Visual Working Memory Impairment in Premanifest Gene-Carriers and Early Huntington's Disease
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Working memory deficits have been found in Huntington's disease (HD) and in a small group of premanifest (PreHD) gene-carriers. However, the nature and extent of these deficits are unknown. In a large cross-sectional study, we aimed to determine the degree of visuospatial working memory dysfunction across multiple stages of HD. Specifically, visuospatial working memory capacity and response times across various degrees of difficulty were examined, as well as the relationship between visuospatial working memory and motor dysfunction. We examined 62 PreHD-A gene-carriers (>10.8 years from estimated disease onset), 58 PreHD-B gene-carriers (<10.8 years from estimated disease onset), 77 stage-1 HD patients (HD1), 44 stage-2 HD patients (HD2), and 122 healthy controls. Participants viewed coloured squares (in sets of 3, 5 and 7) on a screen and were to decide whether on a subsequent screen the encircled square has changed colour. Accuracy and response times were recorded. Compared to controls, significant group differences in visuospatial working memory capacity (accuracy) were seen in PreHD-B, HD1 and HD2 groups across the difficulty levels. Significant group differences on response times were found for all groups (PreHD-A to HD2) compared to controls; the most difficult level producing the only group difference in speed between PreHD-A and controls. Accuracy and speed were positively correlated only in the HD groups. These findings suggest that visuospatial working memory impairments are detectable in both premanifest and manifest HD; the manifest HD showed evidence for a "worse-worse phenomenon" whereby reductions were present in both motor speed and accuracy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".