Vocabulary Apprehension and Recognition in Children with Autism

Typically, children with autism take a longer time to undergo language development. This process includes making sentences, combining words, and repeating what they hear around them. At this moment, these children take standardized vocabulary tests to their language abilities and progress like the Receptive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test (ROWPVT). However, other techniques could be more helpful in assessing the abilities of autistic children. The eye tracker technique is predicted to be a more useful technique in assessing the language abilities of autistic children rather than standardized tests since children with autism have some problems with social interaction. Due this issue, these children are used to pointing to pictures; therefore, their language capabilities aren't completely or properly assessed. The number of correct words correct on each examination will measure and determine their progress. The eye tracker is a technique where eyes movements are captures and recorded. This technique is beneficial since no interaction is necessary and it could measure these language comprehension abilities more accurately. 

For the eye tracker testing, a child sits in front of the eye-tracker monitor screen with no attachments to their body. The eye camera is connected to a computer and confines the pupil and corneal reflections for coding of the position. The child listens to a noun phrase (e.g. man) that's recorded by a female's voice and also looks at four different pictures (e.g. a tree, a boy, a man and a tie) and a question about the target word (e.g. which picture shows a man?) is asked by the person assessing the child. The computer monitor will track the eye movements 
 in order to determine which picture the child looked at when presented with the oral stimuli. The experiment finished when the child was not able to concentrate and look at the screen any longer.  The same procedure will occur with the ROWPVT testing, but the child will be pointing to one of the photographs. The child must look at the correct word for 200 milliseconds longer than the other three possible choices since it was determined that that is when the child looks at the correct word. The results showed that even with children who have severe autism, the eye tracker is a helpful tool that can be used for assessing their vocabulary. 
   

When the child looks at the pictures, the image falls in front of the fovea, the part of the retina that is necessary for visual processing. When fixation occurs long enough, that is when visual information is processed from that point onwwards. The point and direction at which the child gazes at is linked to the onset of critical words in a sentence (e.g., nouns) and then averaged across trials and participants.  Dr. Anne Sutter discussed that this is the process that occurs for word recognition processing. That when anyone reads a word, our eyes jump from word to word, fixating each word for around 250 milliseconds while we skip over function words. People who don't have autism have a tendency to assume early visual processing. Some assumptions are also due to the split fovea processing, which is also used in this present study. Even the children in this study had their brain use information  to identify a word. For instance, these people will make the incorrect predictions when they assume that the position of a letter is perfectly established before the letter is identified. Therefore, they're exposed to priming by transposition, where letter strings prime the activation of word representation in a lexical decision task.  The identities of the letters in any string are assumed to be normally distributed over position. Since each letter position has a different standard deviation, this allows for positional uncertainty and accounts for many transposed letter effects. Overall, this beneficial technique can evaluate word recognition, language comprehension, and visual processing for all individuals. 

          
 References

Pierro M.A. (2013). Vocabulary Comprehension in Children with Autism. FIU Electronic Theses and      Dissertations. 2013. 36-55.

http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1971&context=etd

Directions Towards a New Way of Learning

         As a student, I want to make the most efficient use of my time. What does my time consist of, you ask? School, work, commute, personal care (like feeding myself, showering, makeup), a whole bunch of studying, and most importantly, sleep. It looks like a really long list, but it’s nothing uncommon of the average college student. The hardest but most important part of my day is getting my studying in. I try to get to bed by 12:30 each night and always get 7-8 hours of sleep; otherwise, a minute less and I wind up with the obnoxious physical symptoms of a cold. It gets to a point where studying and getting the right amount of sleep seems to be conflicting, if only I could find a wait to do them both at the same time.

Recently I attended a seminar led by Iliana Vargas on memory reactivation during sleep. She discussed Rudoy and colleagues’ (2009) study Strengthening Individual Memories by Reactivating Them During Sleep. Off the bat, this sounds like something I need for my tougher biology courses, it might save me time in the long run! The experiment consists of a group of people being taught to associate a sound with a visual object on a specific space on a grid. I’ll refer to these as object-location-sound associations. Participants took a nap, a random half receiving the sound periodically during their slumber. A posttest was taken when everyone woke up, and you wouldn’t even believe who did better! Those who received the auditory stimulation during sleep performed with a change in error of 4x less the error of those who didn’t receive the stimulation. Rudoy and colleagues also measured that before the nap, all of the participants had around the same number of errors. So, this tells us that cramming the night before a test isn’t going to help much because our change in error rate simply from sleep, however; this is object-location-sound locations, not concepts, facts, or equations you need to know for a test.

Leslie Jellen discusses a similar study where participants associated a tone to the scent of either shampoo or rotten fish. During sleep half were exposed to the tone. Those who received the auditory stimulation were more likely to somehow imagine the odor was elicited as the sound was produced. This article ends with a variety of questions on associativity, sleep, and applications to life. Jellen suggests we listen to foreign languages in our sleep, for it may increase our chances of familiarizing ourselves with it.

I’m definitely going to adopt Jellen’s language acquisition strategy, but I also have an idea of my own. As a student, it’d be nice to save some time working on memorization of certain things. Perhaps teachers can begin to incorporate musical interventions into their daily classroom instruction. Music is known to increase arousal and in turn can drive improvements in performance. It would be a good addition to the classroom because of the associativity effects it has. While sleeping, auditory stimulation of tunes associated with say, a history event, may increase likelihood of remembering said event.

It’s safe to say I’ll be trying out this whole “learn while you sleep” thing. Maybe I can record my lectures and listen to them through the night? Maybe it doesn’t work that way… either way; it looks like our brain is very receptive to sensory information even when we are sleeping, we shouldn’t waste time not learning if we can always do something to stimulate our brain.

Rudoy, J.D., Voss, J.L., Westerberg, C.E., & Paller, K.A. (2009). Strengthening individual memories by reactivating them during sleep. Science, 326, 1079. doi: 10.1126/science.1179013

http://brainpages.org/research-shows-you-can-learn-while-youre-sleeping/

Could This be the Era of a Solution to Alzheimer's?

Recent scientists have discovered an antibody, Aducanumab, as well as a crucial protein in adult neuroplasticity, Reelin, that reduce the effect of harmful amyloid-beta plaques in Alzheimer's patients.

Alzheimer's disease is characterized as a progressive neural degenerative disorder that destroys memory and causes problems with vital mental functions such as behavior, cognitive deficits, difficulty with language, calculations, and visual-spatial skills. Unfortunately, Alzheimer's disease is the most common form of dementia, serious enough to interfere with daily life and has no known cure or effective treatment. It's greatest known risk factor is increasing age, with a current number of 5.3 million patients in the United States alone with data showing 6-8% of individuals over the age of 65 and 40% above the age of 85.

The two pathological causes that have been much researched as the potential sources of this disease are the production of neurofibrillary tangles and extracellular deposits of protein amyloid beta plaques. fMRI analysis have revealed that the progression of Alzheimer's starts with a massive degeneration beginning from the hippocampus (the main center for memory). The disease typically then proceeds by spreading degeneration to near by areas such as the language cortices and more; typically sparing the motor cortices. This degeneration leads to ventricular enlargement and a whole system atrophy, effecting the individuals behavior, cognition, memory, and overall mental health.  

In Dr. Sisodia's molecular neurobiology research on amyloid beta plaques, he discusses his research on the antibody Aducanumab as well as it's result on almost complete clearance of the amyloid-beta plaques in the study group of patients with early-onset Alzheimer's post-treatment administration. He tells us in his research that although the causes of the disease are still unknown, it is clear that it commences with the progressive amyloid deposition in the brain of affected individuals between 10 to 15 years before the emergence of any initial clinical symptoms such as memory loss. The recent finding of the Aducanumab antibody haults/significantly slows down the process of the amyloid deposition before further cognitive degeneration could occur. To do this, the human monoclonal antibody, Aducanumab, selectively binds to brain amyloid plaques, thus enabling microglial cells for the plaques removal. After one year of treatment, practically no beta-amyloid plaques were detected in the patients who had received the highest dose of the antibody. The cognitive results were evaluated by a standardized questionnaire to assess individual's cognitive abilities and everyday activities of the patients. "While patients in the placebo group exhibited significant cognitive decline, cognitive ability remained distinctly more stable in patients receiving the antibody" (Sevigny). The treatment of this anti-body therefore demonstrates a significant reduction of the progression of the disease, a huge microbiological step for success in prevention of Alzheimer's.

The critical difficulty with this treatment is being able to find individuals very early in their onset, in order to stop progressive cognitive decline before symptoms become dramatic. This issue has had the same result in a second study from the University of Barcelona that uses Reelin, a synaptic cognitive enhancer as well a as crucial protein in adult neuroplasticity in genetically mutated mice. In the results from researchers Daniela Rossi, Lluis Pujadas, Eduardo Soriano and Natalia Carulla, they found that Reelin has a neuroprotective effect in neurodegenerative diseases. This brain plasticity promoter protein can rescue an Alzheimer's clinical phenotype in the mouse animal model by cognitive deficits recovery, which take place after the activation of the Reenal signaling pathway. This signaling pathway homeostatically regulates global neuronal function in cognition, neuronal plasticity, amyloid formation and more. Soriano stresses that this methodological approach on signaling pathways which control different features related to brain plasticity and Alzheimer's disease is an effective technique in comparison to other studies that focused more on lessening the symptoms, a similar technique used when discovering the effects of Aducanumab anti-body. The over expression of Reelin may be beneficial to reduce the amyloid plaque formation as well as the neuroprotective effect of being a synaptic and cognitive enhancer to regulate the precursor of amyloid beta. Although this research has only been proved in invivo animal models and has not yet been attempted on humans and is said to deserve consideration as a therapeutic target for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease pathogenesis as are the findings of the Aducanumab protein.

Both of these research findings explore the microbiological approach to solving the onset of disease as opposed to regulating it's symptoms. By enhancing detectability, we can apply these new discoveries early-on in the disease in order to prevent the maturation of the condition for individuals around the world, eventually dramatically lowering it's effect by preserving patients cognitive function. Together, these two findings are paving the way to solving the degenerative mysteries that could potentially solve and cure the widespread occurrence and effects of Alzheimer's disease. 

References

Sevigny, Jeff, Ping Chiao, Thierry Bussiere, Paul H. Weinred, Leslie Williams, Marcel Maler, and Robert Dunstan. "The antibody aducanumab reduces Aβ plaques in Alzheimer’s disease."Nature537 (2016): 50-55. Web. 29 Apr. 2017.

Universidad de Barcelona. "Reelin protein rescues cognitive deficits in an animal model of Alzheimer's disease." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 6 March 2014.

Photo References

figure 1:

Alzheimer's Brain. Digital image. Pinterest. Sciencephoto, n.d. Web. 29 Apr. 2017.

figure 2:

Pioneering Brain Imaging That Can Detect the Build-up of Destructive Proteins Linked to Alzheimer's Has Been Developed by Japanese Scientists. Digital image. BBC News. N.p., 19 Sept. 2013. Web. 28 Apr. 2017.

Peace and Quiet?

Over the years, both my parents and teachers have stressed the importance of getting a good night’s sleep before big exams. Being well rested certainly does influence focus and concentration. Furthermore, there is a notable link between sleep and the consolidation of memory. However, it turns out that there may be more to improved performance than getting the ideal 7-8 hours of sleep. More specifically, certain types of auditory stimulation during sleep have been found to influence memory.

Dr. Iliana Vargas’ presentation on targeted memory reactivation provided an example of how specific auditory stimulation during sleep can positively affect performance on memory tasks. She described an experiment where participants learned a set of object-location associations on a computer screen while hearing object sounds prior to a nap. During the nap, half of the object sounds were played. After the nap, individuals attempted to match the images with their proper spatial locations. An advantage was found for objects that were cued during sleep versus those that were not, which suggests that retrieval can be influenced by information that is presented while asleep. Vargas also demonstrated that this advantage holds true when a single sound is associated with two objects that have different locations, which further suggests that sleep promotes the flexible use of information by reorganizing memories.

These findings relate to a study carried out by Dr. Phyllis Zee of Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, which found that gentle sound stimulation, synchronized to the rhythm of brain waves, improves memory in older adults. Pink noise, such as a rushing waterfall, increased the time individuals spent in deep sleep and significantly improved performance on memory tests. Deep sleep is crucial for memory consolidation, but as one ages, deep sleep is substantially reduced. This is thought to be associated with memory decline that is characteristic of the aging process. This study demonstrates that time spent in deep sleep, even at an older age, is important for memory.

Although the precise mechanism for memory consolidation during sleep is not entirely understood, it is clear that there are several components at play.  Specific auditory cues can strengthen individual memories, while gentle pink noise improves memory in a more general sense, by increasing the time spent in deep sleep. Auditory stimulation, in some shape or form, may be key to the quintessential “good night’s sleep.”

References

Paul, Marla. "Sound Waves Enhance Deep Sleep and Memory." Northwestern Now. Northwestern University, 24 Apr. 2017. Web. 24 Apr. 2017.

Rudoy, John D., Joel L. Voss, Carmen E. Westerberg, and Ken A. Paller. "Strengthening Individual Memories by Reactivating Them During Sleep." Science. American Association for the Advancement of Science, 20 Nov. 2009. Web. 24 Apr. 2017.

Out of Casualty Comes In(nerve)ation: Amputee Soldiers Can Return to Active Duty

Dr. Gregory Dumaniam, from Northwestern Memorial Hospital, presented his research on the intuitive control of myoelectric prostheses using Targeted Muscle Reinnervation. He studied how reconnecting nerves in the area proximal to amputation can help an amputee to use their prosthetic limb to its fullest extent and alleviate some of the stress associated with traditional prosthesis. Dr. Dumaniam targeted four specific nerves in an attempt to regain complete mobility and sensation in the prosthetic limb. The ultimate goal was to get patients back to where they were in terms of mobility, sensation, and ability prior to amputation of the limb.

With any proximal amputation, the nerve remains intact with full functionality. This sounds great, but can cause problems like phantom pain. Phantom pain is where the nerve ending continues to send pain signals to the brain as if the limb was still there. Dr. Dumaniam found a way to reconnect this nerve to restore sensation and function, sometimes even relieving this phantom pain. The image below diagrams the targeted muscle reinnervation surgery performed.

The major problem with traditional prosthetics is that the amputee can only move one joint at a time, and in order to do so the patient has to learn to use their muscle groups in new ways because new muscles groups are now controlling these movements. This can be very frustrating when learning to operate the prosthetic device for the first time. Integrating Targeted Muscle Reinnervation (TMR) into prosthesis is a step toward relieving this issue. TMR utilizes this nerve signal and innervated muscles to allow the amputee to operate the prosthetic limb. For example, with an arm amputation, the remaining nerve can be connected to the pectoral muscle in order to operate a prosthetic arm. To activate the muscle and move the prosthetic, the brain sends the same signals as if the original muscle was still attached, then this signal innervates the new muscle (pectoral muscle) and this muscle operates the prosthetic.

New technology such as TMR that has been implemented in the field of prosthetics has had a huge impact on soldiers who have lost limbs fighting overseas. Losing a limb used to mean the end of active duty for a member of the armed forces, which can be absolutely devastating for someone who has chosen to dedicate their life to serving their country. The increasing number of injuries overseas has required advancements in the way of prosthetic technology and rehabilitation for soldiers. Some soldiers were even able to return to active duty following mastery of their new prosthetic. At least 167 soldiers with major limb amputation have remained on active duty since the start of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, with some even returning to battle.

With improved functionality, the amputee no longer has to worry about or focus on manipulating the prosthetic device, and can focus on the task at hand. Kevin Carroll, Vice President of Hangry (a prosthetics company), said "if they want to go back to be with their troops, that's an option these days." In many cases it takes at least a year before a soldier is able to return to duty, and each branch of the military has its own guidelines for this. However, once they are able to return to duty, soldiers who are going back into battle are able to perform just as well (at the same physical level) as their fellow soldiers if not better. Even with all these advancements, though, America still won't be training an army of bionic super-soldiers any time soon. Who knows though, maybe one day it will be possible. For now, we'll settle for increased sensation and functionality.

Resources:

https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/05/25/new-prosthetics-keep-amputee-soldiers-on-active-duty

http://usoonpatrol.org/assets/mc/ebrandner/2012_01/Spanky3_web.jpg

http://files.greatermedia.com/uploads/sites/80/2017/04/Flickr_-_The_U.S._Army_-_Departure_Ceremony-e1420556275773-1024x735.jpg