hormonal mediation of visuospatial function in reproductive-age women has produced mixed results. Methods: To this end, we analyzed estradiol concentrations using the gold standard mass spectrometry. Serum samples were collected in the early follicular and mid/late follicular subphases when estradiol is low and high, respectively, while progesterone is low and steady. We assessed visuospatial function using the classic mental rotation task. Results: Women with PMDD had a higher mental rotation total score (t = 2.17; p < 0.05). The addition of six demographic, biological, and anthropomorphic variables in a hierarchical fashion accounted for 45.3% of the total variance in the final model with diagnosis remaining statistically significant (t = 4.36; p < 0.001). Estradiol did not mediate the group difference and was not significantly associated with visuospatial function. Conclusions: The present results provide support for new research directions into the potential biological mechanisms that underlie the pathophysiology of PMDD, represented as enhanced visuospatial ability in women with PMDD in the follicular phase. We review the theory that PMDD is a disorder of the enhanced excitation-to-inhibition ratio, with a focus on findings to date from brain imaging research.

OBJECTIVE: In older adults with Alzheimer\'s disease, slowing of electroencephalographic (EEG) activity during REM sleep has been observed. Few studies have examined EEG slowing during REM in those with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and none have examined its relationship with cognition in this at-risk population.
METHODS: Two hundred and ten older adults (mean age = 67.0, SD = 8.2 years) underwent comprehensive neuropsychological, medical, and psychiatric assessment and overnight polysomnography. Participants were classified as subjective cognitive impairment (SCI; n = 75), non-amnestic MCI (naMCI, n = 85), and amnestic MCI (aMCI, n = 50). REM EEG slowing was defined as (δ + θ)/(α + σ + β) power and calculated for frontal, central, parietal, and occipital regions. Analysis of variance compared REM EEG slowing between groups. Correlations between REM EEG slowing and cognition, including learning and memory, visuospatial and executive functions, were examined within each subgroup.
RESULTS: The aMCI group had significantly greater REM EEG slowing in the parietal and occipital regions compared to the naMCI and SCI groups (partial η2 = 0.06, p < 0.05 and 0.06, p < 0.05, respectively), and greater EEG slowing in the central region compared to SCI group (partial η2 = 0.03, p < 0.05). Greater REM EEG slowing in parietal (r = -0.49) and occipital regions (r = -0.38 [O1/M2] and -0.33 [O2/M1]) were associated with poorer visuospatial performance in naMCI.
CONCLUSIONS: REM EEG slowing may differentiate older adults with memory impairment from those without. Longitudinal studies are now warranted to examine the prognostic utility of REM EEG slowing for cognitive and dementia trajectories.

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Cognitive function represents a complex neurophysiological capacity of the human brain, encompassing a higher level of neural processing and integration. It is widely acknowledged that the cerebrum plays a commanding role in the regulation of cognitive functions. However, the specific role of the cerebellum in cognitive processes has become a subject of considerable scholarly intrigue. In 1998, Schmahmann first proposed the concept of \"cognitive affective syndrome (CCAS),\" linking cerebellar damage to cognitive and emotional impairments. Since then, a substantial body of literature has emerged, exploring the role of the cerebellum in cognitive neurological function. The cerebellum\'s adjacency to the cerebral cortex, brainstem, and spinal cord suggests that the cerebral-cerebellar network loops play a crucial role in the cerebellum\'s participation in cognitive neurological functions. In this review, we comprehensively examine the recent literature on the involvement of the cerebellum in cognitive functions from three perspectives: the cytological basis of the cerebellum and its anatomical functions, the cerebellum and cognitive functions, and Crossed cerebellar diaschisis. Our aim is to shed light on the role and mechanisms of the cerebellum in cognitive neurobrain networks.

BACKGROUND: The increasing number of physicians that are trained in point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) warrants critical evaluation and improvement of current training methods. Performing POCUS is a complex task and it is unknown which (neuro)cognitive mechanisms are most important in competence development of this skill. This systematic review was conducted to identify determinants of POCUS competence development that can be used to optimize POCUS training.
METHODS: PubMed, Web of Science, Cochrane Library, Emcare, PsycINFO and ERIC databases were searched for studies measuring ultrasound (US) skills and aptitude. The papers were divided into three categories: \"Relevant knowledge\", \"Psychomotor ability\" and \'Visuospatial ability\'. The \'Relevant knowledge\' category was further subdivided in \'image interpretation\', \'technical aspects\' and \'general cognitive abilities\'. Visuospatial ability was subdivided in visuospatial subcategories based on the Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) Model of Intelligence v2.2, which includes visuospatial manipulation and visuospatial perception. Post-hoc, a meta-analysis was performed to calculate pooled correlations.
RESULTS: 26 papers were selected for inclusion in the review. 15 reported on relevant knowledge with a pooled coefficient of determination of 0.26. Four papers reported on psychomotor abilities, one reported a significant relationship with POCUS competence. 13 papers reported on visuospatial abilities, the pooled coefficient of determination was 0.16.
CONCLUSIONS: There was a lot of heterogeneity in methods to assess possible determinants of POCUS competence and POCUS competence acquisition. This makes it difficult to draw strong conclusions on which determinants should be part of a framework to improve POCUS education. However, we identified two determinants of POCUS competence development: relevant knowledge and visuospatial ability. The content of relevant knowledge could not be retrieved in more depth. For visuospatial ability we used the CHC model as theoretical framework to analyze this skill. We could not point out psychomotor ability as a determinant of POCUS competence.

Gender differences in spatial abilities favor males in both childhood and adulthood. During early development, this discrepancy can be attributed, among other things, to the influence of an early testosterone surge in boys, societal stereotypes, and expectations about gender. In the present work, we created a spatial task (including letter rotation and letter mirroring) which used letters as stimuli and evaluated the performance of school-aged children (6-10 years old). During this age period, children are being taught literacy skills which rely on the reorganization of cortical networks and the breakdown of mirror generalization. We divided our sample (N = 142, 73 females) into two age groups: 1st-2nd (literacy acquisition; N = 70, 33 females) and 3rd-5th (literacy consolidation; N = 72, 40 females) graders. While boys performed significantly better in letter rotation in the older group, girls\' performance remained substandard in both groups. This pattern is reversed for the mirror task, with older girls outperforming their younger counterparts and boys having similar performance in the two groups. Since the age period of our sample is not associated with large variations in the levels of reproductive steroids, we propose that the similarity of performance between younger and older girls in mental rotation of letters could be associated with society\'s traditional attitudes and expectations on the relationship between visual-spatial skills and gender. As for the mirror task, while only girls had a significant difference between the two age groups, boys did show an improvement, as expected for the inhibition of mirror generalization for letters during reading acquisition.

Dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB) is an insidious neurodegenerative disease characterised by a precipitous decline in cognition, sleep disturbances, motor impairment and psychiatric features. Recently, criteria for prodromal DLB (pDLB) including clinical features and biomarkers have been put forward to aid the classification and research of this ambiguous cohort of patients. Researchers can use these criteria to classify patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) with Lewy bodies (MCI-LB) as either possible (either one core clinical feature or one biomarker are present) or probable pDLB (at least two core clinical features, or one core clinical feature and at least one biomarker present). However, as isolated REM sleep behaviour disorder (iRBD) confirmed with polysomnography (PSG) can be included as both a clinical and a biomarker feature, potentially reducing the specificity of these diagnostic criteria. To address this issue, the current study classified a cohort of 47 PSG-confirmed iRBD patients as probable prodromal DLB only in the presence of an additional core feature or if there was an additional non-PSG biomarker. Thirteen iRBD patients demonstrated MCI (iRBD-MCI). In the iRBD-MCI group, one presented with parkinsonism and was thus classified as probable pDLB, whilst the remaining 12 were classified as only possible pDLB. All patients performed three tasks designed to measure attentional deficits, visual hallucinations and visuospatial impairment. Patients also attended clinical follow-ups to monitor for transition to DLB or another synucleinopathy. Findings indicated that the only patient categorised by virtue of having two core clinical features as probable pDLB transitioned over 28 months to a diagnosis of DLB. The performance of this probable pDLB patient was also ranked second-highest for their hallucinatory behaviours and had comparatively lower visuospatial accuracy. These findings highlight the need for more stringent diagnostic research criteria for pDLB, given that only one of the 13 patients who would have satisfied the current guidelines for probable pDLB transitioned to DLB after two years and was indeed the patient with two orthogonal core clinical features.

It has been consistently reported that deaf individuals experience mathematical difficulties compared to their hearing peers. However, the idea that deafness and early language deprivation might differently affect verbal (i.e., multiplication) vs. visuospatial (i.e., subtraction) arithmetic performances is still under debate. In the present paper, three groups of 21 adults (i.e., deaf signers, hearing signers, and hearing controls) were therefore asked to perform, as fast and as accurately as possible, subtraction and multiplication operations. No significant group effect was found for accuracy performances. However, reaction time results demonstrated that the deaf group performed both arithmetic operations slower than the hearing groups. This group difference was even more pronounced for multiplication problems than for subtraction problems. Weaker language-based phonological representations for retrieving multiplication facts, and sensitivity to interference are two hypotheses discussed to explain the observed dissociation.