A 54-year-old woman was referred to our Korsakoff Center because of extensive cognitive problems following acute Wernicke's encephalopathy (WE). She had a relatively short history of alcohol abuse and was found lying on the floor in her home by her son. After 5 days without treatment, she was diagnosed with WE in a general hospital. During the course of the disease, minimal change to the acute ...

Classical theories assume that unconscious automatic processes are autonomous and independent of higher-level cognitive influences. In contrast, we propose that automatic processing depends on a specific configuration of the cognitive system by top-down control. In 2 experiments, we tested the influence of available attentional resources and previously activated task sets on masked semantic pri...

Cognitive and behavioural responses to food reward, such as attentional biases and overeating, have been associated with individual differences in reward-responsiveness and impulsivity. This study investigated relationships between external eating, impulsivity and attentional bias to food cues, assessed using the pictorial visual-probe task. As previously reported, attentional bias correlated p...

For the last 50 years, research investigating the effect of emotions on scope of cognitive processing was based on models proposing that affective valence determined cognitive scope. More recently, our motivational intensity model suggests that this past work had confounded valence with motivational intensity. Research derived from this model supports the idea that motivational intensity, rathe...

A cohort of 33 people at risk for Huntington's disease (HD), applying for genetic testing, were tested with a battery of neuropsychological tests covering attentional, visuospatial, learning, memory, and planning functions. A psychiatric rating scale, SCL-90R, was also applied, mainly as a control, since cognitive dysfunction could be ascribed to functional disorders as well as neurodegenerativ...

Research into the heterogeneous nature of cognitive impairment documented in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) has focused on disentangling deficits that vary between individuals, evolve and respond differentially to pharmacological treatments, and relate differentially to PD dementia (PDD). We summarise studies conducted in our laboratory over the last 2 decades, outlining the incremental...

UNLABELLED Cognitive dysfunction may occur in 17-40% of patients with multiple system atrophy (MSA). It has been suggested a milder cognitive impairment in cerebellar (MSA-C) than in parkinsonian variant (MSA-P). However, differences in cognitive profiles remain under discussion. OBJECTIVE To evaluate cognitive features in a series of patients with "probable MSA" from Argentina. METHOD Afte...

Cognitive emotion regulation strategies are considered the king's highway to control affective reactions. Two broad categories of cognitive regulation are attentional deployment and semantic meaning. The basic distinctive feature between these categories is the type of conflict between regulatory and emotional processes for dominance, with an early attentional selection conflict in attentional ...

This study investigated the influence of situational and dispositional factors on attentional biases toward social threat, and the impact of these attentional biases on distress in a sample of adolescents. The results suggest greater biases for personally relevant threat cues, as individuals reporting high social stress were vigilant to subliminal social threat cues, but not physical threat cue...

Successful goal-directed visual behavior depends on efficient disengagement of attention. Attention must be withdrawn from its current focus before being redeployed to a new object or internal process. Previous research has demonstrated that occupying cognitive processes with a secondary cellular phone conversation impairs attentional functioning and driving behavior. For example, attentional p...