[Cognitive explanations of auditory verbal hallucinations in schizophrenia: An inventory of the scientific literature]

Positive psychotic symptoms in childhood and adolescence

Based on the assumption of a universal neurodevelopmental model of psychosis, especially of the schizophrenia spectrum, the diagnosis (and treatment) of psychosis in minors commonly follows those in adults. Yet, as our review demonstrates, recent years have seen an emergence of studies of minors indicating that developmental aspects may play a crucial role in the prevalence and appraisal of diagnostically relevant positive psychotic symptoms in their full-blown and subthreshold forms, including neurobiogenetic and other risk factors, such as migration. Thus, caution is advised to not overpathologize potentially transient and clinically irrelevant occurrence of (subthreshold) positive psychotic symptoms in the diagnosis and treatment of psychotic disorders and their clinical high-risk states in minors. More studies on developmental aspects are urgently needed.

Decoding Covert Speech From EEG-A Comprehensive Review

Over the past decade, many researchers have come up with different implementations of systems for decoding covert or imagined speech from EEG (electroencephalogram). They differ from each other in several aspects, from data acquisition to machine learning algorithms, due to which, a comparison between different implementations is often difficult. This review article puts together all the relevant works published in the last decade on decoding imagined speech from EEG into a single framework. Every important aspect of designing such a system, such as selection of words to be imagined, number of electrodes to be recorded, temporal and spatial filtering, feature extraction and classifier are reviewed. This helps a researcher to compare the relative merits and demerits of the different approaches and choose the one that is most optimal. Speech being the most natural form of communication which human beings acquire even without formal education, imagined speech is an ideal choice of prompt for evoking brain activity patterns for a BCI (brain-computer interface) system, although the research on developing real-time (online) speech imagery based BCI systems is still in its infancy. Covert speech based BCI can help people with disabilities to improve their quality of life. It can also be used for covert communication in environments that do not support vocal communication. This paper also discusses some future directions, which will aid the deployment of speech imagery based BCI for practical applications, rather than only for laboratory experiments.

The Determinants of Private Tutoring Participation for Mathematics in China: Focusing on the Role of Student Metacognition

Participation in private tutoring has been a global educational phenomenon and is especially prevalent in China. The present study conducted a student-report questionnaire and collected school reports of mathematical achievement to track a year of the longitudinal variation of private tutoring and obtained an analysis of the impact of metacognition on private tutoring participation and its moderating effects between environment-related and initial indicators and mathematical private tutoring participation. The empirical results of this study showed that metacognitive level for learning process monitoring, family economic condition, and mathematics achievement could impact the decision to participate in private tutoring. The results also showed that family economic condition could moderate the effect of metacognitive level for learning process monitoring on the decision to participate in private tutoring. Practical implications for educational competent department and the schoolteachers were discussed.