María Jesús Funes Molina’s research while affiliated with University of Granada and other places

Objectives: Previous studies have reported impairments in activities of daily living (ADL) performance in the presence of irrelevant but physically/functionally related objects in dementia patients. The aim of the present study was to increase our knowledge about the impact of the presence of contextually related non-target objects on ADL execution in patients with multi-domain mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and dementia. Methods: We compared ADL execution in patients with MCI, dementia, and healthy elderly participants under two experimental conditions: One in which the target objects were embedded with contextually related non-target items that constituted the object set necessary to complete two additional (but unrequired) ADL tasks related to the target task, and a second, control condition where target objects were surrounded by isolated objects (they never constituted a whole set needed to complete an alternative ADL task). Results: Separate analysis of ADL errors associated with the target task versus errors involving the non-target objects revealed that, although the presence of contextually related objects facilitated the accomplishment of the target task, such a condition also led to errors involving the use of irrelevant objects in dementia and MCI. Conclusions: The presence of contextually related non-target items produces both positive and negative effects on ADL performance. These types of non-target objects might help to cue the retrieval of the action schema related to the target task, particularly in patients with MCI. In contrast, the presence of these objects might also lead to distraction in dementia and MCI. (JINS, 2017, 23, 1-12).

The affective prediction hypothesis assumes that visual expectation allows fast and accurate processing of emotional stimuli. The prediction corresponds to what an object is likely to be. It therefore facilitates its identification by setting aside what the object is unlikely to be. It has then been suggested that prediction might be inevitably associated with the inhibition of irrelevant possibilities concerning the object to identify. Several studies highlighted that the facilitation of emotional perception depends on low spatial frequency (LSF) extraction. However, most of them used paradigms in which only the object to identify was present in the scene. As a consequence, there have yet been no studies investigating the efficiency of prediction in the visual perception of stimuli among irrelevant information. In this study, we designed a novel priming emotional Stroop task in which participants had to identify emotional facial expressions (EFEs) presented along with a congruent or incongruent word. To further investigate the role of early extraction of LSF information in top-down prediction during emotion recognition, the target EFE was primed with the same EFE filtered in LSF or high spatial frequency (HSF). Results reveal a reduction of the Stroop interference in the LSF compared to the HSF priming condition, which supports that visual expectation, depending on early LSF information extraction, facilitates the inhibition of irrelevant information during emotion recognition.

In the present study we explored cognitive and functional deficits in patients with multidomain mild cognitive impairment (MCI), patients with dementia, and healthy age-matched control participants using the Cognitive Scale for Basic and Instrumental Activities of Daily Living, a new preliminary informant-based assessment tool. This tool allowed us to evaluate four key cognitive abilities-task memory schema, error detection, problem solving, and task self-initiation-in a range of basic and instrumental activities of daily living (BADL and IADL, respectively). The first part of the present study was devoted to testing the psychometric adequateness of this new informant-based tool and its convergent validity with other global functioning and neuropsychological measures. The second part of the study was aimed at finding the patterns of everyday cognitive factors that best discriminate between the three groups. We found that patients with dementia exhibited impairment in all cognitive abilities in both basic and instrumental activities. By contrast, patients with MCI were found to have preserved task memory schema in both types of ADL; however, such patients exhibited deficits in error detection and task self-initiation but only in IADL. Finally, patients with MCI also showed a generalized problem solving deficit that affected even BADL. Studying various cognitive processes instantiated in specific ADL differing in complexity seems a promising strategy to further understand the specific relationships between cognition and function in these and other cognitively impaired populations.