Search results for " consciousness"

Integration of sensory information precedes the sensation of vection: a combined behavioral and event-related brain potential (ERP) study.

2014

Illusory self-motion (known as vection) describes the sensation of ego-motion in the absence of physical movement. Vection typically occurs in stationary observers being exposed to visual information that suggest self-motion (e.g. simulators, virtual reality). In the present study, we tested whether sensory integration of visual information triggers vection: participants (N=13) perceived patterns of moving altered black-and-white vertical stripes on a screen that was divided into a central and a surrounding peripheral visual field. In both fields the pattern was either moving or stationary, resulting in four combinations of central and peripheral motions: (1) central and peripheral stripes …

Neural Correlates of Visual versus Abstract Letter Processing in Roman and Arabic Scripts

2013

In alphabetic orthographies, letter identification is a critical process during the recognition of visually presented words. In the present experiment, we examined whether and when visual form influences letter processing in two very distinct alphabets (Roman and Arabic). Disentangling visual versus abstract letter representations was possible because letters in the Roman alphabet may look visually similar/dissimilar in lowercase and uppercase forms (e.g., c-C vs. r-R) and letters in the Arabic alphabet may look visually similar/dissimilar, depending on their position within a word (e.g., [Formula: see text] - [Formula: see text] vs. [Formula: see text] - [Formula: see text]). We employed a…

Neural correlates of valence generalization in an affective conditioning paradigm.

2014

In case of uncertainty, predictions that are based on prior, similar experiences guide our decision by processes of generalization. Over-generalization of negative information has been identified as an important feature of several psychopathologies, including anxiety disorders and depression, and might underlie biased interpretation of ambiguous information. Here, we investigated the neural correlates of valence generalization to ambiguous stimuli using a translational affective conditioning task during fMRI. Twenty-five healthy individuals participated in a conditioning procedure with (1) an initial acquisition phase, where participants learned the positive and negative valence of two diff…

A multidisciplinary approach to assess recovery of consciousness in a patient with moyamoya disease

2019

Abstract Introduction Moyamoya disease (MMD) meaning “hazy puff of smoke” in Japanese is a rare chronic cerebrovascular syndrome characterized by progressive stenosis and occlusion of the internal carotid arteries (ICAs) anterior cerebral arteries (ACAs), and middle cerebral arteries (MCAs). Methods Our moyamoya patient with severely impaired cognitive and motor functions underwent a specific motor and neuropsychological rehabilitative treatments to assess the recovery of consciousness. Results Results obtained showed an improvement of clinical and neuropsychological examination. These findings highlighted the importance of an intensive rehabilitation techniques used in the care of disorder…

Childhood methylphenidate treatment of ADHD and response to affective stimuli

2009

Neural correlates of emotional dysregulation in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and persisting influence of Methylphenidate (MPH) still remain insufficiently understood. Decreased activation in the subgenual cingulate and the ventral striatum were found during the perception of positive and negative affective pictures in drug-naïve males with ADHD during childhood (n=10). Males with ADHD during childhood treated with MPH (n=10) did not show any significant differences compared to healthy controls (n=10). Further prospective studies need to clarify direct and indirect mechanisms of MPH treatment that may contribute to emotional processing, which is dysfunctional in males with…

Verbal suppression and strategy use: a role for the right lateral prefrontal cortex?

2015

Verbal initiation, suppression and strategy generation/use are cognitive processes widely held to be supported by the frontal cortex. The Hayling Test was designed to tap these cognitive processes within the same sentence completion task. There are few studies specifically investigating the neural correlates of the Hayling Test but it has been primarily used to detect frontal lobe damage. This study investigates the components of the Hayling Test in a large sample of patients with unselected focal frontal (n = 60) and posterior (n = 30) lesions. Patients and controls (n = 40) matched for education, age and sex were administered the Hayling Test as well as background cognitive tests. The sta…

Neural correlates of disturbed perception of verticality.

2012

Objective: Perception of verticality can be perturbed after cortical stroke. However, a relationship between lesion location and pathologic perception of verticality is still a matter of debate since previous studies revealed contradictory results. Thus, the aim of the current study was to test whether specific cortical lesions were associated with tilts of subjective visual vertical (SVV) and to determine the critical brain areas that cause such tilts in the case of a lesion. Methods: SVV was systematically studied in 54 patients (22 patients with left-sided and 32 patients with right-sided lesions) with acute unilateral strokes, analyzed by modern voxel-wise lesion-behavior mapping techni…

Polar Bear in 'Fortitude'. Affective Aesthetics and Politics of Climate Change

2021

In the first season of the television Eco Noir crime series “Fortitude” (2015) the polar bear appears as a sticky object that embodies an ambiguous affective charge as an icon of global warming. This article discusses the ways in which the polar bear evokes viewer affect in the series through two discourses. The first one relates to violence, essentially present in crime narratives, and how the human and nonhuman animal are positioned in relation to global warming, violence and each other. It raises questions of place and belonging in a local and global context and examines how the polar bear is constructed in terms of stranger danger and victimization in relation to human animals and the t…

Redemption and home in the african american city upon a hill: hannah crafts’s the bondwoman’s narrative.

2019

The Bondwoman’s Narrative (1857) is a novel in which the black female slave Hannah Crafts aims at the remodeling of her society and to gain self–assertion through a deeply Christian commitment and a total and honest respect to the values it impinges drawing broadly on the Bible and reshaping biblical imagery to convey her message and to submit her subjectivity and her Americanness. By using the national continuum of jeremiad rhetoric and her attachment to the values of the Christian creed, the novel partakes and yet takes a different direction from slave narratives by cagily forerunning Du Bois’s praised theory of the double consciousness. In so doing, it positions its protagonist as the fi…

2020

Motor control is associated with suppression of oscillatory activity in alpha (8–12 Hz) and beta (12–30 Hz) ranges and elevation of oxygenated hemoglobin levels in motor-cortical areas. Aging leads to changes in oscillatory and hemodynamic brain activity and impairments in motor control. However, the relationship between age-related changes in motor control and brain activity is not yet fully understood. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate age-related and task-complexity-related changes in grip force control and the underlying oscillatory and hemodynamic activity. Sixteen younger [age (mean ± SD) = 25.4 ± 1.9, 20–30 years] and 16 older (age = 56.7 ± 4.7, 50–70 years) healthy men were…