Débora I. Burin

Estimation of premorbid intelligence: the word accentuation test-- Buenos Aires version.

We have sought to adapt and validate a NART-like Spanish test, the Word Accentuation Test (WAT: Del Ser, Montalvo, Espinosa, Villapalos, & Bermejo, 1997) to estimate acquired intelligence in local normal older adults. The test requires examinees to read aloud infrequent, irregularly stressed Spanish words, a situation that presumably requires lexical knowledge. Results in a sample of 74 participants show that the revised WAT (i.e., the WAT for Buenos Aires) has good concurrent validity with the WAIS Vocabulary subtest and number of years of formal education, as well as high internal consistency. Performance on this test was dissociated from age, memory, or frontal/executive measures.

Sertraline for Preventing Mood Disorders Following Traumatic Brain Injury: A Randomized Clinical Trial

Importance Prevention is more effective than treatment to decrease the burden of significant medical conditions such as depressive disorders, a major cause of disability worldwide. Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a candidate for selective strategies to prevent depression given the incidence, prevalence, and functional effect of depression that occurs after TBI. Objective To assess the efficacy of sertraline treatment in preventing depressive disorders following TBI. Design, Setting, and Participants A double-blind, placebo-controlled, parallel-group randomized clinical trial was conducted at a university hospital from July 3, 2008, to September 17, 2012, with 24 weeks of follow-up. A consecutive sample of 534 patients aged 18 to 85 years, hospitalized for mild, moderate, or severe TBI, was eligible for the study. Ninety-four patients consented to participate and were randomized (46 to placebo and 48 to sertraline), of whom 79 (84%) completed the study. Intention-to-treat data analysis was conducted from July 1, 2014, to December 31, 2015. Interventions Placebo or sertraline, 100 mg/d, for 24 weeks or until development of a mood disorder. Main Outcomes and Measures Time to onset of depressive disorders, as defined by the DSM-IV, associated with TBI. Results Of the 94 patients in the study (38 female and 56 male; 92 white), the number needed to treat to prevent depression after TBI at 24 weeks was 5.9 (95% CI, 3.1-71.1; χ2 = 4.6; P = .03) for sertraline treatment vs placebo. The influence of sertraline in the course of neuropsychological variables was not detected. The intervention was well tolerated, and adverse effects were mild in both the sertraline and placebo groups. Conclusions and Relevance Sertraline appears to be efficacious to prevent the onset of depressive disorders following TBI. Future studies should replicate these findings in a large sample of patients with TBI and depict their long-term physical, cognitive, behavioral, and functional outcomes. Trial Registration clinicaltrials.gov Identifier: NCT00704379.

The Role of Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex in Text Comprehension Inferences: Semantic Coherence or Socio-Emotional Perspective?

Two hypotheses about the role of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) in narrative comprehension inferences, global semantic coherence versus socio-emotional perspective, were tested. Seven patients with vmPFC lesions and seven demographically matched healthy comparison participants read short narratives. Using the consistency paradigm, narratives required participants to make either an emotional or visuo-spatial inference, in which a target sentence provided consistent or inconsistent information with a previous emotional state of a character or a visuo-spatial location of an object. Healthy comparison participants made the inferences both for spatial and emotional stories, as shown by longer reading times for inconsistent critical sentences. For patients with vmPFC lesions, inconsistent sentences were read slower in the spatial stories, but not in the emotional ones. This pattern of results is compatible with the hypothesis that vmPFC contributes to narrative comprehension by supporting inferences about socio-emotional aspects of verbally described situations.

Estimating Intelligence in Spanish: Regression Equations With the Word Accentuation Test and Demographic Variables in Latin America

Spanish is the fourth most spoken language in the world, and the majority of Spanish speakers have a Latin American origin. Reading aloud infrequently accentuated words has been established as a National Adult Reading Test-like method to assess premorbid intelligence in Spanish. However, several versions have been proposed and validated with small and selected samples, in particular geographical conditions, and they seldom derive a formula for IQ estimation with the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) Full-Scale IQ (FSIQ). The objective of this study was to develop equations to estimate WAIS-Third Edition (WAIS-III) FSIQ from the Word Accentuation Test-Revised (WAT-R), demographic variables, and their combination within diverse Latin American samples. Two hundred and forty participants from Argentina and Colombia, selected according to age and years of education strata, were assessed with the WAT-R, the WAIS-III, and a structured questionnaire about demographic and medical information. A combined approach including place of birth, years of education, and WAT-R provided the best equation, explaining 76% of IQ variance. These equations could be useful for estimating premorbid IQ in patients with Latin American Spanish as their birth language.

Conflicting but close: Readers’ integration of information sources as a function of their disagreement

According to the documents model framework (Britt, Perfetti, Sandak, & Rouet, 1999), readers’ detection of contradictions within texts increases their integration of source–content links (i.e., who says what). This study examines whether conflict may also strengthen the relationship between the respective sources. In two experiments, participants read brief news reports containing two critical statements attributed to different sources. In half of the reports, the statements were consistent with each other, whereas in the other half they were discrepant. Participants were tested for source memory and source integration in an immediate item-recognition task (Experiment 1) and a cued recall task (Experiments 1 and 2). In both experiments, discrepancies increased readers’ memory for sources. We found that discrepant sources enhanced retrieval of the other source compared to consistent sources (using a delayed recall measure; Experiments 1 and 2). However, discrepant sources failed to prime the other source as evidenced in an online recognition measure (Experiment 1). We argue that discrepancies promoted the construction of links between sources, but that integration did not take place during reading.

Working memory structure in children: comparing different models during childhood

Working Memory (WM) is an active memory system responsible for the temporary storage and concurrent processing of information. Different authors have considered WM as a complex but unitary system, whereas others have suggested that the system is multidimensional. In this line, the model developed by Baddeley and Hitch (1974) is one of the most well known; it proposes two modality-specific components the phonological loop and the visuo-spatial sketchpad and a supervisory executive system the central executive. This paper contributes to the debate on WM structure by investigating three groups of children of different ages and assessing different models using confirmatory factor analysis. The Working Memory Assessment Battery Test (Alloway, 2007; Injoque-Ricle, Calero, Alloway & Burin, 2011) was administered to 180 monolingual Spanish-speaking children. The three age groups consisted of 6-, 8-, and 11-year-old children (n = 60 participants per group). The results suggest that the WM structure is not uniform across the different age groups tested, showing progressive differentiation and specialization during childhood. This structure would appear to form between the ages of 6 and 8 years and become more complex as adolescence is approached.

Memoria de Trabajo y vocabulario: Un modelo de interacción entre los componentes del modelo de Baddeley y el sistema de información verbal cristalizada

Esta investigación fue financiada por el Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET; Res. No 258/06 y Res. N° 3100/08) y Por la Secretaría de Ciencia y Técnica de la Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBACyT P016). La Batería Automatizada de Memoria de Trabajo (AWMA) fue traducida y adaptada bajo permiso. Copyright

Constructing three emotion knowledge tests from the invariant measurement approach

Background Psychological constructionist models like the Conceptual Act Theory (CAT) postulate that complex states such as emotions are composed of basic psychological ingredients that are more clearly respected by the brain than basic emotions. The objective of this study was the construction and initial validation of Emotion Knowledge measures from the CAT frame by means of an invariant measurement approach, the Rasch Model (RM). Psychological distance theory was used to inform item generation. Methods Three EK tests—emotion vocabulary (EV), close emotional situations (CES) and far emotional situations (FES)—were constructed and tested with the RM in a community sample of 100 females and 100 males (age range: 18–65), both separately and conjointly. Results It was corroborated that data-RM fit was sufficient. Then, the effect of type of test and emotion on Rasch-modelled item difficulty was tested. Significant effects of emotion on EK item difficulty were found, but the only statistically significant difference was that between “happiness” and the remaining emotions; neither type of test, nor interaction effects on EK item difficulty were statistically significant. The testing of gender differences was carried out after corroborating that differential item functioning (DIF) would not be a plausible alternative hypothesis for the results. No statistically significant sex-related differences were found out in EV, CES, FES, or total EK. However, the sign of d indicate that female participants were consistently better than male ones, a result that will be of interest for future meta-analyses. Discussion The three EK tests are ready to be used as components of a higher-level measurement process.

Conocimiento Previo y Memoria De Trabajo en la Comprensión de Textos Expositivos

El objetivo del presente trabajo es estudiar la influencia del conocimiento previo especifico de dominio y de la memoria de trabajo en la comprension de textos expositivos generales y textos expositivos disciplinares. Para ello se administraron a lectores novatos y expertos dos textos: expositivo divulgativo y expositivo especializado, comparando la realizacion de un resumen y las respuestas a preguntas como medidas de comprension lectora. A los participantes de ambos grupos se les administro la Tarea de Amplitud de Lectura para medir la capacidad de memoria de trabajo. Los resultados mostraron un mejor rendimiento de los lectores con alto conocimiento previo en la comprension del texto expositivo disciplinar. En cambio, la memoria de trabajo no tuvo efectos significativos, salvo para los lectores expertos en textos disciplinares. Estos resultados apoyarian la hipotesis segun la cual el conocimiento previo seria el principal factor de la diferencia de rendimiento en la comprension de textos expositivos. Expository Text Comprehension: Prior Knowledge and Working Memory. This paper examines the comprehension of general and disciplinary expository texts as a function of previous domain-specific knowledge, and working memory capacity. Novices or experts in psychology topics read a general expository text and a disciplinary expository text. Two measures of comprehension were collected: the production of a summary, and the response to multiple-choice questions. Working memory capacity was measured with the Reading Span Task. Results indicated better performance from experts on the disciplinary text. No differences were found on the general text, or as a function of working memory, except for expert readers in disciplinary texts. These results support the hypothesis that previous domain-specific knowledge is a key factor in differences in text comprehension, in comparison with the working memory capacity hypothesis.

Self-reported internet skills, previous knowledge and working memory in text comprehension in E-learning

We examined the contribution of Internet operational and navigation skills, previous knowledge, and working memory capacity to expository text comprehension as a lesson within an e-learning course. As different from previous studies in controlled settings; this study addressed students’ typical behavior in more ecological conditions. The first study tested self-reported Internet Skills Scale structure, reliability and concurrent validity, in a sample of 254 college students from a large Latin American public university. The second study addressed the contribution of self-reported Internet skills, previous domain knowledge, and working memory capacity to text comprehension in e-learning. Students (n = 125) read high or low previous knowledge expository science texts and answered questions about them, in an e-learning course specifically designed for research purposes, accessed remotely. They also completed working memory tests. Working memory and navigation were significantly associated with text comprehension: higher working memory, and lower scores in self-reported navigation behavior, led to better comprehension. These results have implications for instructional design and reading strategies interventions.