arXiv subjects

Jason Steffener

Publications and source records attributed to Jason Steffener.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2022

The Role of Lifetime Exposures across Cognitive Domains in Barbados Using Data From the SABE Study

This study characterized the effects of aging on individual cognitive domains and how sex, job type, and years of education alter the age effect on older adults from Barbados. This was an analysis of the cross-sectional data collected as part of the SABE Study (Health, Well-being and Ageing) in 2006. The loss of a single point in each of the individual cognitive domains assessed using the mini-mental state exam served as dependent variables. Independent variables included age, sex, years of education, job type, and the interactions with age in a series of logistic regression analyses. The study aimed to identify which factors altered the effect of age on cognitive performance and which directly affected performance. Results demonstrated that the effect of age differed across the cognitive domains. In addition, sex, education, and job type all differentially affected cognitive performance in an additive, formative manner. The most consistent finding was that high years of education coupled with employment requiring mostly mental effort was the best combination for maintaining high levels of cognitive performance in late life. The results demonstrate that adverse age effects on cognitive performance may be minimized or delayed through modifiable lifetime exposures in the people of Barbados.

q-bio.NC↗

arXiv2021

Subjective Difficulty in a Verbal Recognition-based Memory Task: Exploring Brain-behaviour Relationships at the Individual Level in Healthy Young Adults

The vast majority of fMRI studies of task-related brain activity utilize common levels of task demands and analyses that rely on the central tendencies of the data. This approach does not take into account perceived difficulty nor regional variations in brain activity between people. The results are findings of brain-behavior relationships that weaken as sample sizes increase. Participants of the current study included twenty-six healthy young adults evenly split between the sexes. The current work utilizes five parametrically modulated levels of memory load centered around each individualâs predetermined working memory cognitive capacity. Principal components analyses (PCA) identified the group-level central tendency of the data. After removing the group effect from the data, PCA identified individual-level patterns of brain activity across the five levels of task demands. Expression of the group effect significantly differed between the sexes across all load levels. Expression of the individual level patterns demonstrated a significant load by sex interaction. Furthermore, expressions of the individual maps make better predictors of response time behavior than group-derived maps.

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arXiv2021

Power of Mediation Effects Using Bootstrap Resampling

Mediation analyses are a statistical tool for testing the hypothesis about how the relationship between two variables may be direct or indirect via a third variable. Assessing statistical significance has been an area of active research; however, assessment of statistical power has been hampered by the lack of closed form calculations and the need for substantial amounts of computational simulations. The current work provides a detailed explanation of implementing large scale simulation procedures within a shared computing cluster environment. In addition, all results and code for implementing these procedures is publicly available. The resulting power analyses compare the effects of sample size and strength and direction of the relationships between the three variables. Comparisons of three confidence interval calculation methods demonstrated that the bias-corrected method is optimal and requires approximately ten less participants than the percentile method to achieve equivalent power. Differing strengths of distal and proximal effects were compared and did not differentially affect the power to detect mediation effects. Suppression effects were explored and demonstrate that in the presence of no observed relationship between two variables, entrance of the mediating variable into the model can reveal a suppressed relationship. The power to detect suppression effects is similar to unsuppressed mediation. These results and their methods provide important information about the power of mediation models for study planning. Of greater importance is that the methods lay the groundwork for assessment of statistical power of more complicated models involving multiple mediators and moderators.

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arXiv2016

Quantifying Neural Efficiency and Capacity: A Differential Equation Interpretation of Polynomial Contrasts

Task based neuroimaging tools for the study of cognitive neuroscience provide insight into understanding how the brain responds to increasing cognitive demand. Theoretical models of neural-cognitive relationships have been developed based on observations of linear and non-linear increases in brain activity. Neural efficiency and capacity are two parameters of current theoretical models. These two theoretical parameters describe the rate of increase of brain activity and the upper limits of the increases, respectively. The current work demonstrates that a quadratic model of increasing brain activity in response to the n-back task is a solution to a differential equation model. This reinterpretation of a standard approach to analyzing a common cognitive task provides a wealth of new insight. The results include brain wide measures of neural efficiency and capacity. The quantification of neural-cognitive relationships provides evidence to support current cognitive neuroscience theories. In addition, the methods provide a framework for understanding the neural mechanisms of working memory. This allows estimation of the effects of experimental manipulations within a conceptual research framework. The proposed methods were applied to twenty-one healthy young adults while engaging in four levels of the n-back task. All methods are easily applicable using standard current software packages for neuroimaging.

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