Impaired ability to shift attention between stimuli (i.e. shifting attentional 'set') is a well-established part of the dysexecutive syndrome in Parkinson's Disease (PD), nevertheless cognitive and neural bases of this deficit remain unclear. In this study, an fMRI-optimised variant of a classic paradigm for assessing attentional control (Hampshire and Owen 2006) was used to contrast activity in dissociable executive circuits in early-stage PD patients and controls. The results demonstrated that the neural basis of the executive performance impairments in PD is accompanied by hypoactivation within the striatum, anterior cingulate cortex (vACC), and inferior frontal sulcus (IFS) regions. By contrast, in aging it is associated with hypoactivation of the anterior insula/inferior frontal operculum (AI/FO) and the pre-supplementary motor area (preSMA). Between group behavioural differences were also observed; whereas normally aging individuals exhibited routine-problem solving deficits, PD patients demonstrated more global task learning deficits. These findings concur with recent research demonstrating model-based reinforcement learning deficits in PD and provide evidence that the AI/FO and IFS circuits are differentially impacted by PD and normal aging.

This study aimed to investigate if two weeks of working memory (WM) training on a progressive N-back task can generate changes in the activity of the underlying WM neural network. Forty-six healthy volunteers (23 training and 23 controls) were asked to perform the N-back task during three fMRI scanning sessions: (1) before training, (2) after the half of training sessions, and (3) at the end. Between the scanning sessions, the experimental group underwent a 10-session training of working memory with the use of an adaptive version of the N-back task, while the control group did not train anything. The N-back task in the scanning sessions was relatively easy (n = 2) in order to ensure high accuracy and a lack of between-group differences at the behavioral level. Such training-induced differences in neural efficiency were expected. Behavioral analyses revealed improved performance of both groups on the N-back task. However, these improvements resulted from the test-retest effect, not the training outside scanner. Performance on the non-trained stop-signal task did not demonstrate any transfer effect. Imaging analysis showed changes in activation in several significant clusters, with overlapping regions of interest in the frontal and parietal lobes. However, patterns of between-session changes of activation did not show any effect of training. The only finding that can be linked with training consists in strengthening the correlation between task performance accuracy and activation of the parietal regions of the neural network subserving working memory (left superior parietal lobule and right supramarginal gyrus posterior). These results suggest that the effects of WM training consist in learning that, in order to ensure high accuracy in the criterion task, activation of the parietal regions implicated in working memory updating must rise.

The way pain is remembered and reported can affect medical decisions taken by patients and health-care professionals. Memory of pain has been investigated extensively for the past few decades; however, the results of previous studies are highly variable, indicating that the recollection of pain can be accurate, overestimated or underestimated. It is therefore difficult to conclude how well pain is remembered. The aim of this systematic review and meta-analysis is to summarize research findings on memory of pain in healthy adults and patients suffering from acute and chronic pain. The systematic review will be performed by searching for articles indexed in the following databases: PubMed, MEDLINE, PsycINFO, Web of Science, ScienceDirect, PsycARTICLES, Scopus and Academic Search Complete. Studies will be included if (1) they investigated healthy adults or patients with any acute or chronic pain condition and if (2) they assessed experienced pain (pain intensity and/or pain unpleasantness) and its recollection. No restrictions related to the date of publication and recall delay will be applied. Studies will be screened for eligibility and risk of bias by two independent assessors. The risk of bias will be assessed by a modified Downs and Black checklist. A narrative synthesis will be performed in the first stage; in the second stage, the results of studies with comparable designs will be pooled in meta-analytical syntheses. The question of whether pain is remembered accurately is crucial for valid pain diagnosis, effective treatment and prognosis. So far, a number of studies on memory of pain have been conducted; however, a definitive conclusion on whether memory of pain is accurate is still lacking. In this systematic review and meta-analysis, available data will be pooled together to further inform research and clinical practice. PROSPERO CRD42018093523

Idiopathic Parkinson’s disease (PD) impairs working memory, but the exact nature of this deficit in terms of the underlying cognitive mechanisms is not well understood. In this study patients with mild clinical symptoms of PD were compared with matched healthy control subjects on a computerized battery of tests designed to assess spatial working memory and verbal working memory. In the spatial working memory task, subjects were required to recall a sequence of four locations. The verbal working memory task was methodologically identical except for the modality of the stimuli used, requiring subjects to orally recall a sequence of six digits. In either case, half of the sequences were structured in a way that allowed ‘chunking’, while others were unstructured. This manipulation was designed to dissociate the strategic component of task performance from the memory-load component. Mild medicated patients with PD were impaired only on the structured versions of the verbal working memory tasks. The analogous deficit in the spatial working memory was less pronounced. These findings are in agreement with the hypothesis that working memory deficits in PD reflect mainly the executive component of the tasks and that the deficits may be at least partly modality-independent.

In this study bibliometric mapping method was employed to visualise the current research trends and the impact of the two most influential models of working memory, namely: A. D. Baddeley and G. J. Hitch’s (1974) multicomponent working memory model and N. Cowan’s (1988) embedded-processes model of working memory. Using VOSviewer software two maps were generated based on the index-term words extracted from the research papers citing Baddeley (2000) and Cowan (2001), respectively. The maps represent networks of co-occurrences of index terms and can be interpreted as an indication of the main research fields related to the examined models of WM. The results of the analysis revealed that the spheres of influence of the two main conceptualisations of WM are rather different than similar. Although the first two clusters, i.e. “brain mapping” and “higher-level cognition and development” are present in both maps, their relative importance varies. The remaining clusters are unique to each map. Baddeley’s theory seems to have a greater influence on “neuropsychology”, while Cowan’s theory - on basic research on “biological systems”, including the nervous system in humans and animals. The second difference between these theories concerns their relations to functions and dysfunctions associated with particular sensory modalities: in Baddelay’s theory with the “auditory modality” cluster, and in Cowan’s - with the “visual modality” one.