Background: Macular Degeneration (MD), a visual disease that produces central vision loss, is one of the main causes of visual disability in western countries. Patients with MD are forced to use a peripheral retinal locus (PRL) as a substitute of the

It is known that patients with Parkinson’s Disease (PD) may show deficits in several areas of cognition, including speech and language abilities. One domain of particular interest is pragmatics, which refers to the capacity of using language in context for a successful communication. Several studies showed that some specific aspects of pragmatics – both in production and in comprehension – might be impaired in patients with PD. However, a clear picture of pragmatic abilities in PD is still missing, as most of the existing studies focused on specific aspects of the pragmatic competence rather than on sketching a complete pragmatic profile. Moreover, little is known on the potential role of protective factors in compensating the decline of communicative skills as the disease progresses. The present study has two aims: (1) to provide a complete picture of pragmatic abilities in patients with PD, by using a comprehensive battery (Assessment of Pragmatic Abilities and Cognitive Substrates, APACS) and by investigating the relationship with other aspects of cognitive functioning (e.g., working memory and Theory of Mind) and (2) to investigate whether Cognitive Reserve, i.e., the resilience to cognitive impairment provided by life experiences and activities, may compensate for the progressive pragmatic deficits in PD. We found that patients with PD, compared to healthy matched controls, had worse performance in discourse production and in the description of scenes, and that these impairments were tightly correlated with the severity of motor impairment, suggesting reduced intentionality of engaging in a communicative exchange. Patients with PD showed also an impairment in comprehending texts and humor, suggesting a problem in inferring from stories, which was related to general cognitive impairment. Notably, we did not find any significant difference between patients and controls in figurative language comprehension, a domain that is commonly impaired in other neurodegenerative diseases. This might be indicative of a specific profile of pragmatic impairment in patients with PD, worth of further investigation. Finally, Cognitive Reserve measures showed a high degree of association with pragmatic comprehension abilities, suggesting that the modification of life-styles could be a good candidate for compensating the possible problems in understanding the pragmatic aspects of language experienced by patients with PD.

Recent studies have shown a growing interest in the so-called “aperiodic” component of the EEG power spectrum, which describes the overall trend of the whole spectrum with a linear or exponential function. In the field of brain aging, this aperiodic component is associated both with age-related changes and performance on cognitive tasks. This study aims to elucidate the potential role of education in moderating the relationship between resting-state EEG features (including aperiodic component) and cognitive performance in aging. N = 179 healthy participants of the “Leipzig Study for Mind–Body-Emotion Interactions” (LEMON) dataset were divided into three groups based on age and education. Older adults exhibited lower exponent, offset (i.e. measures of aperiodic component), and Individual Alpha Peak Frequency (IAPF) as compared to younger adults. Moreover, visual attention and working memory were differently associated with the aperiodic component depending on education: in older adults with high education, higher exponent predicted slower processing speed and less working memory capacity, while an opposite trend was found in those with low education. While further investigation is needed, this study shows the potential modulatory role of education in the relationship between the aperiodic component of the EEG power spectrum and aging cognition.

Obstructive sleep apnea syndrome is a sleep disorder that may affect many brain functions. We are interested in the cognitive consequences of the condition with regard to the quality of life of individuals with this disorder. A debate is still underway as to whether cognitive difficulties caused by obstructive sleep apnea actually induce a "pseudodementia" pattern. This work provides a brief overview of the main controversies currently surrounding this issue. We report findings and opinions on structural and cognitive brain changes in individuals affected by obstructive sleep apnea by highlighting the involvement of executive functions and the possible reversibility of signs following-treatment with continuous positive airway pressure. Much research has been done on this issue but, to the best of our knowledge, a review of the present state of the literature evaluating different points of view has not yet been carried out.

Cognitive reserve (CR) is a term used to describe the adaptability of cognitive processes to brain changes. It helps to explain the different cognitive adaptation to daily functioning in aging individuals and in individuals with brain pathology: a higher CR is associated with a delay in the manifestation of cognitive symptoms. CR is estimated using different proxies, such as education, cognitively stimulating life experiences, premorbid intelligence quotient (IQ), and vocabulary size. Despite the complexity of CR, little research to date has systematically focused on the heterogeneity of its effects. We investigated this issue in individuals with probable Alzheimer's Disease (AD) and in individuals with subjective cognitive decline (SCD) by focusing on two variables: (a) the type of CR proxy (i.e., Education and Life experience) and (b) the type of test used to assess cognitive performance (i.e., the Mini-Mental State Examination [MMSE] screening test and the extensive Brief Neuropsychological Examination-2 [ENB-2] test battery). Our results suggest that effects on CR varied: in individuals with probable AD, we found a positive relationship of Education with performance on both the MMSE and the ENB-2 tests; in contrast, individuals with SCD showed a positive relationship of a Life experience proxy selectively with the ENB-2 global score. Different proxies may reflect different compensatory mechanisms of CR depending on task demand and on an individual's global cognitive condition. In particular, while the Education proxy can capture CR-related cognitive compensation in a pathological condition such as probable AD, the more complex Life experience proxy might be useful for capturing CR-related effects when signs of deterioration are subtle, like in SCD. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).