Assessing the capacity for mental manipulation in patients with statically-determined mild cognitive impairment using digital technology

Aims: Prior research employing a standard backward digit span test has been successful in operationally defining neurocognitive constructs associated with the Fuster’s model of executive attention. The current research sought to test if similar behavior could be obtained using a cross-modal mental manipulation test. Methods: Memory clinic patients were studied. Using Jak-Bondi criteria, 24 patients were classified with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and 33 memory clinic patients did not meet criteria for MCI (i.e. non-MCI). All patients were assessed with the digital version of the WRAML-2 Symbolic Working Memory Test-Part 1, a cross-modal mental manipulation task where patients hear digits, but respond by touching digits from lowest to highest on an answer key. Only 4 and 5-span trials were analyzed. Using an iPad, all test stimuli were played; and, all responses were obtained with a touch key. Only correct trials were analyzed. Average time to complete trials and latency for each digit was recorded. Results: Groups did not differ when average time to complete 4-span trials was calculated. MCI patients displayed slower latency, or required more time to re-order the 1st and 3rd digits. Regression analyses, primarily involving initial and latter response latencies, were associated with better, but different underlying neuropsychological abilities. Almost no 5-span analyses were significant. Conclusions: This cross-modal test paradigm found no difference for total average time. MCI patients generated slower 1st and 3rd response latency, suggesting differences in time allocation to achieve correct serial order recall. Moreover, different neuropsychological abilities were associated with different time-based test components. These data extend prior findings using a standard backward digit span test. Differences in time epochs are consistent with constructs underlying the model of executive attention and help explain mental manipulation deficits in MCI. These latency measures could constitute neurocognitive biomarkers that track emergent disease

Synthesizing Enumeration Techniques For Language Learning

This paper provides positive and negative results on algorithmically synthesizing, from grammars and from decision procedures for classes of languages, learning machines for identifying, from positive data, grammars for the languages in those classes. In the process, the uniformly decidable classes of recursive languages that can be behaviorally correctly identified from positive data are surprisingly characterized by Angluin's 1980 Condition 2 (the subset principle for preventing overgeneralization) . 1 Introduction In the context of learning programs in the limit for functions [KW80, AS83, OSW86b], a variety of enumeration techniques [Gol67, BB75, Wie90, Ful90b] are important and ubiquitous. Here is the archetypal case. Suppose one has an r.e. set P of programs for computing total functions. One proceeds as follows. At each point that one is given data about an input function, one conjectures the first program, if any, listed in P that is correct on the data seen through that point...

Synthesizing Enumeration Techniques For Language Learning

this paper we assume, without loss of generality, that for all oe ` ø , [M(oe) 6=?] ) [M(ø) 6=?]

Bilateral Giant Hydronephrosis in a Ten-Year-Old Male

We describe a ten-year-old male with bilateral giant hydronephrosis due to pelviureteric junction obstruction presenting with abdominal distension and renal failure. The diagnosis was confirmed on computed tomography and required a two-stage procedure, initially percutaneous nephrostomy followed by Anderson–Hynes pyeloplasty with recovery of kidney function

Bilateral Giant Hydronephrosis in a Ten-Year-Old Male

We describe a ten-year-old male with bilateral giant hydronephrosis due to pelviureteric junction obstruction presenting with abdominal distension and renal failure. The diagnosis was confirmed on computed tomography and required a two-stage procedure, initially percutaneous nephrostomy followed by Anderson–Hynes pyeloplasty with recovery of kidney function