OBJECTIVE Cognitive impairment is a key factor that threatens functionality and quality of life in seniors. Given the projection that the population of individuals 65 years of age and older will double within the next 25 years, a critical need exists to identify and test effectiveness of protocols that target higher-order cognitive skills such as gist reasoning to maximize cognitive capacity in...

AIM to investigate the prevalence of extrapyramidal signs in elderly people and their relationship to disease. SETTING AND SUBJECTS 151 non-demented subjects age 65 and over living within a defined geographical area in Nottingham who were participating in the MRC multicentre Cognitive Function and Ageing Study. MEASUREMENTS subjects were assessed at home. Extrapyramidal signs were rated acc...

We pose the development of cognitively plausible models of human language processing as a challenge for computational linguistics. Existing models can only deal with isolated phenomena (e.g., garden paths) on small, specifically selected data sets. The challenge is to build models that integrate multiple aspects of human language processing at the syntactic, semantic, and discourse level. Like ...

About two percent of Europe’s aging population—1.9 million people—suffer from mild dementia. In recent studies, people with dementia have commonly identified several unmet needs, including information (for example, regarding treatment or support), communication, and help for memory problems and psychological distress. With the European Commission’s support, the COGKNOW project is attempting to ...

This paper describes a cognitively plausible mechanism for systematically handling complex syntactic constructions within a semantic parser. More speciically, we show how these constructions are handled without a global syntactic grammar or syntactic parse tree representations and without sacriicing the beneets of semantically-oriented parsing. We evaluate the psychological validity of our arch...

Double R Model (Referential and Relational Model) is a model of language comprehension intended for use in the development of software agents with NLP capabilities. Double R Model is fairly unique in adopting a cognitively plausible approach to modeling language comprehension, while at the same time attempting to support the development of large-scale, functional models. The key claim is that a...

Although meaning is at the core of human cognition, state-of-the-art distributional semantic models (DSMs) are often agnostic to the findings in the area of semantic cognition. In this work, we present a novel type of DSMs motivated by the dual–processing cognitive perspective that is triggered by lexico–semantic activations in the short–term human memory. The proposed model is shown to perform...

When participants take part in mental imagery experiments, are they using their "tacit knowledge" of perception to mimic what they believe should occur in the corresponding perceptual task? Two experiments were conducted to examine whether such an account can be applied to mental imagery in general. These experiments both examined tasks that required participants to "mentally rotate" stimuli. I...

As analysts attempt to make sense of a collection of documents, such as intelligence analysis reports, they need to “connect the dots” between pieces of information that may initially seem unrelated. We conducted a user study to analyze the cognitive process by which users connect pairs of documents and how they spatialize connections. Users created conceptual stories that connected the dots us...

Considering the design of universally designed interfaces for static and dynamic web pages, this work focuses on the group of users with cognitive/intellectual disabilities, while simultaneously accounting for the needs of users with motor and sensory deficits. A number of specific inclusive techniques are applied to the login mechanism of a web service in the course of the redesign of this sit...