Patterns of language and visuospatial functional lateralization and cognitive ability: a systematic review

Too smart to be selfish? Measures of cognitive ability, social preferences, and consistency

The authors evaluated the reliability and validity of a set of 7 behavioral decision-making tasks, measuring different aspects of the decision-making process. The tasks were administered to individuals from diverse populations. Participants showed relatively consistent performance within and across the 7 tasks, which were then aggregated into an Adult Decision-Making Competence (A-DMC) index that showed good reliability. The validity of the 7 tasks and of overall A-DMC emerges in significant relationships with measures of socioeconomic status, cognitive ability, and decision-making styles. Participants who performed better on the A-DMC were less likely to report negative life events indicative of poor decision making, as measured by the Decision Outcomes Inventory. Significant predictive validity remains when controlling for demographic measures, measures of cognitive ability, and constructive decision-making styles. Thus, A-DMC appears to be a distinct construct relevant to adults' real-world decisions.

Assessing hearing and cognition challenges in consumer processing of televised risk information: Validation of self-reported measures using performance indicators

Previous research has shown that psychometrically assessed cognitive abilities are predictive of achievements in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) even in highly selected samples. Spatial ability, in particular, has been found to be crucial for success in STEM, though its role relative to other abilities has been shown mostly when assessed years before entering higher STEM education. Furthermore, the role of spatial ability for mathematics in higher STEM education has been markedly understudied, although math is central across STEM domains. We investigated whether ability differences among students who entered higher STEM education were predictive of achievements during the first undergraduate year. We assessed 317 undergraduate students in Switzerland (150 from mechanical engineering and 167 from math-physics) on multiple measures of spatial, verbal and numerical abilities. In a structural equation model, we estimated the effects of latent ability factors on students’ achievements on a range of first year courses. Although ability-test scores were mostly at the upper scale range, differential effects on achievements were found: spatial ability accounted for achievements in an engineering design course beyond numerical, verbal and general reasoning abilities, but not for math and physics achievements. Math and physics achievements were best predicted by numerical, verbal and general reasoning abilities. Broadly, the results provide evidence for the predictive power of individual differences in cognitive abilities even within highly competent groups. More specifically, the results suggest that spatial ability’s role in advanced STEM learning, at least in math-intensive subjects, is less critical than numerical and verbal reasoning abilities.

Although memory retrieval often enhances subsequent memory, Peterson and Mulligan (2013) reported conditions under which retrieval produces poorer subsequent recall-the negative testing effect. The item-specific-relational account proposes that the effect occurs when retrieval disrupts interitem organizational processing relative to the restudy condition. Rawson et al. (2015), in contrast, failed to replicate the negative testing effect despite repeated high-powered attempts. This article examines the discrepant results, ruling out differences in procedures, and concludes that differences in participant population produced the varying outcome. Specifically, participants from the University of North Carolina (UNC) and Kent State University (KSU) completed the same version of the negative-testing paradigm and were assessed on several measures of cognitive ability (working memory capacity, Raven's progressive matrices, and SAT or ACT score). For the UNC sample, free recall scores and the amount of category clustering (a measure of organizational processing) was greater in the restudy than retrieval condition (i.e., the negative testing effect was found); for the KSU sample, there was no difference on either measure. Furthermore, in the restudy condition, recall and clustering was greater for UNC than KSU students whereas in the retrieval condition, there was no effect of site on either measure. As expected, measures of cognitive ability were greater for the UNC than KSU sample. The results indicate that the negative testing effect is replicable but is subject to limitation related to the participant population. An analysis in terms of the relationship between cognitive ability and memory predicted this pattern of results. (PsycINFO Database Record

Many older adults have inadequate health-related literacy, which is associated with poor health outcomes. Thus, it is important to identify determinants of health literacy. We investigated relationships between health literacy and general cognitive and sensory abilities, as well as education, health, and demographic variables, in a community sample of middle-aged and older adults. Participants were 314 community-dwelling adults (67% female, 48% African American) diagnosed with chronic heart failure recruited for a pharmacist-based intervention study to improve adherence to chronic heart failure medications. We adminstered demographic, health, education, cognitive (e.g., processing speed, working memory), and sensory measures, and the Short Test of Functional Health Literacy in Adults (STOFHLA), as part of the baseline condition of this study. STOFHLA scores were lower for participants who were older, less educated, male, African American, had more comorbidities, or scored lower on all cognitive ability measures. Hierarchical linear regression analyses showed that education and cognitive ability were independently associated with the STOFHLA measure and explained age differences in health literacy. The association of cognitive abilities and literacy has important implications for health literacy models and for interventions to reduce the impact of low health literacy on health outcomes. For example, medication instructions should be designed to reduce comprehension demands on general cognitive abilities as well as literacy skills.

Intelligence, Genetics of: Cognitive Abilities

The effect of long standing cerebral damage upon the pattern of functional lateralization revealed by division of the forebrain commissures was investigated in a young conunissurotomy patient with birth injury to the somato-sensory region of his left hemisphere. Results from a battery of sensory - motor tasks showed that, unlike previous conunissurotomy cases, the major hemisphere of this subject had access to somesthetic information from the ipsilateral as well as the contralateral hand, thus allowing him to name objects out of sight in his left hand, and to use this hand to tactually find items, the pictures or names of which had been visually presented to only the left hemisphere. The most plausible explanation for these exceptional cross integrative abilities would be the presence of a left sided ipsilateral somesthetic projection, which, in compensation for the subject's early brain damage, has strengthened into a functional system. Additional evidence for compensatory reorganization in this boy was found in his minor hemisphere, which exhibited an enhanced capacity for expressive language, being capable of transcribing printed words into script6 and, upon occasion, of writing the name of an object. Further research into the lateralization of higher intellectual functions in man involved a study of the psychological processes responsible for the superiority of the right side of the brain on certain perceptual activities. The minor hemisphere, in the several commissurotomy patients tested, was found to excel the major on tasks involving visualization, from incomplete or disjointed sensory data, of the total stimulus configuration: this was revealed by its supremacy on such problems as: judging from a tactual or visual inspection of an arc, the size of the circle from which it had come, or mentally reconstructing the contour of a geometric shape seen in a fragmented state, or perceiving the pattern inherent in a visual display due to the differential spacing of its components. Extension of this testing to normal persons established that competency in the handling part-whole relationships is, in some manner, correlated with handedness, as left handed individuals performed much worse than right handed ones.

The neural mechanisms of infant speech perception are an important topic of cognitive neuroscientific research. One key theoretical question in this area surrounds the lateralization of infant neural speech responses. Specifically, it is important to determine whether infants have patterns of left lateralization for speech in their frontal and temporal lobes, as is commonly seen in adults. However, the spatial patterns of infant findings are inconsistent; some studies show the frontal and temporal regions of both hemispheres activating, while others demonstrate activation predominantly or only in the left hemisphere. This meta-analysis, for the first time in the field, examines studies using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to determine the field-wide pattern of activation of the frontal and temporal lobes when infants are exposed to speech. In this pre-registered meta-analysis, we first completed a literature search using keywords through various popular online databases: PubMed, Web of Science, and the UBC Library. Papers were screened according to a pre-determined inclusion criterion. Those selected for our review would be analyzed for their methodologies and activation results. We coded the results for each contrast for each paper (e.g., neural activation patterns to speech stimuli vs. baseline). Overall, there was not strong evidence for left lateralization in either the temporal or the frontal lobes. We also did not find evidence that any lateralization pattern changed with age. One analysis revealed that patterns of lateralization in the left hemisphere may differ depending on language familiarity, with a marginally significant pattern of left lateralization when infants hear a familiar language. Overall, this meta-analysis provides an overview of the current state of the field concerning localized neural responses to speech stimuli and provides a field-wide answer to the question of the patterns of lateralization to speech stimuli found in infancy.

To examine characteristics that predict the progression from mild cognitive impairment to dementia. Of 970 patients recruited from nine memory clinics around Australia, 185 had mild cognitive impairment diagnosed. Measures of cognitive ability, functional ability, and neuropsychiatric symptoms were completed at baseline and over 3 years of follow up. Over 3 years, 52 (28%) patients with mild cognitive impairment developed dementia. Older age, lower cognitive ability at baseline, and faster decline in cognitive ability over the first 6 months of follow up, but not depression, predicted progression to dementia. The findings confirm that simple clinical data such as age, cognitive ability at baseline, and rate of cognitive decline are important predictors of progression from mild cognitive impairment to dementia over 3 years.

Cognitive failures on several reasoning and judgment tasks can be explained by miserly information processing tendencies. These tasks have been examined in child and youth samples, and we extend this work by examining the developmental trajectory of performance on these cognitive bias tasks and their association with other markers of cognitive sophistication. A longitudinal design was used to examine the development of resistance to cognitive biases in a sample of 204 typically developing children and youth. These youth were 8–14 years of age at first assessment and were assessed at three measurement occasions separated by 3 years. Resistance to cognitive biases as represented by performance on five reasoning and judgment tasks, including ratio bias, belief‐bias syllogisms, attribute framing problems, base‐rate sensitivity, and temporal discounting. The developmental trajectory of resistance to cognitive biases was examined. We also estimated associations between trajectories of resistance to cognitive biases and measures of cognitive abilities, actively open‐minded thinking, and superstitious thinking to examine how individual differences in other measures of cognitive sophistication were associated with the development of resistance to cognitive biases. Cognitive ability measures included intelligence (verbal and nonverbal) and executive function tasks (interference control and set‐shifting). Growth modeling results showed that resistance to cognitive biases increased linearly from 8 to 15 years of age, followed by a flat mean trajectory up to age 20. Cognitive ability, actively open‐minded thinking, and superstitious thinking predicted individual differences in resistance to cognitive biases, but not changes in resistance to cognitive biases. Performance on resistance to cognitive biases tasks was positively correlated with self‐ and parent‐reported academic achievement.

White matter (WM) integrity has been related to cognitive ability in adults and children, but it remains largely unknown how WM maturation in early life supports emergent cognition. The associations between tract-based measures of fractional anisotropy (FA) and axial and radial diffusivity (AD, RD) shortly after birth, at age 1, and at age 2 and cognitive measures at 1 and 2 years were investigated in 447 healthy infants. We found that generally higher FA and lower AD and RD across many WM tracts in the first year of life were associated with better performance on measures of general cognitive ability, motor, language, and visual reception skills at ages 1 and 2, suggesting an important role for the overall organization, myelination, and microstructural properties of fiber pathways in emergent cognition. RD in particular was consistently related to ability, and protracted development of RD from ages 1 to 2 years in several tracts was associated with higher cognitive scores and better language performance, suggesting prolonged plasticity may confer cognitive benefits during the second year of life. However, we also found that cognition at age 2 was weakly associated with WM properties across infancy in comparison to child and demographic factors including gestational age and maternal education. Our findings suggest that early postnatal WM integrity across the brain is important for infant cognition, though its role in cognitive development should be considered alongside child and demographic factors.

Deficits in theory of mind (ToM), evident in most individuals with autism, have been suggested as a core deficit of autism. ToM difficulties in young siblings of children with autism (SIBS-A) compared to siblings of typically developing children (SIBS-TD) would place the former within the broad phenotype. We examined ToM's possible associations with measures of language, cognition, and daily living skills. Participants comprised 24 SIBS-A and 24 matched SIBSTD aged 4.6 years. They completed the false belief and the strange stories tasks. We also collected measures of verbal and cognitive ability and daily living skills. Non-significant differences emerged between the groups on both ToM tasks. Differences did emerge in within-group associations between ToM ability and receptive language. The conclusion is that SIBS-A show resilience in ToM abilities. Possibly, these deficits are not genetically transferred to siblings, at least as measured in laboratory-based ToM tasks.

Although the link between developmental dyslexia and visual-spatial deficit has been recurrently highlighted, the relationship between visual-spatial abilities and reading performance is still a controversial issue, considering the orthographic variability of the language being learned. This study aimed to examine whether visuo-spatial abilities (i.e. attention, short-term memory, and relations) contribute significantly to predicting word and pseudo-word reading independently of phonological awareness in Arabic speaking children in grades 4 and 5. An inter-groups comparison between two groups of readers comprising typical readers (n = 44) and children with dyslexia (n = 32). All participants were tested in phonological (phonological awareness) and visuo-spatial measures (visual short-term memory test, visuo-spatial attention, and visuo-spatial relations). Results showed that typical readers outperformed the group of dyslexics in all the phonological and visuo-spatial measures. Visuo-spatial abilities were also a contributing factor in predicting word reading after controlling for phonological awareness, age, and non-verbal reasoning. Findings indicate that vowelised word reading in Arabic is heavily underpinned by phonological awareness and visuo-spatial abilities, found to be impaired in a group with dyslexia. Findings are viewed in the frame that reveals the integrated roles of phonological awareness and visual and spatial abilities in reading development.

Placing inspection time, reaction time, and perceptual speed in the broader context of cognitive ability: The VPR model in the Lothian Birth Cohort 1936