{"title":"The effect of chronic pain on memory: A systematic review and meta-analysis exploring the impact of nociceptive, neuropathic and nociplastic pain","authors":"Kate Kelly , Emily Keohane , Gemma Davy","doi":"10.1016/j.bandc.2025.106305","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bandc.2025.106305","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Chronic pain is becoming increasingly prevalent in modern society. Much research to date has focused on the physical symptoms of pain associated with various conditions, yet living with chronic pain is also known to impact an individual’s cognition. Within cognition, memory is particularly vulnerable to outside factors, yet our understanding of the impact of chronic pain on memory is inconclusive. This systematic review and <em>meta</em>-analysis examined the association between chronic pain type and memory performance. Chronic pain samples were classified as nociceptive, neuropathic or nociplastic and were compared to healthy controls. Studies were sourced from Embase, Web of Science, MEDLINE, PubMed, PsycINFO, Scopus and CINAHL databases between December 2023 and July 2024. A total of 15 good – strong studies with 1865 participants were included (106 who experienced chronic nociceptive pain, 315 who experienced chronic neuropathic pain, 589 who experienced chronic nociplastic pain and 855 healthy controls). Results indicated that individuals with nociceptive and nociplastic pain had impaired short-term and long-term memory performance compared to healthy controls. The same was not true for individuals with neuropathic pain. These findings demonstrate that the type of pain one experiences impacts memory performance. This has profound implications both clinically and with regard to research and offers a new lens for how we can consider chronic pain when trying to understand the impact on cognition.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":55331,"journal":{"name":"Brain and Cognition","volume":"187 ","pages":"Article 106305"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-05-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143947077","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Letter identification and spatial localization during visual working memory are enabled by unique sequences of stimulus-dependent neural operations","authors":"Mckenzie Haller , Hope Nyarady , Thomas J. Covey","doi":"10.1016/j.bandc.2025.106302","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bandc.2025.106302","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Working memory (WM) is often conceptualized as consisting of a supervisory central executive and the short-term storage of information over a brief period of time. In the present study, we examined the sequence of neural operations that are engaged for visual-verbal and visual-spatial information during demanding WM performance. Participants completed verbal and spatial 3-back tasks (visually presented stimuli), and event-related potentials (ERPs) were obtained for task performance. There was enhancement of anterior N1/posterior P1, P2, P3, and late anterior negative (400+ msec post-stimulus) component amplitude for the spatial compared to verbal 3-back task. We interpret these effects as reflecting spatial orienting (N1/P1, P2 effects) and updating of stimulus location during WM (anterior P3, late negativity effects). In contrast, the verbal compared to spatial 3-back task exhibited enhancement of an anterior P150/posterior N150 component, frontal N2 amplitude, a broader P3 component morphology with posterior localization, and a late anterior positivity/posterior negativity (550+ msec). We interpret these effects as reflecting identification of letter features (anterior P150/posterior N150), stimulus conflict monitoring (N2 effect), stimulus categorization (posterior P3 effect), and rehearsal/updating over the retention interval (late positivity/posterior negativity). These ERP effects likely reflect activity of the distinct ventral and dorsal visual processing streams associated with verbal/object and spatial information.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":55331,"journal":{"name":"Brain and Cognition","volume":"187 ","pages":"Article 106302"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143918281","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Julie D. Henry , Sarah P. Coundouris , Izelle Labuschagne , Kirra Liu , Simon J. Haines , Sarah A. Grainger , Juan F. Domínguez , Alex Puckett , Peter G. Rendell , Jessica Taubert
{"title":"Age-related differences in neural integrity are unrelated to prospective memory age effects","authors":"Julie D. Henry , Sarah P. Coundouris , Izelle Labuschagne , Kirra Liu , Simon J. Haines , Sarah A. Grainger , Juan F. Domínguez , Alex Puckett , Peter G. Rendell , Jessica Taubert","doi":"10.1016/j.bandc.2025.106301","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bandc.2025.106301","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Prospective memory refers to memory for future intentions. In general, prospective memory appears to decline with age when tested in laboratory settings but is preserved or enhanced when tasks need to be completed in daily life. No study to date has tested whether age-related differences in specific brain structures and networks mediate prospective memory age effects in both settings. Here, measures of regional brain volume (anterior prefrontal cortex, frontoparietal networks, and temporal lobes), white matter integrity (prefrontal white matter hypointensities) and prospective memory were obtained from 41 younger and 41 older adults. The results showed that, as expected, older age was associated with smaller regional brain volumes, as well as poorer prefrontal white matter integrity. In addition, age was negatively associated with prospective memory function in the laboratory-based assessment, but positively associated with performance on the task completed in daily life. However, none of these behavioural effects were mediated by age-related differences in neural integrity. These data show that, in contrast to literature focused on neurodegenerative disease in which neural losses have been shown to be predictive of PM impairment, age-related differences in brain integrity may not be the best indicator of <em>normal</em> variation in prospective memory function.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":55331,"journal":{"name":"Brain and Cognition","volume":"187 ","pages":"Article 106301"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-04-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143892304","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Odelia Elkana , Iman Beheshti , for the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative
{"title":"The protective role of education in white matter lesions and cognitive decline","authors":"Odelia Elkana , Iman Beheshti , for the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative","doi":"10.1016/j.bandc.2025.106304","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bandc.2025.106304","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Cognitive reserve, often reflected by education, may protect against cognitive decline linked to brain pathology. White matter lesions (WMLs), common in aging, are associated with the progression from healthy cognitive status (HC) to mild cognitive impairment (MCI). This study explores education’s role, as a proxy for cognitive reserve, in moderating the relationship between WML burden and the HC to MCI transition. Data from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) were analyzed for 153 cognitively healthy adults. Participants were divided into two groups: one (n = 85) remained cognitively healthy for at least seven years, while the other (n = 68) progressed to MCI. WML volumes were assessed using MRI scans and analyzed with linear regression models including age, sex, and an intraction term between group status and education to examine moderation effects. Both WM-hyper and WM-hypo showed a similar pattern across analyses. A significant interaction between group and education for both WML types (WM-hyper: β = -0.097, p = 0.047; WM-hypo: β = -0.070, p = 0.037) was found, suggesting that among individuals who progressed to MCI, higher education was associated with lower WML burden.This suggest that education plays a protective role against white matter pathology among individuals at risk for cognitive impairment.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":55331,"journal":{"name":"Brain and Cognition","volume":"187 ","pages":"Article 106304"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-04-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143875031","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Mizan Gaillard , Scott A. Jones , Dakota Kliamovich , Arturo Lopez Flores , Bonnie J. Nagel
{"title":"Negative life events during early adolescence are associated with neural deactivation to emotional stimuli","authors":"Mizan Gaillard , Scott A. Jones , Dakota Kliamovich , Arturo Lopez Flores , Bonnie J. Nagel","doi":"10.1016/j.bandc.2025.106303","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bandc.2025.106303","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Negative life events (NLEs) have been shown to perturb neurodevelopment and are correlated with poor mental health outcomes in adolescence, the most common period of psychopathology onset. Emotion regulation is a critical component of psychological response to NLEs and interacts, neurobiologically and behaviorally, with working memory. This study leveraged an emotional n-back task to examine how NLEs influence emotion- and working memory-related brain activation using data from 2150 youth in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study. Greater incidence of NLEs was associated with less activation in the amygdala and more pronounced deactivation in other limbic and frontal brain regions previously implicated in emotion-related cognition; however, this association was present only during emotion processing conditions of the task. While NLEs were not significantly associated with task performance in the final sample, behavioural analyses including youth excluded for low task accuracy and poor neuroimaging data quality showed a significant negative association between NLEs and overall task performance. While behavioural findings across the entire sample support prior work, somewhat incongruent with prior literature, imaging results may suggest that during early adolescence the effects of negative experiences on patterns of neural activation are specific to contexts necessitating emotion processing.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":55331,"journal":{"name":"Brain and Cognition","volume":"187 ","pages":"Article 106303"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-04-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143875030","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Exercise, brain and cognition interaction in humans","authors":"Terry McMorris, Chong Chen","doi":"10.1016/j.bandc.2025.106299","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bandc.2025.106299","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":55331,"journal":{"name":"Brain and Cognition","volume":"186 ","pages":"Article 106299"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-04-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143937757","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Jiaojian Dai , Peipeng Liang , Xiaohuan Li , Jingwei Zhang , Liuqing Tian , Xinrui Mao , Chunyan Guo
{"title":"Semantic predictability and semantic relevance through different neural mechanisms to improve memory performance","authors":"Jiaojian Dai , Peipeng Liang , Xiaohuan Li , Jingwei Zhang , Liuqing Tian , Xinrui Mao , Chunyan Guo","doi":"10.1016/j.bandc.2025.106300","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bandc.2025.106300","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Previous studies have shown that semantic predictability and semantic relevance enhance the semantic activation of target words and improve memory performance. However, it is unclear whether semantic predictability and semantic relevance affect memory performance through the same neural mechanisms. The present study examined how semantic processing of semantic predictability and semantic relevance during encoding affects episodic memory retrieval. In our experiments (Experiment 1: item recognition; Experiment 2: associative recognition), we compared behavioral and EEG indicators across true (predictable), invalid (unpredictable but semantically relevant), and anomalous (unpredictable and semantically irrelevant) conditions. In both experiments, memory performance was best in the true condition. In Experiment 1, the old/new effect of FN400 was observed in the invalid condition, while the old/new effect of LPC was observed in the true condition. In Experiment 2, the old/new effects of FN400 and LPC were observed in the invalid condition. In the true condition, only the old/new effect of LPC was observed. These results suggest that semantic predictability and semantic relevance influence FN400 and LPC in different ways. These findings demonstrate that there are differences between semantic predictability and semantic relevance in retrieving information.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":55331,"journal":{"name":"Brain and Cognition","volume":"186 ","pages":"Article 106300"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143843817","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Riccardo Dalla Volta , Francesco Scarfone , Dario Brambilla , Roberto Esposti , Paolo Cavallari
{"title":"Corticospinal suppression in response to pics with implied hand actions: A follow up TMS study","authors":"Riccardo Dalla Volta , Francesco Scarfone , Dario Brambilla , Roberto Esposti , Paolo Cavallari","doi":"10.1016/j.bandc.2025.106298","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bandc.2025.106298","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Presentation of bodily actions is known to affect motor system activity in perceivers’ brain. A previous study (Gianelli, Kuehne, Lo Presti, Mencaraglia & Dalla Volta, 2020) employing hand-tool interaction with apparent motion showed early suppression of corticospinal excitability in hand muscles. To control for the role of apparent motion and to investigate the suppression duration, in the present follow up study participants observed pics displaying hand-tool actions, with no apparent motion but only implied motion. Single pulse TMS was delivered on the hand sector of the left motor cortex at 1 s after fixation cross (baseline), at 150, 350, 500 and 700 ms from stimulus onset, while motor evoked potentials (MEPs) were recorded from the contralateral first dorsal interosseus muscle. Results showed a difference in MEP amplitude between hand action-related and control pics where hand action observation suppressed corticospinal excitability, suggesting early and enduring motor inhibition. In addition, MEP amplitude decreased over time. These findings rule out a necessary role of apparent motion, indicating that the simple presentation of hand actions with implied motion effectively induced motor inhibition. Corticospinal suppression may act to prevent the motor system from automatically transforming observed actions into overt movements whenever an action is observed.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":55331,"journal":{"name":"Brain and Cognition","volume":"186 ","pages":"Article 106298"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-04-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143823220","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Cognitive reserve in young-onset cognitive impairment","authors":"Chiara Carbone , Riccardo Maramotti , Erica Balboni , Daniela Beltrami , Daniela Ballotta , Roberta Bedin , Chiara Gallingani , Manuela Tondelli , Simone Salemme , Federico Gasparini , Giulia Vinceti , Alessandro Marti , Annalisa Chiari , Luca Nocetti , Giuseppe Pagnoni , Giovanna Zamboni","doi":"10.1016/j.bandc.2025.106297","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bandc.2025.106297","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Cognitive reserve (CR) reflects brain’s resilience to pathology, enabling to maintain function despite structural damage. This study investigates its role in young-onset cognitive impairment (<65 years) beyond brain integrity and neurodegeneration. Participants underwent neuropsychological assessment – including the Cognitive Reserve Index questionnaire (CRIq) –, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and blood neurofilaments light-chain (NfLs) measurement. Scores of <em>global cognition</em> and domain-specific cognition were derived from Principal Component Analyses of neuropsychological results. Linear regression models estimated CR’s contribution to <em>global</em> and domain-specific cognition, alongside age, sex, MRI measures, and NfLs as predictors. Among the 115 participants, <em>global cognition</em> was significantly explained by CR [effect size (ES) = 0.229], grey matter volume (ES = 0.348), and NfLs (ES = −0.302). The effect of CR was prominent on <em>language</em> and <em>attentional-executive functions</em>: while the CRIq subscore related to education predicted performance in both these domains, the subscore related to leisure activities was positively associated with the <em>language</em> domain only. These findings highlight CR’s protective role in young-onset cognitive impairment, particularly for non-amnestic cognitive domains<em>.</em> Since a high CR can mask or compensate for neurological cognitive disorders delaying its diagnosis, our results suggest that measures of CR, including time spent on leisure activities, should be considered when interpreting neuropsychological tests.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":55331,"journal":{"name":"Brain and Cognition","volume":"186 ","pages":"Article 106297"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-04-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143816359","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}