PrecisThis paper reports results on the development of immediate memory capacity and verbal rehearsal speed in 112 children with more than ten years of CI use. We found less than half of the sample showed increases in both forward and backward digit spans suggesting disturbances in basic mechanisms related to storage or rehearsal of verbal information. Both spans and verbal rehearsal speeds in elementary school were found to be correlated with speech and language outcomes in high school. These developmental results provide new insights in the elementary neurocognitive information processes associated with high variability in speech and language outcomes. IntroductionOne of our long-term objectives is to understand and explain the enormous variability and individual differences in speech and language outcomes in deaf children who have received cochlear implants. Why are some deaf children very successful with their cochlear implants, often achieving "near-normal" scores within the range of variation observed in typicallydeveloping age-matched normal-hearing peers, while other children struggle and show substantial delays and weaknesses in domains such as speech perception, spoken word recognition, sentence processing, vocabulary, language and reading? Answers to these questions about the underlying factors that are responsible for the variability in speech and language outcomes following implantation have important clinical implications for improving diagnosis and treatment of children with profound hearing loss. Understanding individual differences in outcomes in this clinical population will also be critical for developing new screening methods that can be used to identify those children who may be at high risk for poor outcomes as early as possible so that novel targeted behaviorally-based interventions can be used to help children achieve optimal levels of performance from their implants and reach important speech and language milestones in development.At the present time, many outcome studies have been published documenting the success of cochlear implants in both children and adults (see Kirk & Choi, 2009). Cochlear implants work well in many hearing impaired listeners. However, they do not work equally well for all children and adults who receive this medical intervention. Moreover, the precise reasons for the enormous variability in speech and language outcomes are still unclear and remain poorly understood at this time, even after many years of clinical research on cochlear implants (see Niparko et al., 2009). Individual differences and variability in speech and language outcomes are not new problems in the field of cochlear implantation. In fact, Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the pro...

SUMMAR Y Actigraphic (ACT) recordings are used widely in schoolchildren as a less intrusive and more extended approach to evaluation of sleep problems. However, critical assessment of the validity and reliability of ACT against overnight polysomnography (NPSG) are unavailable. Thus, we explored the degree of concordance between NPSG and ACT in school-aged children to delineate potential ACT boundaries when interpreting pediatric sleep. Non-dominant wrist ACT was recorded simultaneously with NPSG in 149 healthy school-aged children (aged 4.1-8.8 years, 41.7% boys, 80.4% Caucasian) recruited from the community. Analyses were limited to the Actiware (MiniMitter-64) calculated parameters originating from 1-min epoch sampling and medium sensitivity threshold value of 40; i.e. sleep period time (SPT), total sleep time (TST) and wake after sleep onset (WASO). SPT was not significantly different between ACT and NPSG. However, ACT underestimated TST significantly by 32.2 ± 33.4 min and overestimated WASO by 26.3 ± 34.4 min. The decreased precision of ACT was also evident from moderate to small concordance correlation coefficients (0.47 for TST and 0.09 for WASO). ACT in school-aged children provides reliable assessment of sleep quantity, but is relatively inaccurate during determination of sleep quality. Thus, caution is advocated in drawing definitive conclusions from ACT during evaluation of the sleepdisturbed child.k e y w o r d s actigraphy,

The purpose of this study was to investigate the feasibility and validity of a modified version of Buschke’s missing scan methodology, the Missing Scan Task (MST), to assess working memory capacity (WMC) and cognitive control processes in preschool children 3–6 years in age. Forty typically developing monolingual English-speaking children between 36 and 84 months in age participated in the study. The children were tested on measures of WMC (MST), verbal and nonverbal memory (NEPSY Narrative Memory and Memory for Designs subtests), and language skills (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, fourth edition). Children showed increased working memory capacity scores with age, as measured by the MST, with significant differences between 3- and 5-year-olds and 3- and 6-year-olds. Significant correlations were also found between the MST and language and verbal and nonverbal memory scores. MSTscores still remained significantly correlated with the other measures of memory even after age and global language were accounted for in a regression analysis, demonstrating that the MST captures unique variance related specifically to WMC and cognitive control processes used to retrieve and scan information in short-term memory (STM). The results of this study demonstrate that the MST is a feasible and valid methodology for assessing WMC in preschool children as young 3 years of age.

The effect of mild sleep restriction on cognitive functioning in young children is unclear, yet sleep loss may impact children's abilities to attend to tasks with high processing demands. In a preliminary investigation, six children (6.6 - 8.3 years of age) with normal sleep patterns performed three tasks: attention (“Oddball”), speech perception (conconant-vowel syllables) and executive function (Directional Stroop). Event-related potentials (ERP) responses were recorded before (Control) and following one-week of 1-hour per day of sleep restriction. Brain activity across all tasks following Sleep Restriction differed from activity during Control Sleep, indicating that minor sleep restriction impacts children's neurocognitive functioning.

Background With limited SARS-CoV-2 testing capacity in the US at the start of the epidemic (January – March), testing was focused on symptomatic patients with a travel history throughout February, obscuring the picture of SARS-CoV-2 seeding and community transmission. We sought to identify individuals with SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in the early weeks of the US epidemic. Methods All of Us study participants in all 50 US states provided blood specimens during study visits from January 2 to March 18, 2020. A participant was considered seropositive if they tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 immunoglobulin G (IgG) antibodies on the Abbott Architect SARS-CoV-2 IgG ELISA and the EUROIMMUN SARS-CoV-2 ELISA in a sequential testing algorithm. Sensitivity and specificity of the Abbott and EUROIMMUNE ELISAs and the net sensitivity and specificity of the sequential testing algorithm were estimated with 95% confidence intervals. Results The estimated sensitivity of Abbott and EUROIMMUN was 100% (107/107 [96.6%, 100%]) and 90.7% (97/107 [83.5%, 95.4%]), respectively. The estimated specificity of Abbott and EUROIMMUN was 99.5% (995/1,000 [98.8%, 99.8%]) and 99.7% (997/1,000 [99.1%, 99.9%), respectively. The net sensitivity and specificity of our sequential testing algorithm was 90.7% (97/107 [83.5%, 95.4%]) and 100.0% (1,000/1,000 [99.6%, 100%]), respectively. Of the 24,079 study participants with blood specimens from January 2 to March 18, 2020, 9 were seropositive, 7 of whom were seropositive prior to the first confirmed case in the states of Illinois, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Mississippi. Conclusions Our findings indicate SARS-CoV-2 infections weeks prior to the first recognized cases in 5 US states.