ABSTRACT

A large body of literature has established that children orphaned by HIV/AIDS (‘AIDS orphans’) face numerous challenges, such as parental death, poverty, disrupted school attendance and stigma. All of these early life adversities can have long-lasting effects on brain function, especially the executive functions. Working memory, as one of the most studied aspects of executive functions, is also reported to be impaired in children with early adversity. However, limited data are available regarding how early life adverse events affect the neural dynamic associated with working memory processing in AIDS orphans. This study applied the electroencephalogram (EEG) technique to investigate the working memory process in 81 AIDS orphans and 62 non-orphan controls with n-back tasks. Results from EEG analysis and time-frequency analysis showed that AIDS orphans displayed smaller N2 and larger P2, P3 activation as well as enhanced theta and attenuated alpha band oscillations compared to the controls. The present findings indicated a deficit in working memory process in AIDS orphans and suggested that this deficit might be due to the impairments in attention allocation, detection and classification of stimuli and updating process in working memory.

摘要

大量文献表明，因艾滋病毒/艾滋病而成为孤儿的儿童（“艾滋病孤儿”）面临着许多挑战，例如父母死亡、贫困、入学率下降和耻辱。所有这些早年的逆境都会对大脑功能，尤其是执行功能产生长期影响。据报道，工作记忆作为执行功能中研究最多的方面之一，在早期逆境中的儿童也会受到损害。然而，关于早期生活不良事件如何影响艾滋病孤儿工作记忆处理相关神经动态的数据有限。本研究应用脑电图 (EEG) 技术，通过 n-back 任务调查 81 名艾滋病孤儿和 62 名非孤儿对照组的工作记忆过程。脑电图分析和时频分析结果表明，与对照组相比，艾滋病孤儿表现出较小的 N2 和较大的 P2、P3 激活，以及增强的 θ 带振荡和减弱的 α 带振荡。目前的研究结果表明，艾滋病孤儿的工作记忆过程存在缺陷，并表明这种缺陷可能是由于注意力分配、刺激的检测和分类以及工作记忆的更新过程受损所致。