Sabine Pompeia

Universidade Federal de São Paulo | UNIFESP · Departamento de Psicobiologia

Expressive oral language development (EOLD) in adolescence is understudied and usuallyinvolves a small set of language parameters. To explore this development in more detail, weused automated language analyses of transcripts of narrative speech (fairy-tale retellings) of257 Portuguese-speaking 9-15-year-olds. We grouped multiple linguistic paramete...

Sensorimotor synchronization (SMS), the coordination of body movements with external stimuli (e.g., dancing, clapping along with music, sport activities), increases throughout childhood when assessed by finger-tapping (FT) tasks following rhythmic auditory cues using metronomes. However, metronomes may support less rhythmic entrainment than natural...

This paper presents a study on text complexity of Open Educational Resources (OER) in Brazilian Portuguese. In a data analysis of the Brazilian Ministry of Education Integrated Platform (MEC-RED) carried out in September 2020, 86% of the resources on the platform did not have any grade level classification, making it difficult to find, use, and exp...

The umbrella-term ‘executive functions’ (EF) includes various domain-general, goal-directed cognitive abilities responsible for behavioral self-regulation. The influential unity and diversity model of EF posits the existence of three correlated yet separable executive domains: inhibition, shifting and updating. These domains may be influenced by fa...

Individual variability in diurnal preference or chronotype is commonly assessed with self-report scales such as the widely used morningness-eveningness questionnaire (MEQ). We sought to investigate the MEQ's internal consistency by applying exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to determine the number of underlying latent factors in four different adul...

Pediatric cancer treatment can negatively impact cognitive and psychosocial development, although it has been suggested that these adverse effects may be minimized when children have higher resilience and better executive functioning. We aimed to evaluate the impact of pediatric Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) treatment on executive function, re...

Attempting to recall previously encountered information by being tested or quizzed (retrieval practice: RP) enhances memory. In real classrooms, however, it is unclear when testing should take place (placement) in order to elicit better learning. We tested students using authentic undergraduate-course materials with two placements, followed by coll...

Smoking cigarettes and low socioeconomic status (SES) are both related to impaired cognition. However, it is unknown whether people of lower SES, who comprise most tobacco smokers worldwide, are more susceptible to cognitive impairment associated with smoking. In this non-randomized, cross-sectional study we investigated the effects of cigarette sm...

Objective: To determine whether scores in an adapted version of the self-assessment Pubertal Development Scale into Portuguese match those from the gold standard in pubertal development (Tanner scale). Methods: This was a cross-sectional study with a convenience sample of 133 children and adolescents aged nine to 17 years (59 males; mean age of...

Background: Oral and written language in late adolescence are influenced by many pre- and postnatal factors, including cognitive performance at earlier ages. We investigated whether the association between birth weight and lexical knowledge and reading comprehension in late adolescence (14-16 years) is mediated by verbal cognition during early ado...

Popularização de técnicas de estudo eficientes por meio de ações em escolas, mídia e internet Resumo: Pesquisas mostram que alunos e professores muitas vezes desconhecem as técnicas de estudo que melhor promovem a aprendizagem duradoura. Aqui descrevemos a popularização de duas técnicas de aprendizagem: prática de lembrar e prática de distribuir,...

Five different facets or domains of impulsivity (lack of Perseverance, lack of Premeditation, Sensation Seeking, Positive and Negative Urgency) have been detected in undergraduate students by means of a short, 20-item version of the Impulsive Behavior Scale UPPS-P. The present cross-sectional study examined the psychometric properties of a Brazilia...

Obstructive sleep apnea syndrome (OSA) is a common respiratory sleep disorder in children that is believed to adversely affect quality of life and cognition. The purpose of the present systematic review was to obtain evidence of the impact of OSA on children's cognitive/behavioral abilities from primary studies published in MEDLINE/PubMed, LILACS,...

Changes in sleep patterns negatively influence some emotional responses, but their effects on facial expressiveness identification are unclear. To investigate these effects, 21 young, healthy, male volunteers of intermediate chronotype evaluated emotional expressiveness of faces depicting 6 basic emotions in 5 emotional gradients every 4 h over 36...

Caffeine is widely used, often consumed with food, and improves simple and complex/executive attention under fasting conditions. We investigated whether these cognitive effects are observed when personalized habitual doses of caffeine are ingested by caffeine consumers, whether they are influenced by nutriments and if various executive domains are...

O teste Memória Lógica da Wechsler Memory Scale - Revised (WMS-R) é amplamente utilizado na prática clínica como instrumento de avaliação da memória verbal. O objetivo deste estudo foi analisar as propriedades psicométricas iniciais de versões alternativas das histórias traduzidas e livremente adaptadas da WMS-R empregadas no Brasil: três histórias...

Electrophysiological markers of chunking of words during encoding have mostly been shown in studies that present pairs of related stimuli. In these cases it is difficult to disentangle cognitive processes that reflect distinctiveness (i.e., conspicuous items because they are related), perceived association between related items and unified represen...

OBJECTIVE: To present three alternative stories for each of the original stories frequently used in Brazil (Ana Soares and Roberto Mota) and to show their similarity in terms of content, structure and linguistic characteristics. METHODS: The alternative stories were developed according to the following criteria: overall structure or thematic conte...

Objective: Adults with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) display affective problems and impaired attention. Mood in ADHD can be improved by mindful awareness practices (MAP), but results are mixed regarding the enhancement of attentional performance. Here we evaluated MAP-induced changes in quality of life (QoL), mood, and attention...

The autonomous regulation of pupil size provides an objective physiological measure of alertness level. Pupil diameter decreases and its fluctuations increase during drowsiness. In this work, a statistical based technique in frequency domain, known as Spectral F-Test (SFT), was applied in order to compare the power of pupillometric signals measured...

Purpose: Obstructive sleep apnea syndrome (OSAS) is associated with impaired cognition, especially executive functions. However, various of its comorbid conditions are also known to cause cognitive impairment, so it is unclear whether OSAS itself is responsible for cognitive deficits. Our aim was to determine the effects of OSAS on executive funct...

Mindfulness has been defined as being intentionally aware of internal and external experiences that occur at the present moment, without judgment. Techniques that develop mindfulness, such as meditation, have positive effects on reducing insomnia, a sleep disorder that is common both during and after menopause. Our aim was to establish whether post...

Objective: Chronic use of the acetylcholinesterase inhibitor donepezil has been found to improve mood or to induce mania/hypomania in many neuropsychiatric patients with altered cholinergic and dopaminergic tone. Our aim was to determine whether acutely administered donepezil would alter mood in volunteers with no such alterations. Methods: This...

The aim of this study was to investigate neuropsychological performance and biomarkers of oxidative stress in patients with obstructive sleep apnea and the relationships between these factors. This was an observational, cross-sectional study of 14 patients (36.0±6.5 years old) with obstructive sleep apnea and 13 controls (37.3±6.9 years old). All o...

This paper describes a system with potential for identification of sleep deprivation, which, based on our bibliographical survey, has not yet been described in the literature. The system combines two methodologies, i. e., Psychomotor vigilance test (PVT) and pupillometry, which are among the leading methods for the study of sleep deprivation. Howev...

Measuring the dynamics of pupillary motility is a challenge for many researchers due to its nonlinear behavior and produce many outliers and noise. Our goal is to introduce method to analyze the variability in pupil size during the cognitive task. From the data vector X = (X1,X2,...,Xn+1), we define the auxiliary vectors x = (x1, x2,..., xn) and y...

One task that has been used to assess memory effects of prior total sleep deprivation (TSD) is the immediate free recall of word lists; however, results have been mixed. A possible explanation for this is task impurity, since recall of words from different serial positions reflects use of distinct types of memory (last words: short-term memory; fir...

The cholinergic system is involved in the modulation of both bottom-up and top-down attentional control. Top-down attention engages multiple executive control processes, but few studies have investigated whether all or selective elements of executive functions are modulated by the cholinergic system. To investigate the acute effects of the pro-chol...

Herds of white-lipped peccary (Tayassu pecari) have historically been kept in captivity in order to replace stocks lost to hunting however the lack of knowledge regarding their species-typical behaviour remains an impediment to understanding their captive needs. Environmental enrichment has been suggested as an efficient way of decreasing aggressio...

In comparison with basal physiological levels, acute, high levels of cortisol affect learning and memory. Despite reports of cortisol-induced episodic memory effects, no study has used a comprehensive battery of tests to evaluate glucocorticoid effects on the multicomponent model of working memory. Here, we report the results of a double-blind, pla...

Could Lorazepam be More Effective in Alcohol Withdrawal than Other Benzodiazepines? - Volume 16 Issue 1 - Sabine Pompéia, Vania D'Almeida, Sergio Tufik

Captive breeding of peccaries is on the increase in neotropical countries. Few studies, however, have reported behavioural responses of wild animals under farmed conditions. Therefore, the aim of this study was to evaluate the effects of space allowance on the occurrence of social behaviour patterns on farmed collared peccary (Pecari tajacu). We ob...

The Prospective and Retrospective Memory Questionnaire (PRMQ) has been shown to have acceptable reliability and factorial, predictive, and concurrent validity. However, the PRMQ has never been administered to a probability sample survey representative of all ages in adulthood, nor have previous studies controlled for factors that are known to influ...

Episodic memory is impaired in multiple sclerosis (MS) patients, possibly because of deficits in working memory (WM) functioning. If so, WM alterations should necessarily be found in patients with episodic memory deficits, but this has not yet been demonstrated. In this study we aimed at determining whether episodic memory deficits in relapsing-rem...

The acute nootropic potential of donepezil in young healthy volunteers has not been adequately investigated mainly because in previous studies: (1) effects were assessed before peak-plasma concentration (Tmax) was reached; (2) only a few cognitive processes were assessed. Here we investigated a myriad of cognitive effects of augmentation of acetylc...

High cortisol plasma concentrations have been shown to be associated with increases in homocysteine levels. Here we studied whether decreases in cortisol concentration, induced by an acute oral dose of a benzodiazepine, could decrease homocysteine, and if changes were similar in both genders. This was a double-blind, cross-over design study of acut...

Introduction: This study investigated the performance of a sample of Brazilian children aged 4-5 years on the Conners' Kiddie CPT (K-CPT), a computer-based task used to assess attention and inhibitory control in children. Methods: Scores of Brazilian children pre-screened for attention disorders were obtained using the K-CPT, and data were compared...

To evaluate the effects of an acute dose of the benzodiazepine (BZ) lorazepam in young healthy volunteers on five distinguishable visual perception abilities determined by previous factor-analytic studies. This was a double-blind, cross-over design study of acute oral doses of lorazepam (2 mg) and placebo in young healthy volunteers. We focused on...

The present study investigated the performance of Brazilian children in the Continuous Performance Test, CPT-II, and compared results to those of the norms obtained in the United States. The U.S. norms were compared to those of a Brazilian sample composed of 6- to 11-year-olds separated into 4 age-groups (half boys) that represented the socioeconom...

Benzodiazepines slow reasoning performance, but it is still unknown which phase of reasoning is affected and whether this effect is present for different types of relations between entities in reasoning problems. We investigated which phases of deductive reasoning are affected by lorazepam and whether this effect varies according to the type of rel...

This article describes pleasant IAPS pictures that elicit low-arousal rather than the high-arousal physiological responses previously reported in the literature. Thirty-two International Affective Picture System (IAPS) photographs were grouped into 4 sets of 8 photographs: highly pleasant-arousing (sexual content and adventures), highly pleasant-re...

OBJECTIVES: to compare the neuropsychological profile of eutrophic, stunted and chronically malnourished children, and to analyse the role of socio-economic factors on the cognitive development. METHODS: seven to 10 year-old girls and boys from a poor community in São Paulo were evaluated: 27 eutrophyc, 31 stunted and 15 chronically malnourished. N...

Although it is widely known that benzodiazepines impair episodic memory, few studies have investigated their effects upon specific processes involved in free recall. This study evaluated the acute effects of flunitrazepam (1.0 mg; 1.3 mg) and placebo in healthy volunteers on immediate and delayed free recall of word lists considering serial positio...

Well-known reports suggest that the use of energy drinks might reduce the intensity of the depressant effects of alcohol. However, there is little scientific evidence to support this hypothesis. The present study aimed at evaluating the effects of the simultaneous ingestion of an alcohol (vodka(37.5%v/v)) and an energy drink (Red Bull-3.57 mL/kg),...

The study of the contribution of different subtypes of long-term memory, explicit and implicit, in the performance in certain tasks is constrained by three different factors: a) the ambiguous definition of these types of memory, "consciously" and "non-consciously" retrievable, respectively; b) the distinct features of tasks that assess implicit and...

The study of the contribution of different subtypes of long-term memory, explicit and implicit, in the performance in certain tasks is constrained by three different factors: a) the ambiguous definition of these types of memory, "consciously" and "non-consciously" retrievable, respectively; b) the distinct features of tasks that assess implicit and...

The present article compares Brazilian and American norms for the International Affective Picture System (IAPS), a set of normative emotional photographic slides for experimental investigations. Subjects were 1,062 Brazilian university students (364 men and 698 women) who rated 707 pictures from the IAPS in terms of pleasure, arousal, and dominance...

The imidazopyridine zolpidem is a hypnotic drug with relative selectivity for the benzodiazepine (BZP) type 1 receptor subtypes displaying a different biochemical structure to that of BZPs. Little is known of its electrophysiological effects. The aim of the present study was to investigate the acute neurophysiological effects of clinical oral doses...

This study compared Brazilian and North American children regarding naming, familiarity and visual complexity of a set of 400 pictures. Thirty-six Brazilian children (18 boys) aged 5 to 7 were evaluated. Their characteristics and the study procedure and measures were the same as those employed for the North American population enabling direct compa...

OBJECTIVE: This study compared Brazilian and North American children regarding naming, familiarity and visual complexity of a set of 400 pictures. METHOD: Thirty-six Brazilian children (18 boys) aged 5 to 7 were evaluated. Their characteristics and the study procedure and measures were the same as those employed for the North American population en...

Este artículo presenta valores normativos brasileños para el International Affective System (IAPS), un conjunto de estímulos con potencial de poner al descubierto emociones, que es ampliamente utilizado en la investigación experimental. Además, se presentan los resultados de la comparación entre las respuestas de hombres y mujeres brasileños. Un to...

There is a dearth of studies which have employed sophisticated paradigms to investigate the effects of zolpidem on memory. To explore anterograde cognitive deficits induced by acute oral doses of zolpidem by means of the process-dissociation procedure (PDP). The present study followed a placebo-controlled, double-blind, parallel-group design. Young...

Snodgrass & Vanderwart (1980) standardized a set of 260 pictures in the USA for use in studies of cognitive processes that employ pictured objects as laboratory analogues of object themselves. Since then similar norms for this set were obtained in Britain, Spain, Japan and Iceland and a larger set of 400 pictures (including the original 260: Cycowi...

This study was designed to explore the effects on performance in stem-completion tasks of two benzodiazepines (BZ) in equipotent doses: lorazepam, a drug that atypically disrupts perceptual priming, and flunitrazepam, a compound with standard BZ effects. The study followed a placebo-controlled, double-blind, parallel-group design. Thirty-six young...

Certain features of event-related potentials (ERPs), electroencephalographic (EEG), and behavioural measures vary with differing states of alertness and/or sedation. This study was conducted to investigate changes in several measures usually viewed as reflecting states of sedation/sleepiness associated with the use of a range of doses of the hypnot...

Lorazepam has been reported to atypically disrupt visual processing compared to other benzodiazepines (BZs), but it is not known to what extent this effect extends to impairment in other modalities. Our objective was to compare the effects of lorazepam with those of flunitrazepam, a BZ with standard effects, on visual and auditory event-related pot...

Testes de complementação de letras (em inglês ''stem-completion tests'') são amplamente utilizado na literatura internacional para avaliar memória. Não existem no Brasil, porém, trabalhos que propõem estímulos adequados para uso nesse tipo de teste. O objetivo do presente experimento foi selecionar conjuntos de três letras (tríades) que completam p...

This study was designed to explore putative facilitatory effects of low doses of scopolamine (SP) on phonemic (letter) and semantic (category) verbal fluency. A double-blind, parallel-group design was used with 36 subjects who completed a test battery before and 2 h after 0.6 mg or 1.2 mg of SP or placebo. Fluency measures included total number of...

The present article provides normative measures for 400 pictured objects (Cycowicz et al., 1997) viewed by Portuguese speaking Brazilian University students and 5-7 year-old children. Name agreement, familiarity and visual complexity ratings were obtained. These variables have been shown to be important for the selection of adequate stimuli for cog...

This study was designed to explore the role of benzodiazepine affinity to benzodiazepine binding site on acute psychomotor, subjective and memory effects, as well as auditory Event Related Potential (ERP) latencies, in healthy volunteers. Two benzodiazepines with similar affinity to benzodiazepine binding sites, or potency, were compared: the atypi...

Pictorial stimuli and words have been widely used to evaluate mnemonic processes in clinical settings, neuropsychological investigations, as well as in studies on the mechanisms underlying the phenomena of memory. However, there seem to be few studies of standardisation of pictures for research in this field. The present paper aimed at adapting the...

Acute effects of oral flunitrazepam (0.5 and 1 mg), nitrazepam (5 and 10 mg) and placebo were assessed on direct (free recall of words and prose, stem-cued recall) and indirect (stem and fragment completion) memory tasks. Fifty health volunteers took part in this double-blind, independent group study. The relative effects of the two benzodiazepines...

This study was designed to explore whether differences in the psychomotor, subjective and memory effects of different benzodiazepines (BDZ) relate to differences in their potencies. Two BDZs with similar kinetics but different potencies were compared. Flunitrazepam (0.5 and 1.0mg, nitrazepam (5 and 10mg) or placebo were administered to 50 healthy v...

The profiles of the Beck Depression Inventory and State-Trait Anxiety Inventory scores were obtained for a sample of Brazilian university students and compared with those of other studies. Subjects were 270 students from various universities in São Paulo, age 23.8 yr. (SD=6.7 yr.). The mean Beck score for the total sample was 8.5 (SD=7.0); accordin...

The long-term effects of benzodiazepines (BDZ) on psychomotor and cognitive functions were assessed in 28 out patients, users of low therapeutic doses of diazepam (13.6 ± 4.9 mg/day, range: 5-20 mg/day) for 5-20 years (10.1 ± 5.0 years). These patients' performance was compared with two control groups: 53 BDZ-free anxious out patients and 56 health...