Search results for "105"

Transcranial direct current stimulation: Adverse effects and the efficacy of a commonly utilised sham protocol

2017

IntroductionTranscranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a promising neuromodulation method that has, for example, been used to treat depression. Nevertheless, the adverse effects of tDCS and the validity of the current standard tDCS sham protocols have received limited attention.ObjectivesTo evaluate the extent and types of tDCS adverse effects and to assess the reliability of sham stimulation as a control procedure for tDCS in a double-blind setting.AimsTo compare adverse effects between tDCS and sham stimulation groups, and to determine how well the participants and the experimenter are able to distinguish tDCS from sham stimulation.MethodsA sample of healthy volunteers received a 2…

Explaining self-reported traffic crashes of cyclists: An empirical study based on age and road risky behaviors

2019

Abstract The growing rates of traffic crashes involving cyclists are currently recognized as a major public health and road safety concern. Furthermore, risky behaviors on the road and their precedent factors have been conceptualized as potential determinants for explaining, intervening and preventing traffic injuries of cyclists. Objectives This study aimed at examining whether individual factors and self-reported risky behaviors could explain the crash rates of cyclists in a period of 5 years. Methods A sample of 1064 cyclists was used, with a mean age of 32.83 years. Participants answered a survey assessing demographic data and information on risky behaviors, risk perception, knowledge o…

Three-month-old infants’ sensitivity to horizontal information within faces

2016

Horizontal information is crucial to face processing in adults. Yet the ontogeny of this preferential type of processing remains unknown. To clarify this issue, we tested 3-month-old infants' sensitivity to horizontal information within faces. Specifically, infants were exposed to the simultaneous presentation of a face and a car presented in upright or inverted orientation while their looking behavior was recorded. Face and car images were either broadband (UNF) or filtered to only reveal horizontal (H), vertical (V) or this combined information (HV). As expected, infants looked longer at upright faces than at upright cars, but critically, only when horizontal information was preserved in …

Disconnected Lives: Trends in Time Spent Alone in Finland

2020

AbstractDiscussions about social isolation have been extensive over the past few decades. A less sociable nature of social ties has been identified in Western societies. The phenomenon has been associated with demographic changes such as aging and living alone as well as changes in the use of new technologies. In this study we employ representative Finnish Time Use Surveys from three decades, 1987–1988 (n = 1887), 1999–2000 (n = 2673) and 2009–2010 (n = 1887) to examine the trends in social isolation, measured as time spent alone. Our results showed that between 1987 and 2010 the time spent alone increased by 124 min per day. The increase was linear and occurred in nearly all population gro…

2018

The pre-supplementary motor area (pre-SMA) is engaged in speech comprehension under difficult circumstances such as poor acoustic signal quality or time-critical conditions. Previous studies found that left pre-SMA is activated when subjects listen to accelerated speech. Here, the functional role of pre-SMA was tested for accelerated speech comprehension by inducing a transient "virtual lesion" using continuous theta-burst stimulation (cTBS). Participants were tested (1) prior to (pre-baseline), (2) 10 min after (test condition for the cTBS effect), and (3) 60 min after stimulation (post-baseline) using a sentence repetition task (formant-synthesized at rates of 8, 10, 12, 14, and 16 syllab…

Brain event-related potentials to phoneme contrasts and their correlation to reading skills in school-age children

2017

Development of reading skills has been shown to be tightly linked to phonological processing skills and to some extent to speech perception abilities. Although speech perception is also known to play a role in reading development, it is not clear which processes underlie this connection. Using event-related potentials (ERPs) we investigated the speech processing mechanisms for common and uncommon sound contrasts (/ba/-/da/-/ga/ and /ata/-/at: a/) with respect to the native language of school-age children in Finland and the US. In addition, a comprehensive behavioral test battery of reading and phonological processing was administered. ERPs revealed that the children could discriminate betw…

Online Adaptation to Altered Auditory Feedback Is Predicted by Auditory Acuity and Not by Domain-General Executive Control Resources

2018

Published: 12 March 2018 When a speaker's auditory feedback is altered, he adapts for the perturbation by altering his own production, which demonstrates the role of auditory feedback in speech motor control. In the present study, we explored the role of auditory acuity and executive control in this process. Based on the DIVA model and the major cognitive control models, we expected that higher auditory acuity, and better executive control skills would predict larger adaptation to the alteration. Thirty-six Spanish native speakers performed an altered auditory feedback experiment, executive control (numerical Stroop, Simon and Flanker) tasks, and auditory acuity tasks (loudness, pitch, and …

Music Training Enhances Rapid Neural Plasticity of N1 and P2 Source Activation for Unattended Sounds

2012

Neurocognitive studies have demonstrated that long-term music training enhances the processing of unattended sounds. It is not clear, however, whether music training also modulates rapid (within tens of minutes) neural plasticity for sound encoding. To study this phenomenon, we examined whether adult musicians display enhanced rapid neural plasticity compared to non-musicians. More specifically, we compared the modulation of P1, N1, and P2 responses to standard sounds between four unattended passive blocks. Among the standard sounds, infrequently presented deviant sounds were presented (the so-called oddball paradigm). In the middle of the experiment (after two blocks), an active task was p…

Mismatch negativity (MMN) elicited by changes in phoneme length: A cross-linguistic study

2006

Speech sounds representing different phonetic categories are typically easier to discriminate than sounds belonging to the same category. This phenomenon is referred to as the phoneme boundary effect. We aimed to determine whether, at neural level, this effect is indeed due to crossing the phoneme boundary. The mismatch negativity (MMN) brain response was measured for across- and within-category changes in Finnish phoneme length in native speakers and second-language users of Finnish as well as non-Finnish-speaking subjects. The results showed that the MMN amplitude was enhanced in the native speakers in comparison with the two non-native groups which, in turn, did not differ from each othe…

Designing Affordances for Health-Enhancing Physical Activity and Exercise in Sedentary Individuals

2016

Ideas in ecological dynamics have profound implications for designing environments that offer opportunities for physical activity (PA), exercise and play in sedentary individuals. They imply how exercise scientists, health professionals, planners, designers, engineers and psychologists can collaborate in co-designing environments and playscapes that facilitate PA and exercise behaviours in different population subgroups. Here, we discuss how concepts in ecological dynamics emphasise the person-environment scale of analysis, indicating how PA environments might be (re)designed into qualitative regions of functional significance (affordances) that invite health-enhancing behaviours according …