A review of acknowledgement and payment preferences of contributors on a register of patient public involvement in brain injury research.

Background: The Register for Healthcare Technology Involvement and Evaluation is a database which was established to collect names and contact details of people interested in joining patient public involvement (PPI) activity connected to brain injury research. With the establishment of the new HealthTech Research Centre in Brain and Spinal Injury (Brain Injury HRC), the database was refreshed and enhanced to collect demographic data. As well as directing people to appropriate research projects, the database acts as a resource to explore attitudes and opinions on PPI.

Protocol for a scoping review investigating success in research capacity building for nurses, midwives and allied health professionals.

Objective: To identify and describe how success is currently conceptualised in research capacity building in nurses, midwives and allied health professionals in the UK.

Introduction: Having a research active healthcare workforce is associated with improved patient outcomes as well as staff retention. It is therefore seen as a key target for many healthcare organisations.

Do whispering minds tingle alike? Exploring the relationship between ASMR-sensitivity, trait-ASMR, and trigger preference.

The Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) is described as a pleasant tingling sensation originating in the head and neck in response to specific audio-visual stimuli (triggers) with individuals self-classifying as ASMR-responders based on their experience of the phenomenon. There is great variability in the types of triggers that elicit ASMR across individuals, with previous attempts to categorise triggers encompassing multiple affective components across sensory domains. More recently, research indicates ASMR should be considered a personality construct, with traits falling on a spectrum regardless of ASMR-sensitivity.

The development of a brain injury survivor patient and public involvement group by a brain injury survivor.

Background: Patient and public involvement (PPI) in research is seen as key to ensuring applicability and impact. Undertaking PPI in people after brain injury has long been seen to be a challenge. In 2020 The NIHR Brain Injury MedTech Cooperative developed a programme with the aim of improving PPI involvement, impact and diversity in this population.

Elevated Blink Rates Predict Mind Wandering: Dopaminergic Insights into Attention and Task Focus.

Background: The study investigated the neural correlates of mind wandering using eyeblink rate (EBR) and variability (EBV) proxies. Dopamine, a neurotransmitter integral to the brain's reward system, has been implicated in regulating both task-unrelated and task-focused thinking. This study sought to clarify the relationships between dopaminergic function and cognitive control during a task by utilizing EBR and EBV as proxy measures.

Development of the Addenbrooke's MSK screening tool (AMST) for children and adolescents with cystic fibrosis.

Background: Musculoskeletal (MSK) issues are common in the paediatric population and in people with CF. There is currently no MSK screening tool for children and adolescents with CF.

Methods: The protocol to develop the pGALS (paediatric Gait, Arms, Legs, Spine) was followed to create this screening tool.

Heated Behaviour in the Classroom for Children with FASD: The Relationship between Characteristics Associated with ADHD, ODD and ASD, Hot Executive Function and Classroom Based Reward Systems.

Possession of characteristics related to Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder, Oppositional Defiance Disorder, and Autism Spectrum Disorder in children prenatally exposed to alcohol contributes to challenges within the diagnostic pathway for Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD). The presentation of these characteristics, though problematic for the children affected, may not result in referral for diagnosis; focusing on diagnostic thresholds masks the dimensional nature of these characteristics. Children with traits which are undiagnosed may not receive effective support and are often identified as exhibiting challenging behaviour.

Beyond the rubicon: a continuum approach to investigating the impact of ADHD like characteristics on everyday executive function in children with Tourette Syndrome.

Across a range of neurodevelopmental conditions, a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has been shown to be associated with executive function impairment. However, the DSM-V emphasis upon viewing psychological characteristics as existing on a continuous distributed quantitative dimension has enabled the opportunity to consider the influence of sub-diagnostic or sub-referral levels of these psychological characteristics upon cognitive function. This study adopted a continuum approach to the consideration of this ADHD influence and examined the extent to which the difference in parental reported executive functions between children with Tourette syndrome (TS) or typically developing children could be mediated by a concurrent group difference in the possession of sub-referral levels of ADHD-like characteristics.

Untangling the tingle: Investigating the association between the Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR), neuroticism, and trait & state anxiety.

The Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) is an intensely pleasant tingling sensation originating in the scalp and neck and is elicited by a range of online video-induced triggers. Many individuals now regularly watch ASMR videos to relax, and alleviate symptoms of stress and insomnia, all which are indicative of elevated levels of anxiety. Emerging literature suggests that ASMR-capable individuals are characterised by high trait neuroticism, which is associated with a tendency to experience negative emotional states such as anxiety.

Compulsive shopping behaviour and executive dysfunction in young adults.

"Compulsive Shopping" is characterized by poorly controlled preoccupations/urges/behaviors focused on shopping and spending, causing significant distress/impairment. This study looked at what roles executive and related memory problems might exist in compulsive shopping. 205 adults completed on-line questionnaires measuring compulsive shopping, mood, as well as working memory and inhibition components of executive function.

Demonstration of functional rehabilitation treatment effects in children and young people after severe acquired brain injury.

Purpose: To examine relationships between functional outcomes after pediatric acquired brain injury (ABI) and measures of rehabilitation dose.

Methods: An observational study of children receiving residential neurorehabilitation after severe ABI.

Results: Basic total rehabilitation dose shows a paradoxical relationship to global outcome.

Self-reported memory and executive function in adult non-clinical hoarders.

Hoarding is the excessive acquisition of, and failure to discard of, large numbers of items, leading to personal distress. Impairments on memory and executive functions have been systematically associated with hoarding behavior, predominantly focusing upon clinical (mainly middle-aged-elderly) patients with hoarding and/or PTSD. We were interested in hoarding-related memory and executive problems in younger non-clinical hoarders or non-hoarders, based on their scores.

An EEG investigation of alpha and beta activity during resting states in adults with Williams syndrome.

Background: Williams syndrome (WS) is neurodevelopmental disorder characterised by executive deficits of attention and inhibitory processing. The current study examined the neural mechanisms during resting states in adults with WS in order to investigate how this subserves the attention and inhibitory deficits associated with the syndrome.

Method: Adopting electroencephalography (EEG) methodology, cortical electrical activity was recorded from eleven adults with WS aged 35 + years during Eyes Closed (EC) and Eyes Open (EO) resting states, and compared to that of thirteen typically developing adults matched for chronological age (CA) and ten typically developing children matched for verbal mental ability (MA).

Frogs' Legs Versus Roast Beef: How Culture Can Influence Mind-Wandering Episodes Across the Lifespan.

Numerous studies have captured the nature of mind-wandering and how it changes across the lifespan; however, the influence of culture has been neglected. This study investigated the joint effects of culture and age in a large scale online questionnaire-based survey of 308 adults over 18 years of age, both in France and the United Kingdom. To capture a profile of thinking style, self-report measures of mind-wandering frequency, mindfulness, mood, rumination, self-reflection, future thinking, depressive symptoms, and cognitive failures were gathered.

Alcohol Hangover Has Detrimental Impact Upon Both Executive Function and Prospective Memory.

The alcohol hangover (AH) is a state of general malaise following an evening of heavy episodic drinking when the blood alcohol concentration of the person reaches/approaches zero. The aim of the current study was to investigate what impact the AH has upon both executive function (EF) and prospective memory (PM). Previous research has shown that the AH has a detrimental effect upon cognitive abilities, including attention, working memory, and PM.

The disentanglement of the neural and experiential complexity of self-generated thoughts: A users guide to combining experience sampling with neuroimaging data.

Human cognition is not limited to the processing of events in the external environment, and the covert nature of certain aspects of the stream of consciousness (e.g. experiences such as mind-wandering) provides a methodological challenge.

Autistic-like traits in children are associated with enhanced performance in a qualitative visual working memory task.

Prior research has suggested that individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) demonstrate heterogeneity in cognitive efficacy, challenged executive resources but efficient visual processing. These contrasts lead to opposing predictions about visuospatial working memory competency in both ASD and the broader autism phenotype (BAP); compromised by constrained executive processes, but potentially scaffolded by effective visual representation. It is surprising therefore, that there is a paucity of visual working memory (VWM) research in both the ASD and BAP populations, which have focused upon the visual features of the to-be-remembered stimulus.

Older Adults Benefit from Symmetry, but Not Semantic Availability, in Visual Working Memory.

Visual working memory exhibits age effects that are amongst the largest observed in the cognitive aging literature. In this research we investigated whether or not older adults can benefit from visual symmetry and semantic availability, as young adults typically do. Visual matrix pattern tasks varied in terms of the perceptual factor of symmetry (Experiment 1), as well as the availability of visual semantics, or long-term memory (LTM; Experiment 2).

An event related potential study of ihibitory and attentional control in Williams syndrome adults.

The primary aim of the current study was to employ event-related potentials (ERPs) methodology to disentangle the mechanisms related to inhibitory control in older adults with Williams syndrome (WS). Eleven older adults with WS (mean age 42), 16 typically developing adults (mean age 42) and 13 typically developing children (mean age 12) participated in the study. ERPs were recorded during a three-stimulus visual oddball task, during which participants were required to make a response to a rare target stimulus embedded in a train of frequent non-target stimuli.

How does intentionality of encoding affect memory for episodic information?

Episodic memory enables the detailed and vivid recall of past events, including target and wider contextual information. In this paper, we investigated whether/how encoding intentionality affects the retention of target and contextual episodic information from a novel experience. Healthy adults performed (1) a What-Where-When (WWW) episodic memory task involving the hiding and delayed recall of a number of items (what) in different locations (where) in temporally distinct sessions (when) and (2) unexpected tests probing memory for wider contextual information from the WWW task.

Simulator Teaching of Cardiopulmonary Bypass Complications: A Prospective, Randomized Study.

Objective: Complications of cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB) are rare, but life-threatening events that need prompt and rehearsed actions involving a team. This is not adequately taught to cardiothoracic surgical trainees. The objective of this study was to assess the knowledge of cardiothoracic trainees required to manage these events after simulation-based vs.

The Synergistic Impact of Excessive Alcohol Drinking and Cigarette Smoking upon Prospective Memory.

The independent use of excessive amounts of alcohol or persistent cigarette smoking have been found to have a deleterious impact upon Prospective Memory (PM: remembering future intentions and activities), although to date, the effect of their concurrent use upon PM is yet to be explored. The present study investigated the impact of the concurrent use of drinking excessive amounts of alcohol and smoking cigarettes (a "Polydrug" group) in comparison to the combined effect of the single use of these substances upon PM. The study adopted a single factorial independent groups design.

The role of visual and spatial working memory in forming mental models derived from survey and route descriptions.

This study examines the involvement of spatial and visual working memory (WM) in the construction of flexible spatial models derived from survey and route descriptions. Sixty young adults listened to environment descriptions, 30 from a survey perspective and the other 30 from a route perspective, while they performed spatial (spatial tapping [ST]) and visual (dynamic visual noise [DVN]) secondary tasks - believed to overload the spatial and visual working memory (WM) components, respectively - or no secondary task (control, C). Their mental representations of the environment were tested by free recall and a verification test with both route and survey statements.

Visuospatial working memory in children with autism: the effect of a semantic global organization.

It has been reported that individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) perceive visual scenes as a sparse set of details rather than as a congruent and meaningful unit, failing in the extraction of the global configuration of the scene. In the present study, children with ASD were compared with typically developing (TD) children, in a visuospatial working memory task, the Visual Patterns Test (VPT). The VPT array was manipulated to vary the semantic affordance of the pattern, high semantic (global) vs.

Spatial demonstratives and perceptual space: describing and remembering object location.

Spatial demonstratives - terms including this and that - are among the most common words across all languages. Yet, there are considerable differences between languages in how demonstratives carve up space and the object characteristics they can refer to, challenging the idea that the mapping between spatial demonstratives and the vision and action systems is universal. In seven experiments we show direct parallels between spatial demonstrative usage in English and (non-linguistic) memory for object location, indicating close connections between the language of space and non-linguistic spatial representation.