The Effectiveness of Computer-Assisted Cognitive Rehabilitation and the Degree of Recovery in Patients with Traumatic Brain Injury and Stroke

Objectives: To determine the effectiveness of computer-assisted cognitive rehabilitation and compare the patterns of cognitive function recovery occurring in both traumatic brain injury (TBI) and stroke. Methods: A total of 62 patients were finally enrolled, consisting of 30 with TBI and 32 with stroke. The patients received 30 sessions of computer-assisted cognitive rehabilitation (Comcog) five times per week. Each session lasted for 30 min. Before and immediately after cognitive rehabilitation, all patients were evaluated by computerized neuropsychological test (CNT), Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), and modified Barthel index (MBI). Results: We analyzed the differences between pre- and post-cognitive rehabilitation in each TBI and stroke group. Significant differences were observed in MMSE, MBI, and some CNT contents, including digit span forward, verbal learning, verbal learning delayed recall, visual span forward, visual span backward, visual learning, trail making test A and B, and intelligence quotient (IQ) in the TBI group (p < 0.05). In the stroke group, in addition to significant differences that appeared in the TBI group, additional significant differences in the digit span backward, visual learning delayed recall, auditory continuous performance test (CPT), visual CPT, and card sorting test. We compared the difference values at pre- and post-cognitive rehabilitation for cognitive recovery between the TBI and stroke groups. All contents, except the digital span forward, visual learning, word-color test, and MMSE, had greater mean values in the stroke group; and thus, statistically significant higher values were observed in the visual span forward and card sorting test (p < 0.05). Conclusion: Most evaluation results showed improvement and the evaluation between the TBI and stroke groups also showed significant differences in cognitive functions in addition to more CNT contents, which significantly change in the stroke group. The stroke group showed a high difference value in most CNT contents. Therefore, those with stroke in the focal brain region tend to have better cognitive function recovery after a computer-assisted cognitive rehabilitation than those with TBI, which could cause diffuse brain damage and post-injury inflammation.

Treatment of Developmental Reading Disorders: A Visual Attention Span Deficit Approach

<p>A current theory of the cognitive underpinnings of developmental reading disorders supposes that two impairments contribute to the overall profile of disordered reading: one of phonological awareness and one of visual attention span. The severity of each impairment is different for each child. By identifying children that display a severe degree of one impairment, but a limited degree of the other, each impairment can be investigated. The current study identified one participant with a stronger phonological impairment, and one with a stronger impairment of visual attention span. They completed two training programs: one program tailored to improve phonology, and one tailored to improve visual span. Both treatments improved reading performance in both participants. It was expected that the treatment targeting each participant‟s particular cognitive impairment would prove more effective for that participant. However, both treatments were found to show similar levels of improvement with both participants.</p>

Treatment of Developmental Reading Disorders: A Visual Attention Span Deficit Approach

<p>A current theory of the cognitive underpinnings of developmental reading disorders supposes that two impairments contribute to the overall profile of disordered reading: one of phonological awareness and one of visual attention span. The severity of each impairment is different for each child. By identifying children that display a severe degree of one impairment, but a limited degree of the other, each impairment can be investigated. The current study identified one participant with a stronger phonological impairment, and one with a stronger impairment of visual attention span. They completed two training programs: one program tailored to improve phonology, and one tailored to improve visual span. Both treatments improved reading performance in both participants. It was expected that the treatment targeting each participant‟s particular cognitive impairment would prove more effective for that participant. However, both treatments were found to show similar levels of improvement with both participants.</p>

Eye movements reflect expertise development in hybrid search

Domain-specific expertise changes the way people perceive, process, and remember information from that domain. This is often observed in visual domains involving skilled searches, such as athletics referees, or professional visual searchers (e.g., security and medical screeners). Although existing research has compared expert to novice performance in visual search, little work has directly documented how accumulating experiences change behavior. A longitudinal approach to studying visual search performance may permit a finer-grained understanding of experience-dependent changes in visual scanning, and the extent to which various cognitive processes are affected by experience. In this study, participants acquired experience by taking part in many experimental sessions over the course of an academic semester. Searchers looked for 20 categories of targets simultaneously (which appeared with unequal frequency), in displays with 0–3 targets present, while having their eye movements recorded. With experience, accuracy increased and response times decreased. Fixation probabilities and durations decreased with increasing experience, but saccade amplitudes and visual span increased. These findings suggest that the behavioral benefits endowed by expertise emerge from oculomotor behaviors that reflect enhanced reliance on memory to guide attention and the ability to process more of the visual field within individual fixations.

Improving information extraction from visually rich documents using visual span representations

Along with textual content, visual features play an essential role in the semantics of visually rich documents. Information extraction (IE) tasks perform poorly on these documents if these visual cues are not taken into account. In this paper, we present Artemis - a visually aware, machine-learning-based IE method for heterogeneous visually rich documents. Artemis represents a visual span in a document by jointly encoding its visual and textual context for IE tasks. Our main contribution is two-fold. First, we develop a deep-learning model that identifies the local context boundary of a visual span with minimal human-labeling. Second, we describe a deep neural network that encodes the multimodal context of a visual span into a fixed-length vector by taking its textual and layout-specific features into account. It identifies the visual span(s) containing a named entity by leveraging this learned representation followed by an inference task. We evaluate Artemis on four heterogeneous datasets from different domains over a suite of information extraction tasks. Results show that it outperforms state-of-the-art text-based methods by up to 17 points in F1-score.

Impaired Fixation-Related Theta Modulation Predicts Reduced Visual Span and Guided Search Deficits in Schizophrenia

During normal visual behavior, individuals scan the environment through a series of saccades and fixations. At each fixation, the phase of ongoing rhythmic neural oscillations is reset, thereby increasing efficiency of subsequent visual processing. This phase-reset is reflected in the generation of a fixation-related potential (FRP). Here, we evaluate the integrity of theta phase-reset/FRP generation and Guided Visual Search task in schizophrenia. Subjects performed serial and parallel versions of the task. An initial study (15 healthy controls (HC)/15 schizophrenia patients (SCZ)) investigated behavioral performance parametrically across stimulus features and set-sizes. A subsequent study (25-HC/25-SCZ) evaluated integrity of search-related FRP generation relative to search performance and evaluated visual span size as an index of parafoveal processing. Search times were significantly increased for patients versus controls across all conditions. Furthermore, significantly, deficits were observed for fixation-related theta phase-reset across conditions, that fully predicted impaired reduced visual span and search performance and correlated with impaired visual components of neurocognitive processing. By contrast, overall search strategy was similar between groups. Deficits in theta phase-reset mechanisms are increasingly documented across sensory modalities in schizophrenia. Here, we demonstrate that deficits in fixation-related theta phase-reset during naturalistic visual processing underlie impaired efficiency of early visual function in schizophrenia.