Search Results (30)

Anxiety and depression are among the most prevalent mental health conditions worldwide. Early and accurate automated detection from naturalistic conversations (e.g., those recorded with a remote chatbot) could eventually improve screening and, in turn, access to timely care. As a first step towards this goal, we aim to evaluate the efficacy of both traditional machine learning and large language models (LLMs) in classifying anxiety and depression from psychotherapy sessions using labels derived from clinician-annotated session metadata reflecting the primary presenting psychiatric concerns. While psychotherapy transcripts do not reflect the real-world domain of remote naturalistic conversation, we conduct this analysis as an “easy” starting point towards the eventual goal of building generalizable, clinician-assistive models that can infer mental health status from unstructured, non-directive conversations captured in the home setting as part of a remote digital assessment process. LLM underperformance on a psychotherapy benchmark would indicate that LLMs are most likely not yet ready to advance towards mental health classifications in more complex and less structured contexts, such as from remote conversations with a chatbot or family member. To study whether LLMs can classify anxiety and depression from psychotherapy transcripts, we fine-tuned both established transformer models (BERT, RoBERTa, Longformer) and more recent large models (Mistral-7B), trained a Support Vector Machine using engineered features, and assessed prompting GPT chatbots. We observe that (1) all machine learning approaches perform poorly and (2) state-of-the-art models fail to improve multi-label classification performance relative to traditional machine learning methods, indicating the current limitations of using LLMs for classification of psychiatric diagnoses from unstructured patient text as of 2026. Full article

The integration of eye-tracking into consumer-grade virtual reality (VR) headsets presents a transformative opportunity for assessing user mental states within simulated, immersive environments. However, the validity of this built-in technology must be established against gold-standard real-world eye-tracking systems. This study employs a novel paradigm using a physically moving object to evaluate the accuracy of dynamic smooth pursuit, a key oculomotor function in mental state assessment. We rigorously validated the performance of the HTC Vive Pro Eye’s integrated eye-tracker against the Tobii Pro Glasses 3 using a high-precision OptiTrack motion capture system as ground-truth for object position. Eight participants completed both 2D and 3D gaze-tracking tasks. In the 2D condition, they tracked a dot on a screen, while in the 3D condition, they tracked a physically moving object. The real-world object trajectories captured by OptiTrack were replicated within a VR environment. Gaze data from both the VR headset and the Tobii glasses were recorded simultaneously and compared to the OptiTrack baseline using Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) to quantify accuracy. Results revealed a task-dependent performance. In the 2D task, the Tobii glasses demonstrated significantly lower DTW distances, indicating superior accuracy. Conversely, in the 3D task, the VR headset significantly outperformed the glasses, showing a closer match to the real object trajectory. This suggests that while traditional eye-trackers excel in constrained 2D contexts, integrated VR eye-tracking is more accurate for naturalistic 3D gaze pursuit. We conclude that VR headset eye-tracking is not only a reliable but also a cost-effective tool for research, particularly offering enhanced performance for studies conducted within immersive 3D simulations. Full article

Family-implemented interventions are evidence-based practices used to support a range of developmental outcomes, including social communication. Social communication is a broad construct that encompasses a variety of skills, from foundational abilities such as joint attention (i.e., two people attending to the same object or event) to more advanced behaviors like triadic interactions (i.e., responding to or initiating conversation that involves reciprocal interactions). In a previous study, we examined the effects of a brief, parent-implemented Naturalistic Developmental Behavioral Intervention (NDBI), delivered over telepractice with video feedback coaching. The intervention resulted in increased strategy use by all mothers and the frequency of communication for three young children. In the current study, we conducted a secondary analysis of those data to explore whether the communication-focused intervention produced a collateral effect on activity-engaged triadic interactions (i.e., mother–child–mother or child–mother–child exchanges while simultaneously engaging in a joint activity). Although a functional relation was not established, critical theoretical implications are posed. These findings highlight the need for future research to break apart complex skills into subskills to detect any subtle changes in child outcomes. Limitations and directions for future research are discussed. Full article

This study investigates how virtual communication differs from in-person interaction across physiological and behavioral domains, with the goal of informing future interface design. Using a naturalistic setup, we recorded multimodal biosignals, including eye tracking, head and hand movement, heart rate, respiratory rate, and EEG during both in-person and video-based dialogues. Our results show that virtual communication significantly reduces movement and gaze dynamics, particularly in horizontal eye movements and lateral head motion, reflecting both sender- and receiver-side constraints. These physical limitations likely stem from the need to remain within the camera frame and the restricted access to nonverbal cues. Pupil dilation was significantly greater during in-person conversations, consistent with increased arousal during natural communication. Heart rate and EEG trends similarly suggested heightened engagement in face-to-face settings, though interpretation of EEG was limited by movement artifacts. Together, the findings highlight how virtual platforms alter embodied interaction, underscoring the need to address both mobility and visual access in future communication technologies to better support co-presence. Full article

Soil erosion is a widespread problem leading to land degradation in many watersheds, including the Lato Basin, an Apulian permanent river that supplies water used for irrigation in many agricultural territories along the Ionian coast with considerable economic importance for crop production. The loss of fertile soil makes land less productive for agriculture; soil erosion decreases soil fertility, which can negatively affect crop yields. The present research aimed to determine soil loss (t/ha/year) in the Lato watershed in 2024, and then four ecosystem services—loss of carbon, habitat quality, crop productivity and sustainable tourism suitability—directly or indirectly linked to erosion, were defined and evaluated in monetary terms. These ecosystem service evaluations were made for the actual basin land use, and also for two hypothetical scenarios applying different afforestation strategies to the watershed. The first scenario envisages afforestation interventions in the areas with the highest erosion; the second scenario envisages afforestation interventions in the areas with medium erosion, cultivated with cereal crops. Each scenario was also used to evaluate the economic convenience and the effects of sustainable land management practices (e.g., reforestation) to reduce soil erosion and loss of ecosystem services. This study demonstrates that soil erosion is related to land use. It also underlines that reforestation reduces soil erosion and increases the value of ecosystem services. Furthermore, the economic analysis shows that crop productivity is the most incisive ecosystem service, as the lands with high productivity achieve higher economic values, making conversion to wooded areas economically disadvantageous if not supported with economic aid. The results of this study may help development of new management strategies for the Lato Basin, to be implemented through the distribution of community funds for rural development programs that consider the real economic productivity of each area through naturalistic engineering interventions. The reforestation measures need to be implemented over a long time frame to perform their functions; this requires relevant investments from the public sector due to cost management, requesting monetary compensation from EU funds for companies involved in forestation projects on highly productive areas that will bring benefits for the entire community. Full article

A cascading coaching model was used to teach bilingual speech-language pathology (SLP) graduate student clinicians and Spanish-speaking caregivers to implement naturalistic developmental behavioral intervention (NDBI) techniques with autistic preschoolers. Two triads (each consisting of a graduate student clinician, a minimally vocal child diagnosed with autism, and a caregiver) participated in the study. Following the cascading approach, a lead instructor (with limited Spanish conversational skills) coached bilingual student clinicians (in English) to apply culturally adapted NDBI with child participants. Following additional instruction in coaching, student clinicians coached caregivers in Spanish. Effects were evaluated using a multiple methods approach consisting of multiple probes across participants single case experimental design and a qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews with adult participants. All adult participants increased their use of targeted NDBI skills including elicitation techniques (creating communication temptations, using wait time, and prompting) and response techniques (reinforcing children’s communication with natural consequences and providing a contextually relevant vocal model), demonstrating large to very large effect sizes. Although qualitative findings indicated areas for improvement (e.g., additional Spanish supports for clinicians), thematic analysis revealed additional benefits in terms of positive changes across adult learning, behavior, and perspectives; child communication; and child-caregiver relationships. Full article

The assimilation–accommodation theory provides a crucial theoretical framework for understanding the neural mechanisms of second language (L2) processing. Chinese characters, as logographic scripts, contain diverse strokes and components with high visual complexity, and their grapheme–phoneme conversion differs fundamentally from alphabetic writing systems. Existing studies have identified unique neural patterns in Chinese language processing, yet a systematic synthesis of L2 Chinese processing remains limited. This review focuses on the brain mechanisms underlying Chinese language processing among L2 learners with diverse native language backgrounds. On the one hand, Chinese language processing relies on neural networks of the native language (assimilation); on the other hand, it recruits additional right-hemisphere regions to adapt to Chinese characters’ visuospatial complexity and grapheme–phoneme conversion strategies (accommodation). Accordingly, this review first synthesizes current brain imaging studies on L2 Chinese processing within this theoretical framework, noting that prevailing paradigms—limited to lexical and sentence-level processing—fail to capture the complexity, hierarchy, and dynamics of natural language. Next, this review examines the application and implications of naturalistic stimuli paradigms in neuroimaging research of L2 Chinese processing. Finally, future directions for this field are proposed. Collectively, these findings reveal neuroplasticity in processing complex ideographic scripts. Full article

This paper proposes a multi-hop peer-to-peer (P2P) video streaming architecture designed to support dynamic, conversation-aware communication. The primary contribution is a decentralized system built on WebRTC that eliminates reliance on a central media server by employing super node aggregation. In this architecture, video streams from multiple peer nodes are dynamically routed through a group of super nodes, enabling real-time reconfiguration of the network topology in response to conversational changes. To support this dynamic behavior, the system leverages WebRTC data channels for control signaling and overlay restructuring, allowing efficient dissemination of topology updates and coordination messages among peers. A key focus of this study is the rapid and efficient reallocation of network resources immediately following conversational events, ensuring that the streaming overlay remains aligned with ongoing interaction patterns. While the automatic detection of such events is beyond the scope of this work, we assume that external triggers are available to initiate topology updates. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed system, we construct a simulation environment using Docker containers and evaluate its streaming performance under dynamic network conditions. The results demonstrate the system’s applicability to adaptive, naturalistic communication scenarios. Finally, we discuss future directions, including the seamless integration of external trigger sources and enhanced support for flexible, context-sensitive interaction frameworks. Full article

Research on language contact outcomes, such as code-switching, continues to face theoretical and methodological challenges, particularly due to the difficulty of comparing findings across studies that use divergent data collection methods. Accordingly, scholars have emphasized the need for publicly available and comparable bilingual corpora. This paper introduces the El Paso Bilingual Corpus, a new Spanish–English bilingual corpus recorded in El Paso (TX) in 2022, designed to be methodologically comparable to the Bangor Miami Corpus. The paper is structured in three main sections. First, we review the existing Spanish–English corpora and examine the theoretical challenges posed by studies using non-comparable methodologies, thereby underscoring the gap addressed by the El Paso Bilingual Corpus. Second, we outline the corpus creation process, discussing participant recruitment, data collection, and transcription, and provide an overview of these data, including participants’ sociolinguistic profiles. Third, to demonstrate the practical value of methodologically aligned corpora, we report a comparative case study on diminutive expressions in the El Paso and Bangor Miami corpora, illustrating how shared collection protocols can elucidate the role of community-specific social factors on bilinguals’ morphosyntactic choices. Full article

Background: Alcohol use disorder in the context of heroin addiction presents a significant challenge for clinicians, particularly in selecting the most appropriate pharmacological treatment. Methods: The present study aimed to retrospectively evaluate the efficacy of a six-month methadone maintenance (MM)/sodium oxybate (SMO) combination treatment in reducing ethanol intake among chronic alcohol-dependent patients with heroin use disorder (HUD). Specifically, we compared outcomes between those who continued SMO treatment after alcohol detoxification (MM/SMO-Maintained) and those who discontinued it (MM/SMO-Detoxified). Data were recruited using the ‘Pisa Addiction Database’ through a retrospective, naturalistic, cross-sectional comparative design involving a single patient assessment. Results: Our results indicate that treatment retention was higher in the MM/SMO-Maintained group. Conversely, discontinuing SMO treatment after alcohol detoxification was associated with a higher likelihood of dropout. At the endpoint, the MM/SMO-Maintained group showed significant improvement and was considered less severely ill. Conclusions: Long-term SMO treatment has proven to be well tolerated and effective in preventing relapse in individuals with both alcohol and HUD undergoing agonist opioid treatment. SMO may be considered the closest pharmacological option to substitution therapy for alcohol use disorder, and ongoing agonist opioid treatment should not preclude its co-administration. Full article

Cooperation is essential in social life, involving collaborative efforts for mutual benefits. Individual differences in the cooperativeness trait are pivotal in these interactions. A single-group pretest–posttest design was used in this study to determine if Duchenne smiling with gaze and inter-brain synchrony (IBS) during conversation mediates the relationship between cooperativeness and cooperative behavior. The relationships among the variables were examined using mediation analysis and path analysis. We hypothesized that Duchenne smiling with gaze would mediate cooperativeness’ impact on cooperative behavior, while expecting IBS in the left prefrontal region to predict cooperative behavior. The results demonstrated that cooperativeness significantly predicted Duchenne smiling with gaze and cooperative behavior; however, Duchenne smiling with gaze did not mediate the relationship between them. Additionally, IBS during conversation did not predict successive cooperative behavior. These results suggest dispositional factors like cooperativeness may play a more decisive role than momentary expressional cues or neural synchrony in naturalistic unstructured communication in shaping cooperative behavioral outcomes after the communication. The study highlights how personality traits like cooperativeness shape nonverbal communication and social interactions, implying that interventions aimed at developing cooperativeness could lead to more effective collaboration in social settings. Full article

To investigate highway vehicle lane-changing behavior, we utilized the publicly available naturalistic driving dataset, HighD, to extract the movement data of vehicles involved in lane changes and their proximate counterparts. We employed univariate and multivariate Cox proportional hazards models alongside random survival forest models to analyze the influence of various factors on lane change duration, assess their statistical significance, and compare the performance of multiple random survival forest models. Our findings indicate that several variables significantly impact lane change duration, including the standard deviation of lane-changing vehicles, lane-changing vehicle speed, distance to the following vehicle in the target lane, lane-changing vehicle length, and distance to the following vehicle in the current lane. Notably, the standard deviation and vehicle length act as protective factors, with increases in these variables correlating with longer lane change durations. Conversely, higher lane-changing vehicle speeds and shorter distances to following vehicles in both the current and target lanes are associated with shorter lane change durations, indicating their role as risk factors. Feature variable selection did not substantially improve the training performance of the random survival forest model based on our findings. However, validation set evaluation showed that careful feature variable selection can enhance model accuracy, leading to improved AUC values. These insights lay the groundwork for advancing research in predicting lane-changing behaviors, understanding lane-changing intentions, and developing pre-emptive safety measures against hazardous lane changes. Full article

Question asking is a prevalent aspect of children’s speech, providing a means by which young learners can rapidly gain information about the world. Previous research has demonstrated that children exhibit sensitivity to the knowledge state of potential informants in laboratory settings. However, it remains unclear whether and how young children are inclined to direct questions that support learning deeper content to more knowledgeable informants in naturalistic classroom contexts. In this study, we examined children’s question-asking targets (adults, other preschoolers, self-talk) during an open-play period in a US preschool classroom and assessed how the cognitive and linguistic characteristics of questions varied as a function of the intended recipient. Further, we examined how these patterns changed with age. We recorded the spontaneous speech of individual children between the ages of 3 and 6 years (N = 30, totaling 2875 utterances) in 40-min open-period sessions in their preschool day, noting whether the speech was directed toward an adult, another child, or was stated to self. We publish this fully transcribed database with contextual and linguistic details coded as open access to all future researchers. We found that questions accounted for a greater proportion of preschoolers’ adult-directed speech than of their child-directed and self-directed speech, with a particular increase in questions that supported broader learning goals when directed to an adult. Younger children directed a higher proportion of learning questions to adults than themselves, whereas older children asked similar proportions of questions to both, suggesting a difference in younger and older children’s question-asking strategies. Although children used greater lexical diversity in questions than in other utterances, their question formulation in terms of length and diversity remained consistent across age and recipient types, reflecting their general linguistic abilities. Our findings reveal that children discriminately choose “what” and “whom” to ask in daily spontaneous conversations. Even in less-structured school contexts, preschoolers direct questions to the informant most likely to be able to provide an adequate answer. Full article

Traditional neuroimaging methods have identified alterations in brain activity patterns following mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI), particularly during rest, complex tasks, and normal vision. However, studies using graph theory to examine brain network changes in mTBI have produced varied results, influenced by the specific networks and task demands analyzed. In our study, we employed functional MRI to observe 17 mTBI patients and 54 healthy individuals as they viewed a simple, non-narrative underwater film, simulating everyday visual tasks. This approach revealed significant mTBI-related changes in network connectivity, efficiency, and organization. Specifically, the mTBI group exhibited higher overall connectivity and local network specialization, suggesting enhanced information integration without overwhelming the brain’s processing capabilities. Conversely, these patients showed reduced network segregation, indicating a less compartmentalized brain function compared to healthy controls. These patterns were consistent across various visual cortex subnetworks, except in primary visual areas. Our findings highlight the potential of using naturalistic stimuli in graph-based neuroimaging to understand brain network alterations in mTBI and possibly other conditions affecting brain integration. Full article

(1) Background: Spatial cognition (SC) is one of the earliest cognitive domains to be impaired in the course of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), resulting in spatial disorientation and becoming lost even in familiar surroundings as later dementia symptoms. To date, few studies have identified initial alterations of spatial navigation (SN) in the premorbid AD phase by real-world paradigms, and none have adopted an innovative technological apparatus to better detect gait alterations as well as physiological aspects correlated to spatial disorientation (SD). The present study aimed at exploring initial SN defects in patients with prodromal AD via a naturalistic task by using a sensory garment. (2) Methods: 20 community-dwelling patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) due to AD and 20 age/education controls were assessed on their sequential egocentric and allocentric navigation abilities by using a modified version of the Detour Navigation Test (DNT-mv). (3) Results: When compared to controls, patients with MCI due to AD exhibited higher wrong turns (WT) and moments of hesitation (MsH) in the DNT-mv, reflecting difficulties both in sequential egocentric and allocentric navigation, depending on hippocampal deterioration. Moreover, they reported more complaints about their SN competencies and lower long-term visuospatial memory abilities than controls. Remarkably, WTs and MsH manifested in the allocentric naturalistic task of the DNT-mv were associated with autonomic nervous system alteration pertaining to cardiac functioning in the whole sample. (4) Conclusions: Naturalistic navigation tests of hippocampal function using a continuous non-invasive monitoring device can provide early markers of spatial disorientation in patients with MCI due to AD. Future studies should develop cognitive remediation techniques able to enhance SC residual abilities in patients at high risk of conversion into dementia and ecological paradigms to be replicated on a large scale. Full article