OBJECTIVE: The Memory Support System (MSS) is a memory compensation tool that utilizes a calendar/notebook. Although baseline global cognition, declarative memory, and personality have been shown to predict MSS learning, the learning efficiency across amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) subtypes remains unclear. To address this gap, this study compared MSS learning in participants with single-domain aMCI (SD-aMCI) versus multi-domain aMCI (MD-aMCI). METHODS: Five hundred and thirty-six participants with aMCI (SD-aMCI = 268; MD-aMCI = 268) participated in 10-day MSS training during the Healthy Action to Benefit Independence in Thinking ® (HABIT) program. Ordinal logistic regression tested for differences in MSS learning between SD-aMCI and MD-aMCI, with age, gender, education, depression, and baseline global cognition as covariates. RESULTS: Younger age, male gender, fewer years of education, and better baseline global cognition were associated with higher MSS learning efficiency. Participants with SD-aMCI had significantly higher odds of achieving higher MSS final learning score at training end, after controlling for age, gender, education, depression, and baseline global cognition. CONCLUSION: While age, gender, education, and global cognition are important in MSS learning, having cognitive deficits in domains beyond memory further reduces the ability to learn the MSS. Clinicians may need to tailor training sessions according to participants' cognitive profiles to facilitate learning outcomes.
Objective This study investigated the cognitive-functional shift in visual character recognition across the cognitive decline trajectory, ranging from healthy aging through Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) to Mild Alzheimer's Disease (AD). Specifically, it was hypothesized that as global semantic networks degrade, the reliance on rapid holistic processing decreases, prompting a compensatory shift toward sublexical features.Method Using a controlled unmasked priming lexical decision paradigm, this study evaluated behavioral performance across three distinct participant groups (N = 30 per group): healthy controls (HC), individuals with MCI, and patients with Mild AD. The experimental stimuli consisted of 80 Chinese phonograms matched across key psycholinguistic properties. This study utilized mixed-design Analyses of Variance (ANOVAs) alongside item-level hierarchical multiple regression (HMR) models to isolate the specific drivers of reaction times, assessing the predictive power of visual complexity, whole-character frequency, semantic transparency, and phonetic regularity.Results The analytical models revealed distinctly divergent psycholinguistic trajectories. The HC group demonstrated highly efficient holistic processing, with performance primarily driven by whole-character frequency. Conversely, the MCI group exhibited a unique transitional cognitive profile, characterized by a simultaneous reliance on both holistic whole-word access and analytic sublexical features. Crucially, in the Mild AD tgroup, the holistic processing advantage was entirely abolished. This functional disintegration triggered a compensatory reorganization toward bottom-up sublexical properties, with patients relying heavily on semantic transparency and phonetic regularity to achieve semantic access.Conclusions These findings demonstrate a linguistic Compensation-Related Utilization of Neural Circuits Hypothesis (CRUNCH) effect within the degenerating brain. As top-down lexical-semantic hubs deteriorate, reflected behaviorally in this paradigm by the loss of holistic processing advantages, the cognitive system actively compensates by upregulating bottom-up, sublexical pathways. Furthermore, the transitional sublexical dependency observed during the MCI stage highlights the translational potential of psycholinguistic variables as sensitive, noninvasive behavioral biomarkers for the early screening and monitoring of dementia.
Introduction Misophonia is characterized by decreased tolerance to specific sounds, often occurring in interpersonal contexts and accompanied by intense emotional, physiological, and behavioral responses. Disgust and anger are among the most prominent emotional reactions in misophonia, yet it remains unclear whether these responses are accompanied by broader differences in socio-emotional processing, such as facial emotion recognition (FER). The present study aimed to examine FER performance and disgust-related dimensions in individuals with misophonia and to evaluate their associations with misophonia severity and emotional distress.Method In this cross-sectional case-control study, fifty individuals diagnosed with misophonia and 48 matched healthy controls completed measures of misophonia symptoms, emotional distress, disgust propensity and sensitivity, and a FER task assessing recognition accuracy and reaction time across seven facial emotion categories.Results Compared with controls, individuals with misophonia showed higher disgust propensity, disgust sensitivity, total disgust scores, and emotional distress. After controlling for emotional distress, group differences remained significant for disgust propensity and total disgust scores, but not for disgust sensitivity. No significant overall group differences were observed in facial emotion recognition accuracy or reaction time. Exploratory analyses suggested higher accuracy for angry facial expressions in the misophonia group; however, this finding was not supported by a significant group by emotion interaction and appeared to be partly influenced by emotional distress.Conclusions No significant overall group differences were observed in FER accuracy or reaction time between individuals with misophonia and healthy controls. FER performance was not significantly associated with clinical variables. Disgust propensity remained elevated in misophonia after controlling for emotional distress, highlighting the relevance of disgust-related emotional processes in this condition. These findings suggest that individuals with misophonia do not exhibit a generalized impairment in FER and that heightened disgust propensity may represent a relatively distinct emotional feature of misophonia beyond general emotional distress.
