01


Isabel Catarina Martins1 and Catarina Santos2
1 Polytechnic of Porto
2 Polytechnic of Viseu


A multi-sensory method that helps children learn to read and write

Learning is a complex process that involves permanent changes to the structures and functions of the brain. Early literacy development involves the processes of knowing the alphabet, graphemes, written language, reading comprehension, phonological awareness, and comprehensive and expressive oral language. Most reading and writing methods make use of cognitive skills that some children struggle with. Multi-sensory methodologies include a greater number of sensory aids, such as the traditionally used visual and auditory aids, as well as kinaesthetic and tactile aids. These methodologies have proved effective in learning some subjects by children who have had school failures. Various studies show that children with intellectual and developmental difficulties use cognitive processes like those of children with typical development when provided adequate stimuli. However, their learning pace requires a longer period to acquire this competence. The Lemus method uses multi-sensory strategies to facilitate learning in this group of children and young people, utilizing almost the entire sensory system. This project's goal is to document and understand changes in the reading and writing learning processes, through the development and implementation of a multi-sensory methodology-based teaching program. Using a qualitative multiple case study methodology, five participants were selected with the following criteria: the presence of intellectual and developmental disabilities, phonological disorders, and learning difficulties in the reading and writing learning process. We evaluated participants with a Portuguese language test: an Infant/Toddler Sensory Profile and Language Competencies Evaluation for Reading and Writing. The aim was to map the sensory profile of each participant and to verify their learning evolution during the program, in the areas of phonological awareness, reading, and writing. The Multi-sensory program was applied with weekly interventions over four months. After the Multi-sensory program, participants showed improvements in reading and writing learning. There were improvements in the grapheme’s identification and naming. There was an increase in the number of correct answers in four of the five participants, in the reading processes. Although, the writing was more developed than the reading process, in all participants. Despite not being a goal of this research, there was also an increase in the phonological awareness of all the participants: the number of correct answers shows an increase in all the participants. The multi-sensory methodologies integrate visual and audition, as well as kinaesthetic and tactile strategies. This seemed to encourage children to have a more active, motivated, and actively participating attitude towards their learning. It also allowed them to achieve a greater probability of success in their reading and writing learning processes, and, thus, the belief in their abilities and an increase in their self-esteem.

02


Ester Aguiar1, Catarina Martins1, Nádia Canário1,2, Hugo Quental1, Cristina Januário1, Ana Morgadinho3, Diogo Carneiro4
and Miguel Castelo-Branco1,5,6
1 Coimbra Institute for Biomedical Imaging and Translational Research (CIBIT), Institute of Nuclear Sciences Applied to Health (ICNAS), University of Coimbra, Portugal
2 ICNAS Pharma Unipessoal, Lda, Ed. ICNAS, Pólo das Ciências da Saúde, University of Coimbra, 3000-548 Coimbra, Portugal
3 Neurology Department, Hospital da Luz, Praceta Professor Robalo Cordeiro, 3020-479 Coimbra, Portugal
4 Neurology Department, Unidade Local de Saúde de Coimbra - Coimbra University Hospital Centre, Coimbra, Portugal
5 Faculty of Medicine, University of Coimbra, Portugal
6 Institute of Physiology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Coimbra,Coimbra, Portugal


The role of visual processing and decision-making in Parkinson's disease patients: an fMRI study

Hallucinations may be considered as a failure of metacognition. Metacognition involves the appraisal, monitoring, control of cognition, as well as an individual's ability to understand complex world representations. Hallucinations—perceptions of non-existent stimuli—can be seen as a failure of metacognition, as the brain cannot correctly appraise and monitor internal versus external stimuli, leading to the misattribution of internal experiences as external reality. Wrongful interpretations of ambiguous surrounding stimuli suggest alterations regarding perceptual decision-making processes. We are currently investigating the neural mechanisms underlying visual hallucinations (VH) in Parkinson's Disease (PD). Although PD is primarily classified as a motor neurodegenerative disorder caused by the degeneration of the substantia nigra and the dopaminergic nigrostriatal pathway, a wide range of non-motor symptoms (i.e: mood disorders, anosmia, and pain) often appear before the motor symptoms and worsen as the disease progresses and the patient's cognitive abilities decline. The exact nature of these non-motor symptoms (NMS) remains unclear. Among the various NMS, visual hallucinations may affect up to 40% of PD patients. These hallucinations may be related to altered visual processing as well as attention network deficits, which can affect decision-making. We hypothesize that PDVH may experience higher vividness, possibly overlapping imaginary scenarios with external stimuli, leading to hallucinations, which causes an overactivation of the default mode network (DMN) instead of the dorsal attention network (DAN). Perceptual decision-making is the choice/action taken based on the sensory stimulus one is confronted with. An example of this ambiguous process are Mooney pictures, two-toned images of incomplete objects that require holistic feature integration to be perceived as a whole. Therefore, in this study, we used these stimuli to explore visual processing and perceptual decision-making between subjects with and without VH. Eight participants (4 male, 4 female) underwent neuropsychological and ophthalmological assessments before performing an fMRI scan (5 control and 3 hallucination). The task consisted of randomized Mooney stimuli (faces or scrambled) shown three times for 300 ms, with inter-stimulus intervals of 12, 14, or 16 seconds. This will allow us to compare the connectivity patterns between the brain networks involved in perception and decision-making in both normal visual processing and visual hallucinations, providing better insight into whether altered perception may be related to visual hallucinations in PD. Our preliminary results show that PD with hallucinations experience less imaginary vividness, which contrary to our hypothesis does not indicate an overactivation of the DMN. However, their generalized overactivation may indicate a lack of thought control and thus weaker metacognition. Regarding the faces condition, the hallucination group (HL) presents an overactivation of the areas related to object and face recognition, as well as dorsal attention network regions, compared to the control group (CT). On the second condition, the HL have a more generalized cortical activation compared to the CT that presents activation in stimuli-related regions (predominantly anterior). In both stimuli categories, the HL group shows greater bilateral insula activation, contrary to CT.

03


Beatriz Aleixo1,2, Michaela Cabral1,2, Pedro Guimarães1,3,4, Rui Bernardes1,3,4, João Castelhano1, Maria Coelho1,3, Susana Mouga1
and Miguel Castelo-Branco1,3,5
1 University of Coimbra, Coimbra Institute for Biomedical Imaging and Translational Research (CIBIT), Institute for Nuclear Sciences Applied to Health (ICNAS), Coimbra, Portugal
2 University of Coimbra, Faculty of Science and Technology (FCTUC), Department of Physics, Coimbra, Portugal
3 University of Coimbra, Faculty of Medicine (FMUC), Coimbra, Portugal
4 Clinical Academic Center of Coimbra (CACC), Coimbra, Portugal
5 Institute of Physiology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal

Through the autistic eyes - an eye-tracking and deep-learning approach for autism diagnosis

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is an early-onset neurodevelopmental disorder marked by impairments in social interaction and communication, restricted interests, and the presence of repetitive and stereotyped behaviors (Mouga et al., 2021). However, diagnosing autism is often a complex, time-consuming process, and reliant on subjective analysis of current and past behaviors. Thus, this diagnosis could benefit from a deeper understanding of the underlying cognitive processes and behavioral patterns in individuals with ASD, which can be gained by analyzing how they perceive the world while deciding what requires attention and what does not (Canavan et al., 2017). This decision-making process determines visual attention patterns, observed in visual saliency maps (Gorji and Clark, 2018; Kroner et al., 2020), which can be captured through eye-tracking. Visual saliency, particularly when social stimuli are involved, may differ for individuals with ASD (Jiang et al., 2019). These individuals show difficulty in maintaining eye contact, pay less attention to faces and stimuli indicated by gaze, show reduced visual exploration, and difficulty in diverting attention from previously explored stimuli (Fernandez-Lanvin et al., 2023, Liaqat et al., 2021; Pelphrey et al., 2002). Thus, the differences in visual attention between people with and without ASD open the door to the use of Deep-Learning tools for the analysis of visual saliency maps to improve ASD diagnosis, which is the purpose of our work. Due to the lack of relevant eye-tracking data, a new experiment was developed and is already running. Adult participants view a sequence of videos created in Unity showing social scenarios where avatars interact. Both social and non-social stimuli are included, with autistic individuals expected to focus more on carefully selected non-social stimuli, such as transportation objects, flickering lights, and repetitive movements. Nonsensical events, like rotating or jumping objects, were also added to promote participant engagement. After each video, participants describe the most interesting aspects in a brief text, enabling awareness of attention strategies. Visual saliency maps will be created from the collected eye-tracking data with the Tobii X120 eye-tracker and will form part of a dataset to train the MSI-Net model, a convolutional neural network designed to predict human visual saliency (Kroner et al., 2020), which will later assist in diagnosing autism. While results are still to be obtained, the approach is innovative. The analysis of video saliency maps, while more computationally demanding and less common than the analysis of image ones, is crucial in this context, since they account for movement, an important driver of human attention. The study also introduces a novel eye-tracking experiment where the videos were specifically tailored to highlight differences between individuals with and without ASD, alongside the use of the renowned MSI-NET model for autism diagnosis. Future studies could explore differences in attention patterns in bilingual vs. monolingual autistic individuals, highlighting language's impact on cognition, as well as differences between male and female autistic gaze patterns, potentially improving the diagnosis of ASD in females.

04


Hicran Besikci1, Miguel Castelo-Branco1,2 and Maria J. Ribeiro1,2
1 CIBIT-ICNAS, University of Coimbra, Portugal
2 Faculty of Medicine, University of Coimbra, Portugal


Pupil dilations as measures of reinforcement learning and task difficulty

Pupil size has been used as an indirect biomarker to monitor cognitive processes during decision making and learning. Pupil responses under isoluminant conditions reflect the engagement of the ascending brainstem neuromodulatory systems. In this study, we investigated how these neural systems are engaged during value-based learning. We tested 36 healthy older people aged 55-75 years with a reinforcement learning task. The task was performed in a dark room with constant luminance. The reinforcement learning task consisted of different stimuli associated with different reward probabilities grouped in three pairs with three different levels of differences in reward probabilities. Behavioral analyses showed that participants were able to learn through trial and error which stimuli were associated with higher reward probabilities and that difficulty levels had a statistically significant effect on behavioral outcomes such as accuracy and reaction time. As the difficulty level increased (lower difference in reward probability), the reaction time of participants increased and the accuracy decreased. Increasing the level of difficulty led to a larger pupil size response at the moment of decision-making and during the period post-decision leading to the feedback. Pupil sensitivity to the different reward probabilities increased with time-on-task suggesting an effect of learning. Pupil response to feedback mimics the prediction error signal associated with each pairs’ uncertainty In conclusion, as participants learn the task, pupil responses reflect decision uncertainty and prediction error.

05


Sara F. Oliveira1, Catarina F. Gomes1and Maria J. Ribeiro1,2
1 CIBIT-ICNAS, University of Coimbra, Portugal
2 Faculty of Medicine, University of Coimbra, Portugal


Sensory noise, confidence judgments, and accuracy in a perceptual decision-making task affect pupil responses and associated behavioural adjustments differently in young and older people

Decision confidence modulates the engagement of pupil-linked arousal systems during perceptual decision-making, and both are associated with subsequent behavioural adjustments important for optimal task performance. Impaired modulation of the arousal system in older adults might affect their ability to adapt behaviour and optimize task performance. We investigated this hypothesis by studying the association between pupil responses, decision confidence and decision accuracy, their relationship with behavioural adjustments, and if these were altered in older adults. We tested young and older adults, including men and women, with a dot motion direction discrimination task, while measuring task-related pupil responses. Feedback was provided after each trial. Participants were instructed to report perceived motion direction and simultaneously their decision confidence. Confidence judgments of both age groups followed the typical signatures of decision confidence. Older adults were overconfident in the presence of high sensory noise and in incorrect trials. Young people’s post-decision pupil responses were particularly high following low confidence in response to easy to discriminate stimuli and high confidence errors suggesting that the pupil responses are sensitive to performance lapses originating from periods of high internal noise. These effects were significantly reduced in older people. Moreover, group differences in trial-by-trial reaction time adjustments suggested a behavioural consequence of impaired post-decision pupil engagement in older adults. In conclusion, older people showed blunted pupil responses following lapses suggesting that ageing affects how the internal state modulates autonomic responses. These age-related changes might affect the ability to appropriately adjust the cognitive state resulting in sub-optimal task performance.

06


Alejandra Beatriz Sadaniowski1, Cecilia Andrea Murata2 and Laura María Victoria Manoiloff3
1 Universidad Católica de las Misiones, Argentina
2 Universidad de Belgrano, Argentina
3 Universidad Internacional de La Rioja, Spain


Executive functions in native languages

Knowledge of different languages can impact performance on tests of Executive Functions (FFEE) (Garcia, Manoiloff, & Wagner, 2016; Kousaie, Sheppard, Lemieux, Monetta, & Taler, 2014; Luk & Bialystok, 2013). The lack of evidence in indigenous languages hinders and complicates the study of FFEE in bilingual populations speaking such indigenous languages. A pilot study of the Stroop task in Guarani is presented. In the context of a study on FFEE and bilingualism, the Stroop test was administered to 56 adolescents (66.1% female; Mean = 15 years; SD = 1.62), with early L2 acquisition age (M = 3.34; SD = 1.16), abstract reasoning level (Raven M = 22.04; SD = 4.32). Both Spanish (WAT-BA (M = 55.90 SD = 8.60) and Guarani GPS (M = 47.35 SD = 7.78) proficiency levels were assessed. Colours were translated into Guarani, choosing colours with two syllables. Significant correlations were found between the time to say the colours in Spanish and proficiency in Spanish (Rho (54) = -.347 p = .009); the higher level of proficiency in Spanish, the shorter the time to complete the task. In addition, a significant correlation was found between the time to say the colours in Guarani and the level of proficiency in Spanish (Rho (54) = .273 p = .042); the higher the level of proficiency, the longer it took to complete the task. A significant correlation was also found between the Stroop conflict in Guarani and the AoA (Rho (54) = .311 p = .020), the higher the AoA, the longer it took to complete the task. The significant correlations found in Spanish and Guarani showed the relevance of including tests in languages spoken by the participants as indicated by other authors (García, et al., 2016; Kousaie, et al., 2014; Luk and Bialystok, 2013).

07


Antonio Javier Zurita Diaz1,2, Marina Calleja Reina1 and Ana Paula Couceiro Figueira2
1 Faculty of Psychology and Speech Therapy, University of Málaga (UMA), Spain
2 Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Coimbra (FPCEUC), Portugal


Enhancing expressive and receptive skills in children with autism spectrum disorder using aided augmented input

This study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of a combined intervention involving aided language stimulation strategy and the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). ASD, a neurodevelopmental condition, often impairs communication abilities, which can negatively affect academic performance and social interactions. To address these challenges, augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) strategies have been developed, with aided augmented input emerging as a promising method. This approach integrates visual stimuli with linguistic input provided by the communication partner to enhance both expressive and receptive language skills. The study involved ten children with ASD who had minimal verbal abilities. They participated in an intervention that utilized the EC+ ICT application, designed to support communication through multimodal inputs. The children's expressive and receptive communication skills were assessed at two different points: before the intervention (Moment 1) and after 10 weeks of consistent use (Moment 2). Data analysis was performed using SPSS® Statistics version 27.0, and the statistical significance was set at p<.001 to ensure robust results. The findings revealed significant improvements in various aspects of communication following the intervention. Specifically, participants demonstrated enhanced ability to engage in communicative functions, expanded the range of conversational partners, increased the variety of topics they could discuss, and showed greater ease in expressing conversational preferences. These results provide strong evidence for the effectiveness of aided augmented input, combined with technology, in improving expressive language skills in children with ASD. Furthermore, the EC+ application’s ability to be customized to meet each child's specific needs played a key role in its success. This individualized approach allowed for a more targeted intervention, potentially making it easier for children to develop communication skills that align with their personal challenges. The study's results suggest that this strategy could be a valuable tool in educational settings, offering a practical way to enhance communication for children with ASD who struggle with expressive language.

08


Federico Teitelbaum Dorfman1,2,Boris Kogan3,4,5, Pablo Barttfeld2 and Adolfo M. García3,6,7
1 Language, Metacognition and Decision-Making Laboratory, Coimbra University, Coimbra
2 Cognitive Science Group, Facultad de Psicología, Instituto de Investigaciones Psicológicas (IIPsi, CONICET-UNC), Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Córdoba, Argentina
3 Cognitive Neuroscience Center, Universidad de San Andrés, Buenos Aires, Argentina
4 National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), Buenos Aires, Argentina
5 Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Humanities, National University of Mar del Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina
6 Global Brain Health Institute, University of California, San Francisco, CA 94158, USA and Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
7 Departamento de Lingüística y Literatura, Facultad de Humanidades, Universidad de Santiago de Chile, Santiago, Chile


Bilinguals on the footbridge: the role of foreign-language proficiency in moral decision making

Socio-cognitive research on bilinguals points to a moral foreign-language effect (MFLE), with more utilitarian choices (e.g., sacrificing someone to save more people) for moral dilemmas presented in the second language (L2) relative to the first language. Yet, inconsistent results highlight the influence of subject-level variables, including a critical underexplored factor: L2 proficiency (L2p). We put together a systematic review of 57 bilingualism studies on moral dilemmas, showing that L2p rarely modulates responses to impersonal dilemmas, but it does impact personal dilemmas (with MFLEs proving consistent at intermediate L2p levels but unsystematic at high L2p levels). We propose an empirico-theoretical framework to conceptualize such patterns, highlighting the impact of L2p on four affective mediating factors: mental imagery, inhibitory control, prosocial behavior and numerical processing. Finally, we outline core challenges for the field. These insights open new avenues at the crossing of bilingualism and social cognition research.