Abstract conceptual feature ratings: the role of emotion, magnitude, and other cognitive domains in the organization of abstract conceptual knowledge.

This study harnessed control ratings of the contribution of different types of information (sensation, action, emotion, thought, social interaction, morality, time, space, quantity, and polarity) to 400 individual abstract and concrete verbal concepts. These abstract conceptual feature (ACF) ratings were used to generate a high dimensional semantic space, from which Euclidean distance measurements between individual concepts were extracted as a metric of the semantic relatedness of those words. The validity of these distances as a marker of semantic relatedness was then tested by evaluating whether they could predict the comprehension performance of a patient with global aphasia on two verbal comprehension tasks. It was hypothesized that if the high-dimensional space generated from ACF control ratings approximates the organization of abstract conceptual space, then words separated by small distances should be more semantically related than words separated by greater distances, and should therefore be more difficult to distinguish for the comprehension-impaired patient, SKO. SKO was significantly worse at identifying targets presented within word pairs with low ACF distances. Response accuracy was not predicted by Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) cosines, any of the individual feature ratings, or any of the background variables. It is argued that this novel rating procedure provides a window on the semantic attributes of individual abstract concepts, and that multiple cognitive systems may influence the acquisition and organization of abstract conceptual knowledge. More broadly, it is suggested that cognitive models of abstract conceptual knowledge must account for the representation not only of the relationships between abstract concepts but also of the attributes which constitute those individual concepts

Thinking eyes: visual thinking strategies and the social brain

The foundation of art processes in the social brain can guide the scientific study of how human beings perceive and interact with their environment. Here, we applied the theoretical frameworks of the social and artistic brain connectomes to an eye-tracking paradigm with the aim to elucidate how different viewing conditions and social cues influence gaze patterns and personal resonance with artworks and complex imagery in healthy adults. We compared two viewing conditions that encourage personal or social perspective taking-modeled on the well-known Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) method-to a viewing condition during which only contextual information about the image was provided. Our findings showed that the viewing conditions that used VTS techniques directed the gaze more toward highly salient social cues (Animate elements) in artworks and complex imagery, compared to when only contextual information was provided. We furthermore found that audio cues also directed visual attention, whereby listening to a personal reflection by another person (VTS) had a stronger effect than contextual information. However, we found no effect of viewing condition on the personal resonance with the artworks and complex images when taking the random effects of the image selection into account. Our study provides a neurobiological grounding of the VTS method in the social brain, revealing that this pedagogical method of engaging viewers with artworks measurably shapes people's visual exploration patterns. This is not only of relevance to (art) education but also has implications for art-based diagnostic and therapeutic applications

Injections of hope: supporting participants in clinical trials

Understanding hope and better appreciating the personal investments of trial participants could improve patient experience and trial design, argue Emma Harding, Catherine Mummery, and colleague

The arts and dementia: Emerging directions for theory, research and practice

This is a Special Issue of the Journal Dementia that I was responsible for co-editing. This special issue includes papers that are empirical, theoretical and review-based, exploring the visual arts, music, theatre and the spoken word. A variety of cultural contexts and settings are covered (including a UK hospital, a US long-term care facility, closed wards in a Dutch nursing home and a German Museum). A systematic review by Curtis et al. sets the tone for this collection by providing high-level evidence about the effectiveness of a range of arts for health activities on the health, well-being and quality of life for older people in care homes. Music in dementia care has predominantly been considered in community settings and amongst groups of people with mild to moderate dementia. A unique international overview of the most current research into the impacts of music in healthy ageing for people living with strokes and also with a dementia is given by Särkämö, and Daykin et al.’s original study contributes to understanding about how live, participatory music sessions can ameliorate hospital-based care for those with dementia. The importance of confronting the theoretical basis of visual art programmes is tackled by Windle et al., and the study by Schall et al. contributes to the growing evidence base concerning the value of museum-based projects for people with a dementia. There is also a more personal, reflective account by Harrison exploring the transformative effects on an artists’ practice of working with people with a dementia. In a similarly reflective vein, Basting outlines the development of ‘The Penelope Project’ and explores how a creative, community building approach can engage people living with dementias as equals in culture-making projects. Using one of Bastings’ innovations, Swinnen and de Medeiros, in their study, demonstrate the ways in which spoken word projects can support the linguistic agency of people with a dementia in long-term care settings

More Than Meets the Eye: Art Engages the Social Brain

Here we present the viewpoint that art essentially engages the social brain, by demonstrating how art processing maps onto the social brain connectome-the most comprehensive diagram of the neural dynamics that regulate human social cognition to date. We start with a brief history of the rise of neuroaesthetics as the scientific study of art perception and appreciation, in relation to developments in contemporary art practice and theory during the same period. Building further on a growing awareness of the importance of social context in art production and appreciation, we then set out how art engages the social brain and outline candidate components of the "artistic brain connectome." We explain how our functional model for art as a social brain phenomenon may operate when engaging with artworks. We call for closer collaborations between the burgeoning field of neuroaesthetics and arts professionals, cultural institutions and diverse audiences in order to fully delineate and contextualize this model. Complementary to the unquestionable value of art for art's sake, we argue that its neural grounding in the social brain raises important practical implications for mental health, and the care of people living with dementia and other neurological conditions

Progressive associative phonagnosia: A neuropsychological analysis

AbstractThere are few detailed studies of impaired voice recognition, or phonagnosia. Here we describe two patients with progressive phonagnosia in the context of frontotemporal lobar degeneration. Patient QR presented with behavioural decline and increasing difficulty recognising familiar voices, while patient KL presented with progressive prosopagnosia. In a series of neuropsychological experiments we assessed the ability of QR and KL to recognise and judge the familiarity of voices, faces and proper names, to recognise vocal emotions, to perceive and discriminate voices, and to recognise environmental sounds and musical instruments. The patients were assessed in relation to a group of healthy age-matched control subjects. QR exhibited severe impairments of voice identification and familiarity judgments with relatively preserved recognition of difficulty-matched faces and environmental sounds; recognition of musical instruments was impaired, though better than recognition of voices. In contrast, patient KL exhibited severe impairments of both voice and face recognition, with relatively preserved recognition of musical instruments and environmental sounds. Both patients demonstrated preserved ability to analyse perceptual properties of voices and to recognise vocal emotions. The voice processing deficit in both patients could be characterised as associative phonagnosia: in the case of QR, this was relatively selective for voices, while in the case of KL, there was evidence for a multimodal impairment of person knowledge. The findings have implications for current cognitive models of voice recognition

Singing and music making: physiological responses across early to later stages of dementia

Background: Music based interventions have been found to improve wellbeing for people with dementia. More recently there has been interest in physiological measures to provide additional information about how music and singing impact this population. Methods: This multiple-case study design explored physiological responses (heart rate-HR, electrodermal activity-EDA, movement, and skin temperature-ST) of nine people with mild-to-moderate using simulation modelling analysis. Results: In study 1, the singing group showed an increase in EDA (p < 0.01 for 8/9 participants) and HR (p < 0.01 for 5/9 participants) as the session began. HR (p < 0.0001 for 5/9 participants) and ST (p < 0.0001 for 6/9 participants) increased during faster tempos. EDA (p < 0.01 all), movement (p < 0.01 for 8/9 participants) and engagement were higher during singing compared to a baseline control. In study 2 EDA (p < 0.0001 for 14/18 data points [3 music conditions across 6 participants]) and ST (p < 0.001 for 10/18 data points) increased and in contrast to the responses during singing, HR decreased as the sessions began (p < 0.002 for 9/18 data points). EDA was higher during slower music (p < 0.0001 for 13/18 data points), however this was less consistent in more interactive sessions than the control. There were no consistent changes in HR and movement responses during different music genre. Conclusions: Physiological measures provide valuable information about the experiences of people with dementia participating in musical activities, particularly for those with verbal communication difficulties. Future research should consider using physiological measures. video-analysis and observational measures to explore further how engagement in specific activities, wellbeing and physiology interact

Disease Knowledge Transfer across Neurodegenerative Diseases

We introduce Disease Knowledge Transfer (DKT), a novel technique for transferring biomarker information between related neurodegenerative diseases. DKT infers robust multimodal biomarker trajectories in rare neurodegenerative diseases even when only limited, unimodal data is available, by transferring information from larger multimodal datasets from common neurodegenerative diseases. DKT is a joint-disease generative model of biomarker progressions, which exploits biomarker relationships that are shared across diseases. Our proposed method allows, for the first time, the estimation of plausible, multimodal biomarker trajectories in Posterior Cortical Atrophy (PCA), a rare neurodegenerative disease where only unimodal MRI data is available. For this we train DKT on a combined dataset containing subjects with two distinct diseases and sizes of data available: 1) a larger, multimodal typical AD (tAD) dataset from the TADPOLE Challenge, and 2) a smaller unimodal Posterior Cortical Atrophy (PCA) dataset from the Dementia Research Centre (DRC), for which only a limited number of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans are available. Although validation is challenging due to lack of data in PCA, we validate DKT on synthetic data and two patient datasets (TADPOLE and PCA cohorts), showing it can estimate the ground truth parameters in the simulation and predict unseen biomarkers on the two patient datasets. While we demonstrated DKT on Alzheimer's variants, we note DKT is generalisable to other forms of related neurodegenerative diseases. Source code for DKT is available online: https://github.com/mrazvan22/dkt.Comment: accepted at MICCAI 2019, 13 pages, 5 figures, 2 table