Cognition across the lifespan: Investigating age, sex, and other sociodemographic influences

Maintaining cognitive health across the lifespan has been the focus of a multi-billion-dollar industry. In order to guide treatment and interventions, a clear understanding of the way that proficiency in different cognitive domains develops and declines in both sexes across the lifespan is necessary. Additionally, there are sex differences in a range of other factors, including psychiatric illnesses such as anxiety, depression, and substance use, that are also known to affect cognition, although the scale of this interaction is unknown. Our objective was to assess differences in cognitive function across the lifespan in men and women in a large, representative sample. Leveraging online cognitive testing, a sample of 9451 men and 9451 women ranging in age from 12 to 69 (M = 28.21) matched on socio-demographic factors were studied. Segmented regression was used to model three cognitive domains—working memory, verbal abilities, and reasoning. Sex differences in all three domains were minimal; however, after broadening the sample in terms of socio-demographic factors, sex differences appeared. These results suggest that cognition across the lifespan differs for men and women, but is greatly influenced by environmental factors. We discuss these findings within a framework that describes sex differences in cognition as likely guided by a complex interplay between biology and environment

Bilingualism Affords No General Cognitive Advantages: A Population Study of Executive Function in 11,000 People

Whether acquiring a second language affords any general advantages to executive function has been a matter of fierce scientific debate for decades. If being bilingual does have benefits over and above the broader social, employment, and lifestyle gains that are available to speakers of a second language, then it should manifest as a cognitive advantage in the general population of bilinguals. We assessed 11,041 participants on a broad battery of 12 executive tasks whose functional and neural properties have been well described. Bilinguals showed an advantage over monolinguals on only one test (whereas monolinguals performed better on four tests), and these effects all disappeared when the groups were matched to remove potentially confounding factors. In any case, the size of the positive bilingual effect in the unmatched groups was so small that it would likely have a negligible impact on the cognitive performance of any individual

Метод определения дезоксирибонуклеазной активности с использованием бромистого этидия

дезоксирибонуклеазыэтиди

Brainstem Shape is Affected by Clinical Course in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit

The brainstem, critical for motor function, autonomic regulation, and many neurocognitive functions, undergoes rapid development from the third trimester. Accordingly, we hypothesized it would be vulnerable to insult during this period, and that a difficult clinical course in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) would affect development, and be reflected through atypical shape. Our study population consisted of 66 neonates - all inpatients from the NICU at Victoria Hospital, London Health Sciences Centre, ON, Canada, of which 45 entered the final analysis. The cohort varied in gestational age (GA) and ranged from neurologically healthy to severely brain-injured. Structural MRI was used to quantify brainstem shape at term-equivalent age. From these images, brainstems were semi-automatically segmented and co-registered across subjects. The anterior-posterior dimensions on a sagittal maximum intensity projection were used as the basis for shape comparison. Factor analysis was used to summarize variation in shape and in clinical course to determine three shape factors and three clinical factors, and their relationship assessed using correlation. A factor driven by low GA and associated complications correlated with alterations in the posterior medulla, while a factor driven by complications independent of GA correlated with alterations in the midbrain. Additionally, single clinical measures most representative of their respective clinical factor (days in NICU; days on ventilation) predicted the changes. Thus, different clinical courses in the NICU may have different effects on the shape of the brainstem, and may mediate some of the distinct neurodevelopmental profiles observed in premature and brain-injured neonates

Automatic analysis (aa): efficient neuroimaging workflows and parallel processing using Matlab and XML.

Recent years have seen neuroimaging data sets becoming richer, with larger cohorts of participants, a greater variety of acquisition techniques, and increasingly complex analyses. These advances have made data analysis pipelines complicated to set up and run (increasing the risk of human error) and time consuming to execute (restricting what analyses are attempted). Here we present an open-source framework, automatic analysis (aa), to address these concerns. Human efficiency is increased by making code modular and reusable, and managing its execution with a processing engine that tracks what has been completed and what needs to be (re)done. Analysis is accelerated by optional parallel processing of independent tasks on cluster or cloud computing resources. A pipeline comprises a series of modules that each perform a specific task. The processing engine keeps track of the data, calculating a map of upstream and downstream dependencies for each module. Existing modules are available for many analysis tasks, such as SPM-based fMRI preprocessing, individual and group level statistics, voxel-based morphometry, tractography, and multi-voxel pattern analyses (MVPA). However, aa also allows for full customization, and encourages efficient management of code: new modules may be written with only a small code overhead. aa has been used by more than 50 researchers in hundreds of neuroimaging studies comprising thousands of subjects. It has been found to be robust, fast, and efficient, for simple-single subject studies up to multimodal pipelines on hundreds of subjects. It is attractive to both novice and experienced users. aa can reduce the amount of time neuroimaging laboratories spend performing analyses and reduce errors, expanding the range of scientific questions it is practical to address

Event-related potentials reflect prediction errors and pop-out during comprehension of degraded speech

Comprehension of degraded speech requires higher-order expectations informed by prior knowledge. Accurate top-down expectations of incoming degraded speech cause a subjective semantic ‘pop-out’ or conscious breakthrough experience. Indeed, the same stimulus can be perceived as meaningless when no expectations are made in advance. We investigated the event-related potential (ERP) correlates of these top-down expectations, their error signals and the subjective pop-out experience in healthy participants. We manipulated expectations in a word-pair priming degraded (noise-vocoded) speech task and investigated the role of top-down expectation with a between-groups attention manipulation. Consistent with the role of expectations in comprehension, repetition priming significantly enhanced perceptual intelligibility of the noisevocoded degraded targets for attentive participants. An early ERP was larger for mismatched (i.e. unexpected) targets than matched targets, indicative of an initial error signal not reliant on top-down expectations. Subsequently, a P3a-like ERP was larger to matched targets than mismatched targets only for attending participants—i.e. a pop-out effect—while a later ERP was larger for mismatched targets and did not significantly interact with attention. Rather than relying on complex post hoc interactions between prediction error and precision to explain this apredictive pattern, we consider our data to be consistent with prediction error minimization accounts for early stages of processing followed by Global Neuronal Workspace-like breakthrough and processing in service of task goals

Disruption to Functional Networks in Neonates With Perinatal Brain Injury Predicts Motor Skills at 8 Months

Objective: Functional connectivity magnetic resonance imaging (fcMRI) of neonates with perinatal brain injury could improve prediction of motor impairment before symptoms manifest, and establish how early brain organization relates to subsequent development. This cohort study is the first to describe and quantitatively assess functional brain networks and their relation to later motor skills in neonates with a diverse range of perinatal brain injuries. Methods: Infants ( Results: Disruption to connectivity of the somatomotor and frontoparietal executive networks predicted motor impairment at 4 and 8 months. This disruption in functional connectivity was not found to be driven by differences between clinical groups, or by any of the specific measures we captured to describe the clinical course. Conclusion: fcMRI was predictive over and above other clinical measures available at discharge from the NICU, including structural MRI. Motor learning was affected by disruption to somatomotor networks, but also frontoparietal executive networks, which supports the functional importance of these networks in early development. Disruption to these two networks might be best addressed by distinct intervention strategies

CANDELS: The Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey - The Hubble Space Telescope Observations, Imaging Data Products and Mosaics

This paper describes the Hubble Space Telescope imaging data products and data reduction procedures for the Cosmic Assembly Near-IR Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey (CANDELS). This survey is designed to document the evolution of galaxies and black holes at $z\sim1.5-8$, and to study Type Ia SNe beyond $z>1.5$. Five premier multi-wavelength sky regions are selected, each with extensive multiwavelength observations. The primary CANDELS data consist of imaging obtained in the Wide Field Camera 3 / infrared channel (WFC3/IR) and UVIS channel, along with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). The CANDELS/Deep survey covers \sim125 square arcminutes within GOODS-N and GOODS-S, while the remainder consists of the CANDELS/Wide survey, achieving a total of \sim800 square arcminutes across GOODS and three additional fields (EGS, COSMOS, and UDS). We summarize the observational aspects of the survey as motivated by the scientific goals and present a detailed description of the data reduction procedures and products from the survey. Our data reduction methods utilize the most up to date calibration files and image combination procedures. We have paid special attention to correcting a range of instrumental effects, including CTE degradation for ACS, removal of electronic bias-striping present in ACS data after SM4, and persistence effects and other artifacts in WFC3/IR. For each field, we release mosaics for individual epochs and eventual mosaics containing data from all epochs combined, to facilitate photometric variability studies and the deepest possible photometry. A more detailed overview of the science goals and observational design of the survey are presented in a companion paper.Comment: 39 pages, 25 figure

The Fifteenth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys: First Release of MaNGA-derived Quantities, Data Visualization Tools, and Stellar Library

Twenty years have passed since first light for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Here, we release data taken by the fourth phase of SDSS (SDSS-IV) across its first three years of operation (2014 July–2017 July). This is the third data release for SDSS-IV, and the 15th from SDSS (Data Release Fifteen; DR15). New data come from MaNGA—we release 4824 data cubes, as well as the first stellar spectra in the MaNGA Stellar Library (MaStar), the first set of survey-supported analysis products (e.g., stellar and gas kinematics, emission-line and other maps) from the MaNGA Data Analysis Pipeline, and a new data visualization and access tool we call "Marvin." The next data release, DR16, will include new data from both APOGEE-2 and eBOSS; those surveys release no new data here, but we document updates and corrections to their data processing pipelines. The release is cumulative; it also includes the most recent reductions and calibrations of all data taken by SDSS since first light. In this paper, we describe the location and format of the data and tools and cite technical references describing how it was obtained and processed. The SDSS website (www.sdss.org) has also been updated, providing links to data downloads, tutorials, and examples of data use. Although SDSS-IV will continue to collect astronomical data until 2020, and will be followed by SDSS-V (2020–2025), we end this paper by describing plans to ensure the sustainability of the SDSS data archive for many years beyond the collection of data