Emotion Recognition and Traumatic Brain Injury

Emotion recognition through facial expression plays a critical role in communication.  Review of studies investigating individuals with TBI and emotion recognition indicates significantly poorer performance compared to controls. The purpose of the study was to determine the effects of different media presentation on emotion recognition in individuals with TBI, and if results differ depending on severity of TBI.  Adults with and without TBI participated in the study and were assessed using the TASIT and the FEEST. Preliminary results indicate that emotion recognition abilities greatly differ between mild and severe and participants performed better with static presentation compared to dynamic presentation

Stories, Attention, Memory and Aphasia

Persons with aphasia have language deficits that affect their ability to communicate at the discourse level. These linguistic impairments may be related to impaired cognitive functions. The study purpose was to determine the relationship among cognitive processes and story comprehension and production ability in PWA. Participants included 11 PWA and 20 control participants. Tasks included attention and memory measures and a story task. Participants told stories depicted in wordless picture books then answered questions about the stories. Preliminary results indicate that aphasia severity is a better predictor of performance on the story tasks than performance on the cognitive measures

A Compendium of Core Lexicon Checklists

Core Lexicon (CoreLex) is a relatively new approach assessing lexical use in discourse. CoreLex examines the specific lexical items used to tell a story, or how typical lexical items are compared with a normative sample. This method has great potential for clinical utilization because CoreLex measures are fast, easy to administer, and correlate with microlinguistic and macrolinguistic discourse measures. The purpose of this article is to provide clinicians with a centralized resource for currently available CoreLex checklists, including information regarding development, norms, and guidelines for use

Effort Invested in Cognitive Tasks by Adults with Aphasia: A Pilot Study

The objective of this study was to quantify cognitive effort IWA and control participants dedicate to verbal compared with spatial working memory tasks using HRV. Researchers have found that non-brain injured adults’ physiological stress response is not affected by task type (Callister, Suwarno, & Seals, 1992), but by task difficulty (Fairclough & Houston, 2004; Gendolla & Richter, 2006; Iani, et al., 2004; Ryu & Myung, 2005). Assuming IWA have an impaired ability to allocate effort to the tasks, it was predicted that they would demonstrate no change in HRV from baseline to task for either verbal or spatial tasks. Further, a significant positive relationship between change in HRV and task performance was predicted for control participants, but none was expected for IWA

How difficult is it? How well Adults with Aphasia Perceive Task Demands

Researchers investigating self-ratings of task difficulty and effort allocated to lexical decision tasks in adults with aphasia indicated a mismatch between their perceptions and behavioral performance (e.g. Clark & Robin, 1995; Murray et al., 1997a; Murray et al., 1997b). That is, although participants with aphasia performed more poorly on the language tasks, they did not rate the tasks as more difficult (Murray et al., 1997a, 1997b) or as requiring more effort (Clark & Robin, 1995) compared to control participants. Murray et al., (1997a) reported that this impaired relationship between performance and perceptions was only found for difficulty ratings and not for ratings of perceived accuracy, leading them to conclude that individuals with aphasia are impaired in their ability to perceive the demands of the tasks. The purpose of the current study was to extend these findings by including both pre- and post-task ratings of difficulty for verbal and spatial tasks. We hypothesized that if participants with aphasia are misperceiving the demands of the tasks, the relationship between performance and ratings of difficulty would be less for the pre-task ratings compared to the post-task ratings. Comparing the relationship between difficulty ratings and performance on non-verbal (spatial) and verbal tasks would further reveal whether any deficits in perceiving the task demands are specific to verbal stimuli or a domain-general deficit in evaluating task demands

Semantic Knowledge Use within Discourse Produced by Individuals with Anomic Aphasia

According to the feature-specific model (Cree & McRae, 2003), semantic knowledge is a distributed network of features that are stored separately and can be impaired separately. These semantic features are the building blocks of the semantic knowledge system and of concepts in general. This has led researchers to using semantic features-based treatments to improve word retrieval abilities in adults with anomic aphasia. Semantic features-based treatments have been used to improve the ability for individuals with aphasia to re-establish connections between the semantic and lexical systems. Researchers have found that semantic features-based treatment, are typically successfully in improving verbal production abilities in adults with aphasia at the word level (Kiran & Roberts, 2010) and discourse (Boyle, 2004; Peach & Reuter, 2010; Rider, Wright, Marshall, & Page, 2008). Recently, researchers have examined the utility of semantic features-based treatment for improving discourse production in adults with aphasia; however, few researchers have examined how the semantic knowledge is used within discourse. Armstrong (2001) examined the lexical patterns of verbs in discourse samples given by four participants with aphasia (PWA) and four healthy participants. Armstrong categorized verbs from personal recounts into one of five semantic-lexical categories (material, relational, mental, verbal, and behavioral). She found that PWA presented with different verb patterns that resulted in restricted communication. Moreover, the PWA had produced few mental and relational verbs. However, Armstrong included only lexical-semantic categories and they are connected by semantic relationships and possibly also grammatical relationships. To expand our knowledge of the appropriateness of using semantic features-based treatments at the discourse level, it important to understand how semantic knowledge is used beyond simply allowing access to lexical items. Unknown is if semantic knowledge use differs in adults with aphasia compared to cognitively healthy adults. These findings could have significant implications for how to apply semantic features-based treatments to improve discourse level abilities in adults with aphasia. To this end, the purpose of the study, then, was to determine if the semantic knowledge and category types used in discourse by participants with anomic aphasia differed from those used by cognitively healthy participants. Certain semantic knowledge types and category types may be more difficult to access, integrate, or maintain in discourse for adults with anomic aphasia because producing discourse is cognitively demanding and requires processes external to lexical and semantic access. Therefore, we hypothesized that the discourse produced by participants with anomic aphasia would differ in the proportion of semantic knowledge and category types used

Productive Vocabulary across Discourse Types

One of the most illuminative predictors of oral performance, lexical diversity (LD), is often neglected or, when used, it is often estimated incorrectly. In this study, we used dedicated software that combines an algebraic transformation model and curve fitting to explore whether there are differences in LD among four types of discourse (procedural discourse, single picture descriptions, story telling, and recounts) and to assess to what extent age influences LD when using each of the aforementioned types of discourse. A LD hierarchy was found with discourse. However, age influenced LD for specific types of discourse. Clinical implications will be discussed

Preliminary Evidence for using Heart Rate Variability as a Measure of Cognitive Effort

Researchers have suggested that language deficits in individuals with aphasia may result from an inability to adequately allocate effort to verbal tasks (e.g. Clark & Robin, 1995). Heart rate variability has been used as a physiological measure of cognitive effort (e.g. Aasman et al., 1987). The purpose of this study is to establish baseline data and verify the utility of HRV as an indicator of cognitive effort on tasks used with IWA. Relationships among neurologically intact participants’ accuracy on verbal and spatial n-back tasks, the physiological measure of effort (HRV), and perceptions of task difficulty will be reported

Cognitive Effort and Aphasia

Some researchers have suggested that impairments of individuals with aphasia on cognitive-linguistic tasks reflect an impaired ability to match effort with task demands (e.g. Murray et al., 1997, Clark & Robin, 1991). However, a direct physiological measure of effort IWA invest during such tasks is lacking. Heart rate variability is a well-studied measure of the stress response and is an indicator of the effort allocated to cognitively demanding tasks (Hansen et al., 2003). This research will utilize HRV to understand the relationship among perceptions of task difficulty, behavioral performance, and effort allocated to a verbal working memory task