Search results for "Activities"
showing 10 items of 3552 documents
Age at surgery as a predictor of cognitive improvements in patients with drug-resistant temporal epilepsy
2017
Temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) surgery is an effective procedure that can produce cognitive changes. However, the prognostic factors related with cognitive outcomes need to be better understood. The aim of the present study is to know if age at surgery is a reliable predictor of verbal memory competence and considering factors such as: hemisphere; type of surgery; pre-surgical seizure frequency; and epilepsy duration. Sixty-one typically dominant patients with drug-resistant TLE (34 with left TLE [L-TLE] and 27 with right TLE [R-TLE]) underwent a neuropsychological assessment before and a year after surgery. Results showed that R-TLE patients had better evolution in short- and long-term verba…
Task-induced deactivation in diverse brain systems correlates with interindividual differences in distinct autonomic indices
2018
AbstractNeuroimaging research has shown that different cognitive tasks induce relatively specific activation patterns, as well as less task-specific deactivation patterns. Here we examined whether individual differences in Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) activity during task performance correlate with the magnitude of task-induced deactivation. In an fMRI study, participants performed a continuous mental arithmetic task in a task/rest block design, while undergoing combined fMRI and heart / respiration rate acquisitions using photoplethysmograph and respiration belt. As expected, task performance increased heart-rate and reduced the RMSSD, a cardiac index related to vagal tone. Across partic…
'Prefrontal' cognitive performance of healthy subjects positively correlates with cerebral FDOPA influx: an exploratory [18F]-fluoro-L-DOPA-PET inves…
2006
Dopamine neurotransmission influences those cognitive processes, which are generally regarded as prefrontal cortical functions. In previous positron‐emission‐tomography (PET) studies, net blood‐brain clearance of [(18)F]‐fluoro‐l‐DOPA (FDOPA) correlated with impaired cognitive performance in patients with Parkinson's disease or schizophrenia. We hypothesized that FDOPA influx also correlates with performance of cognitive tasks associated with prefrontal functioning in healthy volunteers. The net blood‐brain clearance of FDOPA (K [Formula: see text]) was mapped in a group of 11 healthy volunteers and calculated in striatal volumes‐of‐interest. The Wisconsin‐Card‐Sorting‐Test (WCST), Stroop‐T…
Methylphenidate, modafinil, and caffeine for cognitive enhancement in chess: A double-blind, randomised controlled trial.
2017
Stimulants and caffeine have been proposed for cognitive enhancement by healthy subjects. This study investigated whether performance in chess - a competitive mind game requiring highly complex cognitive skills - can be enhanced by methylphenidate, modafinil or caffeine. In a phase IV, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial, 39 male chess players received 2×200mg modafinil, 2×20mg methylphenidate, and 2×200mg caffeine or placebo in a 4×4 crossover design. They played twenty 15-minute games during two sessions against a chess program (Fritz 12; adapted to players' strength) and completed several neuropsychological tests. Marked substance effects were observed since all three subs…
N170 response to facial expressions is modulated by the affective congruency between the emotional expression and preceding affective picture
2013
Does contextual affective information influence the processing of facial expressions already at the relatively early stages of face processing? We measured event-related brain potentials to happy and sad facial expressions primed by preceding pictures with affectively positive and negative scenes. The face-sensitive N170 response amplitudes showed a clear affective priming effect: N170 amplitudes to happy faces were larger when presented after positive vs. negative primes, whereas the N170 amplitudes to sad faces were larger when presented after negative vs. positive primes. Priming effects were also observed on later brain responses. The results support an early integration in processing o…
The importance of impulsivity and attention switching deficits in perpetrators convicted for intimate partner violence.
2018
It has been stated that Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) increases the likelihood of risky behavior such as intimate partner violence (IPV), but the cognitive mechanisms that facilitate or underlie these types of behavior remain unexplained. In this regard, several authors have established that impulsivity and inattentive symptoms might affect basic processes such as emotional decoding and set-shifting abilities, which are important processes for emotional and behavioral regulation. Hence, these symptoms entail a reduction in sensitivity to key contextual stimuli. Accordingly, the main aim of this study was to examine the involvement of impulsivity (assessed by self-reports) …
The Effect of Memory in Inducing Pleasant Emotions with Musical and Pictorial Stimuli
2018
Music is known to evoke emotions through a range of mechanisms, but empirical investigation into the mechanisms underlying different emotions is sparse. This study investigated how affective experiences to music and pictures vary when induced by personal memories or mere stimulus features. Prior to the experiment, participants were asked to select eight types of stimuli according to distinct criteria concerning the emotion induction mechanism and valence. In the experiment, participants (N = 30) evaluated their affective experiences with the self-chosen material. EEG was recorded throughout the session. The results showed certain interaction effects of mechanism (memory vs. stimulus feature…
Pleasant music as a countermeasure against visually induced motion sickness.
2013
Visually induced motion sickness (VIMS) is a well-known side-effect in virtual environments or simulators. However, effective behavioral countermeasures against VIMS are still sparse. In this study, we tested whether music can reduce the severity of VIMS. Ninety-three volunteers were immersed in an approximately 14-minute-long video taken during a bicycle ride. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four experimental groups, either including relaxing music, neutral music, stressful music, or no music. Sickness scores were collected using the Fast Motion Sickness Scale and the Simulator Sickness Questionnaire. Results showed an overall trend for relaxing music to reduce the severity o…
Increase in Regular Leisure-Time Physical Activity in Spanish Adults Between 1987 and 2017.
2021
Introduction:\ud \ud The prevalence of leisure-time physical activity has increased in recent decades, but values differ significantly among countries. Owing to the improvement of living standards, a higher frequency of leisure-time physical activity is expected in Western countries such as Spain, but there is a lack of research involving large, representative samples during a prolonged temporal frame to confirm this tendency.\ud \ud Methods:\ud \ud Individual representative data from the 1987, 1993, 1995, 1997, 2001, 2011, and 2017 rounds of the Spanish National Health Survey were used. Statistical analyses were conducted from April 9, 2020 to May 5, 2020.\ud \ud Results:\ud \ud A total of…
Habituation of the orienting response as reflected by the skin conductance response and by endogenous event-related brain potentials
2004
The paper is concerned with the question of whether endogenous components of the auditory event-related brain potential (ERP) qualify for showing habituation of the orienting response (OR). Although response decrements have been found in nearly every ERP component, this question is still of current concern because a true selective response inhibition proving habituation of the OR is still lacking. The question has been tackled using single-trial ERP measurements in classical variants of the repetition/change paradigm commonly used in the traditional OR research on autonomous responses such as the skin conductance response (SCR). Results on 120 adults indicate that at least two endogenous co…