Items on the Left Are Better Remembered

We report evidence of a new phenomenon from three experiments: a leftward bias when people try to remember visually presented information. Experiments 1 and 2 showed lateral leftward biases in memory in a large (total N>60000) sample of participants, with data collected via the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) web site. Experiment 3 replicated the findings of a leftwards bias in short-term memory with a more intensive data collection

Dual task impairments in vascular dementia

Several studies have shown that people with Alzheimer's disease (AD) demonstrate difficulties in doing two things at once or 'dual-tasking' and that this dual task impairment is insensitive to normal ageing, chronic depression or prodromal conditions like Mild Cognitive Impairment. It is not known, however, if this impairment is specific to AD, or also present in other dementias, such as vascular dementia (VaD). In this study 15 people with VaD, 25 healthy age-matched and 25 healthy young controls were assessed using a paper and pencil dual tasking paradigm and several measures of working and episodic memory. Age had no effect on dual task performance, but the VaD patients demonstrated a significant impairment in dual tasking ability. Performance on the memory measures was instead affected by age with a further deterioration in the VaD patients. Both dual tasking and memory ability were significantly correlated with disease severity, as assessed by the MMSE. These results indicate that performance on the dual task could be a specific indicator of pathological ageing

What memory binding functions is the hippocampus responsible for?

The role of the hippocampus in binding information in working memory (WM) is little understood. When complex experiences comprise associations between different pieces of information such as objects and locations (relational binding), the function of the hippocampus is required to hold them in WM (Mitchell et al., 2000; 2006; Piekema, 2006). However, recent evidence suggests that if the to-be-associated information leads to the formation of integrated objects such as coloured shapes (conjunctive binding), the hippocampus is less involved in holding temporary representations of these complex events in WM (Baddeley et al., 2010; Piekema, 2006). We investigated the relational and conjunctive binding hypotheses of the hippocampal functions in a patient with right hippocampal damage. The patient and controls were asked to study visual arrays of stimuli which consisted of shape-colour relations (shape-colour pairs) or shape-colour conjunctions (coloured shapes). After the study array, they were presented with a new screen consisting of one set of shapes (line drawings) and one set of colours. They were asked to reconstruct the bindings by selecting the shapes and their corresponding colours. As compared to healthy controls, the patient was impaired in holding relations of shapes and colours in WM whereas he could retain the conjunctions similarly to controls. These results lend support to the role of the hippocampus in supporting memory for inter-item associations but not memory for conjunctions of features which define objects' identity

Short-term memory binding in mild cognitive impairment

We showed that short-term memory (STM) binding is sensitive to sporadic and familial Alzheimer's disease (AD) but is not affected by healthy ageing, chronic depression in the elderly or other forms of dementia. STM binding deficits were also observed in individuals with a genetic susceptibility for AD in the preclinical stages. Hence, we aim to investigate longitudinally individuals with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) using STM binding tasks. Here we report on preliminary cross-sectional results. A comprehensive neuropsychological test battery and a visual STM task were given to 21 MCI patients and 20 controls. The STM task required participants to recognise changes across two consecutive arrays presenting either single features (colour or shape) or feature bindings. The MCI group performed significantly poorer than controls on standard tests of memory, attention and on the binding condition of the STM task, but not on single feature conditions. Performance on the binding task and on standard memory tests did not correlate. Eight MCI patients clearly performed outwith the range of normality in the binding task. However, they did not significantly differ from the other 13 MCI patients in disease severity or demographic and neuropsychological variables. Six patients with binding impairments showed a multiple domain profile whereas ten patients with a preserved binding function showed an amnesic profile [Chi-square = 5.45, p = 0.020]. These results suggest that (1) the binding task is assessing a function different from other memory tests and that (2) STM binding may be differentially impaired in MCI subgroups

Individual integrity and public morality in scientific publishing

Science and science reporting are under threat. Knowingly or not, researchers and clinicians are part of this debacle. This is not due so much to the notorious replication crisis, as to our acceptance of lowering common morality for personal gains, including the widespread, deprecable phenomenon of predatory publishing. Rather than fiercefully countering this loathsome practice, academics are accepting, often supporting a masquerade solution: paying several thousand dollars to publish for all their own papers. This new policy will create a disparity across richer and poorer disciplines; will result in concentrating even more in the hands of large, rich, Western institutions, also penalising younger researchers; will kill observational studies and exploratory research; and will make disseminating science depending more on finances than on quality. This article calls for the full awareness of the academic community on the risks of the current situation in scientific publishing

Politics dictating on science is like a gunshot in a concert:Commentary to “Havana Syndrome: A Post Mortem”, by Robert E. Bartholomew and Robert W. Baloh

In their requiem to the so-called Havana syndrome, Bartholomew and Baloh list five factors that contributed to its creation. I will elaborate on one of them, namely that this novel entity was forged with unreliable data