Prediction of 7-year psychopathology from mother-infant joint attention behaviours: a nested case–control study

<br>Background: To investigate whether later diagnosis of psychiatric disorder can be predicted from analysis of mother-infant joint attention (JA) behaviours in social-communicative interaction at 12 months.</br> <br>Method: Using data from a large contemporary birth cohort, we examined 159 videos of a mother-infant interaction for joint attention behaviour when children were aged one year, sampled from within the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) cohort. Fifty-three of the videos involved infants who were later considered to have a psychiatric disorder at seven years and 106 were same aged controls. Psychopathologies included in the case group were disruptive behaviour disorders, oppositional-conduct disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, pervasive development disorder, anxiety and depressive disorders. Psychiatric diagnoses were obtained using the Development and Wellbeing Assessment when the children were seven years old.</br> <br>Results: None of the three JA behaviours (shared look rate, shared attention rate and shared attention intensity) showed a significant association with the primary outcome of case–control status. Only shared look rate predicted any of the exploratory sub-diagnosis outcomes and was found to be positively associated with later oppositional-conduct disorders (OR [95% CI]: 1.5 [1.0, 2.3]; p = 0.041).</br><br>Conclusions: JA behaviours did not, in general, predict later psychopathology. However, shared look was positively associated with later oppositional-conduct disorders. This suggests that some features of JA may be early markers of later psychopathology. Further investigation will be required to determine whether any JA behaviours can be used to screen for families in need of intervention.</br&gt

Temporal context and conditional associative learning

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>We investigated how temporal context affects the learning of arbitrary visuo-motor associations. Human observers viewed highly distinguishable, fractal objects and learned to choose for each object the one motor response (of four) that was rewarded. Some objects were consistently preceded by specific other objects, while other objects lacked this task-irrelevant but predictive context.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The results of five experiments showed that predictive context consistently and significantly accelerated associative learning. A simple model of reinforcement learning, in which three successive objects informed response selection, reproduced our behavioral results.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Our results imply that not just the representation of a current event, but also the representations of past events, are reinforced during conditional associative learning. In addition, these findings are broadly consistent with the prediction of attractor network models of associative learning and their prophecy of a persistent representation of past objects.</p

Hippocampal - diencephalic - cingulate networks for memory and emotion: An anatomical guide

This review brings together current knowledge from tract tracing studies to update and reconsider those limbic connections initially highlighted by Papez for their presumed role in emotion. These connections link hippocampal and parahippocampal regions with the mammillary bodies, the anterior thalamic nuclei, and the cingulate gyrus, all structures now strongly implicated in memory functions. An additional goal of this review is to describe the routes taken by the various connections within this network. The original descriptions of these limbic connections saw their interconnecting pathways forming a serial circuit that began and finished in the hippocampal formation. It is now clear that with the exception of the mammillary bodies, these various sites are multiply interconnected with each other, including many reciprocal connections. In addition, these same connections are topographically organised, creating further subsystems. This complex pattern of connectivity helps explain the difficulty of interpreting the functional outcome of damage to any individual site within the network. For these same reasons, Papez’s initial concept of a loop beginning and ending in the hippocampal formation needs to be seen as a much more complex system of hippocampal–diencephalic–cingulate connections. The functions of these multiple interactions might be better viewed as principally providing efferent information from the posterior medial temporal lobe. Both a subcortical diencephalic route (via the fornix) and a cortical cingulate route (via retrosplenial cortex) can be distinguished. These routes provide indirect pathways for hippocampal interactions with prefrontal cortex, with the preponderance of both sets of connections arising from the more posterior hippocampal regions. These multi-stage connections complement the direct hippocampal projections to prefrontal cortex, which principally arise from the anterior hippocampus, thereby creating longitudinal functional differences along the anterior–posterior plane of the hippocampus

Spatial navigation deficits — overlooked cognitive marker for preclinical Alzheimer disease?

Detection of incipient Alzheimer disease (AD) pathophysiology is critical to identify preclinical individuals and target potentially disease-modifying therapies towards them. Current neuroimaging and biomarker research is strongly focused in this direction, with the aim of establishing AD fingerprints to identify individuals at high risk of developing this disease. By contrast, cognitive fingerprints for incipient AD are virtually non-existent as diagnostics and outcomes measures are still focused on episodic memory deficits as the gold standard for AD, despite their low sensitivity and specificity for identifying at-risk individuals. This Review highlights a novel feature of cognitive evaluation for incipient AD by focusing on spatial navigation and orientation deficits, which are increasingly shown to be present in at-risk individuals. Importantly, the navigation system in the brain overlaps substantially with the regions affected by AD in both animal models and humans. Notably, spatial navigation has fewer verbal, cultural and educational biases than current cognitive tests and could enable a more uniform, global approach towards cognitive fingerprints of AD and better cognitive treatment outcome measures in future multicentre trials. The current Review appraises the available evidence for spatial navigation and/or orientation deficits in preclinical, prodromal and confirmed AD and identifies research gaps and future research priorities

Amnesia in man following transection of the fornix. A review.

Published accounts of the effects of fornix damage on memory in man are critically evaluated. Most weight is given to cases of surgical transection of the fornix, though other causes of fornix damage are briefly discussed. It is concluded that fornix transection causes amnesia

Disconnection of the amygdala from visual association cortex impairs visual reward-association learning in monkeys.

Cynomolgus monkeys (Macaca fascicularis) were trained in a task that assessed their ability to associate visual stimuli with food reward. Acquisition of stimulus-reward associations was measured under 2 conditions, a 2-stimuli acquisition condition and a 1-stimulus acquisition condition. On each trial in the 2-stimuli condition, the positive (correct) and negative (incorrect) stimuli were presented side by side and the animal chose one by touching it; if the choice was correct, a food reward was dispensed. On each trial in the 1-stimulus condition, either the positive or the negative stimulus was presented alone; if the stimulus was the positive, it was followed by reward delivery, regardless of the animal's response to it, and if it was the negative, it was not followed by reward delivery. Thus, reward delivery was contingent upon the animal's response to the stimuli in the 2-stimuli condition but not in the 1-stimulus condition. The effect of acquisition trials under these 2 conditions was measured, in both conditions, by the animal's subsequent choice when presented with the 2 stimuli side by side. Following preoperative training in this task, the animals were first subjected to unilateral ablation of the inferotemporal cortex. This operation had little effect on the animals' learning ability. Then, the amygdala was ablated in the hemisphere contralateral to that in which the unilateral inferotemporal ablation had been carried out. This combination of crossed unilateral lesions of the amygdala and of the inferotemporal cortex, which disconnects the amygdala from the output of visual association cortex, produced a profound impairment in stimulus-reward-associative learning.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS

Amnesia following damage to the left fornix and to other sites. A comparative study.

Two memory-impaired patients, who had suffered damage to the left or both fornix columns during removal of a ventricular cyst, were compared with 3 others having left-sided hippocampal or thalamic lesions, and with normal controls. The tests used were nonverbal--scene recognition, delayed matching-to-sample and concurrent pattern and object discrimination learning. The last two are differentially sensitive to fornix transection and to hippocampal or thalamic ablations in monkeys; however, the patients with fornix damage did not show a distinctive pattern of impairment. The reasons for this discrepancy are discussed. The study adds to the evidence that fornix transection can cause wide-ranging memory disturbances in man