Associative Agreement as a Predictor of Naming Ability in Alzheimer's Disease: A Case for the Semantic Nature of Associative Links

We aimed to address the long-standing issue of the nature of the relationships that link a cue word to words associated with it. In keeping with a recently proposed neuropsychological model of semantic memory (Zannino et al., 2015), we provide support for the hypothesis that associative links are semantic in nature and not lexical. In support of this hypothesis, we demonstrate a relationship in healthy subjects between the probability of producing word X in response to cue word Y in a free association task and the probability of using word X to describe the meaning of word Y. Furthermore, we provide evidence that associative measures are altered in people suffering from Alzheimer's disease (AD) and predict their level of performance in a picture-naming task. We provide a parsimonious account of the experimental data gathered form these different sources of evidence according to the hypothesis that the links between a cue word and its associates can be viewed as binding a concept (the cue) to pieces of information regarding its meaning (the associates)

Conditioned Text Generation with Transfer for Closed-Domain Dialogue Systems

International audienceScarcity of training data for task-oriented dialogue systemsis a well known problem that is usually tackled with costly and time-consuming manual data annotation. An alternative solution is to relyon automatic text generation which, although less accurate than humansupervision, has the advantage of being cheap and fast. Our contributionis twofold. First we show how to optimally train and control the generationof intent-specific sentences using a conditional variational autoencoder.Then we introduce a new protocol calledquery transferthat allows toleverage a large unlabelled dataset, possibly containing irrelevant queries,to extract relevant information. Comparison with two different baselinesshows that this method, in the appropriate regime, consistently improvesthe diversity of the generated queries without compromising their quality.We also demonstrate the effectiveness of our generation method as a dataaugmentation technique for language modelling tasks

Associative Agreement as a Predictor of Naming Ability in Alzheimer's Disease: A Case for the Semantic Nature of Associative Links

We aimed to address the long-standing issue of the nature of the relationships that link a cue word to words associated with it. In keeping with a recently proposed neuropsychological model of semantic memory (Zannino et al., 2015), we provide support for the hypothesis that associative links are semantic in nature and not lexical. In support of this hypothesis, we demonstrate a relationship in healthy subjects between the probability of producing word X in response to cue word Y in a free association task and the probability of using word X to describe the meaning of word Y. Furthermore, we provide evidence that associative measures are altered in people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and predict their level of performance in a picture-naming task. We provide a parsimonious account of the experimental data gathered form these different sources of evidence according to the hypothesis that the links between a cue word and its associates can be viewed as binding a concept (the cue) to pieces of information regarding its meaning (the associates)

Effect of Dual-Task Motor-Cognitive Training in Preventing Falls in Vulnerable Elderly Cerebrovascular Patients: A Pilot Study

Falling is a frequent and major clinical problem among older adults, as well as in patients with chronic cerebrovascular diseases (CVD). At present, sequential (mixed) and simultaneously (dual-task) motor-cognitive trainings are the best approaches to affording patients more autonomy in their everyday motor independence while reducing fall risks and consequences. The objective of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of an advanced and innovative dual-task motor-cognitive rehabilitation program on fall risks in vulnerable older persons with chronic CVD. To this purpose, 26 consecutive older fallers with chronic CVD were recruited, and completed a mixed motor-cognitive or a dual-task motor-cognitive training program. Each patient also underwent two test evaluations to assess balance, gait, fear of falling, and walking performance at pre-and post-intervention. We found that our experimental motor-cognitive dual-task rehabilitation program could be an effective method to improve walking balance, gait, walking speed, and fear of falling, while reducing the risk of falls in older people with chronic CVD. Furthermore, results show that the simultaneous motor-cognitive training is more effective than the sequential motor-cognitive training. Therefore, our study brings innovative data, which can contribute positively to the management of this population

Primary and Recall Immune Responses to SARS-CoV-2 in Breakthrough Infection

Breakthrough infections in SARS-CoV-2 vaccinated individuals are an ideal circumstance for the simultaneous exploration of both the vaccine-induced memory reaction to the spike (S) protein and the primary response to the membrane (M) and nucleocapsid (N) proteins generated by natural infection. We monitored 15 healthcare workers who had been vaccinated with two doses of Pfizer BioNTech BNT162b2 and were then later infected with the SARS-CoV-2 B.1.617.2. (Delta) variant, analysing the antiviral humoral and cellular immune responses. Natural infection determined an immediate and sharp rise in anti-RBD antibody titres and in the frequency of both S-specific antibody secreting cells (ASCs) and memory B lymphocytes. T cells responded promptly to infection by activating and expanding already at 2–5 days. S-specific memory and emerging M- and N-specific T cells both expressed high levels of activation markers and showed effector capacity with similar kinetics but with different magnitude. The results show that natural infection with SARS-CoV-2 in vaccinated individuals induces fully functional and rapidly expanding T and B lymphocytes in concert with the emergence of novel virus-specific T cells. This swift and punctual response also covers viral variants and captures a paradigmatic case of a healthy adaptive immune reaction to infection with a mutating virus

Weil e Bookchin: l'approccio ecologico alla costruzione di una nuova comunità

Sotto all’apparente distanza il pensiero di Weil e quello di Bookchin possono invece rivelarsi in intima connessione. Uno dei punti cruciali in cui possiamo individuare l’intersezione delle riflessioni di Weil e Bookchin riguarda il concetto di limite. Il limite, o meglio la resistenza che esso ci offre, è ciò che apre alla consapevolezza di dover operare quel decentramento – nella sfera dell’immanenza, corrispondente, in quella della trascendenza, alla decreazione – necessario a invertire il processo di sradicamento e annichilimento dell’umano che si acuisce e sembra divenire la cifra dominante del Moderno e, in particolare, del Novecento