Abstract
Causes of Social Isolation in TBI
Social isolation is prevalent and contributes to poor rehabilitation outcomes among people with moderate-to-severe traumatic brain injury (TBI). One potential barrier to community integration is impairment in the ability to accurately identify facial emotions, which can lead to difficulties in social interactions. This study compared two groups of participants—27 with moderate-to-severe TBI and 30 healthy controls. All participants completed a questionnaire to examine community integration and two tests of facial emotion recognition. The TBI group reported lower levels of community integration compared with the healthy control group. Importantly, those individuals who had lower performance on the facial emotion recognition task displayed reduced integration into the community. The researchers suggest that by incorporating appropriate interventions to improve facial emotion recognition into rehabilitative care, it may be possible to see improvement in community integration and increases in quality of life for both individuals and their caregivers.
Binder, A. S., Lancaster, K., Lengenfelder, J., Chiaravalloti, N. D., & Genova, H. M. (2019). Community integration in traumatic brain injury: The contributing factor of affect recognition deficits. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 25, 890–895. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1355617719000559
Low-Achieving and High-Achieving Students Receive Different Instruction
In reading, math, and science, teachers whose students scored low on a national test reported being less likely to ask their classes to engage in higher-order thinking or offer them advanced work than teachers whose students scored high, according to a report from the National Center for Education Statistics. The new analysis used data from the 2015 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). As a component of the test, teachers and students answered survey questions about classroom instruction—what content teachers covered and what activities they did. This report examined trends in responses to those questionnaires and also linked the data to student achievement results, offering a look at the differences between the content teachers emphasized and the instructional strategies they used with low-scoring students and high-scoring students.
In reading, teachers commonly ask their students to complete reading comprehension activities, but the teachers of low-performing students assigned different ones than the teachers of high-performing students. Teachers whose 8th-grade students scored below NAEP’s basic achievement level were more likely to ask them to summarize passages but less likely to ask them to identify main themes or question the motives or feelings of characters. A similar pattern emerged for older students: 12th graders who scored below the basic level were less likely to say their teachers asked them to interpret and analyze passages. This trend also appeared in science classes, where lower-scoring 4th and 12th graders were not doing as much inquiry-based learning as their higher-scoring peers. It is not known if the differences in teachers’ instruction caused the difference in test scores, or if teachers are changing their strategies for low- and high-scoring students, based on their assessments of students’ abilities.
See the following link for 2015 Student Questionnaires Results Classroom Instruction for Mathematics, Reading, and Science: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/sq_classroom/#mathematics
Effects of Hypoxia in Premature Infants
Nearly 15 million babies are born prematurely, or before 37 weeks of pregnancy, around the world each year. When born too early, a baby’s immature respiratory center in the brain often fails to signal it to breathe, resulting in low oxygen levels, or hypoxia, in the brain. Research shows that even a brief 30-min period of hypoxia is enough to disrupt the structure and function of the hippocampus, which is vital for learning and memory. These findings are concerning for the long-term impact that oxygen deprivation can have on the ability of preterm babies to learn as they grow to school age and adulthood.
In the neonatal intensive care unit, preemies can experience up to 600 short, but impactful, periods of hypoxia each week. More than one-third of babies who survive preterm birth are likely to have smaller brains, presumably due to brain cell loss, compared with the brains of full-term infants. This can increase the risk of significant lifelong neurodevelopmental challenges that will affect learning, memory, attention, and behavior. Using a twin preterm fetal sheep model, researchers studied the impact of both hypoxia alone and in combination with ischemia—or insufficient blood flow—on the developing hippocampus. The results confirm that, similar to human preterm survivors, growth of the hippocampus is impaired. However, brain cells did not die as previously believed. Rather, hippocampal cells failed to mature normally, causing a reduction in long-term potentiation, or the cellular basis of how the brain learns. The severity of the hypoxia predicted the degree to which cells in the hippocampus failed to mature normally. These findings were unexpected because it was not appreciated that the preterm hippocampus was already capable of these learning processes.
McClendon, E., Wang, K., Degener-O’Brien, K., Hagen, M. W., Gong, X., Nguyen, T., . . . Back, S. A. (2019). Transient hypoxemia disrupts anatomical and functional maturation of preterm fetal ovine CA1 pyramidal neurons. The Journal of Neuroscience, 39, 7853–7871. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1364-19.2019
Can Artificial Intelligence Overcome Illiteracy?
Could artificial intelligence be a solution for people who cannot read well or those who cannot read at all? According to psycholinguists, speech technology should never replace learning how to read. Researchers argue that literacy leads to a better understanding of speech because good readers are good at predicting words. About one in five humans is considered to be low literate or illiterate; they cannot read or write simple statements about everyday life. Low literacy can be due to no or little reading practice or to reading impairments such as dyslexia. For developing countries with low literacy rates, voice recognition has been hailed as a solution, but speech technology may not really be the solution for low literacy.
In an article in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, psycholinguists suggest that relying on speech technology might be counterproductive, as literacy has crucial benefits even beyond reading. Social media writing and reading habits are quite different from traditional print media. Information that people used to get from written sources, such as novels, newspapers, public notices, or even recipe books, they now get more and more from YouTube videos, podcasts, or audiobooks. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as some of the general benefits of reading can also be obtained from listening to audiobooks. As audiobooks also provide book language, listening to them will confer some similar advantages—such as a larger vocabulary, increased knowledge of the world, and a larger working memory, which is important to keep track of information and multiple entities over several sentences, paragraphs, or often even pages. But the actual physical act of reading is important for developing the skill of predicting upcoming words, which transfers from reading to understanding spoken language. Reading trains the language prediction system. Predicting upcoming information is useful, as it reduces processing load and frees up limited brain resources. Skilled readers get much better at predicting.
Children who are avid readers encounter over 4 million words a year, whereas children who rarely read encounter only about 50,000 words. As a result, good readers get a deeper understanding of the meaning of words and build large networks of words with strong associations between them—which helps them to predict upcoming words. As poor readers have smaller vocabularies and weaker representations of words in their mind (i.e., the recollection of the sound and meaning of a word), the predictive relationships between words are also weaker. The regularity of written texts helps readers to form the predictive relationships between words that then, by extension, can also be used to better predict words when listening to speech. The researchers maintain that a focus on artificial intelligence voice recognition and voice assistants to overcome literacy-related problems has its dangers.
Huettig, F., & Pickering, M. J. (2019). Literacy advantages beyond reading: Prediction of spoken language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 23, 464–475. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2019.03.008
Hearing Loss and Reading Problems in Children With Brain Tumors
A recent study found that 32% of brain tumor patients developed severe hearing loss within several years of treatment despite treatment with a drug designed to protect hair cells in the inner ear that are essential for hearing. Researchers have identified factors that explain why severe hearing loss sets up pediatric brain tumor survivors for reading difficulties. Researchers analyzed how 260 children and adolescent brain tumor survivors, including 64 with severe hearing loss, performed on skills that are the building blocks of reading. The list included information processing speed, working memory, letter-word identification, and phonological skills, which include the ability to use units of sound (phonemes) to decode words. Compared with other survivors, those with severe hearing loss experienced significant declines during treatment on all eight measures included in this analysis. After accounting for the risk factors of age at diagnosis and treatment intensity, the analysis suggested that survivors with severe hearing loss struggled the most with slowed processing speed and phonological skills. The findings suggest that interventions should focus on improving neurocognitive and language-based skills like processing speed and phonemics before tackling more complex tasks like reading comprehension. Younger children, those less than 7 years old, were particularly vulnerable to declines in skills that are fundamental for reading mastery.
Olivier, T. W., Bass, J. K., Ashford, J. M., Beaulieu, R., Scott, S. M., Schreiber, J. E., . . . Conklin, H. M. (2019). Cognitive implications of ototoxicity in pediatric patients with embryonal brain tumors. Journal of Clinical Oncology, 37, 1566–1575. https://doi.org/10.1200/JCO.18.01358
Expectant Parents’ Emotions Influence Children’s Behaviors
A new research shows that expectant parents’ emotional struggles predict emotional and behavioral problems in 2-year-olds. The study drew on the experiences of 438 first-time expectant mothers and fathers who reported symptoms of depression and anxiety at each of four time-points (i.e., last trimester of pregnancy and 4, 14, and 24 months postbirth). Mothers and fathers also rated their couple relationship quality and their child’s socioemotional adjustment at 14 months, as well as internalizing and externalizing problems at 24 months. Latent growth models indicated direct effects of (a) maternal prenatal well-being on externalizing problems at 24 months and (b) paternal prenatal well-being on socioemotional problems at 14 months. Internalizing symptoms at 24 months showed indirect associations with parental well-being, with couple relationship quality playing a mediating role. The findings highlight the importance of prenatal exposure to parental mood disturbance and demonstrate that, even in a low-risk sample, poor couple relationship quality explains the intergenerational stability of internalizing problems. The team of researchers says their findings highlight a pressing need for greater support for couples before, during, and after pregnancy to improve outcomes for children.
Hughes, C., Devine, R. T., Mesman, J., & Blair, C. (2019). Parental wellbeing, couple relationship quality and children behavior problems in the first two years of life. Development and Psychopathology, 24, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579419000804
Learning From Video Chat
Unlike older children, infants and toddlers need responsive, face-to-face encounters with real humans to learn new information. A research team studied 176 toddlers in two age-groups (24 and 30 months) to see under which conditions they would best learn the name of a novel object. One group of toddlers were offered referential social cues disambiguating a novel word’s meaning in one of four conditions: responsive live (a speaker was present and engaged with children), unresponsive video (a speaker on video looked at the camera and smiled at scripted times), unresponsive live (although present, the speaker behaved as she did on the unresponsive video), and responsive video (a speaker on closed-circuit video engaged with children, as in video chat). Children of both ages reliably learned the word in the responsive live condition, and older children (30 months) learned in the unresponsive live condition. Neither group learned in the responsive or unresponsive video conditions. Although video chat includes more communicative social cues and interaction than a nonresponsive video, the medium still was not sufficient to support learning in the study.
Troseth, G. L., Strouse, G. S., Verdine, B. N., & Saylor, M. S. (2019). Let’s chat: On-screen social responsiveness is not sufficient to support toddlers’ word learning from video. Frontiers in Psychology, 9. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02195