Search results for " brain"

Musical training facilitates the neural discrimination of major versus minor chords in 13-year-old children

2012

Music practice since childhood affects the development of hearing skills. An important classification in Western music is the chords’ major-minor dichotomy. Its preattentive auditory discrimination was studied here using a mismatch negativity (MMN) paradigm in 13-year-olds with active hobbies, music-related (music group) or other (control group). In a context of root major chords, root minor chords and inverted major chords were presented infrequently. The interval structure of inverted majors differs more from root majors than the interval structure of root minors. However, the identity of the chords is the same in inverted and root majors (major), but different in root minors. The deviant…

The Prefrontal Cortex and Neurological Impairments of Active Thought

2018

This article reviews the effects of lesions to the frontal cortex on the ability to carry out active thought, namely, to reason, think flexibly, produce strategies, and formulate and realize plans. We discuss how and why relevant neuropsychological studies should be carried out. The relationships between active thought and both intelligence and language are considered. The following basic processes necessary for effective active thought are reviewed: concentration, set switching, inhibiting potentiated responses, and monitoring and checking. Different forms of active thought are then addressed: abstraction, deduction, reasoning in well-structured and ill-structured problem spaces, novel st…

Prefix Stripping Re-Re-Revisited: MEG Investigations of Morphological Decomposition and Recomposition

2019

We revisit a long-standing question in the psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic literature on comprehending morphologically complex words: are prefixes and suffixes processed using the same cognitive mechanisms? Recent work using Magnetoencephalography (MEG) to uncover the dynamic temporal and spatial responses evoked by visually presented complex suffixed single words provide us with a comprehensive picture of morphological processing in the brain, from early, form-based decomposition, through lexical access, grammatically constrained recomposition, and semantic interpretation. In the present study, we find that MEG responses to prefixed words reveal interesting early differences in the la…

MR imaging of bilateral paramedian thalamic and mesencephalic infarcts: A case report

2010

We describe MR imaging of bilateral infarction of the paramedian portion of the mesencephalus and thalamus due to an occlusion of the Percheron artery. This entity is due to one of the anatomic variants of the perforating arteries supplying the thalamus and mesenchephalus. Clinically this kind of infarction presents with neurologic impairment as a disorder of consciousness, memory dysfunctions, various types of vertical gaze palsy and psychic changes, which need to be differentiated from delirium and coma. At MRI evaluation infarction of the paramedian portion of thalami and midbrain, with a “butterfly wings” pattern, was demonstrated as high signal intensity areas on FLAIR and FSE-T2W ima…

Tonically Active Neurons in the Monkey Striatum are Sensitive to Sensory Events in a Manner that Reflects their Predictability in Time

2002

It is now well established that tonically active neurons (TANs) in the monkey striatum respond to motivationally relevant sensory events, such as conditioned stimuli to which the animal had to react correctly to obtain reward. Recent findings obtained in our laboratory suggested that stimulus prediction may influence the responsiveness of the TANs. In the present study we specifically investigated the effects of temporal aspects of prediction on the responses of single TANs recorded both in the caudate nucleus and putamen of two macaque monkeys. Three different behavioral situations were employed: (1) an instrumental task, in which a visual stimulus triggering a rewarded movement was preced…

2020

Abstract Efficient neuronal communication between brain regions through oscillatory synchronization at certain frequencies is necessary for cognition. Such synchronized networks are transient and dynamic, established on the timescale of milliseconds in order to support ongoing cognitive operations. However, few studies characterizing dynamic electrophysiological brain networks have simultaneously accounted for temporal non-stationarity, spectral structure, and spatial properties. Here, we propose an analysis framework for characterizing the large-scale phase-coupling network dynamics during task performance using magnetoencephalography (MEG). We exploit the high spatiotemporal resolution of…

Estimation of brain connectivity through Artificial Neural Networks

2019

Among different methods available for estimating brain connectivity from electroencephalographic signals (EEG), those based on MVAR models have proved to be flexible and accurate. They rely on the solution of linear equations that can be pursued through artificial neural networks (ANNs) used as MVAR model. However, when few data samples are available, there is a lack of accuracy in estimating MVAR parameters due to the collinearity between regressors. Moreover, the assessment procedure is also affected by the lack of data points. The mathematical solution to these problems is represented by penalized regression methods based on l 1 norm, that can reduce collinearity by means of variable sel…

Measuring the agreement between brain connectivity networks.

2016

Investigating the level of similarity between two brain networks, resulting from measures of effective connectivity in the brain, can be of interest from many respects. In this study, we propose and test the idea to borrow measures of association used in machine learning to provide a measure of similarity between the structure of (un-weighted) brain connectivity networks. The measures here explored are the accuracy, Cohen's Kappa (K) and Area Under Curve (AUC). We implemented two simulation studies, reproducing two contexts of application that can be particularly interesting for practical applications, namely: i) in methodological studies, performed on surrogate data, aiming at comparing th…

Spatial-temporal interactions in the human brain

2009

The review summarises current evidence on the cognitive mechanisms for the integration of spatial and temporal representations and of common brain structures to process the where and when of stimuli. Psychophysical experiments document the presence of spatially localised distortions of sub-second time intervals and suggest that visual events are timed by neural mechanisms that are spatially selective. On the other hand, experiments with supra-second intervals suggest that time could be represented on a mental time-line ordered from left-to-right, similar to what is reported for other ordered quantities, such as numbers. Neuroimaging and neuropsychological findings point towards the posterio…

Discovering Aberrant Patterns of Human Connectome in Alzheimer's Disease via Subgraph Mining

2012

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common cause of age-related dementia, which prominently affects the human connectome. Diffusion weighted imaging (DWI) provides a promising way to explore the organization of white matter fiber tracts in the human brain in a non-invasive way. However, the immense amount of data from millions of voxels of a raw diffusion map prevent an easy way to utilizable knowledge. In this paper, we focus on the question how we can identify disrupted spatial patterns of the human connectome in AD based on a data mining framework. Using diffusion tractography, the human connectomes for each individual subject were constructed based on two diffusion derived attributes: …