Describing the Cookie Theft picture

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louise Cummings

Abstract Speech-language pathologists routinely use picture description tasks to assess expository discourse in clients with disorders such as aphasia and dementia. One picture description task – the Cookie Theft picture from the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination – has come to dominate clinical settings more than any other task. In this article, I examine why this particular picture description task has proven to be so successful in assessing expository discourse in clients with language and cognitive disorders. Using data from the University of Pittsburgh Alzheimer and Related Dementias Study, recurrent cognitive-linguistic impairments in the Cookie Theft picture descriptions of clients with Alzheimer’s dementia are explored. These impairments are mostly pragmatic in nature. It is argued that the sensitivity of the Cookie Theft picture description task to these impairments makes it an ideal assessment tool for any investigation which aims to identify pragmatic markers of neurodegenerative diseases such as the dementias.

2016 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Silvia Convento ◽  
Cristina Russo ◽  
Luca Zigiotto ◽  
Nadia Bolognini

Abstract. Cognitive rehabilitation is an important area of neurological rehabilitation, which aims at the treatment of cognitive disorders due to acquired brain damage of different etiology, including stroke. Although the importance of cognitive rehabilitation for stroke survivors is well recognized, available cognitive treatments for neuropsychological disorders, such as spatial neglect, hemianopia, apraxia, and working memory, are overall still unsatisfactory. The growing body of evidence supporting the potential of the transcranial Electrical Stimulation (tES) as tool for interacting with neuroplasticity in the human brain, in turn for enhancing perceptual and cognitive functions, has obvious implications for the translation of this noninvasive brain stimulation technique into clinical settings, in particular for the development of tES as adjuvant tool for cognitive rehabilitation. The present review aims at presenting the current state of art concerning the use of tES for the improvement of post-stroke visual and cognitive deficits (except for aphasia and memory disorders), showing the therapeutic promises of this technique and offering some suggestions for the design of future clinical trials. Although this line of research is still in infancy, as compared to the progresses made in the last years in other neurorehabilitation domains, current findings appear very encouraging, supporting the development of tES for the treatment of post-stroke cognitive impairments.


1966 ◽  
Vol 05 (03) ◽  
pp. 142-146
Author(s):  
A. Kent ◽  
P. J. Vinken

A joint center has been established by the University of Pittsburgh and the Excerpta Medica Foundation. The basic objective of the Center is to seek ways in which the health sciences community may achieve increasingly convenient and economical access to scientific findings. The research center will make use of facilities and resources of both participating institutions. Cooperating from the University of Pittsburgh will be the School of Medicine, the Computation and Data Processing Center, and the Knowledge Availability Systems (KAS) Center. The KAS Center is an interdisciplinary organization engaging in research, operations, and teaching in the information sciences.Excerpta Medica Foundation, which is the largest international medical abstracting service in the world, with offices in Amsterdam, New York, London, Milan, Tokyo and Buenos Aires, will draw on its permanent medical staff of 54 specialists in charge of the 35 abstracting journals and other reference works prepared and published by the Foundation, the 700 eminent clinicians and researchers represented on its International Editorial Boards, and the 6,000 physicians who participate in its abstracting programs throughout the world. Excerpta Medica will also make available to the Center its long experience in the field, as well as its extensive resources of medical information accumulated during the Foundation’s twenty years of existence. These consist of over 1,300,000 English-language _abstract of the world’s biomedical literature, indexes to its abstracting journals, and the microfilm library in which complete original texts of all the 3,000 primary biomedical journals, monitored by Excerpta Medica in Amsterdam are stored since 1960.The objectives of the program of the combined Center include: (1) establishing a firm base of user relevance data; (2) developing improved vocabulary control mechanisms; (3) developing means of determining confidence limits of vocabulary control mechanisms in terms of user relevance data; 4. developing and field testing of new or improved media for providing medical literature to users; 5. developing methods for determining the relationship between learning and relevance in medical information storage and retrieval systems’; and (6) exploring automatic methods for retrospective searching of the specialized indexes of Excerpta Medica.The priority projects to be undertaken by the Center are (1) the investigation of the information needs of medical scientists, and (2) the development of a highly detailed Master List of Biomedical Indexing Terms. Excerpta Medica has already been at work on the latter project for several years.


2014 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 23
Author(s):  
Mahmud Alpusari

In line with the competency-based curriculum at the University of Riau, the effort to improvelearning basic concepts of science 2 courses puts emphasis on understanding the concept ofmatter, which is based on students' learning activities through scientific inquiry.Implementation of action research consists of two cycles in PGSD JIP University of Riau onthe odd semester of 2013/2014 with 55 third semester students. Based on the research results,lecturing process by applying the model of inquiry learning, students’ activity increased inwhich in the first cycle all activities are good category except activity I and II are faircategory. Meanwhile students’ activity in first and fourth in cycle II is good category, andvery good category in second, third, fifth, and sixth activity. Temporarily student’s learningoutcomes increased from pre-tests with an average65.45 into 77,0 in daily test I and 77.45onthe daily test II. Improvement from initial data to the first cycle was 11.55, while the datafrom the beginning to the second cycle increased 12 points. In general the improvement ofstudents’learning is possible because the learning model used is inquiry learning so thatlearning becomes active which centered into students by presenting a problem, then studentsare asked to carry out a simple experiment using equipment and tools, using data, arrangingreports, communicating the results of observations based on concepts and learned principles.Keywords: Inquiry, students’ activity, learning outcomes.


2001 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 152-161
Author(s):  
Rumi Honda ◽  
Harumi Matuura ◽  
Yoko Takatuki ◽  
Toshiko S. Watamori ◽  
Noriko Kamakura

NASPA Journal ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard J. Herdlein

The scholarship of student affairs has neglected to carefully review its contextual past and, in the process, failed to fully integrate historical research into practice. The story of Thyrsa Wealtheow Amos and the history of the Dean of Women’s Program at the University of Pittsburgh,1919–41, helps us to reflect on the true reality of our work in higher education. Although seemingly a time in the distant past, Thyrsa Amos embodied the spirit of student personnel administration that shines ever so bright to thisd ay. The purpose of this research is to provide some of thatcontext and remind us of the values that serve as foundations of the profession.


2020 ◽  
Vol 105 (3) ◽  
pp. 866-876 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anita P Courcoulas ◽  
James W Gallagher ◽  
Rebecca H Neiberg ◽  
Emily B Eagleton ◽  
James P DeLany ◽  
...  

Abstract Context Questions remain about bariatric surgery for type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) treatment. Objective Compare the remission of T2DM following surgical or nonsurgical treatments. Design, setting, and participants Randomized controlled trial at the University of Pittsburgh, in the United States. Five-year follow-up from February 2015 until June 2016. Interventions 61 participants with obesity and T2DM who were initially randomized to either bariatric surgical treatments (Roux-en-Y gastric bypass [RYGB] or laparoscopic adjustable gastric banding [LAGB]) or an intensive lifestyle weight loss intervention (LWLI) program for 1 year. Lower level lifestyle weight loss interventions (LLLIs) were then delivered for 4 years. Main Outcomes and Measures Diabetes remission assessed at 5 years. Results The mean age of the patients was 47 ± 6.6 years, 82% were women, and 21% African American. Mean hemoglobin A1c level 7.8% ± 1.9%, body mass index (BMI) 35.7 ± 3.1 kg/m2, and 26 participants (43%) had BMI < 35 kg/m2. Partial or complete T2DM remission was achieved by 30% (n = 6) of RYGB, 19% (n = 4) of LAGB, and no LWLI participants (P = .0208). At 5 years those in the RYGB group had the largest percentage of individuals (56%) not requiring any medications for T2DM compared with those in the LAGB (45%) and LWLI (0%) groups (P = .0065). Mean reductions in percent body weight at 5 years was the greatest after RYGB 25.2% ± 2.1%, followed by LAGB 12.7% ± 2.0% and lifestyle treatment 5.1% ± 2.5% (all pairwise P < .01). Conclusions Surgical treatments are more effective than lifestyle intervention alone for T2DM treatment.


Minerva ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mikko Salmela ◽  
Miles MacLeod ◽  
Johan Munck af Rosenschöld

AbstractInterdisciplinarity is widely considered necessary to solving many contemporary problems, and new funding structures and instruments have been created to encourage interdisciplinary research at universities. In this article, we study a small technical university specializing in green technology which implemented a strategy aimed at promoting and developing interdisciplinary collaboration. It did so by reallocating its internal research funds for at least five years to “research platforms” that required researchers from at least two of the three schools within the university to participate. Using data from semi-structured interviews from researchers in three of these platforms, we identify specific tensions that the strategy has generated in this case: (1) in the allocation of platform resources, (2) in the division of labor and disciplinary relations, (3) in choices over scientific output and academic careers. We further show how the particular platform format exacerbates the identified tensions in our case. We suggest that certain features of the current platform policy incentivize shallow interdisciplinary interactions, highlighting potential limits on the value of attempting to push for interdisciplinarity through internal funding.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Tianqi Wang ◽  
Yin Hong ◽  
Quanyi Wang ◽  
Rongfeng Su ◽  
Manwa Lawrence Ng ◽  
...  

Background: Previous studies explored the use of noninvasive biomarkers of speech and language for the detection of mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Yet, most of them employed single task which might not have adequately captured all aspects of their cognitive functions. Objective: The present study aimed to achieve the state-of-the-art accuracy in detecting individuals with MCI using multiple spoken tasks and uncover task-specific contributions with a tentative interpretation of features. Methods: Fifty patients clinically diagnosed with MCI and 60 healthy controls completed three spoken tasks (picture description, semantic fluency, and sentence repetition), from which multidimensional features were extracted to train machine learning classifiers. With a late-fusion configuration, predictions from multiple tasks were combined and correlated with the participants’ cognitive ability assessed using the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA). Statistical analyses on pre-defined features were carried out to explore their association with the diagnosis. Results: The late-fusion configuration could effectively boost the final classification result (SVM: F1 = 0.95; RF: F1 = 0.96; LR: F1 = 0.93), outperforming each individual task classifier. Besides, the probability estimates of MCI were strongly correlated with the MoCA scores (SVM: –0.74; RF: –0.71; LR: –0.72). Conclusion: Each single task tapped more dominantly to distinct cognitive processes and have specific contributions to the prediction of MCI. Specifically, picture description task characterized communications at the discourse level, while semantic fluency task was more specific to the controlled lexical retrieval processes. With greater demands on working memory load, sentence repetition task uncovered memory deficits through modified speech patterns in the reproduced sentences.


Author(s):  
Rebecca A. Owens ◽  
Evelyn Attia ◽  
Joyce J. Fitzpatrick ◽  
Kathryn Phillips ◽  
Stephanie Nolan

OBJECTIVE Eating disorders (EDs) are serious, complex illnesses with both behavioral and physical health features. EDs have high rates of medical and psychiatric morbidity, and a 6% mortality rate, the highest of any mental illness. Early detection of EDs offers the best opportunity for recovery; yet, estimates are that as few as one in 10 individuals with an ED receive treatment. The purpose of this article is to provide an ED identification and management overview for inpatient nurse clinicians in general psychiatric and medical settings, helping to facilitate timely recognition and care. METHOD An overview of ED diagnostic criteria and two evidence-based ED tools are introduced for consideration. RESULTS Opportunities to identify and help manage an ED are numerous. Most individuals with an ED make several health care visits in either medical or psychiatric settings without ever being screened for an ED. General ED screening and assessment tool familiarization can facilitate a treatment trajectory for these patients, improve overall quality of life, and may potentially result in a life-saving intervention for this often-deadly cluster of medical and psychiatric disorders. CONCLUSION Screening and assessment in general clinical settings, identifying patients with undiagnosed EDs, beginning basic treatment plans, and referrals for appropriate follow-up care, have the potential to reduce ED recidivism and related health care costs. Simultaneously, and most important, long-term outcomes for patients with EDs may improve.


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