The executive functions in overweight and obesity: a systematic review of neuropsychological cross-sectional and longitudinal studies

Background: The increasing incidence of people affected by overweight or obesity is a significant health problem. The knowledge of the factors which influences the inappropriate eating behaviors causing excessive body fat is an essential goal for the research. Overweight and obesity are significant risk factors for many health diseases, such as cardiovascular problems, diabetes. Recently, many studies have focused on the relationship between body weight and cognitive processes. Objectives: This systematic review is aimed to investigate the existence and the nature of the relationship between excessive body weight (overweight/obesity) and executive functions, analyzing cross-sectional, and longitudinal studies in order to verify the evidence of a possible causality between these variables. Methods: The review was carried out according to the PRISMA-Statement, through systematic searches in the scientific databases PubMed, Medline, PsychInfo, and PsycArticles. The studies selected examined performance on executive tasks by participants with overweight or obesity, aged between 5 and 70 years. Studies examining eating disorders or obesity resulting from other medical problems were excluded. Furthermore, the results of studies using a cross-sectional design and those using a longitudinal one were separately investigated. Results: Sixty-three cross-sectional studies and twenty-eight longitudinal studies that met our inclusion and exclusion criteria were analyzed. The results confirmed the presence of a relation between executive functions and overweight/obesity, although the directionality of this relation was not clear; nor did any single executive function emerge as being more involved than others in this relation. Despite this, there was evidence of a reciprocal influence between executive functions and overweight/obesity. Conclusions: This systematic review underlines the presence of a relationship between executive functions and overweight/obesity. Moreover, it seems to suggest a bidirectional trend in this relationship that could be the cause of the failure of interventions for weight reduction. The results of this review highlight the importance of a theoretical model able to consider all the main variables of interest, with the aim to structuring integrated approaches to solve the overweight/obesity problems

Percezione visiva del colore: "un caso di analisi del colore in ambito musivo"

Come si determina la percezione del colore? La domanda ha interessato generazioni di studiosi, ne è conferma la continua analisi alla quale è sottoposta ancora oggi la visione del colore da parte dei fisici, ottici, neurologi e fisiologi. Lo studio sul colore mette in evidenza la diversità di “linguaggio” degli artisti (campo estetologico), con quello degli scienziati che si occupano di colorimetria. La corretta utilizzazione di un glossario relativo al colore permetterà e migliorerà la comunicabilità tra storici dell’arte e scienziati

Executive functions in Alzheimer disease. A systematic review

Alzheimer's disease is a severe irreversible syndrome, characterized by a slow and progressive cognitive decline that interferes with the standard instrumental and essential functions of daily life. Promptly identifying the impairment of particular cognitive functions could be a fundamental condition to limit, through preventive or therapeutic interventions, the functional damages found in this degenerative dementia. This study aims to analyse, through a systematic review of the studies, the sensitivity of four experimental paradigms (Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, Stroop Task, Go/No-Go Task, and Flanker Task) considered as golden standard instruments for executive functions assessment in elderly subjects affected by Alzheimer dementia. This review was carried out according to the PRISMA method. Forty-five studies comparing the executive performance of patients with Alzheimer's dementia (diagnosed according to different classification criteria for dementia) and healthy elderly patients both over the age of sixty, were selected. For the research, PubMed, PsycINFO, PsycArticles databases were used. The study highlighted the importance of using standard protocols to evaluate executive dysfunction in Alzheimer's disease. The Stroop task allows discriminating better between healthy and pathological agin

Learning-based MPC using Differentiable Optimisation Layers for Microgrid Energy Management

In this paper we present a learning-based Model Predictive Control (MPC) algorithm based on differentiable optimisation layers. Recent works show that it is possible to include an optimisation problem as a network layer in a Neural Network (NN) architecture. Here the MPC optimisation problem is integrated on the last layer of a NN which is used to estimate the uncertain parameters of the objective function. The NN is then trained online, end-to-end (E2E), based on previous control actions performance. We show that directly targeting the optimality of the control actions leads to improved control results with respect to the standard method of estimating the uncertain parameters and then perform the optimisation. The effectiveness of the proposed method is illustrated on a microgrid energy management problem where the future profile of the electricity price is not know

An Ontological Framework to Link Marketing and Design

Communication issues between people with different backgrounds within the same product development team are commonplace. The causes are many, including cultural differences and language barrier. Moreover, cooperation was proved to be strongly correlated with new product success. In the present study, we studied language differences in order to overcome the debate on them by providing a framework able to help both marketers and designers. The framework is based on three design variables (Function-Behaviour-Structure), a set of 77 products and eight consumer behaviour theories. Connecting these three dimensions helps marketers to address customer needs towards specific design aspects

Emotional regulation and overeating behaviors in children and adolescents: a systematic review

The worldwide prevalence of obesity has dramatically increased, mostly in children and adolescents. The Emotional Eating theoretical model has proposed that the failure in emotional regulation could represent a risk factor for establishing maladaptive overeating behavior that represents an inadequate response to negative emotions and allows increasing body-weight. This systematic review investigates the relationship between overeating and both emotional regulation and emotional intelligence in childhood and adolescence, considering both cross-sectional and longitudinal studies. Moreover, another goal of the review is evaluating whether emotional regulation and emotional intelligence can cause overeating behaviors. The systematic search was conducted according to the PRISMA-statement in the databases Medline, PsychArtcles, PsychInfo, PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Sciences, and allows 484 records to be extracted. Twenty-six studies were selected according to inclusion (e.g., studies focused on children and adolescents without clinical conditions; groups of participants overweight or with obesity) and exclusion (e.g., studies that adopted qualitative assessment or cognitive-affective tasks to measure emotional variables; reviews, commentary, or brief reports) criteria detailed in the methods. Cross-sectional studies showed a negative association between emotional regulation and overeating behavior that was confirmed by longitudinal studies. These findings highlighted the role of maladaptive emotion regulation on overeating and being overweight. The relationship between these constructs in children and adolescents was consistent. The results indicated the complexity of this association, which would be influenced by many physiological, psychological, and social factors. These findings underline the need for further studies focused on emotion regulation in the development of overeating. They should analyze the mediation role of other variables (e.g., attachment style, peer pressure) and identify interventions to prevent and reduce worldwide overweight prevalence

Binge‐watching: development and validation of the Binge‐Watching Addiction Questionnaire

The approach to the vision of TV series has deeply changed in the last years, and watching multiple episodes of TV content in a single session becomes a popular viewing pattern referred as binge‐watching. Early studies defined binge‐watching as a potentially addictive behavior showing characteristics similar to other behavioral addictions, such as loss of control and pleasure anticipation. This study aims to validate a short self‐report questionnaire focused on assessing binge‐watching behavior and determining whether it shows characteristics similar to addictive behavior, the Binge‐Watching Addiction Questionnaire (BWAQ). An online survey was adopted to administer the questionnaire in the general population (N = 1277). Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses assessed both the validity and the structure of the scale in two independent samples. The statistical analyses confirmed a four‐factor model (i.e., “Craving”, “Dependency”, “Anticipation”, “Avoidance”) of the BWAQ with good psychometric properties. The BWAQ can differentiate between people who adopt maladaptive watching activities from those who use TVseries as leisure and entertainment activities. Therefore, this questionnaire may enable researchers to improve this emerging field of research significantly

Food-Related Attentional Bias in Individuals with Normal Weight and Overweight: A Study with a Flicker Task

The primary purpose of the present study was to investigate attentional biases for food-related stimuli in individuals with overweight and normal weight using a flicker paradigm. Specifically, it was tested whether attention allocation processes differ between individuals with overweight and normal weight using transient changes of food-related and neutral pictures. Change detection latencies in objects of central interest (CI) or objects of marginal interest (MI) were measured as an index of attention allocation in a sample of fifty-three students with overweight/obesity and sixty students with normal weight during a flicker paradigm with neutral, hypercaloric and hypocaloric food pictures. Both groups of participants showed an attentional bias for food-related pictures as compared to neutral pictures. However, the bias was larger in individuals with overweight than in individuals with normal weight when changes were of marginal interest, suggesting a stronger avoidance of the food-related picture. This study showed that food-related stimuli influence attention allocation processes in both participants with overweight and normal weight. In particular, as compared to individuals with normal weight, those with overweight seem to be characterised by a stronger attentional avoidance of (or smaller attention maintenance on) food-related stimuli that could be considered as a voluntary strategy to resist food consumption

An Online Learning Method for Microgrid Energy Management Control*

We propose a novel Model Predictive Control (MPC) scheme based on online-learning (OL) for microgrid energy management, where the control optimisation is embedded as the last layer of the neural network. The proposed MPC scheme deals with uncertainty on the load and renewable generation power profiles and on electricity prices, by employing the predictions provided by an online trained neural network in the optimisation problem. In order to adapt to possible changes in the environment, the neural network is online trained based on continuously received data. The network hyperparameters are selected by performing a hyperparameter optimisation before the deployment of the controller, using a pretraining dataset. We show the effectiveness of the proposed method for microgrid energy management through extensive experiments on real microgrid datasets. Moreover, we show that the proposed algorithm has good transfer learning (TL) capabilities among different microgrids

Development in attention functions and social processing: Evidence from the Attention Network Test

According to the attention network approach, attention is best understood in terms of three functionally and neuroanatomically distinct networks – alerting, orienting, and executive attention. Recent findings showed that social information influences the efficiency of these networks in adults. Using some social and non-social variants of the Attentional Network Test (ANT), this study was aimed to evaluate the development of the three attention networks in childhood, also assessing the development of the ability to manage social or non-social conflicting information. Sixty-six children (three groups of 6, 8, and 10 years of age) performed three variants of the original ANT, using fish, schematic, or real faces looking to the left or right as target and flanker stimuli. Results showed an improvement from 6 to 8 and 10 years of age in reaction time (RT) and accuracy, together with an improvement of executive control and a decrement in alerting. These developmental changes were not unique to social stimuli, and no differences were observed between social and no-social variants of the ANT. However, independently from the age of the children, a real face positively affected the executive control (as indexed by RTs) as compared to both a schematic face and a fish. Findings of this study suggest that attentional networks are still developing from 6 to 10 years of age and underline the importance of face information in modulating the efficiency of executive control